Work Text:
It’s only comfort. That is the lie Jeyne tells the voice of her mother that sometimes chatters at her in her head, scandalized at how she lies with Dacey, how she strains to her touch. Jeyne loves her husband – loved. She loved her husband, her wolf King, now a wolf King in all too terrifying reality, if the horrible rumors Dacey has tried not to let her hear are true, Grey Wind’s head sewn to his body, the body so dear to her. He is gone and he is not coming back, this is no tale, there is no starting over. She loved her husband, but he is gone, and Jeyne is left with only Dacey. Dacey who is so very much like him in some of her ways, but then who is so very much like only Dacey herself in all the rest. If there is anyone Jeyne could have chosen besides her Robb to survive the Red Wedding, to come and find her and spirit her away into hiding, it’s Dacey Mormont.
They’d been close before. Jeyne had felt an affinity for Dacey from the start. It was hard not to; she was so strong and free and spirited, all the things Jeyne was not. So often Jeyne felt timid around these fierce Northern ladies, like a shrinking violet surrounded by oak trees. She’d told Dacey that once. Dacey had merely smiled and squeezed her hand, saying, “The storm that fells the oak only washes the face of the violet at its root,” and few words had ever gladdened Jeyne’s heart more than those.
So, close they had always been, but not this close, not until Robb was murdered and Jeyne’s world turned topsy-turvy. Dacey had loved him too, had sworn her life to him and had her world flipped as well. It wears on her, Jeyne knows, that Dacey couldn’t get to him, that she could only watch the quarrels strike him as she fought and scratched, trying to make her way near. That she could only flee with his mother after Roose Bolton stabbed him through the heart, leaving her King’s body behind to be mutilated and desecrated so very horribly. She shivers with it sometimes, her eyes haunted by ghosts Jeyne can’t see, and it is Jeyne who comforts then, who rises on her knees to wrap the much taller Dacey in her arms and tuck her head beneath Jeyne’s chin before easing them back to the bed and holding her until she sleeps.
Jeyne had made Dacey tell her, once, of every bit of it, every last sight and sound of the wedding. Dacey hadn’t wanted to, but Jeyne had insisted until Dacey relented, and if it haunts her dreams still, at least it only haunts her in the one way she knows rather than the hundred ways she could imagine.
Jeyne doesn’t know where they are now; the towns are much the same, running together in an endless blur. They never stay in any one place long enough for it to make an impression anyway. And just as she doesn’t know where they are, neither does Jeyne know where they’re heading, but she lets Dacey do what she thinks best, knowing that she can keep them safe if anyone can, especially here in the North. They are sisters, the two of them, sisters fleeing the fighting after the death of their husbands. No one questions their story, the innkeeps barely even look up to notice their faces upon taking their coin. So they are sisters by day and something not quite sisters at night, sharing a bed, sharing warmth and comfort and touches that once were companionable and have now grown into something quite more.
It had been Jeyne who started it; so much of her recent days seem hazy but that much Jeyne remembers clearly, remembers turning to Dacey in the depth of the night and searching for her mouth, remembers her glad relief when Dacey did not turn away but pressed closer, opening her mouth to follow the seam of Jeyne’s lips with her tongue. Dacey is all she has. Jeyne could not have borne it if she had turned away.
Her innocence had been quite lost by then. Jeyne had lain with Robb more times than she could count. She’d desired him so badly, almost as badly as she desired a child from him, as she desired safety and stability and a life of her own away from her mother and the Crag. She supposes that had been part of what made Robb Stark the Young Wolf so exciting when he’d ended up in her castle, taken by fever. She’d known he could take her away, make her a new life in a new place with a handsome husband and russet-haired babes to fill everything with lively noise. She hadn’t known that allowing herself to give in to that desire by giving in to his for her and her own for him would be like tugging a loose thread only to unravel a woven knit. There had been no going back, so she had gone forward, she’d loved her husband as best she could, had taken him into her body and given him her heart equally freely. Trying for children had been sweet pleasure with him. He’d been kind, considerate, always careful with his touches. But her coupling with him, as frequent and pleasurable as it was, had only hinted at the stormy pleasure she finds now with Dacey, and it discomfits her, makes her feel disloyal to a man dead even more than the touching itself does. It makes her think she should put a stop to all of it. But then she remembers Dacey’s mouth on her, her tongue in Jeyne’s cunt, touching and tasting and sucking, stroking over her and making her tremble like a drop of water dancing on a hot skillet. She remembers Dacey holding her in the night, and waking her in the morning with her sweet kiss, and she pushes the thought below the surface of her mind, ignoring it until it bobs to the surface again as it always does, like a cork in the brine of the sea.
“Jeyne,” Dacey says now, her voice drawing Jeyne up from the depths of a dream like a fish being hauled in on a line. “We’re to leave at first light.” Her voice is dark and husky, like silk rubbed over sand, hinting at all manner of thoughts and dreams and desires. Jeyne’s mother would have been primly disapproving at a woman having such a voice, she would have done her best to cultivate it out of her. It’s not soft or ladylike or refined. Dacey’s voice does not conceal, it is not wrapped up prettily in a bow. It is unvarnished and true, as true as Dacey herself, and it always makes Jeyne shiver, something Dacey doesn’t understand but likes all the same. She reaches up to Dacey, hooks one arm around her neck and draws her back down to the mattress, one stuffed with straw ticking rather than feathers but still comfortable as long as Jeyne shares it with Dacey.
“Not yet,” she says, setting her lips to Dacey’s neck, stretching her body to lie flush against hers from shoulder to ankle. Dacey tilts her head to give Jeyne’s lips better access, makes an agreeable murmur. She insinuates her thigh between Jeyne’s and pushes it up, rubs up against Jeyne’s cunt where she’s already hot and aching, that stormy pleasure back and far too delicious to let go, no matter how disloyal the experience of it may make her to her sweet boy King who died too soon. Jeyne opens her thighs, she says, “Let’s not go just yet,” and she pushes that cork down deep, deep under the waves, knowing she’ll see it again sometime but determined that it won’t be just yet. Not just yet.