Margaery squeezed her hand, leaned closer towards him, close enough to press her forehead against his. "You are frightened," she said, and Jon swallowed in response, did not answer. He did not want her to think him craven. But perhaps he was. Perhaps this responsibility would prove more than he knew how to handle.
And he could not bear to imagine her response when she realised. "I am too," she said, inadvertently breaking him out of the riotous circle his mind had been unable to crack on its own. "We are so young," she said. "We still require a regent. Neither one of us knows what it is everyone wants from us. We still--" She stopped, and Jon heard her swallow. "But he will be ours. Our flesh and blood, Jon. We cannot fail him." Her voice, on those last few words, was almost pleading, and that both broke and staunched him, in ways he had never even imagined.
He did not make a conscious choice to wrap his arms around her and pull her to his chest, but he did it nonetheless, pressing his jaw to her temple. "Aye," he heard himself whisper. "We cannot."
Jon had never known a mother, not her touch nor her love or confidence or pride. But he had grown up knowing exactly what a mother should be like. He had seen it every day of his early life, seen it in the way Lady Catelyn would shelter her children, soothe their hurts, teach them of the world. For a brief moment, when he had burnt with the fever of the pox, he had believed he might have received it himself, and until Margaery, he had known nothing sweeter. Margaery, he believed - had to believe - would be that, the thing he had watched and never had, for their children. He had to believe that. Believed it, even if he did not have to.
She loved her family fiercely, and she was so strong, so much older than her years. If he could believe that of her, he had to believe the same of himself, that he could be to their child what his Lord father had been to himself and his siblings, what his uncles had been to him.
He had to, or he could never be worthy of her, of any of this. Even telling himself that, however, did not take away the terror that seemed to make his blood run cold.
"He will be a lovely little thing," Margaery continued. She released the back of his hand, reached up to card her fingers through his hair. Despite the situation, the touch shot sparks of icy heat down his spine, made him shudder. "He will have your beautiful curls." Her fingers traced along his face, and he could not help the instinctive tremble that still went through him at her touch. "Your cheeks and jaw and mouth." Her forefinger traced his lips, and Jon could not help but suck in a sharp breath, felt the first stirrings of arousal despite all the fear, all the things he did not know how to deal with. "He will be strong, and kind, and gentle."
"And smart," Jon interjected, the words catching on even if he still could not quite seem to see more than some blurred vision of her fantasy. "And chivalrous and fierce."
"Aye," she returned, and he thought her imitation was deliberate this time, a gentle jape to ground him, and it did steal some of the tension right out from his ramrod straight back. "And we shall love him, and raise him right, and we will be a family, Jon. A true family."
Suddenly, it was a sob and not a fearful gasp that Jon was choking back. Family. The word alone touched something so deep within him that it hurt. Jon had grown up with relatives, but he had never had a family, not truly, not one that was his. In so many ways, he had been on the outside looking in, not quite belonging to anyone or anything, never quite able to claim anything or anyone in return, except perhaps his Uncle Arthur, the uncle who looked least like him, believed least in the things he did. As if that word alone had broken something within him, suddenly most of his fears and apprehensions seemed to wash away. He was left imagining the warm, delicate weight of a newborn within his arms, the joy of watching a trueborn child of his own blood take his first steps and speak his first words, of teaching him the sword and leading him to the Godswood. Tenderness unlike anything he had ever even dared imagine swelled through him. He was not aware of the tears before he felt the wetness on his own cheeks, before he felt a sob tear through his throat. It hurt, badly, but it was the best kind of hurt he thought he had ever felt. "We will," he said.
Somehow, without him quite catching on, she detangled herself from his hold and rose to her knees, and the next thing he knew, his face was buried in her shoulder, and her arms were tight around his back. She held him steady as the sobs came, pressed his face to her neck and stroked his hair, comforted him without speaking a word. That, more than anything, reassured him, finally, that everything really would be all right.
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T/N:
100 powerstones = 1 extra chapter