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His name, on all legal documents, is Jaehaerys Stark, and his parents are Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. But that is not all of the story. That does not speak to promises in hospitals, split knuckles and black eyes, or a name that may be the name of peace in The South but is an ill omen of war to The North that he calls his home.
Jaehaerys I Targaryen the king of the once-royal House of the Dragon, the man for whom he was named because his father did not think for one moment what it meant to his Northern Lady’s people, is not a name well remembered where he comes from. His policies may have been for peace in the South, but uprooted the North and sent them spiralling under change that did not have the impact he intended. Maybe he thought he was a good man. Maybe Rhaegar thought he was giving him a kingly name. Maybe there were a hundred and one good reasons.
But Rhaegar had already lost his crown. His mother was eighteen when she caught the eye of the soon-to-be disgraced and exiled prince, who had already lost his wife of six years and two children for his already straying eyes. Rhaeger, twenty-four years old and in a place of power that should have damned him to the last, spelt her death when she was barely nineteen years old. He wants no place in his father’s house, in his blood and his mistakes. Nor his choices, and the name he does not want.
So, he goes by Jon Stark instead.
Once, he’d suggested changing his name properly to Jon and getting rid of Jaehaerys once and for all. His father (his real father, Rhaeger be damned), simply pursed his lips and said it was not for him to decide. Jon, all of nine at the time, had not understood. It would take a very long time for him to understand.
Rhaegar Targaryen and the once noble House Targaryen had been deposed when Aerys II murdered the brother and father of the woman he ran off with, when they could not procure his heir and he could not procure his son’s lover. The Rebellion fell on his head shortly and swiftly, and before long, the kingship of Westeros was dissolved and replaced by a council headed by House Baratheon. Kingship, as he’ll later come to mutter in decisive bitterness, in all but name.
Rhaegar had all his lands and titles stripped from him, keeping only enough of his wealth that it would not cause an uproar. His ex-wife and children moved to Dorne. His one remaining son was raised in the North. He would never live without eyes ever on him, as a condition of his surrender and abdication. Robert Baratheon may not have been king, but he has long since been the most powerful man in Westeros, with his son set to inherit. King in all but name.
Jon was always going to, in some part, be watched as well. He’s known since he was a child that Robert did not like him, that he was the stinging reminder that the woman he loved had not chosen him. His father protected him to the last from his tempering fury, but Jon knew that there was no bleeding out the half of him that was Targaryen.
Changing his name would not change it. All it would do is incense Rhaegar, and he’s never known quite what to say to a Rhaegar who feels like everything is slipping out of his hands all over again. Sometimes Jon thinks his father is half mad.
No one dares to whisper about his name to his face in school, but he knows they do. He hears them whisper the name Jaehaerys and Targaryen and wonder in too loud voices why he carries the name of his mother’s house, and not his fathers, or even a bastard's name. He wants to tell them that he is as much a Stark as any of his cousins, his siblings, and that he’d sooner die than be a Targaryen.
But he doesn’t. Some particularly bold boy starts getting up into his face about it once, but Robb is at his back before he can blink, and the kid sulks away, sending a look back at the pair of them. Jon looks at his brother, his closest friend, and feels a twist in his stomach. He’s only ever heard Robb even say that name once, and it was talking about the king.
His parents only use it when he’s in trouble. His mom always couples it with a single raise of his brow that has him pleading for mercy before she can say his name again. Only with them does he not feel utter vitriol for the name, only with them does he not always feel sick. Jon is the name his mother gave him, the name she whispered to her brother as she lay dying in her blood. Jon thinks that they all knew what was coming, even before it happened.
He asked his father, once, why he did not hate Rhaegar. “Because he gave me you,” he’d said at first, but when Jon had given him a look, he’d sighed and looked away. “Because…Lyanna chose him. Was it the right choice, was it okay? I cannot say for sure. His eye never should have turned to her, I do know that. But I cannot hate him, because I would have to hate the parts of you that are him.”
“I’m nothing like Rhaegar!” Jon had spit. His father had just looked at him sadly and said no more on any of it.
He is everything like Rhaegar, sometimes.
