He doesn’t ask about Arya.

He can’t ask at first, because that would be mean and cruel, to see Sansa standing there, shivering and cold, to hear his first words to her in years be Where is Arya. 

He can’t ask later, when Sansa tells him of King’s Landing and Ramsay. It would be cold and callous to hear her pain and trauma and respond by asking, have you heard of Arya?

It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask at dinner, the words worked and reworked in his mind. 

Where is my little sister? Where is Arya?

He thinks of her, skinny little thing, with her tangled hair and dirt streaked face. He thinks of her raining kisses on his face, clutching Needle with such joy. 

He thinks of the last time he saw her, in Winterfell’s yard, tears on her face as she watched him go. 

Where is she? I shouldn’t have left her. Her, most of all, I shouldn’t have left. Where is my little sister?

Sansa was, is, his younger sister. But Arya… Arya is his little sister. 

He’s the one she’d run to with her troubles and her tears. He’d taught her how to sit a horse. Would that he could have taught her to wield Needle too. 

Where are you, little sister?

The words are on his tongue, burning, but he swallows them down.

He had been Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. He’d face death in all it’s blue eyed glory. 

He’d died and seen nothing and been raised again. He’d killed a boy to let a man be born. 

And yet, he’s as scared as a boy of three, to afraid to ask the one question that matters to him most. 

He swallows the words down, cursing himself for coward all the while. But he could not bear it if the answer to that question were dead. 

He doesn’t ask it at all. He can’t. 

Because if Arya were dead, he’d have to ask Melisandre to return him there as well.