Chapter Text
"Bloody hell, Dad,” Jorah grumbled, waving a hand in front of his face to brush another cobweb away. “When was the last time someone came up here?”
Jeor failed to answer him. He was still trying to take in the fact that his son had just called him ‘Dad’ for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime.
The two of them had wasted so many years being bitter and angry, and it was only Jeor’s fairly recent brush with death that brought them to reconciliation and even that had been strained for a while. Now here they were a few years later, closer than they ever had been.
“Are you ok?”
His son’s voice shook him from his reverie as Jeor looked up at those blue eyes that were so like his wife’s.
“Getting old,” he said with a humourless chuckle. “Hearing’s not what it used to be. What were you saying?” He asked as if he hadn’t heard everything his son had said.
Jorah sat down with a huff, his legs hanging out of the loft as he looked at his father who was still standing at the bottom of the ladder looking up at his boy.
“You’ve asked me to get up in this dusty, spider-infested loft to look for a bloody box,” he grumbled as he crossed his arms. “Can you at least tell me what it looks like?”
Jeor looked affronted at the remark.
“You insisted that you were the one to get in the loft if I recall - “
“Because people your age should not be climbing ladders and crawling around in lofts,” Jorah cut him off.
“What do you mean, ‘people my age’?” Jeor shot back angrily. “Do you think I’m bloody senile or something?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Jorah replied, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Well, what did you mean?” Jeor replied, his pride still stinging from the comment. Did his son really think he was incapable?
Jorah took a deep breath and tried to choose his words more carefully this time.
“What if you’d tried to get up here and fell off the ladder, hit your head and nobody realised until it was too late?”
“That would never happen,” Jeor insisted.
“But what if it did?” Jorah replied with a pained expression and tears glistening in his eyes. “I’ve only just found you again. I can’t bear the thought of losing you.”
It hit Jeor then. It had nothing to do with his stupid pride and everything to do with the fact that his son was terrified that he would lose him again. He wasn’t sure what to say as he stood and watched his son whose head hung low as he stared at his hands.
“It’s a large wooden box,” Jeor said after a lengthy pause as he cleared his throat and looked up at his son. “It should be in the left corner of the loft under a couple of white sheets. It’ll have your name on it.”
Jorah looked at his father quizzically for a moment before disappearing back into the loft.
Jeor took a few steps back as he heard boxes being moved and dragged around overhead for several minutes before Jorah finally re-emerged at the loft hatch with the wooden box. He carefully lowered it down to his father who placed it on the landing, smirking when he noticed that his son still had a few errant cobwebs in his hair and on his shoulders.
“Let’s take this downstairs and have a proper look through it shall we?” He said as Jorah followed behind him, wiping the sweat and grime from his brow.
Jeor handed his son a towel and a cup of coffee and then set about prising off the lid of the wooden box which hadn’t been opened in decades. It took a fair amount of physical effort but finally the lid popped open, and a small cloud of dust followed as Jeor raised the lid.
“When was the last time you opened this thing?” Jorah asked
“Not long after you ran away and joined the Army,” Jeor replied quietly, his eyes firmly on the box as he refused to look at his son. “I put it up in the loft and never looked at it again until now.”
The two of them sat in awkward silence, neither knowing what to say. They’d spent decades not talking to each other, wasting so many years due to anger and stupid male pride.
Jeor leaned over to peer into the box, pulling out a tiny babygro and holding it up for his son to see.
“We brought you home from the hospital in this,” he said with a watery smile. “Annabelle and I watched over you that entire first night. We were so afraid something might happen if were left you alone for more than a minute.”
“I tried to do the same,” Jorah admitted, blushing lightly as he recalled how Daenerys had gently pulled him away from the nursery door and towards their bedroom.
“You never grow out of wanting to protect your children and wanting to keep them safe, no matter how old they get,” Jeor said as he put the babygro to one side and pulled out a teddy bear and handing it to his son. “You loved this old thing when you were an infant.”
Jorah looked at the tatty old bear and frowned. It had clearly seen better days and had been stitched back together more than once and had a patch on its stomach with a frayed edge where some of the stitching had come loose.
“Why are you showing me all of this stuff, Dad?” Jorah asked, looking his father in the eye.
Jeor ignored the question and brought out a pile of old photographs instead, making himself comfortable on the sofa as he picked up his cup of coffee and began looking through the pictures, smiling as his hands drifted over photos of his wife and so from many years ago.
“You look so much like your mother,” Jeor said, shaking his head at a particular photograph. “There’s so much of her in you that it’s hard for me to look at you sometimes and not miss her as much as the day she died,” he admitted quietly.
Jorah wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to say to that.
“You’re going to see him too, you know,” Jeor added.
“See who?”
“Noah.”
Jorah sat up straight as a shiver ran down his spine.
“You’ll see him in your son,” Jeor continued. “Maybe it’ll be in the little things - something he says or does, but it’ll remind you of Noah and how much you miss him and how you never got to see him grow up.”
“I should have protected him,” Jorah said quietly. “I should have protected both of them.”
He looked up when he felt his father’s hand on his knee.
“You couldn’t have protected them any more than I could have protected your mother,” he replied sadly. “It’s taken me far too many years to swallow that bitter pill, son. Don’t make the same mistake that I did. You’re already a much better father than I ever was to you, don’t let the past ruin your future.”
“How do you live with it?” Jorah asked. “How do you live with the guilt of blaming yourself for not doing more?”
The question hurt but Jeor knew exactly what his son meant; the self-flagellation was something he was more than familiar with.
“You surround yourself with people who clearly have more common sense than you do,” Jeor replied with a wry smile. “I thought that if I cut myself off from the people I loved that it would solve all my problems but it only ever made them worse and made me even more miserable and bitter than I was before,” he sighed deeply, running a hand over his greying beard. “And I used to think that sucking everything up and not talking about your feelings was the way to deal with things, but I couldn’t have been more wrong about that either.”
“I’m scared, Dad,” Jorah said so quietly that Jeor almost didn’t hear him, but he couldn’t mistake the hitching of his son’s breath. “I’m so scared that it’s going to happen again.”
He pulled his son towards him and held him to him as he sobbed in his arms.
“I know,” he soothed, rubbing a hand over his son’s back. “I know, let it all out. You’ll feel better. I promise you.”
There had been nothing he could do to protect his wife from the aneurysm that took her life, but he could be there for his son in his time of need. While everyone expected Jorah to be strong during his wife’s pregnancy, behind closed doors and at his father’s house he could drop the façade for a moment and be honest and admit to the fears that had been bubbling under the surface and seek solace and support in the arms of his father. His father had failed him so many times before, but he would not fail him this time when he needed him the most.