Chapter Text
Sansa Stark could endure many things.
She had survived the sight of Ser Ilyn Payne striking her father’s head off not ten yards away from her. She had borne countless beatings and slaps and sneers and sly insults from Joffrey, his men, and his mother in the years that had followed. She had kept her sanity when Aunt Lysa and Sweetrobin (if he’d ever had any), with whom she had thought she could find a home, had lost their own. She had withstood months of savagery at the hands of Ramsay Bolton. She had faced the humiliation of having to ask Petyr Baelish, of all people, to help her save Jon and Rickon when she could find no other way on her own. And she had kept the candles burning, the soldiers’ wounds stitched, and the refugees fed during the Long Night, when Jon and his aunt had gone off to fight the War for the Dawn.
So she had been able to endure Jon Snow’s returning from the war as a shaking, malnourished fraction of his former self.
“No man comes back from war unchanged,” her father had said, and Sansa had never had cause to doubt his word. She would have stopped doubting it in any case when she saw the haunted glaze over Jon’s gray eyes and the stoop to his shoulders and the trembling of his hands. He had, after all, fought the Night’s King face to face and come back to tell the tale, which was more than could be said for most of his soldiers. Less than half of them had returned from the final battle, and of those who did, many had lost their wits altogether. Sansa had worried at first that Jon might be one of them; but within a few days of his return, he had tried to hold a small council meeting at his bedside and begun writing instructions for the burial of the dead. His hand had shaken violently, and he had had to stop writing altogether, but he had produced a ghostly smile when Sansa had reassured him that she would take care of everything. The next day, when they had buried Arya and Bran in the crypts, he had shaken almost as violently; but afterward, he had set a torch in the wall and bent over the walking stick that helped him walk on his injured leg to murmur words Sansa could not hear in front of each grave. When he had emerged, he had asked Sansa, his voice still barely above a whisper, if she needed him to help with any of the arrangements for the funeral feast being held in the great hall. Sansa had only shaken her head, but whatever was still shaking inside of her had begun to still, and she clutched Jon’s arm tightly out of relief.
Slowly, as the months had worn on, Jon’s shaking had stopped, and his leg had healed. He had knelt in the dirt with the rest of Winterfell’s remaining men during the days to repair the war-torn castle and sat at Sansa’s side during the evening at council meetings, although he had insisted he belonged behind her and indeed behind all of the other lords, and certainly not at the her side, given his less than wholly Northern lineage. Sansa had had to tell him twice that the Queen in the North wished him at her side and nowhere else before he had agreed. His eyes had flashed with annoyance, and Sansa had had to hide her smile.
Sansa had been able to endure being married for the sake of her husband’s pity just a year after that.
After all, she had been married twice before: once for her husband’s family’s obsession with control over all seven kingdoms, and then once again for the claim her own family’s name would grant the man who raped and tortured her every night. She had almost been married twice as well: once for the whims of a drunken lout and for the maniacal pleasures of his supposed son, her betrothed, and then once again for the insatiable lust of the creature who had so vainly craved her own mother’s attentions.
Pity had been an utterly benign motive compared to all of those, and pity it was that she had seen written so plainly on Jon’s face when his aunt had announced her intention for Sansa to marry the new King of the Reach, a grand-nephew of Olenna Tyrell’s whose ruthlessness on and off the battlefield were legendary. She had seen pity, and a shade or two of guilt, overwhelm his face when his aunt had spoken, and deeper pity when she had stood up to protest and the thought of the brute setting his hand to her had overwhelmed her so thoroughly that she would have collapsed to the floor had Jon not jumped out of his seat to catch her. Pity and something she could not name had colored his face as he had gently helped her to her feet, and the pity had only disappeared when he had rounded on his aunt and begun shouting at her. His shouts had continued the following day, when he had found his aunt cornering Sansa in her own chambers to continue the prior night’s discussion about finding a suitable husband for the Queen in the North. Sansa had merely glared at the other woman, but Jon had almost burst with rage. The queen had stopped in her tracks, gotten an odd smile on her face, and said that Sansa would be lucky to have such a protective man as Jon for a husband. Sansa had still felt faint, but she had also been half afraid that the two would take their disagreement to the dragon pit if she refused, so she had agreed; and the moment she had, Jon’s eyes had widened. Sansa had taken all of two seconds to tire of the pity she had seen there, and she had turned away from him at once.
