Familiar Stranger

Jon

"My sweet Alayne," the short man announced in a silky smooth voice, a strange smile touching his lips. He held Jon's gaze even as he swept his arm back dramatically; his grey-green eyes both unnervingly intent and innocently unassuming.

Jon wretched his eyes from those intelligent orbs that danced with humor unknown to him, and schooled his features into one of distant politeness as he faced the tall figure that had appeared in the background—and felt his blood freeze.

Those eyes.

Blue eyes.

He knew them.

They had haunted his nightmares and tainted his dreams. The contempt in them had seared into him like daggers in his boyish heart, slicing apart his dreams to fit in. To belong. To be one of them.

A Stark.

Those blue eyes were as familiar as the angry hiss that always accompanied them in his dreams. "Bastard blood." It hissed. "You don't belong. You are not one of us. Why are you here? Who are you to sit at this table as if you were one of us?"

Jon felt his throat constricting. The buried hurt rising up to claim him. It couldn't be. How could this be happening? How could she be here? She was dead. Long slaughtered and thrown into a river to become one with the fishes that were the sigil of her house. To the water they returned upon death and in the water she had been disposed in.

But yet those Tully blue eyes stared at him, widening as they locked with his. And Jon tensed . . . waiting . . .

But they remained clear and bright, devoid of any anger or malice. Instead tears filled their startling depth, only to be quickly brushed away by a delicate hand before she dipped low into an effortless curtsy.

"Lord Commander," she murmured, her voice soft and demure.

Jon blinked, confused, studying her intently as she straightened up.

She's not the one I thought she was, he realized. The Lady Catelyn.

But yet he knew her.

She was . . .

Sansa.

The name shot through his heart like a bolt.

Only then did Jon finally lay his eyes on the dull brown hair that was meant to mask her, but it flowed around her like a beacon: the brown hair of House Stark.