FIC * Let the rain * ASOIAF * Jon & Robb
Oct. 13th, 2011 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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literenIo un giorno la smetterò di scrivere fanfic in fretta e furia, così avrò anche il tempo di editarle e postarle in modo meno osceno.
Quel giorno (ovviamente) non è oggi.
---
Jon has been staring at the woman all night. She's a redhead, petite and with soft features, just his type. Once or twice she looked his way and smiled, and that's all the encouragement that Jon needs. When Robb gets up and heads for the bathroom, Jon gathers his courage and approaches the woman's table.
"Hi," he says, trying not to sound as if he's regretting this, because this is a bad idea and nothing good will come out of it. "Can I get you a drink?"
"That'd be lovely," she says, flashing him another of those hypnotizing smiles. "My name's Ygritte."
"Jon," he says, caught off guard for a moment. Then he remembers himself. "John Smith. Nice to meet you."
Ygritte smirks but doesn't say anything about his obviously fake name. She drinks scotch, which is surprising since Jon expected her to order something pink and sticky and sugary. "You're American," she says and Jon nods because it's impossible to pretend otherwise, his accent gave him away. "What brings you to Canada?"
He swirls the liquid around in his glass. "It's a long story," he says.
"I like stories," Ygritte says, moving his chair closer.
Jon shouldn't be telling her anything, but Robb isn't here and Ygritte isn't going to repeat this to anyone.
"I'm looking for my sister," he says. "I heard that a girl matching her description was seen around these parts, so me and my brother came here to investigate. No luck, though." It's hard to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
"Sorry to hear that," says Ygritte. "It must be hard for you, coming all the way here and go home with nothing."
Jon shrugs. "We didn't have our hopes up. Besides it wasn't a complete waste of time, we were able to find some work along the way."
"Might be that you'll find something else too," she says. She drowns the rest of her liquor and flashes him a smile.
Before long, she's dragging him to the alley outside the bar. "Do you do this often, John Smith?" she asks, clinging to his arm. "Pick up drunk chicks in bars?"
Jon shrugs. "You're not that drunk," he points out. He looks into her eyes, and there's a flash of realization across her face, and then she draws her fangs and attacks.
Luckily for Jon, Robb is there too. He jumps out of his hiding place and cannonballs into the girl, knocking her off his feet. Jon's hand goes to his neck but he hasn't been bitten. He'll have to thank Robb later, provided that both of them make it through the night. His machete is in his bag, hidden somewhere in this alley, but Robb's brilliant plan didn't take into account the fact that there isn't much time to search the alley while the vampire is trying to bite their heads off.
"Do something," Robb says. He's pinning Ygritte to the ground, but then she snarls and kicks him in the stomach. In all of two seconds their positions are reversed, and now Robb is the one with his back to the pavement and two hands around his throat. "Jon!" he says, choking.
Jon would very much like to do something, if he could. "You're the one with a knife!" he yells. He picks up the lid of a trashcan and throws it at Ygritte, but it barely grazes her. She shifts her attention to Jon, however, and Robb has the time to throw him the knife. It almost cuts off Jon's fingers but he catches it, and he's on Ygritte before she has any time to move.
She starts yelling but doesn't have the time. Her head comes off after only one swing, spraying Jon and Robb with blood. The boys remain frozen for a second, panting heavily, until Ygritte's body slumps backwards and falls to the pavement.
"Gross," says Robb, wiping blood from his cheek.
'Gross' doesn't even begin to cover it, but they've got more pressing problems. "Come on, we've got to go" says Jon, giving Robb his knife. "I don't want the Canadian police to ask why we beheaded a young girl in a back alley, it would be awkward."
They manage to cross the border without any troubles. Jon tries to not to think that Ygritte was really cute, and that if she hadn't a vampire he would have tried to hit on her for real.
