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WHO: Jon Snow
WHERE: Along the road; Margaery's home
WHEN: 9 September
OPEN TO: All - feel free to find him along the road in the village or at the inn dropping off the game he's killed.
WARNINGS: N/A
STATUS: Open

Jon had spent the last several weeks with a certain routine: he awoke early and took to the woods when the animals were still grazing and hunted what he could. He never shot the first animal he saw because, in theory, if there were enough to be eating, he would see another and be able to take it instead. If he never saw another, it would be a good thing he hadn't taken the first. That had been one of the many lessons he'd learned from his lord father and he'd carried it with him to the Wall and now to this place.

Afterward, he would check his snares to see if anything small had wandered into the traps. He'd gotten lucky with rabbits, of late, and while the pelts were small, he still skinned them and saved them in hopes that there was something they could make from them. He knew that winter would come to this place eventually and none of the clothing that their captors had given them had seemed especially warm to Jon. There was no fur on any of them; how would they keep warm during the winter with no fur to line their collars or wrists?

After the work of the day was done, he would take his kills to the inn to be cooked and would spend much of the rest of the day surveying his own home for repairs. There had been a leaky roof that he'd had to patch with little in the way of supplies and Jon hoped that the ground wouldn't quake again and cause actual damage to the building itself. He had no tools to fix it and, truthfully, these homes were nothing like anything he'd seen in Westeros. He knew how to thatch a castle roof, yes, but these homes had something else entirely.

Come mid afternoon, he found himself wanting to check on the Lady Margaery. She had her own house some distance along the road away from his own and if she needed repairs, he imagined she'd be less suited to complete them than he was. It was with that purpose in mind that he headed out along the road, head bent, to see if there was something he might do for her.

It was an offer made of kindness, he told himself. Nothing more and nothing less.

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"Westeros, my lady," Jon said. "I come from the North; I was born at Winterfell." Was there a possibility that she came from there as well? She sounded Westerosi, at least in her accent, and while she didn't sound like she was from the North, she might still know of Winterfell.

"I'm Ned Stark's bastard son. His second oldest," Jon explained. Did she know his family? He hoped so. There were so few here that did.

Her eyes widen with the sort of alarm that comes of someone just up and announcing themselves a bastard in general conversation like that, which is not something that Peggy is exactly used to. She opened her mouth and then closed it, brow furrowed as she wondered what you even said to something like that. "Peggy Carter," she manages, thinking it falls short, but it's better than standing there gaping.

"Do you always introduce yourself like that?" she can't help but wonder.

The way she said her name told him, immediately, that she was not from Westeros. Someone from Westeros who sounded like she did would have had a house or at least have been a noble-born bastard like himself. He had expected some Southron house to fall from her lips, perhaps something from The Reach, and at the very least the name Flowers or Hill.

Carter was no bastard's name and it was no name he'd ever heard among the great houses. She could not be from where he was from. Hmm.

"No, I don't. Your accent, though, you sounded as though you were from the Seven Kingdoms. I'm sorry for the confusion. I was just hoping you were from my home."

"Oh, no, I'm sorry," Peggy says, realizing the confusion. "I was born just outside London," she explains, though he's right in that their accents do seem to align. She thinks of the others in the village who also bear an accent and wonders if Jon and Margaery are from the same world, as well. "That's where you're from, then, this Seven Kingdoms place?"

After her experience with zero matter, she's becoming much more familiar with parallel universes. Perhaps this is just another of those? "What's it like there?"

"I am, my lady. I come from Winterfell, in the far north," Jon explained. He had hoped she'd know it just as Robb and Margaery knew it but as she didn't, it meant less for him to explain it.

"There are two others from there who have come to this place and one of them is my brother, Robb. I was just hoping you might be someone else who had news of my home."

She hadn't met a Robb, but she does know that name very well. She raises her eyebrow, because the knowledge of Winterfell and its people that she does have mostly starts and stops with Margaery's love life. She doesn't bring up her opinion, though, because she has only just met Jon.

"You could tell me about your home," Peggy offers. "I might not be from there, but I wouldn't mind hearing about it."

That was something that Jon liked to talk about, especially when he was as far from home as he was at the moment. He gave the woman a little smile and then started to describe Winterfell the way it had been when he was a boy.

"Winterfell's the seat of the North," he explained. "It's a great big castle, built up of gray stone. There's spring water that runs through the walls and keeps it warm, even in the middle of the winter, and the snow doesn't pile up against the stones of the castle."

"That sounds a little like a winter palace, something you might find in Russia," she says, though she's fairly sure they don't have the hot springs that keep it warm so much as they tend to depend on very thick furs to do that for them. "Are you nobility, then? Your family, at least," she clarifies, since he had introduced himself as a bastard and she's still not entirely sure what to make of that.

Perhaps the politics where he's from are slightly different, though. One never knows.

"My father and my siblings were," Jon said. He was not, clearly, given his bastard's name but if she wasn't from Westeros, he supposed that meant little to her.

"I don't know who my mother was. She might have been highborn, I guess, but I never knew her. She died giving birth to me."

It's not as common any longer, but there are still many problematic pregnancies that end in complication. Peggy can only imagine what it must be like for someone to not know their mother because of that and she feels a great well of sympathy for Jon, because a mother might be willing to sacrifice all for their child, but it's hardly fair to either of them. "I'm very sorry," she says, weighted down with grief and empathy. "I can't imagine what it would be like, without parents. No matter how frustrating they can be, I learned to appreciate them."