A month later, the queen and half the North had watched as Sansa’s uncle escorted her to Winterfell’s heart tree. Jon’s eyes had widened when he had seen her sweep into the godswood – with what Sansa could not tell from her distance – and then softened with pity again when she had reached the tree and taken his proffered arm. Despite her anxiety, Sansa had liked the end of the ceremony better than all the rest of it; for when Jon’s warm hand had steadied her neck and his warm lips had softened around hers, she had avoided the pity. She had even felt a pleasing tingle in her chest for a brief moment before Jon had withdrawn and she had had to turn and stare at the assembled guests, who by the look of them pitied her even more than Jon had.
That was the night Sansa had discovered she could endure her husband’s revulsion as well as she had his pity.
Jon had forbidden even the talk of bedding, so he and Sansa had swept upstairs to Sansa’s chambers unaccompanied by any save for the servants, whom Sansa had promptly dismissed at the door to her solar. They would have enough gossip for their grist mill on the morrow, when they stripped the bed and found her soiled sheets.
But the sheets, it turned out, had remained clean as a new-bathed babe. Sansa had managed to unlace her gown while Jon had turned to put up Longclaw and inspect the fire. He had finished and turned to her just as she had slid her shift off of one shoulder; and for the second time that day, his eyes had gone wide as ale horns. She had always been careful to let none but her maidservants ever see the scars Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton had left on every part of her body not covered by dresses with sleeves at least halfway down her arms, so she had not been particularly shaken by the shock that had covered Jon’s face. She had expected to see pity there as well; but instead his eyes had darkened, and his jaw had tightened, and Sansa had turned away. She had not wanted to sour her sweet memories of Jon kissing her brow on the battlements and on her lips just a few hours before, and waving to her as he rode from Winterfell and embracing her at Castle Black, with the memory of his not being able to look at her without recoiling at the sight of her wounds.
“You don’t have to do that, Sansa; I won’t touch you,” he had said, and his voice had lowered to a rasp. Despite herself, Sansa had whirled around to meet his flashing eyes. Within a moment his expression had reverted to its usual inscrutability. It had been Sansa’s turn to wear the shocked look when he had bade her good night and stalked off through the door that connected her chambers with his. She had waited motionless at her own bedside for a good ten minutes before she had realized that Jon truly did not mean to have her that night. She had collapsed into bed with tears streaming down her face not long after that, although whether she cried more from relief or from hurt she could not have said.
But Sansa had endured that night and all the nights and days that had followed it over the past eight months.
She had felt the tension in Jon’s arm when he offered it to her to escort her into the great hall for breakfast. She had seen that same arm drop swiftly as soon as she reached her seat. She had watched his hand creep up next to hers on the council room chamber’s great oak table as he spoke to the assembled lords, and she had watched as he snatched it away the moment he noticed its proximity to her. She had swept up next to him time after time when he was conversing with one or two of those same lords, or laughing at one of Tormund Giantsbane’s jokes, or poring over ravens’ messages, or walking in the godswood; and just as many times, when he had noticed her approach, his body had stiffened, and his tone had changed from a low, comforting lilt to clipped and sharp. He had bade her “My lady,” without fail, but also without warmth, as if he were afraid she would order his head off if he showed her any semblance of conviviality. And night after night, he had escorted her to the door of her chambers, where night after night, he had bent his head stiffly, wished her a grave “good night,” and turned on his heel to depart for his own quarters. Sansa’s shoulders had slumped a little lower every time; but she had stiffened them, swept into her bedchamber, and reminded herself how much worse she would have had to endure with any man save Jon. Not all of the men she could have married would have beaten her or taken against her will; but almost certainly none of them would have offered her such thoughtful counsel, or deferred so readily to their queen’s decisions without trying to overrule her, as Jon did. And hardly a week went by when Sansa did not find that Jon had ordered five dozen lemons added to the cooks’ orders so she could have her fill of lemon cakes, or wake to see her maids adorning her night table with a glass of flowers he had cut himself for her from the glass gardens, or even find a new pendant or hairpin adorned with blue stones winking at her from her jewel case. No, if puzzling behavior was Jon’s worst flaw, she could endure it, and far better than she could Tyrion’s whoremongering or Ramsay’s brutality.
