"I wanted her to be," he finds himself admitting. "I wished for it, when I was a boy. I saw how she was with the others and I wanted that, but I grew to resent her for her cruelty, even if I understood why she felt the need to be awful towards me."
He says it like a confession being spoken to a face carved into the white wood of a heart tree, like a secret shame he's never spoken aloud. Something he feels immensely guilty for, given the woman's fate. As horrible as Catelyn Stark had been to him, she hadn't deserved to die the way that she did, to lose Robb and never see her daughters again. It wasn't her fault that she never knew the truth Ned had shared with no one.
"One of the perks of leaving for the wall was being free of her hatred for me. But the curse of being a bastard does not lift when one leaves home. It goes with you. Followed me all the way to the Wall. She was able to scorn me from afar by hating me through the men who were supposed to be my sworn Brothers."
Bitter. So much bitterness, so much that he told himself he had no right to feel, as it was simply the way of the world for bastards.
But he wasn't a bastard. Jon Snow as a construct, a lie. A deception meant to protect him from the harm what would have come to him, not welcome torment.
"I would—" He tries to answer, but upon opening his eyes to take in the sight of the ancestor whose Valyrian features were mirrored in the father that was slain before he was born, he finds himself suddenly choked up by the prospect of doing things differently, and his what-ifs veer in an entirely different direction. "I should have been raised by my parents. My real parents."
Jon's vision swims, Daemon's features blurring against the sudden flood of tears as the seal he'd placed on sadness he'd told himself he had no right to feel when Ned Stark had been the only parent he'd ever known breaks.
no subject
He says it like a confession being spoken to a face carved into the white wood of a heart tree, like a secret shame he's never spoken aloud. Something he feels immensely guilty for, given the woman's fate. As horrible as Catelyn Stark had been to him, she hadn't deserved to die the way that she did, to lose Robb and never see her daughters again. It wasn't her fault that she never knew the truth Ned had shared with no one.
"One of the perks of leaving for the wall was being free of her hatred for me. But the curse of being a bastard does not lift when one leaves home. It goes with you. Followed me all the way to the Wall. She was able to scorn me from afar by hating me through the men who were supposed to be my sworn Brothers."
Bitter. So much bitterness, so much that he told himself he had no right to feel, as it was simply the way of the world for bastards.
But he wasn't a bastard. Jon Snow as a construct, a lie. A deception meant to protect him from the harm what would have come to him, not welcome torment.
"I would—" He tries to answer, but upon opening his eyes to take in the sight of the ancestor whose Valyrian features were mirrored in the father that was slain before he was born, he finds himself suddenly choked up by the prospect of doing things differently, and his what-ifs veer in an entirely different direction. "I should have been raised by my parents. My real parents."
Jon's vision swims, Daemon's features blurring against the sudden flood of tears as the seal he'd placed on sadness he'd told himself he had no right to feel when Ned Stark had been the only parent he'd ever known breaks.