---
The Starks are a family of Hunters. They have been for years, ever since the first Brandon Stark moved to the States from Northern Europe, around the same time that the Salem witch trials were taking place. Jon's father used to tell them about it, and that had always been little Bran's favorite story because the protagonist had the same name as him, never mind that the original Brandon had died shortly after his arrival at the hands of the same witches he was supposed to hunt. Being a Hunter wasn't good for your lifespan, but that was what you did anyway, because it was in your family.
That was what Catelyn Stark could never understand. She was from just outside Jackson, Mississippi, and her family was a normal one, they ran a small inn and her father was a member of the city council and her mother baked homemade pies for their guests and when she told goodnight tales to her children she had no idea that the monsters were real. Catelyn was going to marry someone normal, like a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer, but then she had met Eddard Stark and had married him and had five kids with him. But she had never understood the life of a Hunter, not really.
Catelyn wasn't Jon's real mother. He called her "mum" because his dad insisted, and Robb too, but both he and Catelyn have always been uncomfortable with it. When Jon was little he never understood why his mum didn't hug him as she did with Robb. As he grew up he counted himself lucky that she didn't, because she had this habit of picking Robb and Sansa up and kissing them, especially when dad hadn't been home for a while, even though they were old already, like four or five years old, and hugs were starting to become annoying. Jon thought it was because Catelyn liked Robb's and Sansa's hair better, because it was red like hers and very pretty, while Jon just had plain black hair. But then baby Arya came along, and she had dark hair like Jon, and Catelyn hugged her just as much as Robb and Sansa if not more, and Jon didn't understand why.
---
Jon was only six at the time, but he still remembers the day when he asked his dad why mum didn't love him as much as Robb and Sansa, and his dad told Jon that his real mum wasn't Catelyn, it was another woman who had died years ago when Jon was just a baby. His dad and Robb said that it didn't matter and everyone loved Jon, though it wasn't true. Mostly, Catelyn tried to treat Jon the same as her real children, but Jon felt the difference. She had never really smiled at him. Thinking back on his childhood, years later, Jon realized she must have been shocked when her husband had returned home with the son of another woman.
The only time when Jon was glad to be someone else's child had been when his dad decided that he and Robb were old enough to learn how to use a rifle. They were twelve at the time. Catelyn didn't want to let Robb near a weapon. "Take only Jon," she begged Eddard. "I don't care if he becomes a Hunter, but not Robb."
At the time, Jon didn't realize the meaning behind her words, but his father got very angry. It was the first time Jon saw them fight. Afterward, Eddard brought both of his sons to the field behind the house and showed them how to take apart a rifle and load it and had them practice by shooting at old cans. Jon hit the mark with almost every bullet, but Robb's sullen expression took all of the fun out of it.
Later that night, Robb told Jon that he didn't care if they were just half brothers. "We're going to fight the monsters together," he promised. And they had.
---
To her mother's relief, Sansa didn't show any inclination towards shotguns and rock salt. She didn't even want to hear about monsters because she thought they were too scary and her favorite stories were those of her TV shows. Sansa preferred "normal pastimes", as she liked to call them. By the time Jon and Robb graduated, she was head cheerleader and had a role in the school musical. She wanted to study Medieval Literature at Harvard and major in English.
Arya was her sister's polar opposite: ever since she had been able to walk and talk, all she could think about was Hunting. Her grades were abysmal, but she didn't care about that. Finally, towards the middle of her freshman year, Eddard threatened to stop giving her shooting lessons if she failed another test. She got a B+ in her next essay, and the teacher said that it would have been an A if Arya stayed on topic.
"It's not fair," Arya complained to Jon afterward. "The subject was 'your father's job' so I wrote about that time when dad killed those vampires in Orlando. I put in lots of details too and it was a really good story, I should have gotten more than a lousy B+."
"Maybe you should have made up that dad was an accountant," Jon suggested, but Arya complained that it would have been boring and she would have fallen asleep writing the essay.
---
They have breakfast at a small diner with a name like Tim's or Ted's. Jon orders two specials of the day while Robb reads the local section of the newspaper. It looks like there's a sad lack of mysterious deaths in this part of the world, which is good if you're a regular citizen working nine to five, but not if you're a Hunter looking for the next job.
