Chapter Text
Theon’s breath came in icy puffs, and he drew his cloak tighter about himself. His feet crunched through the knee-deep snow. Jon was right; it was beautiful. He’d just neglected to mention how fucking cold it was.
Shivering, he made his way through the forest, following the elusive voice that called out to him. The trees were merely dark shapes in the mist, like silent giants. “Hello!” he cried.
No answer.
He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Hello! Is anybody out there?” But only his ringing echo answered back.
His toes—his remaining toes—had grown numb through the thick fabric of his wrappings. His leg had never properly healed, and though he could manage without crutch or cane, he still limped terribly, especially in the snow. It was far from his only physical reminder of Ramsay. Especially when it rained—and it rained a lot in this strange northern land—he could still feel Ramsay in his scars, in the empty sockets in his jaw, in his missing fingers. And in the hundred other humiliating ways his body had been damaged.
Jon had his own scars, and Theon knew he felt them all—Vargo lived in the lashes on his back; Euron lived in the scar on his faceand the flesh he’d carved off of him; even the Halfhand and the wolf and the people he’d killed as a soldier had left their marks on him as well. And not just on his body. Many a time Theon had woken up to find Jon gone from their bed. How many times had he hobbled, panic-stricken, from their stone house, only to find Jon outside, watching the mist rolling down from the mountains? “I couldn’t sleep,” he’d say. “The walls were too closed-in.”
However, it was Theon who couldn’t sleep on this morning. He’d woken from a dream he could not quite recall, though it hadn’t been one of his frequent nightmares. The fire had burned down to embers during the night, and as he rose to stoke it, he heard a voice, very faintly, call his name.
His head shot up. One of their neighbors, perhaps? Jon’s people were, understandably, mistrustful of a Roman living in their midst, and he couldn’t think of a reason any of them would come seeking him out in particular. Not to mention, his name had a very distinct sound to it when said in their native language, which he’d been rather slow in picking up. This didn’t sound like that. In fact, it sounded rather…familiar, somehow.
When it came again, he pulled his cloak on and went outside to check, leaving Jon asleep.
The mists on the snow bathed the world in white. When the voice called out again, a plaintive, “Theon,” it was muffled. It almost sounded like…
“Robb?” Before he could stop himself, he was heading into the forest.
No matter how far he wandered, the voice never grew any closer or farther. It was always just maddeningly out of reach. But he still grasped for it, stumbling through the snow with a growing urgency.
“Robb! Is that you?”
“Theon!”
This time it was distinctly closer. Right in front of him. He staggered a few steps, now seeing a dark figure in the fog. “Robb?” His heart stopped. The chilled air burned his lungs as he drew in a deep breath. “Robb, is that…?”
“Theon?” The figure came closer. A very solid Jon materialized before him. “Theon, what are you doing out here?”
Theon looked around. “I thought I heard someone calling for me.”
Jon tutted. “Now I know how you feel when you wake up and I’m not there.” He pulled Theon close to him. “You should be more careful, especially in the mists. The spirits like to play tricks on us. After all we’ve been through, I don’t intend to let anyone take you away to the half-world.”
“I didn’t intend to be taken,” Theon said. “I just thought…it might be somebody trying to say goodbye.”
“You’re shivering,” Jon noted, and threw his cloak around the two of them. Theon leaned into his warmth. “Let’s go home and get you warm again.”
The thought of the fire crackling, and the bed warmed by their two bodies, sounded suddenly far more irresistible than any mysterious voice in the mist. “Alright,” he said. Even if the touching and exploring had come slowly, he always felt safe with Jon’s body against his, the heady smell of him, the solidness of him after Theon woke up from a bad dream.
They started back for their home, a stone hut Theon would have considered crude this time last year, something beneath him and unfitting for a noble citizen of the Roman Empire to live in. Fortuna had a strange sense of humor that way, and even though Theon had largely given up worshiping the gods, he occasionally still left a bit of food on the hearth for the goddess of fortune and fate, a hedge against her divine humor. As long as she let him keep Jon, he didn’t need to ask for anything else.