They're a day's ride from Winterfell when Daenerys blinks awake to find two bright, burning red eyes regarding her in silent evaluation. Behind her, Jon stirs without waking. Sometime in the night his arm ended up around her waist, and it tightens slightly, his skin warm on hers, but then he settles.

"Hello," she says quietly into the watery morning light. The wolf's ears stand at attention, alert, intelligence burning in the strange eyes. Solid white and massive, he doesn't move, his eyes fixed on her. Even as Jon sighs behind her, Ghost doesn't shift his attention. Watching the wolf carefully, Daenerys can't help but wonder if this is an intentional meeting, his master slumbering behind her – a chance for Ghost to evaluate her and determine if she's left wanting. If she's good enough.

The thought gives her pause. It's not a question she's used to humoring, even when it comes to Jon. It isn't a question of being good enough for him, or him being good enough for her. She knows the kind of man he is. She's made no attempt to hide herself from him, and he's still here, so he must know who she is.

But Ghost doesn't.

Slowly, Daenerys draws her hand from beneath the furs. It's cold in the tent with the fires burned low, but cozy with Jon's naked skin against hers, she barely feels it. Ghost regards her outstretched hand silently, not shying away as she gets closer, but not exactly welcoming her either.

He simply watches her.

Yet when her hand finally sinks into the mass of his soft fur, he leans into her touch, a silent request for more. How like Jon, she muses, very much aware of the man at her back as she scratches behind Ghost's massive ears. Not a word spoken, and yet she feels as though she knows exactly what the wolf wants from her in that moment – affection he won't ask for, doesn't want to admit he desires, but craves all the same.

How simple things seem for those few breaths, dragging her nails lightly down Ghost's neck, the wolf quiet and still under her gentle touch. In the soft grey of morning, with Jon's breathing deep and even behind her, and the massive direwolf calm beneath her fingers, there's no reason to imagine a great storm brewing on the edge of the world. No reason to remind herself that this is rare moment of peace before it arrives, a moment where the seven hells still hold their devils.

Yet the devils are coming. The wights and the walkers and the grumpkins and the snarks. Direwolves and dragons.

Winter is here, and the long night marches south for them all.

Daenerys unclenches her fingers with some effort, smoothing the ruffled fur back out as Ghost lowers his massive head to the edge of the camp bed. She misses the earlier days with the dragons in that moment, misses it fiercely. Drogon would never tolerate these sorts of ministrations, wouldn't fit in the tent these days. It almost seems a shame to keep this moment to herself, to not wake Jon and reveal Ghost's presence, but he needs his sleep. Someone will be along for them eventually. If she can afford him another hour, that's what she'll do.

They were up late into the night, first poring over maps of the north and discussing the Wall's defenses. After the others had left Jon's tent, she'd lingered, and he'd told her about how he came to be at the Wall. He spoke of a Samwell Tarley with such affection and warmth she longs to meet the man Jon respects so, even if she does suspect he may be related to the men she'd roasted on the field of Lannisters. He sounds nothing like those others, so she said nothing in the moment. But Jon also told her of other men, and though he didn't speak of the night that earned him a chest full of scars, his voice darkened and his words grew sharper until he'd fallen silent, brooding.

Perhaps she should have left him to his thoughts, but they haven't spent a night apart since he came to her on the ship. So she'd coaxed him into her arms, distracted him with pleasure. After, he'd lain curled onto his side beside her, his breathing slowing as she'd dragged her fingers through his loosened hair, and she'd asked herself just what it is they're doing.

She'd never loved Daario. Even before she'd walked away feeling nothing, she'd known it wasn't love. He'd been what she needed at the time – someone she could manipulate, someone she could rule, someone to keep her bed warm. She'd used him, and perhaps known some small affection for him, but it wasn't love.

Drogo was more complicated. She had loved him, but despite everything he gave her in the end, despite knowing that he loved her as deeply and thoroughly as any man has loved a woman by the time he died, none of that could ever erase their beginning. How many nights had he raped her? How many nights had she cried silent tears as he'd taken her as he would have taken a slave? He'd learned before long, learned because she did from another slave, but that love would forever be tainted by those early, humiliating, wretched nights. A part of her would never be able to truly forgive him, even if his death gave her the dragons.

A warm, rough tongue on her hand draws her out of her thoughts, and Daenerys comes back to herself to realize Ghost is licking her still outstretched hand. He's enormous, but gentle, and Jon stirs awake at her quiet laugh of delight.

"Making friends, are you?" His voice is rough with sleep, his northern accent thick and rumbling, but there's no mistaking the happiness of it. She hasn't heard that in his voice yet, the almost childlike pleasure with which he speaks, and she's not even sure if he's talking to her or the direwolf. But he presses closer, his arm flexing to pin her against his torso, his mouth on her shoulder in an openmouthed kiss that vibrates with a low, contented noise from deep in his chest. She's grown used to Jon early in the morning like this, half-asleep and affectionate, not yet fully alert to the burdens of the day, and she longs to sink into his arms and forget herself for a few more minutes.