The waitress comes back with the specials, which are just large plates of eggs and bacon and are special only in name. Jon wolfs it down anyway
"I think I found something," his brother says after a while. He folds the newspaper and passes it across the table.
Jon scans the paragraph. "A car went off a bridge? It's not much," he says.
"We've gone on some hunts with less than this," Robb points out. "It might be nothing but dad would want to check this out, just to make sure."
"All right," Jon says. "But first we've got to find some place with a laundromat. I'm all out of clean clothes."
He's in half a mind to buy only black clothes from now on, since it will be easier to hide the stains. Monster blood is awfully hard to clean. He borrows one of Robb's shirts, since vampire blood isn't exactly fashionable and they're trying to keep a low profile. They're about the same height but Jon is thinner than his brother and has narrower shoulders, so the shirt hangs loose to him and makes him look underweight.
Robb tries the coffee and makes a face. "This could be the second worst coffee I've ever had," he says. Then he proceeds to pour three packets of sugar in his mug.
Jon can't believe it would be as bad as that. They've tried almost every diner in the States and they're experts on bad coffee and greasy food. He takes a gulp of coffee and almost gags. "God," he says, making a face. "You weren't kidding."
He ends up drinking it anyway, because they've got several hundred miles to go today and he needs the caffeine.
---
They travel on motorbikes. Sometimes one of them points that it's too conspicuous and they should get a car, which would also give them the advantage of a trunk, but in the end they're too attached to Grey Wind and Ghost. Those are the bikes' names. It felt silly even all those years ago, bikes with a name, but Grey Wind was even older than Robb and Jon. That bike had been sitting in a corner of the garage for as long as the boys could remember, covered with a tarp and gathering dust, until dad gave it to Robb for his sixteenth birthday. Dad had fixed it and it worked so well that it seemed new. It looked new too, all shiny and white with a silvery wolf painted across the side. A wolf for a Stark, that was the ancient sigil of their family from centuries ago. Jon wasn't a Stark, he even had a different surname, and he resented his brother for several long weeks, feeling alternatively bitter with jealousy and ashamed at wanting his brother's gift.
Then, for his birthday, Jon received a bike too. It was brand new and all white, his dad explained, so that Jon could paint it however he chose. "Every sigil has to start at some point in time," dad said, "so why not start now?" In two hundred years' time it would all be the same. Jon never painted his bike at all, because all white was god enough a sigil for Snow, but he loved his bike. He used to spend those days riding around with Robb until nightfall. Arya asked for a bike too, Jon remembers. Bran didn't care, Sansa wanted a pony, Rickon was too little and the noise of the engine scared him, but Arya wanted a bike like her brothers. "On your sixteenth birthday," dad promised. But Arya had disappeared long before then.
---
Neither Jon nor Robb likes to do laundry, so they just wait until they can't put it off any more.
"But first we've got to find some place with a laundromat," Jon announces one morning, after searching in his duffel bag for a clean shirt that isn't there. "I'm all out of clean clothes."
He's in half a mind to buy only black clothes from now on, since it will be easier to hide the stains. Monster blood is awfully hard to clean. He borrows one of Robb's shirts, since vampire blood isn't exactly fashionable and they're trying to keep a low profile. They're about the same height but Jon is thinner than his brother and has narrower shoulders, so the shirt hangs loose to him and makes him look underweight.
"Are you all right?" Robb asks him while he's feeding quarters to the washing machine.
Jon shrugs and leans against the wall. "I'm fine," he says. Unsurprisingly, the lie doesn't fly with his brother.
Robb sits down in one of the plastic chairs in front of the machines. "Tell me," he says, and he sounds so much like dad, it's almost enough to break Jon.
