Comment fic meme #3
Here we go for the post-exchange comment fic meme. (Posted on the mod account as usual because I don't want to enable anonymous comments on the exchange comm.)
A couple of rules:
- please include the pairing/character (and maybe a short prompt/kink) in the comment title - both for prompts and for fills.
- there are both show and book fans in this ( Read more... )
A couple of rules:
- please include the pairing/character (and maybe a short prompt/kink) in the comment title - both for prompts and for fills.
- there are both show and book fans in this ( Read more... )
She has almost forgotten the reason that the child had come. As the Stark in Winterfell, it was his decision to allow her to remain in the Dreadfort. After all, she and the baby were the only surviving Bolton heirs. Walda did worry; after all, where else would she go? There was nothing left of her family in the North, and the Twins would most certainly not welcome her back, after Roose Bolton had finally fallen.
But she wouldn’t think about that right now.
“I like it here,” Rickon declares then. “There aren’t a lot of silly rules. And you have jam. We don’t have that at Winterfell, not now.” But he trailed off, his face almost sad.
Walda smiled. How could she have forgotten that despite his position, he was still a little boy? And he was almost of an age with Marissa, who had been sent to practice her letters, in the event that things went badly. Walda only wanted to shield the child.
“There are rules,” she said gently. “And my first rule is that you may have as much jam as you like. Why don’t you take some home with you, Lord Rickon?”
He grinned then, but slowly. “As much as I like?”
Walda nodded, wiping a stray gob of jam from his cheek that Shaggydog had been remiss in cleaning. “As much as you like.”
When her maid brings her the baby for his feeding, she turns, holding her son close as he gives suck, but Rickon watches her and the child intently.
“Does he have a name?”
The baby, sated, drowses in Walda’s arms, and she bends to kiss his rounded cheek.
“You should name him Davos.”
“His name is Domeric,” she says. It had really been her idea to name the child after her husband’s first heir, and although Roose had not lived to see his son’s birth, Walda believes that he would have approved. The baby is a docile and sweet thing, with his father’s eyes, and his mother’s smile.
“Davos is a better name than that,” Rickon says then, determinedly. “The best captain in the Seven Kingdoms.”
Walda of course knew of the Lord of the Rainwood, one of the heroes of the Great War, and how he had journeyed to Skagos, of all places, to seek out this strange little boy. “I am sure that he is,” she says, “and when you have sons, you should honor him thus.”
Rickon only smiles, and reaches a tentative hand out to her child. “Careful,” Walda says softly, but the child is gentle, and Domeric smiles, grabbing Rickon’s finger in a fist. Their laughter mingles and for the first time in a long while, things feel like home again.
When Osha comes to fetch him, Rickon carries a large jar and orders her to take up the other that sits on the table.
“I want to visit Lady Walda again,” he said to the woman, “and soon. She’s going to make jam for us until the glass houses are rebuilt.”
Walda watches them go, filled with relief.
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And later that evening when she put Marissa to bed, the little girl asked her about Lord Stark.
“We are to make jam for Lord Stark’s household,” Walda told her, “and won’t that be fun?”
Marissa loved helping to pick the berries in the glass houses, darting in and out of the vines and in the low limbs of the apple and peach trees that were just beginning to bear small and stunted fruit, and even if she was too small to help Walda and her ladies with the boiling, she loved to label each jar, her shaky child’s penmanship improving with each one, her drawing lessons with the Septa put to the test as she impressed pictures of the contents around their titles, to benefit the kitchen boys who could not read.
Marissa nodded, “Yes,” she said sleepily, “so much fun. Is he really a little boy?”
“Yes, a little boy with a large wolf.”
Her sister looked interested, but tired. “I must play with him when next he comes. Do boy lords play, do you think?”
Walda pulled the covers tight around the child. “I think that this one might,” and she pressed her lips to Marissa’s forehead, leaving the child to her innocence, and her dreams.
When she is alone, in her rooms, she draws out her husband’s ring, a signet with the sigil of his house, now forbidden, and presses it to her lips. “I suppose we are safe then,” she says softly. Walda is not sure exactly who she is talking to, or why she has kept this relic, but the weight of it about her neck and the cool press of the metal against her bare skin comforts her. It is a reminder of being raised high, of her fear of things that lurked perilously close in the shadows, of a silent, queer lord who made her his bride and despite everything, had shown her every kindness. She drops it down the front of her nightdress again, lying in her bed, closing her eyes against the memories.
“Safe,” she says again before she sleeps.
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I can't edit the subject line because of replying to the initial post it but the title is The fruits of victory.
Flay typos and all that.
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Marissa playing with Rickon: Approved!
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Walda's just keeping busy. :) She loves that stuff as much as Rickon, but she is much neater about it.
I'm glad that Rickon and Marissa worked in the story. I'm always nervous when I write children and I think that Walda, aside from Roose, is probably my favorite character to write.
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We don't get much in canon about Walda but I presume that if she can find something in Roose to like, she must be a special person, or at least a very kind one.
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