But when the largest Free Folk clan left in Westeros came to visit Winterfell eight months after the wedding, Sansa discovered what she could not endure.
She could endure the grins elicited so easily from Jon by the clan’s leader, a petite, golden-haired woman named Val with a mischievous glint in her green eyes and wits to match. She could endure the servants’ gossip about how much the King in the North enjoyed the woman’s presence. She could even endure their whispering about how the king preferred such a loud, spirited woman, so like his long-dead Free Folk lover, to the more demure and less engaging company of his wife.
But one day, Sansa heard murmurs about what a coincidence it was that every evening, after the king had escorted his queen to her chambers, he departed for the staircase that led to the craftsman’s halls, and without fail, the Lady of the Free Folk left her own chambers for and headed for the same halls within the span of ten minutes. She ignored the rumors as best she could for the next two days; but on the third day, curiosity got the better of her and she tiptoed out of her chambers and down the hall after Jon almost as soon as he had left her at their door. He made for the very same staircase the servants had discussed, so she swept back up the passageway and down the main stairs to the next floor, where the Lady of the Free Folk was staying. No sooner had Sansa emerged at one end of the hall than the Lady Val exited her own chambers at the other end; and the lamp the other woman carried illuminated both her progress down the hallway and its abrupt stop at the door to the very same staircase Sansa had seen her husband descend not five minutes past. The door opened and then closed, and the Lady Val and her lamp disappeared and left the passageway in darkness and Sansa frozen against the wall.
Perhaps it had been a coincidence, she tried to tell herself as she mounted the staircase to return to her rooms. But Jon followed the same path the following night, and, once again, so did the Lady Val.
And that Sansa could not endure.
The next morning, a new brooch from Jon turned up in her jewel case; but she did not wear it to breakfast, as she had all of the other pieces he had given her. A hurt look flashed briefly across his face when he showed up to escort her to the great hall for the morning meal, and he faltered when he greeted her with his usually impassive “Good morning, my lady.”
“Good morning, my lord,” replied Sansa, who spared him barely a glance before lifting her chin and resting her hand upon his arm as lightly as she could. Jon hesitated a few moments before leading her down the stairs. But when they reached the great hall, the Lady Val greeted them both warmly and then turned to Tormund Giantsbane to crack a joke that turned Jon’s stiffness into a gale of laughter.
No more could Sansa endure that. It took all of the training her mother had ever given her at being a lady not to round on both her husband and the woman who almost certainly had become his lover under the roof of her own childhood home and have them both thrown out. She did not, of course; but the moment the meal ended, she made her excuses to Jon about seeing the steward and swept out of the hall with his puzzled glance at her back.
Sansa took her luncheon and dinner in her chambers and busied herself as best she could with her sewing in between the two. She was due to visit Wintertown in two days’ time, and she had always taken with her on her visits such clothing as she and her ladies could make and mend for the children staying there who had been orphaned in the war. She could not avoid Jon by staying in her chambers and sewing forever; indeed, by dinnertime she felt as though she would suffocate if she did not get some fresh air on the morrow, and in any case she could not just stop being queen. But she did not have to endure either Jon’s presence or the Lady Val’s, and that would do for the moment. No doubt, she thought with some bitterness, they would be laughing merrily together without her anyway. So she was not altogether surprised to find tears seeping out of her eyes, down her cheeks, and onto her pillowcases when she retired early that evening. Being betrayed under her own roof, it turned out, was as hard to endure in its own way as outright brutality, especially when the man betraying her was the very same the man who had once sworn to protect her at all costs, who had patiently taught her how to wield a sword in the event some disaster should befall Winterfell while he was still on his errand to Dragonstone, and who had held her so gently as she had wept in front of Arya’s and Bran’s tombs.
No, Sansa supposed, enduring a few tears after the events of the past few days should have come as no shock. But she was surprised to hear the faint knock on her solar’s door, and even more surprised to find some strange part of herself hoping that it was Jon. She was downright shocked to hear another knock after a few minutes, this one at her bedchamber door, and see the door open to the light of a candle and the voice of one of her maidservants telling her that it was indeed her husband and no other who had come to see her. And she was astonished to no end when she opened her mouth to refuse and the only words that left it were, “Very well.”