---
They didn't go to college. Robb didn't even consider it as an option, much to Catelyn's dismay. Though his mother was careful never to say it out loud, it was also evident that she didn't like the idea of her eldest son becoming a Hunter. It made Robb feel guilty when dad started to take them along on his jobs, but it never stopped him. Jon and Robb started traveling back and forth across the country, following after dad in his pickup truck, chasing after vengeful spirits and ghouls and werewolves. They found out the hard way that hunting monsters isn't half as glamorous and exciting as the tales made it out to be, but that never stopped them. There were a couple of close calls, like when Robb was almost beheaded by an axe-wielding zombie bridegroom, or when a harpy almost clawed out Jon's eye, but they learned quickly and laughed about it afterward. After a couple of years dad was starting to say that they were ready to handle a job on their own, but then Robert Baratheon came to visit.
He was one of dad's oldest friends, they used to work together when they were younger and Robb and Jon had heard hundred of stories about him and how he was the greatest Hunter of his generation. Robert turned out to be a delusion. He came at the end of the autumn, bringing with him his bitchy wife and news of demons in the south. "More than we've ever seen together, Ned," he said, sitting at the kitchen table and drowning his fourth bottle of beer. "More than any hunter has ever seen together in the same place. They're planning something, I don't know what, I don't know when, but it's happening soon. I said I was retired, but you've got to help me with this last job." And his father had looked unhappy, but he went with him.
Catelyn begged him not to go, saying that surely someone else could deal with this, like Jaime Lannister who was Robert's brother in law, the job was so far away from home and it sounded so dangerous. "I trust Jaime even less than the demons he's supposed to slay," dad said. "I'm more of a brother to Robert than Jaime could ever be." And then there had been no more mention of dad not going. The boys wanted to go with him, but dad another job, a cursed necklace all the way in Nevada, and they had been too overjoyed at the thought of their first solo job to argue any more. They went, them west, dad and Robert and Cersei south, leaving behind Catelyn and the kids.
---
They never knew who betrayed their family. They don't even know if someone did betray them, though Jon thinks it's far more likely that than the alternative, which is that a bunch of demons just happened to pay them a house call when only Catelyn and the kids were home, when their house remained safely hidden for over twenty years. When Jon and Robb got Sansa's phone call, they had just passed Reno on their way back. They sped through the remaining miles as quickly as they could, but it didn't matter. The house had already burned to the ground long before they made it back, and Sansa was the only one who remained, and she couldn't remember anything. Couldn't, or wouldn't, not that it made any difference.
Jon stopped Robb and insisted that he tried holy water and silver before he hugged Sansa. She was not possessed, and it was better to be safe than sorry, but Sansa still resented Jon for that. The girl insisted that someone pulled her out of the burning house. That was all that she could tell them, since she wasn't even sure whether her savior was human or supernatural, and Jon was privately convinced that Sansa was in shock and had made up the story in her head. She couldn't even tell what happened to the others.
With Catelyn, they didn't have to wonder very long. The fire department found her body in Bran's room, burned so much that they had to identify her through her dental records and wouldn't even let Robb see her. It was the first time that Jon felt sorry for Catelyn, and the first time that he saw his brother cry, though he couldn't say if Robb was crying because of his mother or because hers was the only body that they found. Jon wanted to cry too, but they had a job to do.
Finding Bran and Rickon was easier than they could have hoped. Some family friends, the Reeds, had noticed signs of demonic activity but arrived too late to stop anything. They found Rickon wandering outside the house, miraculously unscathed, and then Bran. "We thought they were the only survivors," Meera Reed explained, "and we couldn't call an ambulance, there would be too many questions asked." Bran's spine had been broken by a fall of several feet. The horse doctor who treated him thought Bran had tried to escape from the fire by jumping off a window, until Jon and Robb explained that their home only had one floor. Nobody had any idea as to what could have happened, and since Bran had been in a coma ever since the accident they weren't likely to find out any time soon. There didn't seem to be anything that they could do for him, so they left him and Rickon with the Reeds and went looking for Arya.
Their little sister was nowhere to be found. Sometimes Sansa called with reports of a girl who had been sighted killing vampires in Los Angeles or exorcising demons in Boston, but these stories were about as accurate as the ones about alligators in the sewers. The only thing Robb and Jon were able to find in twelve months of searching was their father's grave, side by side with Robert Baratheon's, side by side in a field outside Baton Rouge.
