the white wolf

Oathbreaker. Crow. Bastard.

Jon has always chafed against the things he's been called, has always bristled at being a bastard brought up in his lord father's household and he'd always listened eagerly at the knee of Benjen Stark when he came for infrequent visits to Winterfell and told tales of ranging against the Wildlings. Jon had thought he'd be a hero too, that he'd rise high in the Night's Watch in spite of his low birth and as soon as he'd turned sixteen, he'd gone to the Wall to take his oaths and wear the black. His lord father had been proud of him and had even said the next they met, they'd talk of his mother.

There would never be another time.

News doesn't travel quickly to the Wall but it does travel and it doesn't take him long to learn that Ned Stark had been beheaded in King's Landing for treason. Jon would have thought someone like his father would at least be given the opportunity to take the black but he knows nothing about what happened down south and he knows nothing other than the cold words telling him that his lord father was dead. Mormont hadn't given him a chance to mourn and had, instead, sent him ranging beyond the Wall. The King-Beyond-the-Wall, Mance Rayder, was a much bigger threat than anything hundreds of leagues south of them.

Jon's party hadn't done so terribly, at first, but when things had turned south Jon had been forced to kill Quorin Halfhand and prove himself a true turncloak, someone willing to break every oath he'd made to throw in his lots with Wildlings. Ygritte had helped in that. The Wildling girl had tormented him at every turn and while he found her attractive, in her way, he'd also resisted laying with her. He had to keep one shred of honor and he didn't want to father a bastard or lay with a woman when the Night's Watch had asked him not to do that very thing. Of course, he'd failed in that too. If they hadn't found the godsdamned caves, he thinks he could have resisted, but the warmth and the allure of Ygritte's body had been too much for him in the end.

It's only after they've had one another half a dozen times over that he ventures deeper into the cave, almost to where the water reaches his shoulders, and finds something gleaming there just beneath the surface. Jon sucks in a deep breath and dives down, grasping it, and comes up with something he can only describe as an egg though not like one he's ever seen before.

"Ygritte," he calls out, voice low and rough. "Come tell me what this is? Have you ever seen anything like this before?"

One of these days, Jon was going to end up paired with someone who wasn't Ygritte but apparently this mission wasn't it. They were getting shipped out north of the Wall in the middle of bloody winter because, really, when better to go shoot in the dark at caves and hope you might hit something? Up in the mountains, it was cold, and there was usually a layer of frost on the ground even when there wasn't snow.

Oh, and there was snow. Tons of snow. Jon preferred the cold over the heat in Dorne, true, but after shutting down the last Wildling incursion at the Wall, he really wanted to go somewhere nice for a change. He'd wanted to switch to an air unit, fancied himself on the back of a dragon for a while, but after trying to test in, he decided it wasn't for him. He liked being a ranger even though Ygritte drove him insane.

The problem wasn't her ability. She was a damn fine shot and she could take care of herself. The problem was that she was so godsdamned distracting. Her hair, her scent, the way she took the piss out of him no matter what he said or did, her loyalty, her freckles - everything added up to something he couldn't resist and it drove him insane because he absolutely under no circumstances could sleep with her. No way. No how.

And now they were getting sent North again and he was going to have to deal with all of that in close quarters for who knew how many moons. Again. He took his orders, saluted his CO and went to find her.

"You got the orders off Mormont? We're going North again."