He’s not…he knows he doesn’t deal with things in the right way, that he’s cold and off-putting and not easy to love, not easy to be a friend to. He knows that he’s got a lot of anger in him, and he learns, slowly, after years and years of screaming matches with his father, where he gets it from. They’re both difficult men. Stubborn and proud and as his mom calls it, endlessly bull-headed.
He’s a lot like Lyanna, too, sometimes, or so he thinks when he catches his father looking when he thinks he cannot see. He doesn’t know what parts of him are Lyanna as much, but he knows he must sound like her sometimes, must have some of the same facial expressions, because he knows how to read his father’s face, knows what expression ghosts paint on the faces of the living. He knows that when he does something a little reckless and wild, his father is thinking of the sister he lost.
So when Bran has his accident and is paralysed for life, Jon makes a choice that he realises just a little too late is just the perfectly awful mix of both his parents.
The Night’s Watch is one of the oldest military groups in the world. It’s not what it once was, Jon learns quickly once he gets there, but there is something so seductive about it to him. Something in it that is still noble, still something he thinks he could make himself in. Something sings to him in the promise of service, of duty, of living a life for one thing and one thing alone. This part of him is all Lyanna. This part of him is all Stark.
And then there are the ambitions that he holds close to his heart and the fears. He knows who he is, what he is, and what that makes him. He could easily become a pawn in someone’s game. His father has already gone to King’s Landing to wait on Robert Baratheon’s hand, and he knows his existence is a tenuous strand between his father and his oldest friend. He takes a look around at the ties that bind him and feels angry. So he cuts them all off. This part of him is all Rhaegar.
The first time Jon really remembers getting into a screaming match with his father was when he really put his foot down about not wanting to go by Jaehaerys on anything save for legal documents. Rhaegar had gone pale for a moment, and then a familiar anger had crossed his face, and he was yelling, eyes wild and wide. Jon had dished it back not a moment later, and it had taken his dad hearing from his study and dragging Jon inside to break it up.
He’d been fourteen.
He’d spent five years letting Rhaegar keep calling him Jaehaerys and sometimes Jae when he was trying to be familiar in a way that always rubbed Jon the wrong way, but it was never Jon with him, never the name he wanted for himself. He’d conceded on the name change and found a way to live with it. He doesn’t hate the name, he thinks, and there’s still apart of him that clings to it, even all these years later. He just hates that it reminds him of Rhaegar fucking Targaryen. Hates that he will never escape his father. He knows a name won’t change that fact. He just wants his father to listen.
But Rhaegar doesn’t listen to him. It’s not until Jon screams in his face that day, Call me that one more time and I’ll never fucking talk to you again! that some of it gets through his thick skull. Rhaegar had taken a half step back, and Jon, vision half blurred by tears and lower lip trembling, had balled his hands into fists and glared with all he had. His voice had been sharp when he said, You’re not my fucking dad. You don’t get to tell me who I am.
Ned had arrived then.
Aemon Targaryen, his great uncle, is at The Wall. His uncle Benjen had seemingly neglected to tell him this until it was too late, and Jon was blinking at this sudden new relative. Aemon, blind, and old enough to remember when the possibility of something resembling retirement was introduced to The Watch (old enough that it was made for him), smiles at him like he can see Jon’s shock. “Jon Stark,” he says, sounding happy beyond words. “Rhaegar has spoken of you before.
“And what did he call me?” Jon asks, not even bitter that Rhaegar didn’t mention Aemon. He knows the call from the man is coming soon enough. He’s already bracing himself for it. He’s never let his father share his family with him, because it always ends in another screaming match, mainly about his mother. Jon knows more about it with every year that passes. He cannot forgive Rhaegar for that. For a lot of things.
“Jaehaerys,” Aemon says knowingly. When Jon huffs, he smiles and beckons him closer. Jon approaches after a brief moment of hesitation, crouching in front of his great-uncle. Aemon reaches out, and traces Jon’s face, smiling knowingly. “Yes. You have his nose. But much of your mother too, I reckon. You go by Jon.”
It is not a question. And still, he nods. Aemon hums. “Good. Jon it will be.”
So it’s that fucking easy, Jon thinks later. He kicks the snow and tries to pretend he feels better for it. Benjen draws near and tells him he has a call waiting for him. His face says enough.
