Work Text:
i do as i please
now i'm on my knees
your skin is something that i stir into my tea
and i am watching you
and you are starry, starry, starry
(JOANNA NEWSOM)
In another world, it might have been a love story.
The girl is made for love stories: her big brown eyes rapt and gleaming when she hears them, has absorbed fairy tales and poems and songs since before she could walk. Memorizes declarations of fidelity and adoration and she has had her perfect fairy tale wedding dress picked out for years now (a long-sleeved one with an A-line cut and pearls on the bodice).
She reads love poems, knows the lines inside and out and she guards them close to her heart, mouthing the words until they are tattooed on her tongue and come to her as easy as breathing.
It might have been a love story except: the boy.
He is handsome and dark-haired and lean but he is not a prince. He talks too loudly and swears too often and his bad reputation follows him wherever he goes, trailing behind him like an ugly shadow. His mouth is sometimes cruel and it twists into a smirk.
Still, she sits down next to him and he offers her a cigarette (she declines politely, she is always so sweet and polite) and he does not tell her to leave.
-
She crosses her legs at the ankle and folds her hands in her lap, and he sprawls next to her. There is space enough between them for a third person and she inhales deeply, holding her breath even though she doesn’t realize it.
“You hate them too, sometimes, don’t you?” he asks her, the smoke curling up and vanishing into the sky. She watches it go, watches it snake up until it looks like a cloud and then it’s gone.
Pressing her lips together, she says nothing.
He sighs, chuckles a little, rubs the back of his neck. Turns to her and smiles. (We should note here that this is one of his rare genuine smiles, not one of his ever-present smug smirks. It is a knowing smile, and a slightly sad smile.) “I see it in your face,” he says. He chucks the cigarette to the ground and stomps it out.
She releases the breath that she had been holding.
She smiles back.
-
He is a good man deep down and she knows it, but he is always next to a great man and maybe it’s because she knows how that feels that she decides to like him for it.
One day, she sits down next to him and he moves a little closer.
-
She has a reputation for being a crybaby but Theon has only seen Jeyne cry once and that was enough to make him never want to see it again.
He’s just walking around the yards of the Wintefell castle after school one day (Robb is doing something terribly important with Ned, something about being the future lord of Winterfell and deep down, he is jealous) and Jeyne is kind of tucked up against a tree at the edge of the yard, her denim-clad legs folded against her chest and both of her hands covering her mouth. He can see the silver rings gleaming on her fingers, the lilac nail polish but mostly he sees the mascara trails on her face and without any preamble, he sits down next to her.
(Jeyne does not move away and secretly, this pleases him.)
For a very long time, the only sounds come from Jeyne, sobbing and gulping and gasping for breath before she finally manages to choke out, “He asked me for Sansa’s number. He was just using me to get to her."
Theon nods slowly. If he were a different man, a better man, he might have said something to comfort her, he may have told her that this boy wasn’t worth her time, but he is Theon and all he can do is reach out and offer her his hand. She looks at it for a long time before taking it. Her hand is white and tiny and it trembles in his.
“It’s so hard sometimes,” Jeyne continues. Her face is swollen and shiny and red and her tears are big and sloppy. One hangs on the tip of her nose. He wants to reach out and brush them away, but he doesn’t. “I love Sansa so much. She’s my absolute best friend in the world, but sometimes being her friend is so hard when all anyone ever does is notice her and fawn over her and adore her and - and I just… I have to sit off to the side and be ignored and watch everyone love her.”
Their palms are pressed together and their fingers are laced and Theon moves closer to her. Jeyne’s free hand covers her mouth and she’s gasping out another sob. “It’s not her fault that she’s just so charming and sweet and clever and pretty,” Jeyne spits out, more venom in her voice than Theon has ever heard and he just squeezes her hand because he’s had these thoughts himself, wicked thoughts that come late at night when he thinks about Robb and how much Theon does not belong.