As a child and then a teenager, it was often hard to remember that, at times, but Peggy began to understood as she grew older. That, and had to hear less of the stringent Margaret that her mother offered when disapproving.

"I had my lord father, at least," Jon said. Without Ned Stark, he would have felt adrift and lost and he felt that having him in his life for the first part of it had made a big difference as to who and what he was. He was Ned Stark's son, for good or for ill, and Jon always tried to live up to that mantle.

"He taught me everything I knew about being a good man and a skilled fighter. I owe him everything. He could have left me behind, I could have grown up an orphan, but he did not. He was an honorable man."

Peggy thinks of her brother as he speaks of his father. She thinks that everyone has a hero figure of sorts, someone whom they look up to because they can teach them how to be better. "I'm sorry that he's not here with you," she says. "I've someone like that myself, but no longer."

"Did you still have your lord father at home?" she asks, using his terms to make him feel more comfortable.

Jon shook his head. "No, my lady. He died a few years ago. I was lucky to have him as long as I did, yes, but I haven't seen him in several years."

So much of House Stark was dead and gone now and it was ironic that he was the one to carry the banner. Him, Jon Snow, the bastard son of Eddard Stark, was the one to carry the name on into the next age.

It was a heavy burden. It was a burden he should never have had to carry.

"That must be terribly hard," Peggy says, thinking of the heartbreaking grief she still feels when she thinks of losing Michael. True, it had helped to set her on the path that she's on in order to do best by him, but at the same time, there never really is a balm to losing someone. "Would you like to tell me about him?" she offers.

"I know sometimes, people like to talk about those they lost. And sometimes, it's the hardest thing in the world."

"I am not one to speak much about those I have lost," Jon admitted. Speaking to someone about losing his father was painfully intimate, how could he go on to talk about Ygritte? About Arya and Bran and Rickon? About Robb? Jon still dealt with the fact that in this place, his brother lived, when in Westeros Robb was dead and gone, lost somewhere at the Twins.

"I keep my pain inside, I press it close to my heart until it's difficult to breathe and it pains me with every breath. It is strange to share it with someone, to speak of it."

She understands, is the trouble. For so long, Peggy has kept her own pain and grief close to the chest so as not to burden those around her, but now she finds herself worrying how much of that is possibly healthy. Then again, she's the first to shuck the notion of needing therapy.

"Well, we don't need to speak of it," Peggy insists. "Why don't you tell me something inconsequential?" she suggests. "For me, there's a lovely little diner in New York City that boasts the best apple pie I've ever had."

The words weren't ones that he recognized but he recognized the sentiment. Jon tried to think of something good, something happy that he could talk about without bringing up painful memories. It took him a moment but he settled on a memory of Winterfell.

"When I was young, at Winterfell, we used to go swimming in the pools in the Godswood. Winterfell's cold even in summer, you see, but the pools there are hot. They come up from the ground that way, heated, and the snow never lays long on the ground there. I used to swim there with my brothers and sisters."

Hot springs sound lovely beyond measure, something that she never really took time to enjoy even when they were available. Time, though, had been something of a scarcity to her. There had never been enough and she had always been forced to prioritize the war effort above her own personal enjoyment.

Even her vacation time, all those weeks and weeks, had been used to investigate a case on her own time. She's not sure she does know how to power off. "And how many brothers and sisters do you have?" she asks politely.

"I had five," Jon explained. "An older brother, Robb, who's here in the village and then two younger sisters and two more younger brothers. One of my sisters, Sansa, I saw her just before I came here. The other, we think she's alive but we don't know. The other two are dead."

Robb, too, had died but he didn't want to mention that to Peggy when Robb was alive here in the village; it was confusing for Jon, who had died and come back again and he hardly wanted to confuse someone he hardly knew.

"I'm very lucky to have Robb here."

She knows something of dead brothers, though she doesn't say as much. Her life is still behind closed doors and there are some moments, even, when Peggy feels as if she hasn't quite processed Michael's death yet, that it doesn't entirely feel real.

"I'm sure he's happy to say the same of you," she says calmly. "Your other sister. What happened to split you up?" she asks. "That you no longer know what's become of her?"

"She went south with my lord father but she fled the city, disappeared. No one has seen her for quite some time," Jon explained.

"Before she left Winterfell, I had a sword made for her. I heard she had lessons with it - I only hope she had enough to keep herself safe no matter where she wound up."

"Perhaps she's still okay," Peggy says, encouraging as she can be even though she comes from a time of war and her cynicism (or realism, really) has made her somewhat more realistic. "It sounds like you came from a rather harsh world, but that it made its people stronger."

She's not sure if that's a consolation, really, but at least there is something.

"It's a very harsh world," Jon agreed. "But I like to think that it tempers a man, makes him stronger. There's no one stronger than my sister Arya. If anyone could survive out there alone, she could."

Jon had faith in that. Besides, Sansa had word that she lived through Lady Brienne. There was a chance that Arya was still alive out there, even if it was somewhere far away from Winterfell.

The more she talks to Jon, the more Peggy begins to understand how crucially important family is to him. "I only had the one brother," she shares, feeling like Jon has told her so much about his life that she owes something in turn. "Michael. Only, he died when I was nineteen, in the war," she says, folding her hands before her. "I would give anything to imagine he's somewhere out there, surviving."

"This place can bring the dead to us," Jon said. It wasn't something he'd talked about at length, really, but Robb had been dead before coming here. There was always a chance that her brother could come here to this place.

"My brother is here and he has been dead for years. Your brother could come too."