His parents weren’t happy when he told them, of course. The Wall is dangerous. He’s giving up everything and he’s barely legal. But…he doesn’t care. He wants to do this, he tells himself as he packs his bags, as each of his siblings takes a chance to shadow his doorway. Robb just looks at him sadly. Sansa has tears in her eyes. Theon is the most normal, somehow. Arya hugs him and begs him to stay. Rickon just asks him to play. Bran isn’t…
Ned and Catelyn Stark have raised their children to be fine on their own. They have raised them to be strong, raised them to be better, raised them to do what they want. But they too haunt his doorway as he packs his life away, and he thinks that this is not what they wanted for him. His dad has always protected him fiercely, from everyone. He’s going South in a few days. Who knows what will come of that?
His dad hugs him tight before he goes, studying his face like it holds all the answers he’s looking for. His mom just kisses his cheek and smiles sadly up at him. He’s grateful for them. He’s waiting for when Rhaegar figures out what he’s doing.
Rhaegar and he scream at each other over the phone for hours. The Old Bear, Jeor Mormont, The Lord Commander, walks in at some point and just stares for a moment at his new recruit, and the fury in his eyes as he and his father engage in a verbal spar. Later, Jon will get sat down with Benjen and Jeor, and be drilled for what Rhaegar said, what happened. He’ll tell them what little he remembers from the conversation. The main points of a very complicated call.
One: He called his father a cunt. Repeatedly.
(One point five: he does not regret it. Nor does he intend to take it back. Benjen gives him a look when he says so. Jon just knows that he said much worse later.)
Two: Rhaegar Targaryen is a self-righteous asshole who thinks he can tell Jon what he should do with his own life. He is not happy with Jon’s decisions.
Three: He told his self-righteous asshole cunt excuse for a father that if he calls him Jaehaerys one more time, he’s throwing him off the top of The Wall. When he says that, voice cold, Benjen finally cuts him off with a snap of his name, Jon. He glares at his uncle and sees him struggle for a moment. He feels bad. He deflates and breathes deep a few times.
Four: He’s staying here and Rhaegar is just going to have to live with it.
Five: His father cried. He cried. They both cried, angry and upset with one another. What Jon doesn’t say to this part is that he cried harder once he finally hung up on Rhaegar, shoulders shaking and breaths coming in too hot and too fast. Sometimes it seems like things are getting easier with his father, and then they’re all too similar again and it all falls right back apart.
Sometimes it feels like his mother isn’t real.
He doesn’t know her, and will never get to know her. He’s her ghost to Ned and Benjen, memories of a woman they could not save. One night, at The Wall, he and his friends start talking about their families, and they all know who he is, so they let him be avoidant and just talk about Robb instead of anyone else in his family. Whispers have spread plenty far about the argument, even three months since then.
Once, when he was younger, in school, they had to do a family tree for a project. He’d written his name (Jon, not Jaehaerys), and then Lyanna’s name. It had taken a moment to write Rhaegar. His teacher had come on by and because his name was still Jaehaerys in the system and on like everything else, told him to write his proper name. He’d erased his name and wished he could erase Lyanna and Rhaegar’s too and write Eddard and Catelyn instead.
Catelyn is real though. She’s the one who brought him to the hospital when he got really sick as a kid. She’s the one who tries to call him the most. She’s the one he knows he’s hurting when he can’t find the strength to call. It’s her who he thinks of when he hears about his father.
He does something very reckless and very Lyanna when he hears about his father getting shot.
He tries to run.
He’s maybe a mile down the road when Benjen finds him. This far north, the best way to get around is by horses still, so he’d been planning to ride until he could hit Mole's Town and steal a car from the garage The Watch owns there. From there, he’s not sure what he’d do, but any chance of getting to think that through is dashed when Benjen cuts him off.
He gets off his horse when he’s told to. He’s ready for anger and shouting and more tears than the ones that are already in the corners of his eyes. Benjen stalks forward, hands balled into fists at his side, but when he gets in front of Jon, in touching distance, he hesitates. Jon looks away from him, feeling a sob rise to his throat.
Benjen pulls him in for a bone-crushing hug and Jon clings to him and sobs and sobs and sobs.
Benjen gets him blackout drunk that night. Jeor Mormont kindly pretends that he does not reek of alcohol and is not visibly hungover the next morning. Life goes on.
