AN: GoT/asoiaf just happens to be a recent obsession of mine, and I wrote a thing for it! To anyone following my other stories, sorry for dropping off the map it's just a bit of a difficult time for me. Anyways, enjoy! :)

amor matris
a mother's love

"Your mother doesn't like me," Jon had said one day, quietly, almost as if he didn't want to be heard. It was the height of summer, long before the pair of them had turned ten and they were wasting an afternoon of idleness away from their sisters around the edge of Winterfell.

Robb didn't reply immediately. The complexities of the warped views of adults were always something far beyond his reach—he knew there was a reason Jon's name was Snow, and not Stark, but he didn't much care for it. In the mind of a boy there was only playing at war, not politics, and Jon Snow was the best opponent he'd ever faced. The only rival general who could match him in both speed and power. To him names weren't important in battles, but Jon had always been far more sensitive than he, attuned to the subtle changes of feeling in people around them and connected to the atmosphere of a room in a way he'd never be.

If Robb ever went to war, a real war like the ones his father had fought, he wanted Jon as his closest advisor.

He turned the pebble he'd been holding over in his hands, before using it to etch scratches into the stone wall Jon was perched on beside him. Little permanent scars that told the Seven Kingdoms were Robb Stark had been.

Finally he stared up into the stormy grey eyes of his half-brother. "That's only because she's not your mother." He'd given him a wolfish smile then, or so he liked to think. Father was always saying how much Jon looked like he belonged to the North, to Winterfell, much more so than he. Sometimes he was jealous, and othertimes it fell right in beside the other differences in their faces he cared little for.

Jon didn't reply. Robb discarded the stone and clambered up onto the wall beside him. "She wouldn't like me either if she wasn't my mother. That's what mothers are," he'd continued, matter-of-factly. "The only people in the entire world who have to like you no matter what."

He started stepping slowly along the wall away from Jon, his arms splaying out on either side of him for balance.

"That means I have no one," Jon's solemnity made Robb frown. "No one to like me no matter what."

"You have me," he'd said. A touch too quickly, a touch too assuredly. A little less and he might've been believed. To punctuate the statement he'd turned on the wall, offering his half-brother a bright grin, but Jon's expression remained blank. Disbelieving. Unbearably thoughtful.

A heartbeat passed between them; one, two. Thump, thump.

Robb's gaze dropped and he was suddenly forced into a bizarre state of self-reflection he was unaccustomed to, as if Jon's very stare had led him to question the statement he'd offered so carelessly. Bran was just a baby, not old enough in Robb's eyes to be a Stark and no brother of his yet, and not for the first time and not for the last he wondered why Jon Snow couldn't have been born of his own mother. Or why couldn't people pretend it was so? It would surely make things a lot less complicated.

Jon Snow was his brother in every way. It couldn't get much simpler than that.

"I don't want to talk about this anymore," he decided, and declared so in his best imitation of his lord father as he jumped down from the wall; that authoritative tone saved for the future, for his time as the Lord of Winterfell. "Do you want to ask the squires for a game of Mudparr?"

Jon didn't reply. He was too busy staring over the wall into Wolfswood to the east, with a far off look in his eye. Robb didn't like the distance it created between him and Jon Snow and a part of his young mind began to panic. "I bet I can climb the First Keep faster than you." He was clutching at something, anything, to claw back the boy he knew away from all these pensive thoughts. Robb wasn't used to such quiet contemplation. He became insistent. "Jon."

Finally Jon's stone grey orbs dropped, coming to rest on Robb staring up at him imploringly. He blinked, as if noticing him for the first time in a few minutes. "Did you say something about Mudparr?"

Robb was visibly relieved, willing his pulse to stop racing as he pushed away from the wall and back in the direction they'd come. Unable to shake the feeling he had almost lost Jon to something dark and indomitable he tried to distance the pair of them from it entirely.

He called over his shoulder, certain his half-brother would follow. "The squires want a game. They always want a game." He turned to find Jon clambering down from the wall and starting to walk behind him, albeit a little slower than normal. When their eyes met again he offered the only reassurance he felt he could to this pondering boy, the same togetherness and kinship he'd been feeling since he was old enough to know it.

"And we always win."

fin.