Chapter Text
When he dreams, he dreams of Winterfell.
He dreams of the Stark estate, nestled deep in the Vermont countryside, he dreams of running through the halls with Robb, snowball fights with Arya and Bran, watching little Rickon teeter around on his tiny legs, helping Sansa gather flowers from the gardens. He dreams of playing hide and seek, running through the woods, breathless and joyous and free.
He dreams of Ned's hand on his shoulder and Catelyn's warm hug.
He dreams of coming home from school one day, after he'd gotten detention for cursing and had to stay late. He dreams of walking in the front door to silence, then into the kitchen to the bodies of Ned and Cat on the floor, blood pooling around them. He dreams of yelling and running through the house and finding Robb's body near the back stairs. He dreams of the terror he'd felt. He dreams of the way he'd vomited on the floor in the hall. He dreams of hearing a small noise upstairs and finally finding the rest of them huddled in a closet on the second floor, Sansa with her arms around the others and fear in her eyes.
There's a rush of police and medics and reporters.
All of them are underage. Jon's mom had died when he was only three and her best friend, Jon's godfather, Ned Stark had taken him in. The Starks had raised him like one of their own. Robb had been his brother.
The other four Stark children are miraculously alive and unharmed. Jon isn't able to talk to them very much in all the rush, but he pieces together what happened. All of them had been upstairs when they'd heard screams and Robb, as the oldest, had grabbed his baseball bat and gone down to investigate. He'd been fourteen. Big tough hero.
It's Sansa that tells him, through tears, that she'd heard Robb shouting and then a gurgling noise and then nothing and she'd known something was wrong. She'd looked downstairs and seen Robb's body at the bottom and something moving off to the side. She'd had to pull Arya into the closet and keep a hand over her mouth to stop her from shouting or going down. Bran had pulled Rickon in and they'd prayed that Rickon would keep silent. He was only five.
At the station, a man comes and talks to them. Old and gruff, like a grizzly bear. He says he's with the FBI and he asks Jon a lot of questions that Jon thinks are odd. The man asks Sansa and the others questions, but he focuses on Sansa.
What did she see moving downstairs? What noises did she hear?
She repeats her story and when she gets to a detail, he stops her.
"Cold?" the FBI agent says. "Like what kind of cold?"
The question strikes Jon as strange. Sansa had mentioned feeling cold to the police, who hadn't even blinked at it. It had been an unusually cold winter, even for Vermont.
"Well," Sansa says, voice shaking, "there was frost on the banister." She hadn't told the police that, Jon guesses because they hadn't asked. "It was so cold. Like I was outside for hours but I wasn't."
The FBI agent frowns and writes this down and asks if she'd seen anything specific about what was moving around in the living room. What, Jon notes, not who.
When the man leaves, Sansa's face is so pale he can see her veins through her skin and her eyes are almost as red as her hair. She's twelve years old.
Jon hesitates for only a little before running after the FBI agent. He's able to slip away from the police easily. Jon's always been sneaky. Quick and fast. He'd always been the best at hide and seek (Arya might have been, but she would get impatient and make mistakes. Jon was patient).
"What does the cold mean," he says to the FBI agent's back as the man walks across the parking lot. His voice echoes in the dark, bounces off the patrol cars around them, and the man pauses.
"Go back inside," the man says without turning around. "Be a good little boy and go back inside."
He's not a little boy. He's fourteen and he'd just found the bodies of three of the people he cares about most, ripped apart in his home.
"What does the cold mean," he says again, louder, and the man sighs.
"Keep your voice down, kid."
"I'm not a kid."
The FBI agent laughs at that, but not meanly. He sounds tired.
"What it means is that you shouldn't worry about it. Go back inside. Your brothers and sisters need you." The man gets into a beat up old Ford pickup and drives away and something in Jon's brain doesn't sit right because an FBI agent would not be driving that.
Despite what the FBI agent had said, the Starks aren't his brothers and sisters, not really, and that is made perfectly clear over the next few weeks. Their Aunt Lysa agrees to take them in, but she won't take Jon. He's not blood.