Jon meets Ygritte and knows he is too deep to surface quickly. She is fire and flame and enticing. He does not think of his mother, seduced by flames and someone who seemed too impossible to be real. He doesn't think of all the mistakes his parents made as Ygritte unbuttons his shirt, as his hands find a way to her hair and then under her shirt, as he gives himself over to her.
He doesn’t think at all of his family. She is getting his mind off of his father and his siblings and all of the missed calls on his phone. Ygritte is beautiful. She’s a wildfire. Jon is too much like both of his parents for this to end well. And yet, and yet, and yet. He loves her. He kisses her and thinks that he could stay with her forever.
He is eighteen years old, and some change.
The same age Lyanna Stark was when she met Rhaegar Targaryen.
It wasn’t okay, but they did love each other. Lyanna was entranced by the Prince, and he by the Northern beauty. He’d just divorced Elia, and she did not like the man her father was eyeing for betrothal, her brother's best friend. There had been something exhilarating about it all, to the both of them. Rhaegar’s eyes should never have strayed to her. She was too young. He too…everything.
But they loved one another, in some twisted sense of the word. She wanted him. He wanted her. So they ran away together, made mistakes, and had sex and giggled and pretended the world wasn’t real. And then Aerys made his demands and Brandon and Rickard were tried for and found guilty of treason. She’d wailed when she learned of their deaths. For the first time in his life, Rhaegar Targaryen was forced to face the consequences of his actions.
He abdicated easily enough. It didn’t save Lyanna, though. Benjen punched him in the face.
Ygritte tells him they should run away for a day. Jon doesn’t think and does just that. Benjen, having learned his lesson, doesn’t raise the alarm to Winterfell. He does cry though and think about his damned nephew and the mistakes he knows he’s repeating. He just hopes it doesn't kill him. He just wants Jon to come home.
Catelyn calls him one day, and then Robb. He hasn’t talked to any of them in months, not since he met Ygritte. She leans over his shoulder, and he turns off his phone, and goes back to what he was doing. Thoughts of his mom and brother are gone from his mind by the time he slinks back to The Wall. His uncle catches him in the hallway.
They say nothing. Benjen does not look happy, but he brushes past Jon without so much as a word beyond a cursory notification that he will be on a ranging beyond The Wall for the next six months. Jon watches his uncle go and feels the world turn to dust in his hands. Three days later, Jeor Mormont is killed in a skirmish, and Jon Snow turns Nineteen the day after. It’s only then he thinks of his parents.
His real dad only tells him the full story once, after that first screaming match. Tells him why as much as he dislikes Rhaegar, as much as he knows that they will never be truly at peace with one another, why he cannot hate him. Jon’s dad regrets a lot of what happened. Rhaegar had no hand in his father’s madness, and most of what remains of House Targaryen is sedate and at peace. It is better with them away from the throne.
Jon thinks his dad is a fool, cannot see how he cannot hate Rhaegar. He does, sometimes. He does, most of the time. But his father has his own sense of the world, his own sense of duty to Lyanna and the child she bore. Jon knows he has a lot of his father in him. He’s starting to see it more and more. Ned loves Jon, and that means also loving the parts of him that are Rhaegar.
Jon wishes he could love the parts of himself that are Rhaegar. But he hates that man too much sometimes to do so. It’s not an easy life to live. He’s not an easy person to like. Or love.
He visits his mom in the crypts a lot. He’ll sit at the base of her statue, and tell her about his day, about school, about anything. This is his own moment, and he thinks only Robb, Theon, and their parents know he does it. He would never tell anyone at school, anyway. None of them have a dead mother who is memorialised in only a statue.
Sometimes, he studies her face and holds it in his hand. He wishes every day that he got to know her, that he could understand the parts of him that belong to her. But he doesn’t. She’s not there to caution him, to tell him what he should avoid, to tell him how to avoid her mistakes. He cries a lot when he sits down here, cries so hard he can’t even choke out an I love you.
Ygritte dies in his arms. He never speaks of it to anyone, even his friends who came upon them. He loved her. He didn’t realise what they were reenacting before it was too late, and staring at her closed eyes, he thinks he might have damned her. He’s nineteen years old and has been for maybe a week and a half. He’s tired of being here, of having to live this life. He thinks of his mother in the crypts, doomed to be forever nineteen years old and have her son always begging at her stony feet for something real.