Quel giorno (ovviamente) non è oggi.
---
Jon has been staring at the woman all night. She's a redhead, petite and with soft features, just his type. Once or twice she looked his way and smiled, and that's all the encouragement that Jon needs. When Robb gets up and heads for the bathroom, Jon gathers his courage and approaches the woman's table.
"Hi," he says, trying not to sound as if he's regretting this, because this is a bad idea and nothing good will come out of it. "Can I get you a drink?"
"That'd be lovely," she says, flashing him another of those hypnotizing smiles. "My name's Ygritte."
"Jon," he says, caught off guard for a moment. Then he remembers himself. "John Smith. Nice to meet you."
Ygritte smirks but doesn't say anything about his obviously fake name. She drinks scotch, which is surprising since Jon expected her to order something pink and sticky and sugary. "You're American," she says and Jon nods because it's impossible to pretend otherwise, his accent gave him away. "What brings you to Canada?"
He swirls the liquid around in his glass. "It's a long story," he says.
"I like stories," Ygritte says, moving his chair closer.
Jon shouldn't be telling her anything, but Robb isn't here and Ygritte isn't going to repeat this to anyone.
"I'm looking for my sister," he says. "I heard that a girl matching her description was seen around these parts, so me and my brother came here to investigate. No luck, though." It's hard to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
"Sorry to hear that," says Ygritte. "It must be hard for you, coming all the way here and go home with nothing."
Jon shrugs. "We didn't have our hopes up. Besides it wasn't a complete waste of time, we were able to find some work along the way."
"Might be that you'll find something else too," she says. She drowns the rest of her liquor and flashes him a smile.
Before long, she's dragging him to the alley outside the bar. "Do you do this often, John Smith?" she asks, clinging to his arm. "Pick up drunk chicks in bars?"
Jon shrugs. "You're not that drunk," he points out. He looks into her eyes, and there's a flash of realization across her face, and then she draws her fangs and attacks.
Luckily for Jon, Robb is there too. He jumps out of his hiding place and cannonballs into the girl, knocking her off his feet. Jon's hand goes to his neck but he hasn't been bitten. He'll have to thank Robb later, provided that both of them make it through the night. His machete is in his bag, hidden somewhere in this alley, but Robb's brilliant plan didn't take into account the fact that there isn't much time to search the alley while the vampire is trying to bite their heads off.
"Do something," Robb says. He's pinning Ygritte to the ground, but then she snarls and kicks him in the stomach. In all of two seconds their positions are reversed, and now Robb is the one with his back to the pavement and two hands around his throat. "Jon!" he says, choking.
Jon would very much like to do something, if he could. "You're the one with a knife!" he yells. He picks up the lid of a trashcan and throws it at Ygritte, but it barely grazes her. She shifts her attention to Jon, however, and Robb has the time to throw him the knife. It almost cuts off Jon's fingers but he catches it, and he's on Ygritte before she has any time to move.
She starts yelling but doesn't have the time. Her head comes off after only one swing, spraying Jon and Robb with blood. The boys remain frozen for a second, panting heavily, until Ygritte's body slumps backwards and falls to the pavement.
"Gross," says Robb, wiping blood from his cheek.
'Gross' doesn't even begin to cover it, but they've got more pressing problems. "Come on, we've got to go" says Jon, giving Robb his knife. "I don't want the Canadian police to ask why we beheaded a young girl in a back alley, it would be awkward."
They manage to cross the border without any troubles. Jon tries to not to think that Ygritte was really cute, and that if she hadn't a vampire he would have tried to hit on her for real.
---
The Starks are a family of Hunters. They have been for years, ever since the first Brandon Stark moved to the States from Northern Europe, around the same time that the Salem witch trials were taking place. Jon's father used to tell them about it, and that had always been little Bran's favorite story because the protagonist had the same name as him, never mind that the original Brandon had died shortly after his arrival at the hands of the same witches he was supposed to hunt. Being a Hunter wasn't good for your lifespan, but that was what you did anyway, because it was in your family.
