Chapter Text
five days before
“You’re going to have to take that off.”
Sansa Stark tightens her grip on the steering wheel and studies her left hand. Her nails are well-groomed, cuticles clean, and a far too ostentatious diamond ring sparkles on her fourth finger.
“He’s not going to be happy,” she sighs, but she slips it off anyways and tucks it carefully into her purse, keeping her eyes on the road.
Arya snorts. “It’s just a ring; he’ll get over it.”
Her sister rolls her eyes. “There’s very little he ever ‘gets over’, Arya, and you know that.” Arya opens her mouth to respond when Sansa’s ringtone echoes through the car’s Bluetooth. The girls share a look at the name on the display, and Sansa reaches forward to accept the call.
“It’s like he’s fucking psychic,” Arya mumbles.
“What was that?”
Sansa can’t help the smile that spreads across her face when she hears the smooth voice fill up the car. “Nothing, just, were your ears burning?”
The voice chuckles. “No, sweetling. Though I must admit I was thinking about you too. The office is so quiet without you down the hall.” There is a deep sigh from the other line, and his voice goes low. “Why, there’s so few people here today, I think if I locked the door we might be able to-”
“Ew, gross Petyr!” Arya shouts, covering her ears. “Younger sister in the car!”
Petyr is silent for a moment, and Sansa tries to hold in her laughter. “I didn’t know you were picking up Arya, my dear,” he says finally, sounding clearly sullen.
Sansa smiles at her sister who looks surprisingly scarred; she would’ve thought Arya would be used to Petyr’s marginally creepy flirting at this point. “Well, we figured we’d save gas this way. You know, help the planet?”
“Oh, how altruistic of you.”
“Hm? Oh no, my daily moment of altruism will come later tonight, when I call you to say goodnight.”
Arya looks at her in horror, and she relishes how she can practically hear Petyr lean closer to the phone, even from miles away. “Oh?” He clarifies, and she grins.
“Mm hm,” she confirms, and Petyr groans.
“I don’t understand why you have to be gone a full week,” he grumbles. “A wedding only lasts a couple of hours, Sansa, I could’ve had you flown up there and back in a matter of hours.”
Sansa leans back in her seat; she misses him too, even though neither of them will admit it outright. “Yeah? And that wouldn’t look suspicious, me flying in last minute in a private plane? This week is about not provoking my parents.”
“I don’t give a fuck what Ned and Catelyn Stark think,” Petyr bites out in response. He must be more desperate for her than she thought.
“Yeah? Well I do.” Sansa exhales, fighting the urge to both punch and kiss him, and upset she could act on neither impulse. Not with him thousands of miles away. “You agreed to this, Petyr,” she adds, knowing her tone will show him that she’s serious. “It’s not the right time.”
“I don’t think it counts as an agreement if I was coerced,” he shoots back, but the anger has faded and he sounds more amused than anything. Sansa feels the tension bleed from her body. “Speaking of our agreement, I’ve taken very good care of your little gift. Even Tyrion Lannister complimented me yesterday on my new, silk pocket square. I wonder what he would say if he knew it was really your-”
“Okay, bye Petyr!” Arya interrupts, lunging forward to end the call.
Sansa had turned bright red at this point, but she is still indignant. “Hey!”
Arya just stares at her. “Your fiancé is a lecherous creep.”
Sansa smirks at her sister, thinking about the man to whom she’s planning on binding herself. Petyr Baelish has no boundaries, very few morals, and does not care about anyone in world but himself. And me, she tells herself, but even the voice in her mind sounds shaky. But she knows what he wants, and he knows what she wants. The same thread of ambition runs through them both. She hopes that will be enough. “Lecherous? Did you buy a thesaurus recently?” Sansa teases, eager to get off the subject of her questionable taste in men.
“Ugh, shut up,” Arya retorts, but she is smiling. “Sansa…” she begins seriously, and the redhead glances over at the change of tone, “how are we going to pull this off?”
Sansa tilts her head, giving her younger sister a determined look before turning back to the road. “We stick to the plan,” she says, moving to fiddle with the radio. The rest of the drive is silent.
-
twenty-six days before
Sansa hurries inside the small coffee shop, unwinding the long woolen scarf from around her neck. She spots a mop of dark curls at a table near the back, smiling as her brother turns to wave her over. Just behind him, her sister is typing away on her phone. After waving back, she orders a cappuccino from the pretty, redheaded barista before weaving around the mess of tables toward her coffee dates.
Despite the fact they had lived in the same house for sixteen years, Sansa and Jon had never been close. Nor had she spent a lot of time with Arya, as their personalities and interests were wildly different, but they at least had a mother in common. Since living in the city, though, and especially since her break up with Joffrey, Arya had stuck close. They had learned to strike a precarious balance: Sansa coerces her sister into shopping trips, and she allows Arya to take her to the range to teach her to shoot. Something that had made her fiancé very happy.
Jon is different. Even when he moved to King’s Landing, they had never tried to see each other. Sansa runs in the circles at the top of the city, working for and making deals with the major players in order to win a game of which she still does not know the scale. Jon, on the other hand, left that world behind in order to live a normal life, a decision Sansa would never understand. But then again, she had always been the most ambitious member of her family.