Beside them, the wolf whines, sitting back on his haunches and looking at his master expectedly. Jon sighs against her skin, stretching to steal one more kiss from her lips before pushing himself onto an elbow to address the piercing red stare. "You were supposed to wait at Winterfell," he tells the starkly white creature, his attempt at a scolding making her bite her tongue to contain her laughter. "Might you have at least waited another five minutes before barging in?"

The wolf tilts his head, regarding them both with what she swears is amusement before walking to the corner of the tent. There he curls himself into a white ball of fur, his tail sweeping over his snout as he settles with a huff of warm breath.

"Ghost approves," Jon tells her as he leans down to kiss her, slipping beneath the furs into the cradle of her parted thighs in a lazy slide of his body over hers. He's relaxed in a way she hasn't seen before, as though having the wolf nearby settles him as Drogon settles her.

"That's awfully kind of him." Sliding her palms over his shoulders, Daenerys draws Jon closer, the cool air slipping into the space between their bodies as the furs fall to his hips. He hums a low sort of agreement, his fingers delving into her hair as his thumb sweeps over her brow.

He doesn't say anything right away, his lashes brushing his cheeks as he blinks down at her. It's still early, the sun barely beginning to rise, and the camp remains quiet. It won't be long before the armies stir, the cook fires prodded into life, the din of thousands of voices surrounded them, but not yet.

"How did he come to be with you?" Daenerys asks, her voice little more than a whisper. She's loathe to break this peace, this unexpected sliver of ease and calm in the midst of so much struggle, but the silence grows too heavy without words. Too intense.

Too likely that Jon may choose to break it in a way she wishes he wouldn't.

The question works. Jon's expression shifts, a corner of his mouth lifting in a wry smile. "We found their mother with the five pups that went to my siblings." His eyes darken, the smile dropping abruptly. "It's how I convinced my father to keep them when Greyjoy would have seen them dead. Five direwolf pups for the five Stark children."

"And Ghost?"

"The runt of the litter, if you believe it looking at him now. They'd left him to die." Jon glances over his shoulder, his gaze lingering on the wolf as he adds, "He wasn't like the rest of them."

"But still family." The last word nearly sticks in her throat, the old longing rising sharp and brittle on her lips. "Still family," she repeats fiercely, digging her nails into his shoulders as he meets her stare. It's as much to remind him that the Starks are his family as it is to banish her own foolish sentimentality. The old doubts linger in the depths of his eyes, and she wills him to move past them. To accept his name, his birthright, his siblings.

Daenerys ignores her own wishes. That path is closed to her now. No sense in dwelling on what may have been.

"Still family," he echoes, the ease of only moments earlier vanished. His jaw has gone hard as the ice and mountains of the north when she presses her fingers against it, guiding his mouth toward hers.

A part of her is angry, angry that he should even think to doubt his family when he still has one. She has no family, has had no family but the brother who sold her. Daenerys has made a family with the dragons, has found people who serve her from love in their hearts rather than coin in their purses, but it isn't the same. It isn't two sisters and a brother in an ancestral home, waiting with fires laid.

She may have had her brother growing up, but Viserys' love came with a possessive, temperamental streak. He was never gentle with her without an ulterior motive, and despite Jon having spoken only briefly of his family, she knows it wasn't like that for him. Tyrion has told her a little – about the boy banned from his family's visit, angry and defiant in the cold night – but he also told her how close Jon was with his siblings.

If the maesters are to be believed, there's a bit of magic in her bond with the dragons. Magic and fire and blood. Those are her bonds, but Jon …

Is it magic that brought the great wolf bounding across the frozen north, deserting the great stone walls of Winterfell to seek out his master? Is it magic that causes Jon to smile fondly when someone mentions his sisters, to speak of Sansa with a proud undercurrent in every word. Or is it something else, some quality that is simply the result of family and love she's never known?

She'll meet his sisters soon enough. His brother too. All the people left behind Winterfell's ancient walls, those hard northern men and women who called Jon their king. Not in the way she's grown up believing in kings and queens, by birthright and legacy, but by love. Honor. Faith. Respect. All the things she'll have to earn in this land, the things she can't buy with gold or demand with dragons, and Jon has them. Has them without even trying.

Perhaps that's why he can be freer with his affections. Perhaps that's why it seems so easy for him to lock arms with Davos, to brush his fingers against hers beneath a table in reassurance, while she still struggles with keeping her spine stiff and her emotions chained deep within.

"Dany?" Jon's thumb brushes against her lips, his brows furrowed as she realizes it's not the first time he's said her name. "What is it?"

For perhaps the first time in her life, she wants desperately to be wrong. She wants Jon's not so subtle insinuations to be right. She wants to have a family. She wants love. Her brother taught her that love and affection were weapons, that they would make her weak. Jon doesn't make her weak. Jon isn't weak.

But it doesn't matter what she wants, what her entire being cries out for as he looks down at her with a bit of worry, his thumb still stroking her lips. Winter is here. War is coming. Whether the witch was right or Jon, it doesn't much matter with the long night slinking ever further south.

So she kisses him. Winds her fingers into his hair, tugs him closer, and keeps kissing him until they both forget for a few more minutes what waits for them beyond the Wall.