It never would have worked out, Jon thinks, in the end. Ygritte hated his role in The Watch, found everything on the other side of The Wall, his side of The Wall, to be an insult to the people who were on the wrong side of The Wall when it was built. She’d fuck him senseless and it would hang between them, The Wall and all the mistakes he was making, The Ghosts he ran from.
He never deserted, though. He ran off every so often, stole moments with her, but most men on The Wall have at some point. Most of those lovers don’t die in their arms, though. Most of them don’t leave behind an aching hole. Most of them aren’t twisted inverses of a story that’s already been written.
The hardest part of it all is that he doesn’t learn that she’s in the group that’s been wreaking havoc against The Wall for months until he sees her there. She’s dead to a bullet just a breath later, and he never sees who does it, but he holds her and tries to not feel betrayed that she’s here. This group helped spell Jeor Mormont’s death.
But he remembers her passion, her hope for something better. A lot of these people are here because they’re desperate and angry at the way things have played out. The Watch is more of The Seven Kingdom's thankless border patrol than anything they were made for. He looks at the carnage around him and thinks that it might be time to start rewriting the story.
A lot of good men died that day. Her blood is all over the front of his shirt.
Happy Belated 19th Birthday, Rhaegar texts him. It’s followed by another excuse about why he didn’t do it on time.
Jon throws his phone at the wall.
It’s really a series of moments of bad timing and even worse luck on his part that lands him in his position as Lord Commander. There is no hierarchy when it comes to inheriting the title, and there’s a common consensus that anyone is in the pool of choices, so long as they can get the votes. They spend as much time as they can–a week–waiting for the best choice to come back, but Benjen is truly deep beyond The Wall.
So they turn to the other Stark.
It’s strange, being elected by men whom most of which are at least twice as old as he is, but there’s also a boon to it. Having a Stark or even just a Northerner as Lord Commander on The Wall has always been a sort of boon to The Night’s Watch, assuring a good relationship with Winterfell and The North, and of course, support. Jon knows that it isn’t just how he took charge during the skirmish at The Wall following Alliser Thorne nearly bleeding to death that got him here.
It is also traditional that The Lord Commander visits Winterfell at his earliest possible convenience, to announce himself to The North and the one man whom he even somewhat reports to. Jon just has the unlucky pleasure that the Warden of The North is his dad and that he hasn’t been home and seen any of his family outside his uncle for two years.
He texts them all the news. His siblings celebrate and congratulate him (even Theon), but his parents are a little more subdued. The private text that Catelyn sends him is a thinly veiled order that she expects him to come home, and come home soon, and the text from Ned is much the same. He stares at them both for a time and then looks at Ghost.
“Guess we’re going home, boy,” he says.
Jory picks him up at Mole’s Town, heedless of Jon’s protests that he does have a licence and is perfectly capable of using it. At least he’s allowed to sit in the passenger seat and nap for a good half of the almost eight-hour drive. He’d been planning to fly, but couldn’t find a way to not only not endanger himself, but also bring Ghost along. Ghost, who seems plenty content to take up the whole of the backseat of the car.
Jory seems much the same. The injuries he’d sustained during the attempted assassination of his dad had made it nigh impossible for him to return as Captain of The Guard, but that does not mean they have thrown him out. Jon suspects that his presence here is Catelyn’s way of making sure he doesn’t find an excuse to suddenly not show up at Winterfell. Jory has always been good at corralling the kids.
“They’re excited to see you,” Jory says as they hit the outskirts of the land surrounding Winterfell. Jon can see it, looming in the distance, proud and tall as ever. Jon nods, humming non-committedly and pretends he’s alright with this, that his heart isn’t threatening to careen out of his chest from how hard it’s beating. Jory’s eyes rove over him, concerned.
The last time Jon was here, Bran was still in a coma. He hasn’t seen any of his family in two years. But he can’t keep running. Winterfell looms, and he curls his fingers into a fist.
He steals away with Robb at some point, free of Theon’s bitching and their little siblings who seem determined to be the one getting the whole of his attention. They go up to the old tower and lay side by side on the floor, shoulders pressed together and pinkies curled around one another. They don’t say anything, not for a long time.