If Jeyne were another woman, Theon would have already been planning his next moves. He would pull her in close to him and hold her against his chest before picking her up and carrying her to his room. He would kiss her tearstained cheeks and undress her, lay her down on his bed, press his lips to her eyelids, crawl over her, fuck her, make her forget.
But no, she is not another woman, she is Jeyne and he is Theon, so he just holds her hand.
She pulls herself in close to him and rests her head on his shoulder and they stay like this until it gets dark.
-
For some reason, they start spending more and more time together usually just wandering around the gardens and yard together but one day, Theon finds himself walking Jeyne from lunch to her Southron History class and giving her shoulder a squeeze as she walked in the door.
He can rationalize walking her to class – it was right across the hall from his algebra room – but he can’t rationalize giving her shoulder a squeeze.
-
“So,” Robb begins on the walk home from school a few weeks later.
“Hm?” Theon hums, eyeing his best friend, even though he has an idea as to what Robb is about to say.
“Jeyne?”
“Fowler?”
“Don’t play dumb. Poole. You two have been hanging out a lot lately.”
Theon lights a cigarette and shrugs. “Oh. Her. Um, she’s nice.” He flicks the ash onto the street.
“Are you two dating?” Robb asks and he’s got that concerned big brother tone in his voice and under his gaze, Theon feels guilty, naked, exposed.
-
They live in the same castle but on opposite sides and one night, Jeyne sneaks into Theon’s room, shivering in her grey flannel pajamas and bare feet. Her toenails are painted hot pink and when she slides into bed next to him, her hands are cold where she presses them against his cheeks.
Theon was still awake when she knocked on the door and it had seemed as natural as anything to just step aside and let her dart in.
“I had a bad dream,” she whispers when he clicks the light off and lies down next to her, on his side so he's facing her. She lifts her hand up and threads their fingers together. He can see her eyes shining in the dark. “I dreamed that I was lost in a maze. And you were in the middle of the maze but I couldn’t get to you.” He hears the waver in her voice and he squeezes her hand. “I had to save you, but I couldn’t reach you. And I was so scared. I woke up and I thought it was real, so I came here to make sure you were still okay.”
He reaches up and touches her cheek, stroking his fingers down the soft skin. She smells like lotion and toothpaste and he can already feel her breathing even out. “Go to sleep, Jeyne,” he whispers. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
-
Jeyne remembers something in one of her stories, one that said that music could soothe beasts, that they weren’t all bad, not all of them, and maybe Theon was beginning to thaw.
The Starks leave for a week to do some kind of family bonding thing (and, of course, neither Theon nor Jeyne were invited) and one morning, Jeyne wakes Theon early when it’s still cold and grey. Jeyne wakes Theon and drags him outside and because the morning mist clings to the grass and the trees are a deep green, almost black, and everything is grey and still and she breathes, “Doesn’t it look so magical, Theon?” She claps her hands together and smiles at him. “Doesn’t it look like something you’d see in a movie? I love when everything looks so untouched and perfect.”
And Theon, to his own surprise, just nods but he’s not looking at the yard.
-
He takes her out for tea once after school. The walk together, falling into step, their footfalls going from clacking on the pavement to muffled on the grass. A strand of dark hair falls free from her long braid and he tucks it behind her ear.
Her cheeks color at this.
(Remember this part, it will come back later.)
-
One night, both Sansa and Robb have dates so Jeyne invites Theon to her room for dinner and a movie.
(It sounds like a date, but it’s not. It most emphatically is not.
It is, however, an invitation, and one that Jeyne accepts.)
They order the best Dornish food available in the North which ends up being blander and far greasier than they’d imagined and Theon decides that since he picked the food, she should get to pick the movies so he spends the next few hours whining good-naturedly through some of Jeyne’s favorite romances.
After the credits roll and she turns off the TV, he procures a bottle of peach schnapps he keeps stashed in his closet and they take turns drinking straight from the bottle and eventually Jeyne hoards it for herself. Her pink lipstick leaves a stain on the bottle’s mouth and he imagines kissing her on the lips and having her lipstick stain his skin.
