#dark-ish jon

Half forgotten images had risen to the surface as Jon stared down at the date: pastel streamers and white birthday cake, Sansa pink cheeked and beaming and radiant in her yellow summer dress, a paper crown perched at a jaunty angle on her head, giggling as her family sang her happy birthday, the slim line of her neck as she leaned forward, the laughing purse of her lips as she blew out the candles.

It had been her thirteenth birthday and the last for which her family had been alive.

The memory of it had risen burning and bitter as bile in his throat as Jon stared down at the visitation request, a nauseous wave that made him want to stuff the form under his mattress and his memories with it, shove them away where he would never have to feel them again.

“Who’s it from?” Grenn had leaned over from the top bunk, bald head catching the light as he frowned at the paper. “You never get visitation requests.”

“No one.” Jon folded the paper and pocketed it, voice hard and bored. “My lawyer.”

Grenn eyed Jon, but shrugged after a moment and turned away. They were cellmates and something like friends, but on the inside everyone knew better than to ask about the outside world. There was no point. Castle Black Penitentiary was a federal supermax prison and most of them would never leave it, would serve out their life sentences within its concrete walls.

On the other side of the glass Sansa leans forward and unhooks the phone from the side of the booth, and on his side of the partition Jon mirrors her. Her face has lengthened since he last saw her, lost it’s baby fat, but her hair is just as red as he remembers, the deep auburn of autumn leaves.

And what does she see?

Jon knows; knows he’s become gaunter and leaner since they were teenagers, his face hard and the scar he'd gotten from a Wildling in his first year cutting his left eyebrow knitted and poorly healed. A maelstrom of prison ink sleeves his right arm. It was an ugly thing, his sleeve, a gaunt wolf and raven pecking blood the only easily recognizable shapes among the dozen lesser tattoos snarling around them, crude and black as though seared into his skin.

Sharp, tingling energy like soda frizz runs up and down the tattoos as Sansa’s eyes fall to them, the same prick of pins and needles he feels in the mess hall when a Wilding boy was looking at him or in the yard before a fight. It’s worse somehow though, his chest tight, fingers numb as frostbite.

How many hours did you play and replay what you’d say if you ever saw her again?

A thousand and one it must’ve been, staring up at the cold concrete of his cell, the grey twisting and swirling. But he can’t remember a word of it now, every one of them shriveled and dead.

Coward.

“I didn’t get the form till yesterday.” It's a pointless thing to say, and the voice he says it in is somehow just as hard and bored as the one he answered Grenn with the day before. He leans back in his chair. “The guards like to fuck with them.”

“Yesterday was the earliest I could submit it.” Sansa’s voice is tinny through the phone, but somehow still bone jarringly familiar even after all these years, soft and precise. “Minors aren’t allowed to visit without parental consent.”

Parental consent.

She doesn’t have parents. Not anymore, not after the neighbors had found Mr. and Mrs. Stark on the floor soaking the carpet with their blood, bits of bone and brain matter spattered-

Jon still remembers the moment he’d known, realized, the twisting and horrible recognition of the Stark carpet in the background of the blown up pictures the detectives had slapped down on the steel table before him as he sat clueless and shivering in the interview room of Wintertown PD.

Sansa is looking at him, Jon realizes, waiting for something, eye piercing and blue, and Jon clenches his jaw against them. He’d thought he was stronger than this. Numb to it. Numb after four years on the inside, numb after thousands of hours shivering in the cold of Castle Black’s concrete walls, of shuffling with other inmates as they were herded like cattle in their orange jumpsuits, of the throbbing pain of his first beating from a Wildling a month after he’d been locked inside.

"The clock is broken." Jon jerks his chin at the circle of cracked glass on the wall to their left. Say it, a part of him wishes he could scream, say you know. Say you know I did it . It would hurt, hurt like the drag of a knife ripping off strips of skin, hurt the same as the white hot slash of shiv against bone when his eyebrow was cut open, but at least it would be done. At least he wouldn't have to feel this horrible, twisting thing beneath his breastbone. "It's ten minutes till visitation is over."

“I know. The bus leaves in twenty.”

“You should say it then.” The voice he says it in doesn’t feel his; too flat, too bored . “Whatever it is you came to say, you should say it.”