That was what Catelyn Stark could never understand. She was from just outside Jackson, Mississippi, and her family was a normal one, they ran a small inn and her father was a member of the city council and her mother baked homemade pies for their guests and when she told goodnight tales to her children she had no idea that the monsters were real. Catelyn was going to marry someone normal, like a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer, but then she had met Eddard Stark and had married him and had five kids with him. But she had never understood the life of a Hunter, not really.
Catelyn wasn't Jon's real mother. He called her "mum" because his dad insisted, and Robb too, but both he and Catelyn have always been uncomfortable with it. When Jon was little he never understood why his mum didn't hug him as she did with Robb. As he grew up he counted himself lucky that she didn't, because she had this habit of picking Robb and Sansa up and kissing them, especially when dad hadn't been home for a while, even though they were old already, like four or five years old, and hugs were starting to become annoying. Jon thought it was because Catelyn liked Robb's and Sansa's hair better, because it was red like hers and very pretty, while Jon just had plain black hair. But then baby Arya came along, and she had dark hair like Jon, and Catelyn hugged her just as much as Robb and Sansa if not more, and Jon didn't understand why.
---
Jon was only six at the time, but he still remembers the day when he asked his dad why mum didn't love him as much as Robb and Sansa, and his dad told Jon that his real mum wasn't Catelyn, it was another woman who had died years ago when Jon was just a baby. His dad and Robb said that it didn't matter and everyone loved Jon, though it wasn't true. Mostly, Catelyn tried to treat Jon the same as her real children, but Jon felt the difference. She had never really smiled at him. Thinking back on his childhood, years later, Jon realized she must have been shocked when her husband had returned home with the son of another woman.
The only time when Jon was glad to be someone else's child had been when his dad decided that he and Robb were old enough to learn how to use a rifle. They were twelve at the time. Catelyn didn't want to let Robb near a weapon. "Take only Jon," she begged Eddard. "I don't care if he becomes a Hunter, but not Robb."
At the time, Jon didn't realize the meaning behind her words, but his father got very angry. It was the first time Jon saw them fight. Afterward, Eddard brought both of his sons to the field behind the house and showed them how to take apart a rifle and load it and had them practice by shooting at old cans. Jon hit the mark with almost every bullet, but Robb's sullen expression took all of the fun out of it.
Later that night, Robb told Jon that he didn't care if they were just half brothers. "We're going to fight the monsters together," he promised. And they had.
---
To her mother's relief, Sansa didn't show any inclination towards shotguns and rock salt. She didn't even want to hear about monsters because she thought they were too scary and her favorite stories were those of her TV shows. Sansa preferred "normal pastimes", as she liked to call them. By the time Jon and Robb graduated, she was head cheerleader and had a role in the school musical. She wanted to study Medieval Literature at Harvard and major in English.
Arya was her sister's polar opposite: ever since she had been able to walk and talk, all she could think about was Hunting. Her grades were abysmal, but she didn't care about that. Finally, towards the middle of her freshman year, Eddard threatened to stop giving her shooting lessons if she failed another test. She got a B+ in her next essay, and the teacher said that it would have been an A if Arya stayed on topic.
"It's not fair," Arya complained to Jon afterward. "The subject was 'your father's job' so I wrote about that time when dad killed those vampires in Orlando. I put in lots of details too and it was a really good story, I should have gotten more than a lousy B+."
"Maybe you should have made up that dad was an accountant," Jon suggested, but Arya complained that it would have been boring and she would have fallen asleep writing the essay.
---
They have breakfast at a small diner with a name like Tim's or Ted's. Jon orders two specials of the day while Robb reads the local section of the newspaper. It looks like there's a sad lack of mysterious deaths in this part of the world, which is good if you're a regular citizen working nine to five, but not if you're a Hunter looking for the next job.