Instead, he says, “It’s really hard sometimes, isn’t it? Being friends with them.” His candor surprises even himself and Jeyne lowers the bottle and gives him an odd look.
“I don’t understand why you would have so much trouble with it,” she says. “You’re so handsome. Handsomer than Robb, I think.” She runs her thumb up and down the side of the bottle. Her cheeks are flushed and she looks very thoughtful. Her hands are tiny and pale and her nails are deep blue, the same color as the plate on her house sigil. “You’re handsomer than Robb, and you’re talented and you’re clever.” She takes a long drink of schnapps and a giggle bubbles out of her, high and girly. “And sweet.”
Theon is taken aback at this and he chuckles. “I’m not sweet,” he protests, and Jeyne crawls up to him until her head is resting on his chest, her index finger stroking the hollow of his throat.
“Yes, you are,” she murmurs. “You’re sweet and you’re kind and funny. Sweet like sugar,” she teasingly sings in a falsetto. She looks up at him. Her cheeks are flushed and her lips are ripe and her eyes are bright and glassy. “Kiss me,” Jeyne whispers, leaning forward and Theon pulls away.
This is strange for him, because it’s not like he hasn’t kissed (or fucked) drunk girls before. If he’s honest, most of his sex has been inebriated but with Jeyne this, like most things, is different. Maybe, he thinks, it’s because she’s totally sloshed and he’s barely buzzed and he thinks that that’s never stopped him before but these days, thinking leads to madness so he decides to talk her down instead of doing a weak rationalization of his actions.
“That’s enough drink for you, Poole,” he says, taking the bottle from her. He puts it on his bedside table where it balances precariously and suddenly Jeyne looks very small and sad and scared.
“Don’t you like me?” she whispers, and her voice has that dangerous waver to it, the waver that breaks Theon’s heart. “I thought you liked me. I thought… I thought you liked me.” Her big brown eyes are still bright but they’re bright with tears.
Theon takes her hands in his. “I do like you, Jeyne. I like you a lot. I just – I can’t. You’re drunk.” He strokes the dark hair away from her forehead and he so wants to kiss her. He wants nothing more than to kiss her and taste her pink lipstick on his mouth. “It wouldn’t be right.”
She gives him a watery smile at that, and promptly vomits on his carpet.
(The next morning, he will bring her a glass of water and some painkillers while she moans at the kitchen table and complains about the blinding lights and neither of them will mention how she tried to kiss him.)
-
In a weird way, she’s the best friend he’s ever had. Not that Theon’s had many friends – even back on Pyke, he mostly clung to his brothers and Asha – but he’s more honest with Jeyne than he’s ever been with anyone else and there’s something about her that just draws him to her.
A warm day finds them outside again, sitting in the shade of a tree and Theon is smoking and Jeyne is working on homework.
“You really shouldn’t smoke,” she says after a few moments of silence. She scrawls something on her paper, wrinkles her nose, crosses it out and writes something down underneath what she crossed out. “It’ll kill you,” she adds and has a superior look on her face.
Theon just scoffs at her and what is dead may never die comes, unbidden, to mind and he says nothing but he makes a point of flicking his ash in her direction.
What she says next surprises him.
“How many girls have you slept with, Greyjoy?” When he gives her an incredulous look, she just smiles slyly at him. “I mean, there are rumors around school. The things people say about you…” She trails off and just grins at him, a wide grin, a flash of white teeth. “You’re kind of dirty, aren’t you?” she says in the same teasing tone that she uses with Sansa and he’s utterly taken aback at sweet, innocent little Jeyne asking him about this with such candidness and he grins back at her, chuckling.
And she stands up, brushing grass and dirt off her jeans and collecting her things and just grins at him again and walks into the castle, tossing her dark hair over her shoulder.
He follows her moments later.
