fic: you've left me in the dark (Game of Thrones, Jeyne/Robb)
Title: you've left me in the dark
Characters: Jeyne/Robb
Rating: PG13
Summary: They die once, to be reborn again.
Author's Note: This is a modern day AU for these two because they deserve to be happy at some point. I own nothing here. And I know I'm posting fic twice today, I apologize.
There are many religions and philosophies and mythologies around the world that speak of reincarnation, of born again souls lost in one time and then redeposited and recreated in another.
Many people, depending on the person, will tell you that’s complete bullshit. You live once, you die once, and that’s the end.
Their problem, those people, is that they’ve never had it happen to them.
-
The first time she sees him, she’s running on being awake for the past fifteen hours. Her hair has started to come loose from the tight braid she’d put it in yesterday evening before her shift, and her skin and eyes are tired looking when she catches glimpses of her reflection in her hurried walk around the hospital. She’s haggard. Coffee has long since stopped working today.
Jane is sorting through the charts at the nurses’ station when the laugh catches her ears’ attention. She looks up to where a colleague is stitching a nasty cut along a man’s cheekbone. The cheekbones are nice ones in that way cheekbones can be nice.
He’s tall, she can tell that even from where he sits on the gurney. Dark red hair and oh, blue eyes that look around and meet her gaze. He smiles at her, a lazy quirk of his mouth at the corners.
She can feel herself flush, for some unknown reason because she hasn’t turned red since grade school over a boy that had embarrassed her over something she no longer remembers. She busies herself with the chart in front of her.
Her pager calls her away for a car wreck coming in. By the time she finishes down there and comes back up to the floor, he’s gone. She doesn’t know what to name the feeling in her stomach; disappointment doesn’t quite fill in all of it.
-
She starts to see him more after that.
On the subway when she’s headed home, red hair sticking out amongst everyone else at the stop.
From the corner of her eye as she studies, because being an intern doesn’t mean she’s stopped studying it just means she has less time to sleep now as she crams everything in, in the coffee shop around the corner.
She swears she even sees him in the ER one night, but she’s pulled away again before she can get a better look.
The could be sightings drive her crazy enough, thinking it’s her mind playing tricks. But it’s nowhere near as bad as the dreams.
The dreams are far worse.
-
The first dream happens when she’s catching a thirty minute nap in the call room. She’d been tired and exhausted and kicked out the two people making out; and seriously this is not some TV show, people, she’d said.
Jane doesn’t even bother to pull a blanket over her, just head to the flat pillow, pager in her hand, and eyes shut. To anyone that would walk in, they’d see her legs and fingers twitching in unease though her lips remain pressed tight together.
Blue eyes. A crown of twisted, dark metal. Flushed skin and a wound that gapes. The howl of a wolf, terrible in its beauty and power.
She wakes with a catch in her throat and realizes that the pager is screaming at her.
“Shit,” she says to the empty room. She’s late, and she can’t afford to be.
The images from her nap fade away. For now.
-
Her cell phone buzzes jarringly on the table. She doesn’t need to look up to see that it’s her mother again, for the third time today, and ignores it by pressing the red button. Let her leave a voice mail, her notes and flashcards are more important than the yelling and scolding she would be listening to.
“Hey,” a voice from above her head says, and she looks up to see him.
Her fingers freeze and she’s gripping the flashcards now.
“You work at the hospital, right?”
“Yes,” Jane finds her voice. It’s weird to see him here. It means that she’d not been crazy when she’d thought she’d seen him around, which is a relief. Normal people would probably be upset and label him a stalker, but she doesn’t feel threatened or alarmed in his presence. There’s something there, for lack of better words that she’s failing to come up with.
“Right.” He rocks back and forth on his feet, old boots that match the faded jeans hugging his hips and legs.
His mouth opens to say something else, but her phone vibrates again. Courage seems to desert him as he backs away, saying, “I’ll let you get that.”
“Wait. You don’t have to.” Jane’s speaking to his back, and he’s already gone. She looks down at the screen, and really she could curse her mother.
-
She’s at the nurses’ station again. At the computer to be exact, typing things like ‘star crossed lovers’, ‘premonitions’, and ‘past lives’ into Google. So far she’s come up with a lot of bullshit that isn’t helping her at all. She’s not crazy though, she know she’s not, knows that he’s something to her.
