Chapter Text
SANSA
Sometimes Sansa wakes from sleep with her dreams still clinging to her skin like frost dusting a windowpane. Safe in her bed at Winterfell she starts awake, thinking she’s still in her gilded cage in the Red Keep or screaming in her and Ramsay’s marriage bed. It takes a moment to calm the stutter of her heart in her breast as she shakes off the ghosts whispering in her ears, but she is no longer a little dove curled in a lion’s paw or a piece of flesh wrung through a madman’s hands. She is home.
It was not an easy homecoming. Sansa had to scrub clean each room of the castle before the feeling of Ramsay’s hands on her skin and his hot breath in her ear started to fade, and sometimes she thinks that his cruel laugh is too meshed into the cold grey stone for her to ever be truly free. Jon gently insisted that she take the Lord’s chambers because he knew she couldn’t bear to set foot in her childhood room again. It took days for her to even be able to walk past it without her limbs locking in place, but the stones of her parents’ chambers stack around her like armor. A phoenix rising from smoldering ash, she does not crumble.
She works to repair the castle from the damage inflicted by the Boltons, the pretenders who dared to grasp at her ancestral seat, who infested her home and stripped it bare. Her men slowly repair the ruined ramparts and the broken gates but all reminders of a once happy home have been stolen away.
Sansa placates the angry rustlings of the bannermen that wash in and out of Winterfell like the tide. One full tidal moon swept them back in holding Jon’s crown aloft, held out freely along with their love and respect that he had lost as he turned his eyes toward the isle of dragonglass. She turned them down gently, reminding them of their King’s loyalty, loyalty to the proud fir trees and the curved black boughs that cast shadows over the snow-dappled ground, to the lakes frozen to sheets of mirrored ice, to the clean and crisp northern air. Jon is their king. Jon is her king. But Jon left her alone in this place with her painful memories and something wearing Bran’s skin, and even though Jon helped her take back their home and swore to always keep her safe she curses him everyday for going south, hurt and anger coiling deep and spiteful in her belly. She had tried to warn him that he needed to be smarter than Robb, smarter than Father. He did not heed her words.
So she waits. Sansa fills her time doing the work her younger self would have recoiled from. She helps prep food in the kitchens, ties up her skirts to harvest their meager crops, tends to patients in the infirmary, watches Brienne train the soldiers. She learns her people, their names and stories and their hopes and dreams. She finds her days full and her body blessedly tired at the break of dusk. There is no time to miss Jon.
The Dragon Queen is as beautiful as the rumors whispered. Sansa is no Varys but she has her own little birds who sang her songs of skeins of silver hair strung with bells and violet eyes bending men to her will. The queen is as beautiful as her little birds sing, but her beauty is that of a wildfire, something to be feared and not coveted. There is something unhinged about Daenerys Targaryen and the first sight of her is enough to prick the hairs on the back of Sansa’s neck. Sansa can see something shining in her eyes, something feverish and frantic lying behind the beautiful violet. Sansa has seen eyes shine like that before. Her breath burns ice cold in the valley of her ribs, blood screaming in the face of danger. Something is wrong, something is broken. Run child, run.
The queen simpers to her when she is introduced and Sansa has to swallow her disdain, distantly thinking to herself that Daenerys would not have fared well in Lannister court where courtesies were armor and words weapons, where to not play a role believably could spell ruin. Jon’s face is outwardly calm but his eyes are pleading with her, so Sansa bites the inside of her cheek hard enough that blood, hot and metallic, spills over her tongue. Jon brought this woman to the North, to their home, so Sansa honors the guest right. She will deal with Jon later.
“Winterfell is yours, your Grace”. Daenerys’s summer smile wilts at the bite of ice in Sansa’s eyes. The dragon queen is someone her younger self would have revered - beautiful, powerful, molding the world in shape of her desires - but Sansa is no longer a little dove and there is more to ruling than beauty. Large dragons and lovely eyes do not make a good leader. Sansa can see how much it pains the queen to ingratiate herself rather than take what she wanted with fire and blood. An entire ancestry of conquest runs through her Targaryen veins, ancestry whispering that the world is hers by right, ripe and ready for the taking. Sansa will honor the guest right, but her trust is not so easily won.