Arya, Bran, and Rickon cry and Sansa begs and pleads to no avail. The Starks are taken away to Boston and Jon is thrown into foster care.
He's angry all the time and he goes to the police station after school every day and asks if they have any updates. The officers always kick him out and one day, Jon decides that if they're not going to help him, he'll help himself. When the officers aren't looking, he sneaks past them all and into their records room.
He's always been sneaky.
The police do catch him, though. He's still just a fourteen year old kid in a building full of police and they find him quick enough.
He's sitting in an interrogation room with a social worker that looks like she'd rather be anywhere else when the FBI agent walks in.
"Let's go," he says to Jon and hands some papers to the social worker.
Jon isn't sure what happens, but the man, who introduces himself as Jeor Mormont, takes him out of the station and puts him in the Ford pickup and takes him to McDonalds.
Jeor Mormont isn't an FBI agent at all, he tells Jon in a ratty motel in the next town over, two hours after they'd left the police station. Jon is ravenously shoving a burger into his mouth. Mormont laughs and hands Jon the second bag. "I remember being your age, believe it or not," he says. "Couldn't ever eat enough."
Jon isn't sure what to make of this man who pretended to be an FBI agent. He should probably be scared, but he finds he doesn't really care and takes the second bag and eats three more burgers before he's full. When he's full, he eats the fries.
"So who are you," Jon asks finally.
"I'm a hunter.”
Jon frowns. A hunter. Who pretended to be an FBI agent. "What do you hunt?"
"Monsters." Mormont says. "Demons. Ghosts. Vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, skinwalkers, everything you've ever thought was hiding under your bed and told yourself wasn't there." He stares at Jon, waiting for a reaction.
"Oh," Jon says, and then, "what kind of monster makes things cold?"
There's a look that flashes through Mormont's eyes that Jon now looks back on and realizes was satisfaction.
"Not sure," he shrugs. "But if you want, you can come with me and maybe we'll figure it out. No promises, though. You come with me, you train with me, and I help you look for what killed your parents and your brother. But you have to understand there are no guarantees in this business."
Jon agrees.
He spends years training under Mormont.
He learns how to use a gun, a knife, a sword, an axe. Shotguns, bow and arrows, snares and lures and demon traps. He learns lore and history and basic Latin. He learns how to forge IDs and credit cards and lie without getting caught. He's always been good at sneaking and he gets even better. He works out and buffs up.
He learns how to drive on the dirt roads in rural Montana. Mormont's property is riddled with old cars and Jon takes them out for joyrides, speeding so fast that he almost loses control, doing donuts in the dirt.
When Jon is fifteen, he goes with Mormont to Nebraska where they find a kid in the same situation Jon had been in. Family killed. No relatives to take him in. Alone.
Smart.
Very smart. Jon can tell just from when Mormont questions him, and Mormont can tell, too. The boy asks just the right questions back, and suddenly Mormont is bringing him to Montana.
"Like I'm runnin' a fuckin' daycare," Mormont grumbles and Jon rolls his eyes and turns to the boy in the back seat.
"Don't listen to him, he's always this grumpy, it don't mean anything."
The boy in the back looks pale, but nods.
That's how Sam Tarly joins their pack.
Sam isn't the best at weapons and fighting. He's terrible, actually. Jon gets the sense he's a pacifist by nature, but that doesn't mean he's useless.
He's the smartest person Jon's ever met and he remembers everything he reads. He becomes a walking encyclopedia. He learns basic witchcraft. He learns dead languages and reads ancient texts. He tracks news reports and police scanners and finds patterns.
He gets Mormont hooked up to the internet, much to Mormont's dismay, and learns how to hack into police archives and databases. One time he even hacks the FBI. He takes over their ID and credit card forgery and he's much better at it.
Eventually, Sam and Jon become a well oiled machine. Sam is the brains and Jon is the brawn and they are efficient. Mormont frowns and mutters under his breath about this not being traditional hunting, but both Jon and Sam know he's proud of them.
Jon is sixteen years old when he kills his first monster.
So far it's just been him tagging along with Mormont, not really allowed to participate. Mormont has him watch, or Jon's allowed to draw devil's traps or lay down salt or help with the minutiae.
