The Long Winter | Jaime Lannister X Stark OC | GOT/ASOIAF

A Stark Of Winterfell

The face she saw reflected back at her in the looking glass made her want to cry.

Ross Stark never cried - she never laughed much either, no matter how much Lyanna called her dour, or Brandon teased her - but the sorry visage in the mirror made the weight of everything that had happened suddenly hit her like a ton of bricks and bitterness. 

She looked half dead. Her already long and sharp face was now nothing short of gaunt, her cheeks hollow and her skin holding a greyish sort of pallor that wouldn't have looked out of place on a corpse. The purple bruise smudging her jaw hardly helped, nor the raw scratch marks down one side of her face. Both eyes were shadowed with dark circles, and both were glassy, rather wet.

A sorry sight to behold, Lady Stark.

She mechanically pulled each pin out of her hair, one by one, letting it fall loose from the tight braided style it had been scraped back into my nameless handmaids, that only made her face look more pinched and plain. The dark strands hung dead straight, limp and listless, but at least concealed half her battered face. 

Ross knew she had never been beautiful, not like her sister, but she had never looked as pitiful as this in her life. And she hated it.

Underneath her dress - that hideous purple gown, gods she loathed that colour almost as much as she loathed the man who forced her to wear it - her skinny body was mottled with similar bruises and gouges, the skin broken in many places, and numerous scrapes and claw marks from where his hideous overgrown nails had torn at her. 

Some were fresh, some half healed, others fading to scars, but each and every one was another reminder of her helplessness, another addition to her frustration, more fuel for the furious, burning hatred that had been growing in her like a cancer since she arrived in the Red Keep and Aerys publicly mocked her for the first time atop the Iron Throne. No wonder Rhaegar took the other Stark girl, this one seems half-dead already for all the life in her. 

She knew that as she was almost a woman grown - and a daughter of the North - she shouldn't let petty insults from a madman hurt her. But she'd spent her whole life hearing the same thing.

 Ross had always liked to think herself stronger than the girl of almost sixteen that she was; she had been Lady of Winterfell since her mother's death when she was eight, after all, and had learned to run the entire household efficiently, as a lady should, ever since. If she couldn't be beautiful, then let her at least be clever, capable, made of steel. But this just showed that she wasn't even that. 

A sad, plain, weak little girl. Aerys hadn't said that; that was what she saw in the mirror. Tears welled in her eyes but she stubbornly refused to let them fall, even as her throat choked up. She never cried, and she wouldn't start for him.

She was too weak to go against him. Too pathetic to do anything but lie back and let the Mad King violate her. At first, she had merely been here as a guest ('guest', who were they fooling, she had been a hostage since the day she arrived) to ensure the North's good behaviour after the disaster at Harrenhal. Then Lyanna was kidnapped from her bed, then brave, reckless Brandon was imprisoned after yelling for Rhaegar to come out and die. 

The king had taken her for the first time that night. She knew then that her brother was as good as dead; if Aerys cared about making an enemy of House Stark, he would not have raped their eldest daughter. She had been a maiden, but that had hardly mattered. Her future marriage prospects were the least of her concerns at the moment.

And then Father arrived, walking into a trap she was helpless to prevent, and Ross' world turned to tangible ash before her very eyes. 

What followed had been over a moon ago, but she still relived it every day, every night, whenever she smelled anything burning, whenever she closed her eyes.