The moon hangs like a sickle in the sky, casting the room in a silver light. Jon glances at Robb, his best friend, his brother, his other half, and when Robb catches him looking, he smiles widely. Jon smiles back, a little less wide and a lot more wanly, and rests his head on Robb’s shoulder. “I missed you,” Robb finally says.
“Yeah,” Jon says, the words getting trapped in his throat. “I missed you too.”
Once, around when the whole Jaehaerys debacle began, a teacher at school had gotten unhappy with Jon and Robb calling each other their brother. “You are cousins,” he’d said, voice stern and eyes alight with a vicious malice. Robb and Jon had stood shoulder to shoulder, hurt in both their bodies. “I do not know why either of your parents entertain this notion about you being brothers, but you are cousins.”
He knows, as he gets older, that the teacher was overstepping and on a power trip of massive proportions. He knows that if he and Robb consider each other brothers, then they are brothers, and that is that. No matter how much Jon bitches with even Theon, that doesn’t mean they’re not brothers, either. It doesn’t mean Theon isn’t his brother too, in a little bit of a messier way than Robb is.
But Jon is nine years old when that teacher tells him that, nine years old and with one parent dead and the other in the wind, so he starts crying when the teacher speaks of his parents like they aren’t also Robb’s. His mom and his dad are Catelyn and Ned Stark, and this teacher is trying to tell him otherwise.
He’s inconsolable. Theon is around by that point but not a brother yet, so he sits with Jon and Robb in the office, holding Jon’s hand as he cries and keeps crying even as he tries to stop. When their father sweeps in, having come straight from being Lord of The North and looking like it, the administrator who greets him goes pale.
The teacher is fired. Jon knows his dad doesn’t like throwing his power around in places like these, knows he’s trying to give his kids some semblance of a normal childhood, but when his dad picks him up and sits with him in the backseat of Rodrick’s car, he’s never been so grateful for it.
His mom comes up to him in the hall, grabbing his hand as she comes to stand in front of him, studying his face as she does. Her fingers, soft and long and familiar, trace the burn scars he got from one of the first fights at The Wall he was ever involved with. He told Robb some pieces about Ygritte. She’ll hear before long.
Sighing deeply, he leans forward to rest his head on her shoulder. They’ve always been a tall family, and she herself is blessed with it. She runs a hand through his hair, holding him close as he whispers, finally, “Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, baby,” she says.
Jon Stark meets Theon Greyjoy on his first day of school, when Robb Stark drags the boy to the table he’s sitting at and says he’s his new friend, and that Jon is his brother. He calls him Jaehaerys, though. The name Jon isn’t a thing, not quite yet. Jon stares at Theon. Theon stares at him. And thus begins the most petty rivalry of Jon’s life.
Theon is one of the first to call him Jon, though. He of course follows it with some insult that has Jon shoving him into the snow. He was the one who hugged him as he cried after the teacher brought up his parents. He gets messy families, gets not quite being wanted by your parents, gets being a stain in a life. Jon and Theon argue and bitch, yes, but they respect one another. Jon has never not been happy to have Theon in their family. He’s grateful, even, that he is.
So when he gets the call that Theon has disappeared, he books it back South without another thought. His family needs him. Going back to Winterfell was enough to make him want to come back, enough to make it seem possible he could again. Benjen has returned by this point and promises to hold down The Wall for as long as Jon can steal away.
Jon also meets the woman Robb is going to marry when he goes home.
It’s not easy, watching Robb throw himself towards things. He’s trying to avoid the grief and the fear in his heart, and Jon doesn’t dislike Talisa, but he worries about his brother, worries about his best friend. He wishes that they could just find Theon. It’s been nearly two months and there’s not a whisper of him. He has to go back to The Wall after barely a week in The South, and with the new policies he’s enacting, he can’t steal away again.
Jon watches the wreck from The Wall.
Edd comes in without knocking, and Jon is just about to jokingly tell him off when he sees his expression. He stays where he is, sitting in his chair, as Edd sighs heavily and glances back like he’s worried about something. “A Man claiming to be your father is here. He wants to talk to you, Jon.”