But they encounter a pack of skinwalkers in New Jersey that's bigger than they'd been anticipating and Mormont is outnumbered. Jon watches a man change into a dog, bones shifting and cracking under his skin, hair sprouting, human teeth falling out and replaced with canine.
In the mess, he's knocked over and the jagged edge of a metal table nearly takes his eye out. One of the skinwalkers pins him down, snapping at his face, all sharp teeth and rotting breath and dripping saliva. Jon holds it away with one arm and brings the silver knife up to its neck with the other. Hot blood pours onto him, splashing his face and neck and shirt.
It's his first kill and Mormont claps him on the back and doesn't say anything.
Back at the hotel, he showers and scrubs the blood off of his face and neck and hands, feeling the bile rise in his throat.
It had been a man. A human. A person.
A person with a family, probably. Someone that loved him, maybe.
In that moment it doesn't matter that the skinchanger ate human hearts and had killed dozens of innocent people.
When Mormont is asleep, Jon goes outside and hotwires the car and drives north for hours until he hits the suburbs of Boston. He ignores his phone that buzzes constantly, both Mormont and Sam. He turns it off when he remembers that Sam can track cellphones.
He's in the backyard of their house, in a copse of trees.
The house is huge, the backyard is huge, with a pool and a small wooded area at the back near the fenceline. Jon has a moment of anger, but pushes it away. He shouldn't envy them their nice life. He doesn't wish his on them.
He gets there in the early hours after midnight and none of the house lights are even on, but he stares at the windows anyway, looking for any movement. Looking for them.
He knows their address by heart. He's been having Sam keep an eye on them, just in case. He memorized this address years ago, never thinking he'd actually use it. But here he is.
Just one look, he tells himself. He'll stay here until he sees one of them, and then he'll leave.
He doesn't remember falling asleep.
"Jon," he hears a voice whisper, low and urgent. "Jon, wake up."
He opens his eyes to a pair of bright blue eyes and soft, shining copper hair. Light filters through a canopy of trees and he's on the cold ground and he feels like he's been hit by a truck.
He sits up and her hands come to brace him and he jerks away from her touch.
She looks over her shoulder towards the house. She's crouched down next to him, in a set of pale blue pajamas that looks softer than anything Jon's felt in years.
"What are you doing here," she whispers. "Rickon found you this morning and came in and you're lucky he found me and not Aunt Lysa or Petyr. He said dad was sleeping in the trees."
Jon doesn't know what to say to this. He knows he has Ned's coloring, it had been a joke in the family. Robb had looked like his mom and Jon had looked like Ned and they'd joked that Jon really was their brother. Jon remembers asking Ned once, when he was very young, and Ned had shaken his head no. Lyanna had moved down to South Carolina after high school, gotten knocked up, and came running back to Vermont a few years later. Ned didn't know who Jon's dad was, but it wasn't him. He had smiled sadly and mentioned that the Snows and the Starks were distantly related, some type of cousins a bunch of times removed. Some common ancestor come over from the old country that might account for the similarity.
Jon stands up, and Sansa stands up, too.
"You shouldn't go investigating men sleeping in your backyard on your own," Jon tells her with a frown. Sansa had always been just a little too naive, a little too immersed in her fairytales. He has a sudden, choking fear that some day Sansa will find herself in a dark alley with one of the monsters he now knows exists.
She frowns. "I thought he was joking, but he wouldn't let it go. What are you doing here? Where have you been?"
He doesn't know how to answer that. He didn't plan for this. He'd just wanted to see one of them again. It's been two years and so much has happened, Winterfell seems like another life. A dream. He had come here needing to make sure it wasn't.
"We tried asking where you were," she continues when he doesn't answer. "No one would tell us." She pauses and hesitates. "Arya ran away last summer and went back to Vermont and couldn't find you. She was missing for a week."
He feels guilt punch through him but he doesn't know how to respond to any of this.
"Montana," is all he says. "I got taken in by a guy from Montana."
"Montana," she breathes. "Then what are you doing here? What happened to your face?"