-
The days pass and Theon walks Jeyne to class sometimes and sometimes they have lunch together and more often than not, they sit outside together when it’s nice enough to. He always offers her a cigarette and she always politely declines and one day, she brings him a small white cake with wild strawberries and cream on the side and she had blushed and said, “Sansa and I made extra and I thought you would like some…”
When the weather turns cooler, they go inside, usually to Theon’s room where they sit on his bed and sometimes Jeyne helps him with his math homework (Jeyne is remarkably good at math, Theon soon learns, and she’s been put in advanced classes for most of her life) and sometimes he teaches her cyvasse but mostly they talk and Theon likes to listen to her chatter animatedly about her classes and her friends and Sansa.
Jeyne, Theon learns, excels at not only math, but all forms of science as well, although she is absolutely crap at history and writing, and she’s much funnier than he ever thought she would be; sometimes, she makes jokes just to make sure he’s paying attention. She wants to visit the Reach and the Stormlands someday and while she loves all animals, she’s scared of snakes and lizard lions and horses. She has a scar on her right knee from falling down the stairs when she was a child and Sansa turned down the boy who was using Jeyne to get closer to her friend and that when she was younger, she wanted to marry Ser Beric Dondarrion because she saw him in a tourney on TV once.
“I think I like those fantasy stories because they distract from reality,” Jeyne tells him in a low voice. “I mean, obviously, that’s why they started but… even if it’s stupid or childish, there’s something really nice about that. It’s nice to think that these things happen somewhere, even if it’s not in real life. It’s nice to think that maybe someone else would believe in them and that they’d try to be like someone in a story – all noble and kind and honorable.” She looks up at him, scrunches her face in thought and says, “Do you know what I mean?”
He does.
-
Wylla Manderly turns sixteen and they throw a huge party and Theon and Jeyne go and Theon and Jeyne both get spectacularly drunk and they nearly fuck in the closet.
It happens like this:
Theon and Robb and a few of their friends are among the first to arrive and they immediately start drinking (and maybe Theon had been a little drunk even before he showed up, having cut his last class to watch TV and pregame a little) so when Sansa and her group of girls arrived an hour later, he was already swaying in place.
And Jeyne is wearing a black shirt and a short denim skirt and her hair falls down her back and maybe she isn’t beautiful but Theon can’t take his eyes off of her so he keeps her in his peripheral vision for the next few hours, watching her take shots and dance to some hilariously bad EDM and gossip with Sansa and Wylla and Alys Karstark. A few times, her eyes flicker to him and once she gives him a small smile and wave and suddenly he’s furious wondering why she doesn’t come over to talk to him and why doesn’t she like him the way he likes her and if she was just using him to get to Robb and aren’t they supposed to be friends?
He stomps into the closet to find his coat to retrieve his cigarettes and lighter when he hears the door open behind him.
It’s Jeyne. Of course it’s Jeyne, and here’s where everything starts to go downhill.
“Oh,” she says when she sees him and she’s laughing, swaying in her high heels. Even with the added four inches, she’s a head shorter than he is and he wants her so fucking bad. “Hi. I just came to get my…” She holds up her black purse, fishes around in it and pulls out a silver tube. “Lipstick,” she says, waving it around before slicking some on. She’s drunk and unsteady and it smudges a little.
“Jeyne,” he says and he closes the distance between them in two strides and he grabs her by the hips and crushes his mouth against hers.
As far as first kisses go, it’s not ideal but Theon doesn’t think any are. Jeyne is surprised but she kisses him back, shy and unsure and she tastes like tequila and limes and surprise and he knows that he’ll be covered in lipstick but he doesn’t care and her hand is fisting in the front of his shirt. He licks into her mouth and she giggles. “How long have you wanted to do this?” she teases him.
“So long,” Theon whispers and he grins. She’s kissing him again, bony fingers wandering up his chest under his shirt and the room is spinning and he’s way too fucking drunk for this and his palm is damp against the hot expanse of the small of her back. He can hear people outside the closet, talking and laughter and music and the steady throbbing of the bass but all he can focus on his how Jeyne tastes like tequila and limes and surprise and how when he kisses her neck, he can smell her perfume mingling with sweat and her skin is hot, hot, hot against his and this is the biggest mistake he’s ever made.