The waitress comes back with the specials, which are just large plates of eggs and bacon and are special only in name. Jon wolfs it down anyway
"I think I found something," his brother says after a while. He folds the newspaper and passes it across the table.
Jon scans the paragraph. "A car went off a bridge? It's not much," he says.
"We've gone on some hunts with less than this," Robb points out. "It might be nothing but dad would want to check this out, just to make sure."
"All right," Jon says. "But first we've got to find some place with a laundromat. I'm all out of clean clothes."
He's in half a mind to buy only black clothes from now on, since it will be easier to hide the stains. Monster blood is awfully hard to clean. He borrows one of Robb's shirts, since vampire blood isn't exactly fashionable and they're trying to keep a low profile. They're about the same height but Jon is thinner than his brother and has narrower shoulders, so the shirt hangs loose to him and makes him look underweight.
Robb tries the coffee and makes a face. "This could be the second worst coffee I've ever had," he says. Then he proceeds to pour three packets of sugar in his mug.
Jon can't believe it would be as bad as that. They've tried almost every diner in the States and they're experts on bad coffee and greasy food. He takes a gulp of coffee and almost gags. "God," he says, making a face. "You weren't kidding."
He ends up drinking it anyway, because they've got several hundred miles to go today and he needs the caffeine.
---
They travel on motorbikes. Sometimes one of them points that it's too conspicuous and they should get a car, which would also give them the advantage of a trunk, but in the end they're too attached to Grey Wind and Ghost. Those are the bikes' names. It felt silly even all those years ago, bikes with a name, but Grey Wind was even older than Robb and Jon. That bike had been sitting in a corner of the garage for as long as the boys could remember, covered with a tarp and gathering dust, until dad gave it to Robb for his sixteenth birthday. Dad had fixed it and it worked so well that it seemed new. It looked new too, all shiny and white with a silvery wolf painted across the side. A wolf for a Stark, that was the ancient sigil of their family from centuries ago. Jon wasn't a Stark, he even had a different surname, and he resented his brother for several long weeks, feeling alternatively bitter with jealousy and ashamed at wanting his brother's gift.
Then, for his birthday, Jon received a bike too. It was brand new and all white, his dad explained, so that Jon could paint it however he chose. "Every sigil has to start at some point in time," dad said, "so why not start now?" In two hundred years' time it would all be the same. Jon never painted his bike at all, because all white was god enough a sigil for Snow, but he loved his bike. He used to spend those days riding around with Robb until nightfall. Arya asked for a bike too, Jon remembers. Bran didn't care, Sansa wanted a pony, Rickon was too little and the noise of the engine scared him, but Arya wanted a bike like her brothers. "On your sixteenth birthday," dad promised. But Arya had disappeared long before then.
---
Neither Jon nor Robb likes to do laundry, so they just wait until they can't put it off any more.
"But first we've got to find some place with a laundromat," Jon announces one morning, after searching in his duffel bag for a clean shirt that isn't there. "I'm all out of clean clothes."
He's in half a mind to buy only black clothes from now on, since it will be easier to hide the stains. Monster blood is awfully hard to clean. He borrows one of Robb's shirts, since vampire blood isn't exactly fashionable and they're trying to keep a low profile. They're about the same height but Jon is thinner than his brother and has narrower shoulders, so the shirt hangs loose to him and makes him look underweight.
"Are you all right?" Robb asks him while he's feeding quarters to the washing machine.
Jon shrugs and leans against the wall. "I'm fine," he says. Unsurprisingly, the lie doesn't fly with his brother.
Robb sits down in one of the plastic chairs in front of the machines. "Tell me," he says, and he sounds so much like dad, it's almost enough to break Jon.