Jon pauses. It would not be Ned, meaning it can only be Rhaegar. He feels his hand curl into a fist in his lap and he breathes deeply, closing his eyes and taking a few moments to digest the information. Finally, after what feels like years but is only a few seconds, he meets Edd’s eyes and tells him, “Send him here. Close the door on your way out.”
Make him have to face a closed door, first, Jon thinks, feeling a little cruel and more than a little unhappy. He tries to get back to what he was doing, but his head is spinning with a hundred calculations of just how long it might take to get here from where Rhaegar likely is in the courtyard, how eager he will be to get to Jon, and what happens when that knock at the door comes. He breathes deeply, closing his eyes and holding his head in his hands.
They haven’t spoken since that call. Jon didn’t tell him not to ever come back. But he did say a lot of other things. He winces as he remembers them.
A knock at the door. His heart is in his throat. “Jon?”
Theon calls him, once he gets access to his phone again. His voice is rough and awful so of course Jon points it out, which gets a tired laugh out of his brother. Jon feels his face pinch. It’s all wrong, it all sounds wrong, and he just wants to run back home, but duty keeps him here at The Wall. Sam will be heading out soon, Aemon in tow, to drop him off at Dragonstone so Rhaegar can keep an eye on him, before he goes to Old Town to begin his studies.
The message that Jon had sent Rhaegar about it hadn’t been as his son. It had been as Lord Commander Stark contacting the last relative Aemon had left to him. This is what pulls at his mind the longer he and Theon call, the more he thinks they both recognise the destruction in both their lives.
“Take care of yourself, Jon,” Theon says weakly.
Robb had told him not to call Theon by his name when Jon spoke to him, offering no further explanation beyond we’re working on it. So he just says, voice dull, “Yeah. You too.”
Rhaegar sits across from him, looking out of place. Jon’s grip on the armrests of his chair is white-knuckled. The air is tense, full of everything that they last said to one another. Jon called Rhaegar a lot of things, a lot of things he shouldn’t have called him. He doesn’t take it back. He just knows he never should have said them in the first place. He remembers realising that Rhaegar was crying on the other end.
“You look well,” Rhaegar says, voice a little stilted, and very awkward. Jon’s expression betrays nothing. Rhaegar’s eyes rove over him for a long moment, taking in the all-black clothes, the hair that is piled up at the back of his head because Jon hates having it in his face while he tries to work, all the little things that are very Jon. “I know this is sudden, but–”
“Why are you here?”
Rhaegar winces. Jon’s sure he expected coldness, expected the bite, but it still seems to hurt him, in one way or another. Jon’s grip on the armrests tightens. He looks away and says, in a soft voice, “Aemon passed away. I wanted you to hear it from me.”
“Oh,” Jon says softly. Aemon had been a presence at The Wall that Jon had needed, a man who guided him through the type of things that weren’t easy, who guided him kindly. Sometimes, they’d sit alone and Aemon would trace the shape of his face, and smile like he was feeling summer all over again.
“I’m sorry,” Rhaegar says, standing up after a moment. Jon and he look at one another, his grey Stark eyes meet Rhaegar’s strange purple Valyrian ones. His father swallows tightly and leaves without another word.
Jon doesn’t feel the knives when they come. Only the cold.
He wakes up once, on the way to the hospital. The world is tilting dangerously around him, and he can feel his heartbeat like a drum that rattles the ground under his feet, can feel how he slowly bleeds and slowly dies in the back of this ambulance. Someone’s hand is in his, running calloused fingers over the back of his hand, over his bruised knuckles. He’d given them a good fight. It still didn’t save him, just made his death come slowly.
He looks at his bloody stomach and passes out before he can count how many knife wounds there are.
Jon Stark–Jaehaerys Stark–is nineteen years old when he flatlines in the back of an ambulance. His mother was Lyanna Stark and she was nineteen years old when she died. Oh gods, he thinks, as he sees his stomach in that brief moment before he passes out, I don’t want to die.
They start his heart again.
Jon dreams of Lyanna in the endless black. Dreams of a statue lit only by candlelight, dreams of a sad and solemn face, dreams of a crying statue. He can hear voices around him, voices he knows, feel a soft hand take his hair and braid it. He drifts between worlds, drifts between life and death. Blue petals fall around him. A child screams in the night. Blood pours over a stone statue, and he grovels at her feet and prays.