Jeyne’s hand trails down his chest into his jeans and he groans into her mouth as her hand wraps around him and he presses his face into her neck.
And suddenly Jeyne is giggling again before it turns into a full bodied laugh, shaking against him. “You’ve got whiskey dick, haven’t you?” she whispers against his cheek and Theon moans, partly because out of lust and partly out of embarrassment. She laughs again, trying to keep quiet but unsuccessfully. “Should I be offended?”
Her hand is warm and he thrusts into it pathetically and the color is high in her cheeks and her hair is wild around her face and neck and shoulders and her eyes are so bright and he can’t stop looking at her. He doesn't ever want to look at anything else. “No,” he moans again, his hands crawling all over her skin. “Because I want to fuck you, Jeyne, it’s all I think about, you’re all I think about, I want to fuck you so bad, I want to fuck you so bad, so, so bad,” and Jeyne laughs again, her bones rattling against his.
-
She left him there in that closet, gave him one final kiss and said, “Sansa’s waiting,” in an apologetic voice before slipping out.
And Theon had walked home alone, skin burning, miserably drunk and alone.
He’s still burning and drunk and alone when he gets back to Winterfell and he watches a sitcom with a laugh track until he passes out and he wakes up with a splitting headache and a text from Jeyne (she’s simply “Poole” in his phone) sent shortly after he left We need to talk.
He deletes it.
-
He spends the rest of the day in bed, miserable and hungover and she sends him another text (“Sorry for leaving you last night. We need to talk.”) but there are no knocks on his door, no phone calls and he buries his head under his pillow.
-
He spends the rest of the next day in bed as well but the day after that is a school day and he catches her between classes, gently touching her arm, the fabric of her shirt soft under his fingers.
(Remember that he takes her out for tea?)
She turns to him slightly alarmed, her big brown eyes making him think of a doe in the headlights and she says, “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” soft and shy. “I thought you were embarrassed.”
“I did well on my last math test,” Theon blurts out awkwardly and Jeyne gives him a strange look. “Because of your tutoring,” he clarifies, but she’s still looking at him oddly. She looks like she wants to smile, her lips pressed together tightly, but mostly she looks ready to run at a moment’s notice. “And I guess I thought that I should take you out for tea to thank you. If you want to, I mean. If you don’t then…”
Jeyne worries her lower lip between her teeth for a moment before she says, “Okay. When?”
“How does after school sound?”
She looks down at her eggplant purple flats and smiles shyly before nodding slowly.
-
It might be a love story because: the girl.
She might not be as beautiful or royal as a princess in a story but she gentle and kind and she has a sweet nature and an endless capacity to give love and a forgiving heart.
And sometimes, that’s all you need.
-
They meet up outside of the school and walk to the coffee shop together. She looks paler than usual and her fingers play with the strap of her bag.
She speaks first. “Look, Theon, I’m really sorry about the other night. I was really drunk and weird and Sansa kept asking if you and I are dating now and I’d had too much to drink and it’s just… Look, I’m just really sorry, okay?” Jeyne gives him a pleading look. “I don’t want things to be weird between us because I really like you. I would hate if our friendship ended because I can’t hold my liquor.”
And Theon says, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get it up.”
He doesn’t mean to say it but it makes Jeyne laugh anyway and he likes the sound of her laugh and it eases the tension a little. And then Theon says, “We could, you know. We could date.”
Jeyne looks at him sharply and a strand of hair has fallen free from her braid. He tucks it behind her ear and her cheeks color, but whether it’s at his hands or his words, he doesn’t know. But she smiles at him anyway and her cheeks turn an even darker shade of red when he holds the door to the tea shop open for her.
They sit down and Jeyne orders lemon cakes with her tea and when they arrive, she uses her finger tips to gently push the plate closer to the center of the table.
“So,” she says, stirring sugar into her tea. “Is this a date?”
Theon takes a cake and cuts it in half with his fork. “No,” he says. “This is tea,” but she knows what he means, and she smiles.
end.