Until the Seven Hells Freeze Over

Chapter 11- Confessions

*Trigger warning: su*cidal ideation. Please read with caution.*

That evening, after hiding for the rest of the day, sick with devastation, you thought about ending it.

As you stood in the Lord Commander's bed chamber, you thought of all the ways you could end this nightmare for both yourself and the poor life growing inside you, each more grizzly than the last.

Now more than ever, you felt trapped.

You couldn't stay here; Stannis was right. Everyone would most certainly speculate that your child was Jon's, even though it was not. You would need care that Castle Black, without a doubt, could not provide. It was only intended to house men, after all, so pregnancy or childbirth was not a condition the infirmary was prepared for.

And to think of Timothy on top of it all.... He was gone now, thank the Gods, but he could be back any second. You'd just come to terms with this, ready to take on the risks when it was only your life in danger, but now...

You walked slowly, as if in a trance, to the mirror, and placed your hands on your stomach. It was still the same size as it was before; given the timing of when Timothy attacked you, your pregnancy was no more than a month along. You still couldn't comprehend that soon there would be a baby, his baby, inside of you.

What if it looks like him? You thought to yourself. What if it looked like the man who beat you. The man who raped you. The man who'd taken away your home and your safety and your family and your innocence.

You couldn't even cry now. All you felt was a deep, pervasive numbness that froze you to your core. You couldn't do this. You couldn't fight anymore.

You slowly walked to the window, grunting as you wrenched open the glass pane and peered at the drop below. The frigid air hit you in the face with a burning sharpness, but you barely even flinched. The drop was significant—50 feet or so. Significantly higher than the drop from Timothy's bedroom window, which had left you with only a deeply bruised back. Now you were in a castle, and the height of falling from the top floor would be lethal.

Still feeling as if you were in a trance, you stepped up onto the ledge of the tall window, feeling the wind immediately ripple through your clothing, chilling you to the bone.

Your body's natural sense of adrenaline picked up when you wavered slightly on your feet, overcome by a wave of dizziness. The sun was gone and the moon was just a delicate crescent in the sky, offering little light to illuminate the snowy earth beneath you.

Stannis had offered you a less permanent solution to your problem. At midnight, his trusted advisor, Davos Seaworth, would meet you at the front entrance to the castle and take you safely to White Harbor, a city in the North that was south of Winterfell and large enough to keep you anonymous.

But you would still be carrying the child of that man, and that's what you couldn't accept.

You took a deep breath, and for a moment, your mind was made up. You shifted your weight slightly forward, and that's when the thought entered your mind.

Jon. Finding your body.

You imagined how at first, you would be broken beyond recognition, and he would be confused when he saw it at a distance.

Then, as he took a few reluctant steps forward, he would recognize something, anything—the color of your hair, the reflection of the sun on your skin, the shape of your hand.

And then he would run with all his might, see that it was too late, and drop to his knees like he had been shot in the back with a flurry of arrows.

You imagined the scream that would erupt from his chest, how he would reach out to try to piece your body back together again. How he would cry out your name until his voice gave out, and all he could do was weep, never understanding why you did what you did. Why you had left him like this, when you had seemed to finally be happy again.