“Westerling, you’ve got a guy in three that needs sutures.”
Jane groans and takes the chart from the resident. They say you can’t have too much practice, but really you can. She flips it open just as she pushes the curtain back to see that now she has a name to match to the face. Rob Stark, 27, in for a cut needing stitches on his arm. She can see the pale line where the skin has started to heal from the first time she’d ever seen him.
His blue eyes open wider at the sight of her, and he smiles.
She holds his chart tight. “You didn’t do this on purpose to see me did you?”
He, Rob now, blinks. “No. That would be crazy.”
“Crazy like coming up to me in a coffee shop and then running away?” She asks and takes a seat on the metal stool.
He smiles again, and he really is handsome. “No not like that.”
Jane ducks her head and feels her braid slip over her shoulder. She clears her throat, and takes his arm. It’s a nasty gash, but not too deep. She lifts a piece of gauze to clean it before taking up her tools. “So this is the third time you’ve been in here for something like this. You’re not some dare-devil thrill seeker are you?”
Rob laughs, and then looks sheepish. “No, I, um, play hockey. And I was supposed to play for this one team, the Freys, they’re like a whole family of hockey players, and I didn’t. I chose another team, and they don’t really like seeing me on the ice anymore.”
She’s efficient with her stitches, but careful too. Looking up at him, she gives him a look. “So they beat the crap out of you every chance they get?”
“Pretty much.” He’s patient, unflinching under her hands.
“That’s stupid.” She snips the excess off the end.
“Tell them that.”
Jane bites her lips, and tries to come up with how to lead in to what she really wants to say. How does one say ‘hey, I think I’ve met you before in a previous life or something’ without sounding like she needs to be up three floors in the Psych Ward.
“Westerling, if you’re done here you’re needed in the lab.”
She’s both relieved and annoyed at the resident calling her away. “Sorry,” she tells him.
Rob’s mouth twitches. “‘S’not a problem. You’re busy.”
In a moment of courage, she blurts out, “You could meet me at the coffee shop. I’m there most times when I’m not here.”
His face opens up, hopeful and bright and relieved all at once. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she stumbles on her feet as she walks away, but manages not to fall. “Good.”
His smile and those straight white teeth get her through the rest of her shift.
-
The next night that she has off, she eats dinner with her mother. She can really only ignore her for so long.
She’s washing the dishes in the sink, hands moving methodically over the white plates with a sponge and her eyes closed. Her mother talks in the background.
“… I just don’t know why you don’t settle down, honey. You’re not getting any younger, don’t you want children-”
Jane gasps, images coming fast. The slide of bare skin against bare skin, strong hands and flashing blue eyes, her mother telling her to get rid of it, it would be better if she didn’t carry an heir.
The plate slips from her hands to crash in the sink.
“See, you’re tired all the time. If you would only pick something else to do with your life.”
She wants to scream at her mother to shut up, to just be quiet for once, that she there’s nothing less in her life that she wants than to be only a wife, she wants to help people, anything but do nothing.
Her hands shake. She drops the sponge, and says, “You’re right, I’m tired. I’m going home.”
-
Jane’s running.
From what, from who, she doesn’t know. Running to stay alive, running to save someone. A wolf’s howl comes again and tells her to go faster. The trees blend and blur until the scene’s a long dining hall with tables covered in blood. At the head of the table, far away but close enough too that she sees every horrible detail, is a man’s body. But where a human head should have been is the head of a wolf, sewn in a horrible mockery of something twisted.
She screams and wakes and screams in the emptiness of her bedroom. Her body twists, legs kicking at the sheets stuck to them, and she barely makes it to the bathroom before she’s vomiting.
Sleep is a lost cause for the rest of the night.
-
Jane fiddles with the heat guard around her coffee, picking at the flimsy cardboard. She sits straighter when she sees Rob enter the shop and spot her. She takes satisfaction in the fact that he looks just as pale and tired as she knows she does as he sits across from her.
The time for tact and subtlety has passed.
“What are you to me?” She asks, forces the question before he can even open his mouth.
King, lover, husband, companion.
“Yours.” His voice is hoarse, but his face serious.
She nearly sobs in relief.
“Yours.”