For a second he's confused until he remembers the ugly gash through his right eyebrow and the heavy bruise to his left cheekbone that had already begun to purple when he'd looked at himself in the mirror after his shower last night. He feels the bruise now that he remembers it, he can feel the tightness of his skin and he knows it's going to split at some point. There's also the claw marks on his shoulders where the skinchanger had held him down, but Sansa can't see that.
"You don't even have anything on it," she scolds, and her hand comes up and cool fingers grip his chin and turn his head so she can look at the cut better. "That's going to get infected."
He'd left the motel without really treating it. He hadn't been thinking.
She's frowning at him and he can't find anything to say. His brain is numb and spinning and all his training flies out the window and he can't think of even the most basic lie.
She sighs. "Wait here, I'll go get something for it."
He tries to stop her, but all he can say is "don't tell the others."
She pauses, nods, then continues back to the house.
He hopes she doesn't say anything. He hopes Rickon forgets. Seeing Sansa was bad enough, he doesn't think he can handle it if Bran or Rickon come outside. Arya.
His little shadow. Tiny, brave, argumentative Arya. She'd tried to find him and he hadn't been there. His heart aches.
He debates running away. Getting out of there before Sansa can come back. It would be the smart thing to do. There's a reason he hasn't come to see them before.
They're a liability, Mormont's voice echoes in his head. Something wants to get to you, they can go for the people you love. Keep those people to a minimum. In fact, try to not to love anyone at all.
But he doesn't run. He can't. He's rooted to the spot where he stands, surrounded by trees, just out of sight of the big house.
She's back soon enough, running across the grass and into the trees and Jon hopes no one's seen her. From the position of the sun, he can tell it's still early. Arya likes to sleep late, so does Bran. Jon doesn't know anything about her aunt or the man she mentioned, he assumes the aunt's boyfriend or husband.
She sits him down on a rock and squats down next to him and begins working on his face. She hands him a towel filled with ice and makes him hold it against his bruised cheekbone while she tends to the cut. She cleans it out with something that stings, making him wince, and she's careful to keep the liquid out of his eye. Then she dabs on some sort of cream and concentrates carefully as she layers a half dozen band-aids across the long gash.
"There," she says with a slight frown. "That's the best I can do with what we have, but I think you might need stitches?"
He turns to say something to her, but finds he can't. She's very close to him and she looks so concerned. She looks like home. He clenches his jaw tight and realizes, suddenly, that if he speaks he's going to start crying. He hasn't cried in years. He didn't cry when he found the bodies and he didn't cry at the funeral. He didn't cry when he broke his arm last year or any of the times Mormont knocked him to the ground in training.
"Jon what happened," she whispers and brings her hand up to his face again, tracing along the bruise on the other side. "Did the man from Montana do this?"
He shakes his head no and says "I can't explain. I can't tell you. I should go."
"Go?" she asks, voice raising an octave and almost breaking out of her whisper. "You can't go, you just came back!"
He doesn't say anything to this and she just stares at him. After enough time passes, she sighs.
"Aunt Lysa and Petyr will be up soon, I need to go back inside. But once Petyr goes to work, I'll bring you out some breakfast, ok?"
He nods and she stares at him for a few more seconds until he says "ok. Yeah."
She goes back in and Jon doesn't stay.
He goes back to the car and at the last minute, grabs a piece of paper and writes down one of the burner phone numbers with the words if you're ever in trouble. He goes back and sticks it to a tree near the rock with an old knife they'd been meaning to get rid of anyway because it was too small for either of them.
Then he turns on his primary phone and calls Mormont.
Mormont is furious and threatens to kick Jon out, but he doesn't actually do it. He pretends to be angry about Jon stealing the car, but Jon knows he's angry because he went to go see the Starks.
Jon doesn't tell him about talking to Sansa, or Rickon finding him.
He keeps the Stark burner phone on and ignores the first call that comes through. It's too soon for Sansa to be in trouble, she's probably just angry. She doesn't leave a voicemail and then calls repeatedly for the next two hours. She never leaves a voicemail and the calls eventually stop.
He kills more monsters and hardens his heart.