She slides into the last empty seat in the corner, holding her bag in her lap. “Jon, Arya,” she greets fondly, nodding at them both. Arya hardly looks up from her phone. “I only have an hour left on my break, and I have to make it all the way back across the city, so if we could-”
Arya scoffs. “Yeah, we know, you have a job in the shiniest building of the Red Keep, far from the rest of us plebeians. Give it a rest, Sansa. Neither of us wants to be here more than you.”
Sansa glares at her sister, opening her mouth to respond, when Jon interjects. “Hey, okay, I know this is going to be tense, but we agreed this was the best way to deal with what’s about to happen, right? Face to face.” He quiets when the redheaded barista brings Sansa’s coffee over; the girl shoots him a conspiratorial grin when she thinks no one is looking.
When she leaves, Sansa leans over to Jon. They might not get along, but the sight of her half-brother blushing is an opportunity she cannot pass up. “What was that?” she questions, and that finally gets Arya to put her phone down. “Flavor of the week?”
Arya spins around to catch a glimpse of the retreating barista and laughs. “Get it, Jonny Boy!” she crows, punching her brother in the arm. The girl turns around at the noise, winking when she catches Sansa’s eye. Jon turns even redder, and then the whole table is laughing.
The laughter clears the air around the siblings, and Sansa takes the chance to bring up the reason they are all here. “You all got the invitation for the wedding,” she says, her voice low.
Jon nods. “Yeah, Robb’s marrying that ER nurse,” he replies, and Sansa is a little surprised at the bitterness that seeps through his tone. “No surprise there.”
Sansa shares a glance with Arya, but neither comment on it. Jon’s rapport with Robb, Sansa knows, is an entire can of worms by itself. “Mom and Dad can’t know about… my relationship,” she says carefully, fingers wrapping tightly around her coffee mug as she avoids looking down at her engagement ring. “And we all know that they won’t believe me if I tell them I’m not interested in anyone, or worse, they’ll try to set me up with someone again, so we need to get our stories straight.”
“They can’t know I got discharged,” Jon says quietly. “I’ll figure out a way to tell Dad later, but not now.”
Arya slumps back in her chair. “Yeah, I’m definitely not telling them I dropped out.”
Sansa rolls her eyes. “Well at least I don’t have to clean up your bloody face anymore. What made you stop fighting, anyways?”
Jon leans forward, eyes wide. “Fighting? What the hell, Arya?”
“It’s over; don’t worry about it,” Arya nearly shouts at both her siblings, swiping her phone on and off in a nervous gesture. “I have a legit job now.”
Jon narrows his eyes. “Yeah, no, you and I are having a long talk later.”
Sansa exhales. “Arya’s craziness aside, that’s a lot of baggage we have to plan for.”
Arya snickers. “Yeah, Jon got discharged, I dropped out, and you’re engaged to a creepy middle-aged pimp. One of these things is not like the other,” she says in a sing-song voice, and Jon nearly falls out of his chair for the second time.
“What the fuck? Sansa!”
Sansa glances at her watch before picking up her phone, telling her secretary to cover for her if Cersei or Petyr come calling. This is going to take longer than she had planned.
-
four days before
“Things are… good, right? Work? Your neighbors are nice?”
Sansa slips by her father to pull a mug out of the cabinet. “Yeah, dad, things are good.”
Out of the many members of the Stark family, only Ned and Sansa rise with the sun regardless of the occasion. Robb, Jon, and her mother enjoy sleeping in when possible, the younger boys are still of the age where sleeping until midmorning is normal, and it would be a miracle to get Arya up before noon most days.
Arya and she had gotten in too late last night to do more than sleepily hug the family and climb into bed, and Jon’s flight had luckily been delayed so that he had not arrived until three in the morning. Sansa counts this as a blessing; it’s pretty obvious that he is the worst liar of the three of them. Not to mention the most honorable, and likely to spill everyone’s secrets out of guilt. Better to let Sansa and Arya paint a picture that he only has to emulate.
She pours a healthy amount of coffee into her mug, relaxing into the normality of it. When Ned swings around to hand her the cream, she smiles in thanks, adding just a dash.
Her father chuckles. “You used to empty the carton, you know.”
Sansa grins. “Well, I’ve changed a lot over the past two years,” she teases.
His smile fades a little. “Hopefully not too much, honey,” he says, kissing her gently on the forehead.
If only you knew, she thinks, keeping her eyes away from his. “I’ll always be your daughter, dad,” she reassures him. She had never been particularly close with her father, not like Arya and Jon, but their morning ritual had got her through some rough days in high school. Petyr, she knows, will ruin that comfort, if not her relationship with her father in its entirety.
They are interrupted by a yawning Robb who enters the kitchen not unlike a zombie. When Sansa presses a cup of coffee in his hands, he drinks it down with one gulp.
“Your brother got in late last night,” Ned says, changing the subject to something less emotional now that someone else has arrived in the kitchen. Her father had never excelled in expressing himself in groups. “Do you know why he flew in from King’s Landing? I’m sure the Wall had a direct flight-”
“Oh, that one’s on me,” Sansa lies easily. “Jon and I don’t get to spend a lot of time together, so I asked him to stay with me for a couple of days when he got early leave. It just gets so… crazy around here, sometimes, and Arya and I wanted to steal some time for ourselves.”