Jon starts toward her as if to take her in his arms, but she freezes him in place with a single look. Nevermind that her hands are aching to reach out to him, to draw him close to her side to remain there for all their days, she has not forgotten and she has yet to forgive.
“You must be tired from your journey, your Grace, allow me to show you to your chambers.” Sansa says, crisp as autumn air, as she takes the queen’s arm and turns her back on Jon, steeling herself against the misery written with all his features. He will learn what it feels like to wait.
She delays the inevitable, ensuring the queen is settled comfortably and attempting to organize the encampment for the staggeringly large army swarming the castle grounds. Jon watches her from the ramparts, black striking against the clouded blue of the sky. She refuses to meet his gaze but she can feel his sitting squarely between the bones of her shoulders. Worry gnaws at her belly as she counts out food stores in her head, trying to ration their hard-won food among thousands of new mouths. Too many hours later and with an aching head she reluctantly, stiffly, invites her brother to her solar.
“You need to trust me.” They are barely over the threshold when the plea rushes out of his mouth. She scoffs.
“As you trusted me with your plans? No word for moons and then suddenly we hear you’ve cast off your crown and bedded a Targaryen.” He winces, and guilt begins to creep its sharp fingers up her throat but Sansa will not soften.
“Everything I have done, I’ve done for this family.” Family. That word cuts right to the quick of her anger and exposes it like a raw nerve, a weeping wound not yet healed over.
“You LEFT this family!” She nearly screams, half-wild, “You left the North, you left Winterfell, you left me -” She breaks off, chest heaving as she leans against her desk, and Jon’s sharp intake of breath seems to cleave the air between them. “I needed you, and you left me. Bran’s body came back with something else living in it, speaking with his voice. Littlefinger almost destroyed Arya and I with his whispers and she slit his throat in the Great Hall. I have to placate your lords and bannermen who feel abandoned too, they tell me everyday that you’ve left us behind and I almost started to believe it. I’m tired, Jon. I am so, so tired.”
His eyes are guarded, and regret rises in her chest. She’s half-moved to give in, to soothe away his furrowed brow with her fingertips and whisper that none of it matters. He seems inclined to do the same as he reaches across the desk for her hands, but she speaks her last hurt.
“You left this family, and you came back as her family.” There is a moment of heavy silence where they just look at each other, struggling to find a way to stitch shut the gulf that time and distance had opened between them. Jon runs a hand over his weary face.
“I am sorry for leaving you, truly. Every day apart from here, every step that took me further from your side, it all felt wrong. I would lay in my bed on Dragonstone when dreams wouldn’t come and think about you, about the Arya and Bran I had yet to meet. And when I did dream, it was always of you. I was tearing myself in two but I didn’t know what else to do.” Her heart flips in her chest and she scolds it, tamps it down, pats it back into place. Brother, brother, brother. “I should not have left you, but you’ve done a better job than I ever could have as ruler in the North. They listen to you, respect you, love you. You must know that.”
She sighs. “They will love me less when the queen feasts with us tonight. Honestly, Jon, what were you thinking, bringing her to our doorstep? We need her dragonfire, it’s true. The dead creep closer and I will take any solution to protect our people, but there’s something about her I do not trust.” The miserable look on his face tells her that perhaps he does know what he’s done, knows the lines that he’s crossed, the insidious threat he’s allowed to slither into their home. She takes a deep breath.
“Did you bend the knee to protect the North, or because you love her?” The question hangs in the air between them and for a moment it feels like they’re both holding their breath, balancing on the edge of the precipice.
“Have you no faith in me at all?” The ugly rage swirling and twisting in Sansa’s chest stills. She looks at him, his twilight-dark eyes and thick black curls. Her Jon, as dear to her as her own heart.
“You know I do.” She allows her voice to soften and she can see some of the tension leave Jon’s body. A beat passes, but Jon was never as talented as her at schooling his features and the fierce pride that flares in his eyes is almost enough for her to forgive him.
“You told me I had to be smarter than Robb, smarter than Father. And aye, I know they would never bend the knee to a foreigner but neither did I. ”
She blinks at him slowly until it dawns on her.
Oh Jon, her Jon. She slips her hands into his, feels his calluses brush against her palms. Warm, solid, steady.
“The pack survives.” She whispers. He squeezes her fingers.
“Yes, sister. Our pack survives.”