They're on a job in Seattle when they manage to bust part of a human trafficking ring. Sam had gotten some red flags pinged on a warehouse on the outskirts of the city near the docks and when they'd checked it out, it turned out to not be anything supernatural at all; the monsters were strictly human.
The correct procedure is to alert the proper authorities because they don't deal with human criminals, but Jon loses his cool and reveals himself to the guards, which starts a fight and Mormont has no choice but to join in. They end up taking out the guards, Mormont cursing the whole time as they tie them up.
“We need to get out of here,” Mormont grunts. He's already made the call to his connection in the FBI and they'll be here soon. The guards are out and the kids will be safe, he says. Jon is loathe to leave them, but he knows they can't be caught here.
They're almost at the car when one of the kids follows them. He's maybe twelve, Jon thinks.
“Take me with you.” He's slim and dark and looks scared.
“No can do, kid,” Mormont says, opening the car door and throwing his kit in the back.
“I won't go back,” the boy's voice shakes but Jon can see the determination in his eyes.
“The cops are coming,” Jon tries to reassure, hand hesitating on his own door handle.
“I won't go with them,” the kid says, more resolute. “They'll send me back. I won't go back.”
Jon wants to know what the kid means, but he also doesn't want to know. It must be bad if he's not happy to be rescued. Jon looks at Mormont over the hood of the truck.
“No,” Mormont growls.
And so Satin Flowers joins their group.
Satin has a natural affinity for magic and his Latin is the best of all of them.
He learns witchcraft with an enthusiasm that makes Jon gag. Witchcraft is a nasty business, lots of bodily fluids and animal parts. Jon's got no taste for it, but he can't deny it's helpful. Witches can be wicked powerful, and Sam's basic knowledge only goes so far.
Satin doesn't talk about what he was running away from, but Jon gets the picture over time. Satin will say things about his mother, sometimes. About the things she would do to him, and what she'd let her friends do. Jon feels fiercely protective of small, quiet Satin. He feels the same way about Sam, somehow still kind and jovial in the face of what they do.
He realizes one day that he would die for them.
He'll kill for them.
He and Mormont stop at a hunter bar at the border of Wyoming and Montana on their way back home from Texas.
There's a young girl behind the bar with wild orange hair, she can't be much older than Jon. He would wonder why they're letting an underage girl serve drinks, but he's found that hunters have their own set of rules. He also finds out that her mom owns the place.
When Jon and Mormont sit at the bar, she makes eye contact with him and gives a smile that Jon will find out later is the smile she gives when she knows she's going to get her way.
Later in the night, on his way back from the bathroom, she pulls him into the back office and he loses his virginity on top of the desk, knocking papers to the floor and smashing a lamp that he promises to pay for, which makes her laugh.
He finds himself at Ygritte's bar more and more often. It's not too far from Mormont's property, two hours, less if he's speeding on the back roads. He stops there when he can and she gives him a different kind of training.
There's one night, they're naked in her bed and she tells him she wants to come along on a hunt.
She knows how to use a shotgun, he's watched her pull it on patrons who get a little too rowdy. Hell, he's even watched her knock a guy out cold one time when he'd gotten too handsy with her.
Mormont is opposed to the idea, he's opposed to the idea of Ygritte in general, but Ygritte isn't one to take no for an answer, so she comes along and she doesn't do too bad of a job. Her dad was a hunter, but he'd been killed when she was just a kid. Her mom had never let her hunt, but she says she's eighteen now, her mom can't tell her what to do.
Jon is fine with her coming along. She's older than him by nearly two years and she's the only girl he's ever had sex with (he is absolutely not her first and she reminds him of that a lot), so he's sort of happy that this is something he knows more about than her.
It's a fairly routine exorcism. The demon fights them but they're four on one and they get him into the devil's trap quickly and Satin reads the Latin incantation. When the demon has poured out of the man in the trap and he collapses onto the floor, Mormont checks the man's pulse and nods that he'll live. He and Satin gather their things to leave, but Ygritte holds Jon back and tells Mormont and Satin they'll meet them back at the hotel. Mormont doesn't look pleased but Jon tells him to go, so he does, grumbling.