Ned frowns. “Why didn’t he just drive with you?”
Apparently, the interrogation never ends. “He booked his flights before Arya and I decided to arrive. Truthfully,” she leans in conspiratorially, “I wanted to see if we could set him up with a nice girl. He works so hard, you know; he deserves a little happiness.”
Ned’s eyes cloud over a little, and he hunches forward. “Of course,” he says, and Robb takes the silence as a cue to start talking about the wedding.
Nodding along to her brother’s words, Sansa pulls out her phone. Ignoring a missed text from Petyr for a moment, she opens the group chat entitled “the barista, the fighter, and the gold digger”. She rolls her eyes; she never should have let Arya name it.
Ten points to me! Dad now feels guilty about being hard on Jon.
Knowing her siblings won’t wake up for at least a few more hours, she switches to Petyr’s message: What are you wearing?
Sansa sighs, catching herself before she rolls her eyes again. Robb would definitely ask her what’s going on, and there is no way on planet earth that she is showing him this message. Desperate, much? She texts back.
Even though it has been at least half an hour since he texted her, his response is almost immediate. For you? Always.
Sansa puts her phone down, ignoring the flash of heat that travels up her spine at his words. She tries to focus on Robb’s words.
This is going to be a long week.
-
three days before
“Sansa, your mobile is ringing!”
“Who is Everyone’s Favorite Creepy Pimp?” Rickon asks, his tone innocent as he picks it off the coffee table.
“Arya!” Sansa snaps, rushing past her giggling sister and lifting the phone from her youngest brother’s hands. Arya is still laughing when her sister sprints by her and up the stairs, slamming her bedroom door shut behind her. She can hear Sansa’s voice, low and irritated, through the thin wood, but she cannot make out the words.
Arya has always been confused by the relationship between her sister and Petyr Baelish. More often than not, the conversations she overhears are either about business and the game, as Baelish calls it, or they are the worst kind of depraved. The former Arya doesn’t want to get involved with, and the latter makes her wish that she could wash her ears out with soap. Surely it is impossible sustain a relationship with ambition and sex, even if it’s, supposedly, really good sex.
Arya shudders.
Yet, sometimes, she remembers the look on Baelish’s face when Joffrey put Sansa in the hospital. He had looked ready to kill, and sure enough, the boy was dead within the week. And she cannot argue with Sansa’s more frequent smiles, even if they are accompanied with sighs of exasperation. All the way back in that hospital waiting room, she had resolved that if Sansa was somehow happy, she would be happy for her.
Arya is pulled from her thoughts by her mother, who walks past her into kitchen with an armful of groceries.
“I could use some help, Arya,” Catelyn says pointedly, and she rushes to the car to unload the rest.
They are in the middle of putting away the food when Catelyn speaks again. “Can I ask you a question, dear?”
“Sure, Mom.”
Catelyn pauses for a moment, then: “does Sansa have a boyfriend?”
Arya freezes for a moment, then relaxes. For this one, she doesn’t have to lie. “No,” she answers honestly. After all, Baelish is not her sister’s boyfriend anymore. She doubts that word could ever have really been applied to Littlefinger. It seems too juvenile.
Catelyn hums. “It’s just… she’s been very distracted this week.”
Leaning on the counter, Arya reaches to put the cereal on the top shelf. “Yeah, well, she has a pretty big deal job now. I think it’s just hard to leave it behind for a week. Plus, she told me there’s a position opening up. She might be in line for a promotion.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.” Arya grins when her mother’s back is turned. She should get extra points for that one. It might not even be a lie; Baelish could be plotting to kill Sansa’s boss at that very moment. She snickers at her own thought; her sense of humor had always run a little morbid.
Jon and Robb come tumbling into the kitchen, both reaching for the new case of beers in the refrigerator. “Yeah, Sansa told me about that too,” the younger says conversationally, trying to back up his sister’s story but completely missing the odd look his brother sends him.
“She told you before me?” Robb says skeptically. Arya tenses; everyone knows Robb and Sansa are close. Of course it would raise red flags.
“I just didn’t want to take anything away from your big day!” Sansa sweeps into the kitchen, phone still pressed to her ear. She takes a bottle of water from the still open refrigerator, and leans up to kiss Robb on the cheek. “It’s no big deal; I was going to tell everyone after the wedding.”
Robb smiles down at her, suspicion forgotten, and Arya wonders when sweet little Sansa had become the best liar out of them all. Littlefinger should hold a workshop on it, she snarks to herself. “Who are you talking to?” Robb asks, and Arya watches to see how Sansa answers this one.
“Co-worker,” she says simply. “We have a big project due next week.” Arya might as well be able to hear Petyr laugh over the line. Sansa spins out of the kitchen and back up the stairs.
Unfortunately, her fun is ruined in a matter of seconds. “So tell me more about your classes,” her father says, and Arya sighs.
“Well, business management is even worse than it sounds…”