---
They didn't go to college. Robb didn't even consider it as an option, much to Catelyn's dismay. Though his mother was careful never to say it out loud, it was also evident that she didn't like the idea of her eldest son becoming a Hunter. It made Robb feel guilty when dad started to take them along on his jobs, but it never stopped him. Jon and Robb started traveling back and forth across the country, following after dad in his pickup truck, chasing after vengeful spirits and ghouls and werewolves. They found out the hard way that hunting monsters isn't half as glamorous and exciting as the tales made it out to be, but that never stopped them. There were a couple of close calls, like when Robb was almost beheaded by an axe-wielding zombie bridegroom, or when a harpy almost clawed out Jon's eye, but they learned quickly and laughed about it afterward. After a couple of years dad was starting to say that they were ready to handle a job on their own, but then Robert Baratheon came to visit.
He was one of dad's oldest friends, they used to work together when they were younger and Robb and Jon had heard hundred of stories about him and how he was the greatest Hunter of his generation. Robert turned out to be a delusion. He came at the end of the autumn, bringing with him his bitchy wife and news of demons in the south. "More than we've ever seen together, Ned," he said, sitting at the kitchen table and drowning his fourth bottle of beer. "More than any hunter has ever seen together in the same place. They're planning something, I don't know what, I don't know when, but it's happening soon. I said I was retired, but you've got to help me with this last job." And his father had looked unhappy, but he went with him.
Catelyn begged him not to go, saying that surely someone else could deal with this, like Jaime Lannister who was Robert's brother in law, the job was so far away from home and it sounded so dangerous. "I trust Jaime even less than the demons he's supposed to slay," dad said. "I'm more of a brother to Robert than Jaime could ever be." And then there had been no more mention of dad not going. The boys wanted to go with him, but dad another job, a cursed necklace all the way in Nevada, and they had been too overjoyed at the thought of their first solo job to argue any more. They went, them west, dad and Robert and Cersei south, leaving behind Catelyn and the kids.
---
They never knew who betrayed their family. They don't even know if someone did betray them, though Jon thinks it's far more likely that than the alternative, which is that a bunch of demons just happened to pay them a house call when only Catelyn and the kids were home, when their house remained safely hidden for over twenty years. When Jon and Robb got Sansa's phone call, they had just passed Reno on their way back. They sped through the remaining miles as quickly as they could, but it didn't matter. The house had already burned to the ground long before they made it back, and Sansa was the only one who remained, and she couldn't remember anything. Couldn't, or wouldn't, not that it made any difference.
Jon stopped Robb and insisted that he tried holy water and silver before he hugged Sansa. She was not possessed, and it was better to be safe than sorry, but Sansa still resented Jon for that. The girl insisted that someone pulled her out of the burning house. That was all that she could tell them, since she wasn't even sure whether her savior was human or supernatural, and Jon was privately convinced that Sansa was in shock and had made up the story in her head. She couldn't even tell what happened to the others.
With Catelyn, they didn't have to wonder very long. The fire department found her body in Bran's room, burned so much that they had to identify her through her dental records and wouldn't even let Robb see her. It was the first time that Jon felt sorry for Catelyn, and the first time that he saw his brother cry, though he couldn't say if Robb was crying because of his mother or because hers was the only body that they found. Jon wanted to cry too, but they had a job to do.
Finding Bran and Rickon was easier than they could have hoped. Some family friends, the Reeds, had noticed signs of demonic activity but arrived too late to stop anything. They found Rickon wandering outside the house, miraculously unscathed, and then Bran. "We thought they were the only survivors," Meera Reed explained, "and we couldn't call an ambulance, there would be too many questions asked." Bran's spine had been broken by a fall of several feet. The horse doctor who treated him thought Bran had tried to escape from the fire by jumping off a window, until Jon and Robb explained that their home only had one floor. Nobody had any idea as to what could have happened, and since Bran had been in a coma ever since the accident they weren't likely to find out any time soon. There didn't seem to be anything that they could do for him, so they left him and Rickon with the Reeds and went looking for Arya.
Their little sister was nowhere to be found. Sometimes Sansa called with reports of a girl who had been sighted killing vampires in Los Angeles or exorcising demons in Boston, but these stories were about as accurate as the ones about alligators in the sewers. The only thing Robb and Jon were able to find in twelve months of searching was their father's grave, side by side with Robert Baratheon's, side by side in a field outside Baton Rouge.