Ygritte is high off the fight, Jon recognizes it. He's been there himself sometimes, when adrenaline and fear kick in hard. It happened to him on his first hunt, too. She pushes him to the floor and fucks him next to the unconscious body of the man who'd been possessed and any protests Jon might have had leave the minute her hands are down his pants.
Months after the Boston incident, he gets a call on the Stark line.
She leaves a voicemail this time.
I just wanted to let you know I told Arya about you. I know I promised I wouldn't, but you promised to stay so I guess we're both liars.
There's a long pause and there's dread pooling in Jon's stomach.
She wants to talk to you. Can you call this number and just talk to her? I caught her looking up Greyhound routes to Montana and I do not need her disappearing again. Just call her and tell her you're ok and tell her to not go to Montana. Call between four and six pm. We'll be home from school and Petyr won't be home yet.
She sighs.
If you care at all about her, just call, ok?
He shouldn't call.
He calls.
He waits until five thirty on a Tuesday. He'll give himself a half hour and that's it.
Sansa picks up the phone and says “Baelish residence.”
“It's me. Jon.”
She's silent for a few moments and then Jon hears a voice yell in the background. Sansa's voice is further from the phone as she yells back “it's some guy wanting to know if we're satisfied with our electric bill!”
There's another yell from the distance and then Sansa comes back on the line and says “no, we're very happy with our electric bill, thank you,” but he can tell she's walking and there's a sound of a door shutting. Another pause. “I didn't think you'd call.”
“I almost didn't,” he tells her. No need to lie, she already knows what a piece of shit he is.
“How's the eye?”
“You were right, needed stitches. Looks terrible.”
There's another, longer pause. “I'll get Arya.”
There's movement and a lengthy silence with muffled voices and then suddenly: “Jon?”
Jon feels a smile break out over his face. “Hey, Underfoot.”
She makes a noise and says “don't call me that,” like she always used to, but Jon can hear the tears in her voice.
Arya peppers him with questions that he does his best to answer. Yes, I'm in Montana. Yes, I'm fine. No, I haven't ridden a horse, but they have a lot of ranches around here. Yes, I was in Boston. I'm sorry I couldn't stick around.
Jon's glad he called so close to Sansa's cutoff time at six because he gets the sense that Arya would talk to him for hours and Jon doesn't think he can handle that. Even now, only twenty minutes in, he feels an ache deep in his chest. Any longer and he might suffocate in it.
“I gotta go now,” Arya sighs. “You'll call again?”
“Sure,” he lies. “Remember what I said: we travel a lot so don't come to Montana to look for me, I probably won't be here. And be good for your sister, and take care of Bran and Rickon.”
He can sense the eye roll through the phone as she says “yeah, yeah.”
Then there's movement and shuffling and Sansa comes back on.
“Thank you for doing that,” she says quietly. “I can't lose her again.”
The ache in his chest twists painfully and all he can do is grunt a vague sound of agreement.
“You're not going to call again, are you?” she asks, voice low.
“No,” he says, and the line goes dead.
All this time, all this training, and Jon is always keeping an eye out for monsters that bring the cold.
Sam's first guess, after being told, is ghosts, but Jon shakes his head.
“Ghosts can make you feel cold but they don't make frost,” he says with a frown. “And Sansa said she was so cold it felt like she'd been outside for hours, just from a few seconds of being near this thing.”
They look. They read. Well, Sam reads, mostly. Jon can read just fine but he gets antsy and needs to take breaks to go outside and hit something or shoot something.
The closest thing Sam finds are legends only. Fairytale stories of beings simply called The Others who rode ice spiders and could raise the dead and all the stories say they were vanquished thousands of years ago.
It's all nonsense.
As the years roll by, he begins to doubt that monsters that bring the cold even exist. He wonders if Sansa had been exaggerating, if her twelve year old mind had been playing tricks on her. He tells himself to stop looking, to stop thinking about it. He has a new life now, the Starks aren't his family anymore, but no matter how hard he tries to forget, it's always in the back of his mind.
When he dreams, he dreams of Winterfell.