Sansa stiffens in the chair. “And what did I come to say?”

“You know.” Jon laughs, the sound scraping his throat, cement on cement. He clenches his jaw hard enough to make his teeth ache, swallows a second laugh sharp as bile. It leaves him hollow, somehow tired beyond words. “It’s ok, Sansa. Really. You never got the chance. You were the only one who couldn’t, and you’re the one that deserves to. Out of everyone-”

“Shut up, Jon.”

The words crack through the phone, a punch to the gut that steals the words and breath from Jon. Behind the glass Sansa’s face is tight, angry, hard. “Do you really think that’s why I came?” Tears prick her eyes. “That that’s what I believe? That you did it? That you killed them?”

She jerks her face to the side, glares at the wall and wipes the moisture from her eyes with an angry swipe. “I know you didn’t, so just shut up.”

Jon’s heart thuds against his ribcage like it’ll crack. “How?” He eventually rasps. “You can’t know that, Sansa.”

“I can. I looked at the case files. Petyr forgot to lock his desk once. I read it all: the police report, the deposition in the station before you had your lawyer, the one they said incriminated you and hung their whole case on.”

Jon works his jaw. “But the gun,” he starts, not knowing why, not knowing why he’s arguing what he knows is true. It’s too easy. A hundred times he’d had this conversation that first year: the police at the station with his hands cuffed to the table; the public defendant he'd been assigned in a cold concrete room; the judge in an empty courtroom, jury staring down at him impassively as they read the sentence.

Eventually he’d learned to stop telling it. None of them had believed him. Why would they? He was only some bad seed who’d bounced from foster home to foster home all his life until he’d eventually been taken in out of pity by the Starks when he was thirteen.

“The gun had my fingerprints,” he starts, “the forensics showed-”

“Only because dad showed you and Robb how to use it the week before. They didn’t believe you, but I remember it. Your lawyer wasn’t on your side, Jon. He should never have pled guilty or let you be tried as an adult. You were barely seventeen.”

“I thought-” there’s a great sucking hollow in him that pulls the words from him, a void that won’t let him think, “when you weren’t in the courtroom- when you didn’t answer my letters- didn’t come to the courthouse-”

“That first year-” Sansa swallows, and for the first time since she sat down Jon realizes just how young she is, four years younger than him, barely eighteen, skinny and coltish. “I thought- it wasn’t until I found Petyr’s papers that-”

She swallows again, the movement harsh. “I tried to come after that. But they wouldn’t let me in without parental consent. I got a fake I.D. but they spotted it immediately. And Petyr, fucking Petyr wouldn’t-”

“That’s who they put you with?” A vague, half forgotten memory rises to the surface of Jon’s mind, and he frowns at the glass. “Didn’t he have a case against him by a minor?”

“It was settled out of court.”

“Still, to get custody-”

“Lysa’s my aunt.”

“But he’s in the same house-”

“Jon,” Sansa’s voice is flat, “leave it.”

Jon pauses, studying the tightness of Sansa’s face, the muscle clenched in her jaw. Anger flushes through him. “Fuck him, then.”

A tight smile twists Sansa’s lips. She clears her throat. “I’m going to mail you some paperwork later. It’ll make me your legal advocate. Not a lawyer, because I don’t have a degree, but I’ll still have access to the evidence in your case.”

Jon frowns. “Sansa,” he starts slowly, “what are you doing?”

“If we can find new evidence, we can reopen your case.”

“What for? Their case was airtight. And you’re not a lawyer.”

“Not yet.”

For a long moment all Jon can do is stare at her. When he speaks though his voice is hard. “You can’t be serious. You have your whole life ahead of you. You haven’t thought this through.”

“No, I have.” Sansa leans forward, brushes back a stray lock of hair from her face, eyes fierce. “I’ve done nothing but think about it for four years, Jon. You don’t deserve to be here. I talked to a few lawyers, but Petyr drained most of my trust fund and they’ll never take the case otherwise. I even tried to talk to some of daddy’s old friends, but none of them will help either. So I’ll do it. I’ve already signed up for classes.”

They stay staring at each other silently until the clock on the wall ticks the hour and a door opens behind Jon, a prison guard behind it.

He blows out a hard breath. “I can’t ask you to do this.”