Rhaegar has three children. Rhaenys, Aegon, and Jaehaerys. His two oldest live at the southern tip of Westeros, in the hot and dry desert that is Dorne. His youngest lives at the other end of the continent, in the cold lands of his mother. They both live in the homes of their mother, with the families of their mothers, far away from him on the stormy isle that is Dragonstone, the last thing he has of his House.
Jon doesn’t really get close to them, or to his aunt Daenerys, until he’s an adult, until he’s at The Wall. They’ve all visited, once or twice, and he likes them all enough. He remembers summers when they’d meet somewhere in the middle, the three children of Rhaegar Targaryen, and giggle and laugh like they didn’t have a care in the world. But when they’re older, those giggles disappear and are replaced by whiskey and softly falling snow that swallows their conversations.
He wakes up in the hospital and immediately feels like he wants to die.
He’s swallowed up the storm not a moment later. Doctors and nurses bustle around him, and he tries to speak and ask where his mom and his dad are, where he is, what he’s doing here. He’s pretty sure this is the Hospital near Winterfell, not the one near The Wall. He doesn’t know how he got here. But he can feel the scars on his stomach, feel the bandages that wrap around him.
Ned and Catelyn burst into the room soon enough. He sobs and tries to reach for them, but his dad stops him, pulling him in for a hug and pressing a breathless kiss to his brow. Jon cries silently, clinging to his mom as she hugs him tightly and pets his hair and shushes him gently. He can see the fear in their eyes, see how they look at him like they’ve just been given a gift of the most massive proportions.
When Rhaegar comes, neither of them says anything to each other for a long time. His mom told him that he’d been one of the first ones there, that he’d stayed around. And yet, it took him a while to finally see Jon, to look him in his eyes.
“Jon,” Rhaegar says, his voice rough. He sobs out the next name, “Jaehaerys, I–” Jon moves to glare at the man for that name, but finds himself frozen by the look in his father’s eyes, the inherent hopelessness that lies there. “I know you do not like that name because it comes from me. I know you do not love me, that you cannot find a way to. I do not ask you to love me or to love that name. But listen to me, let me speak to you.”
Jon says nothing. Rhaegar hesitates like he hadn’t really expected to get that far. Slowly, he reaches out and takes Jon’s hand in his, running his thumb over the back of his knuckle like Benjen did in the ambulance. Or so Jon’s heard. “You are more than I have ever deserved. You, Rhaenys, and Aegon are things I can never hope to truly deserve. But I do love you, in whatever way I can. I am…I am not good at this. At being a father, at being what any of you need. There is nothing I can do to undo what I have done to the three of you. All I ask is that you know that I know what I have done. That I understand that, and for you to understand that I will always love you.”
The thing is, Jon already knows this. It’s why Rhaegar was so angry when he joined The Watch–he thought Jon was condemning himself to death. And, glancing down at his stomach, Jon doesn’t think the man was fully wrong. But he can’t…he cannot love Rhaegar, and can never stop feeling some inch of hatred for everything he’s reaped. But he’s never changed his name. He will always be, in some part, named Jaehaerys. Has he not kept that?
“I know,” he whispers.
Elia Martell, mother to his half-siblings, is the last visitor he has. before he goes home. She holds his face between her manicured hands and studies it carefully. He does not know what she thinks of the woman Rhaegar ran off with right after the divorce, but she has never had ill will to him. “You are okay?” She asks him softly, smiling and kissing his forehead when he nods. “A gift from the Gods.”
He comes home, one more time. The wolves are howling all around them, barking and yapping up a storm as Robb helps him hobble unsteadily up the stairs. He’s never been so glad to be home, never been so glad that he gets to be here again. He’d truly thought his life was forfeit in the snow. He really thought that he’d finish what started when Rhaegar’s eyes strayed and that all of Lyanna would die before any of it could get older than nineteen.
But it didn’t. He’s home, his family and Aegon and Rhaenys and Daenerys are all around, laughing and smiling and eating dinner like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Outside, the snow is falling softly. Rhaegar called him a few days ago, to ask if Jon wanted something he saw at the store. They didn’t get into another screaming match. Jon had still told him no, citing one reason or another.
Things are, for once, a little easier.