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Chapter Text

The jagged skyline of King’s Landing rises sharp and strong through the windshield.

For a moment, the familiarity of it seems strange to Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell. But then again, she’s been away from Westeros’s capital for just four years—a far shorter amount of time than the six years she actually spent living here. The first time she’d laid eyes on the city, it had seemed to glimmer in the sunlight. Crown Prince Joffrey had smiled and pointed out the broken spires of the Dragonpit, the belfry of the Great Sept of Baelor, the seven turrets of the Red Keep, all of it set off against the wall of silvery skyscrapers built across the Blackwater Rush.

An optical illusion, Sansa knows now. Nothing but a trick of light against glass.

Something over the bay catches her eye. “What is that over there? Scaffolding?” she asks the driver, leading forward from her seat in the back to point. Buckled in beside her, Jon Snow stops tapping away on his phone to bob his head around the headrest to get a better view.

“Oh, yes, ma’am.” The driver nods at the rows of scaffolding lining the northmost stretch of the city’s historic walls. “They say that section will be done by the end of the year.”

Sansa frowns. “But—I thought King Stannis said at the Jubilee that the repairs from the battle had finished?” She’s sure she’s remembered correctly. The man had even smiled —and widely enough that Sansa could see it on her bedroom’s television at Winterfell.

“The waterfront walls, yes. They left the city the most open to attack and storm surges,” the driver clarifies, signaling before merging onto the exit ramp. The car circles up and around and, for a beat, the Blackwater Bay—foamy grey, peppered with ferries and tourboats—fills their view. Four years ago, flaming ships and screaming men had blanketed the Bay.

Then they drop down into a sloping tunnel that will carry them under the halo of historic boroughs outside the city walls. “But it’ll take a while still. Surely you saw all the damage, ma’am, before you left for the North?”

Before I left for the North?

Sansa draws in a slow inhale and lets it out to the four-count beat of the tunnel lights flashing through the car’s windows. This is Visenya’s Tunnel, an express tunnel that takes them below King’s Landing’s walls and all the way up to the Street of the Sisters.

It’s the same tunnel through which she and her father had been spirited away from the Red Keep. Back then, their royal chauffeur service had been a dark SUV with tinted windows and a military motorcade that escorted them all the way to a strip of air tarmac and the House Stark jet waiting there.

She hadn’t been doing much looking back. “No, I’m afraid I didn’t.”

From the corner of her eye, she sees Jon peering over at her. He’s her Night’s Watch bodyguard for this trip, ready to put himself between her and danger. But on this front, she doesn’t need his help.

***

To keep his sister-wives chaste, Baelor the Blessed constructed the Maidenvault. These chambers belonged to Daena Targaryen, known to history as Daena the Defiant, as she escaped from her imprisonment several times. When she fell pregnant, she refused to name the father of her child. She raise her son, Daemon, in these very chambers until Aegon IV acknowledged him as one of his Great Bastards and gifted him with Blackfyre, Aegon the Conquerer’s own longsword. Daena’s later life is unknown, overshadowed by Daemon’s ill-fated rebellion against his half-brother, Daeron the Good.

Sansa’s eyes skim over the plaque just inside the door of the suite of rooms assigned to her for her sojourn in King’s Landing. She knows all of the plaques inside the Tower of the Hand by heart, as well as the one that had hung in her old room in Maegor’s Holdfast.

They’re meant to memorialize the Keep as a living monument, but frankly they don’t go much beyond what is taught in schools. The good stories, like those of Queen Naerys and Aemon the Dragonknight, or of the Dance of the Dragons, are retold over and over again with varying degrees of salaciousness in popular historical fiction or big budget movie films. Even Daena has a half-dozen documentaries and films done on her. This set say she and Aemon were passionately in love, that group say she just wanted freedom.

But if the Red Keep back then had been anything like the Red Keep Sansa had survived, no one would ever really know.

Sansa signs and moves through the foyer into the little sitting room. Three lady’s maids bustle around Sansa, unpacking her trunks and suitcases. One maid, Danyelle, is arranging her shoes in a tidy row in a rack and another maid, Jenny, is sliding her gowns onto hangers and shaking them out before hanging them in the wardrobe.

Jon’s not with her anymore. He’s been assigned quarters in the White Sword Tower along with the other bodyguards coming in from out of town with members of the Great Houses for the festivities. Those festivities being the wedding of Shireen Baratheon, Princess of Dragonstone, to Prince Quentyn Martell of Dorne. For two weeks, she was beholden to the Iron Throne, as were the rest of the Westeros’ houses.

After all, they’d pledged their fealty and loyalty to Stannis as Lord of the Seven Kingdoms after he’d taken the throne from his not-nephew, Joffrey. That oath bound all members of a house, and so when Stannis called for one of House Stark’s daughters to serve as a bridesmaid for Shireen, House Stark couldn’t refuse.

Her quarters in the Maidenvault have a touch of irony, under those circumstances, but overall it’s a quite sumptuous set of rooms. There’s a bedroom with a four-poster bed and an attached balcony overlooking the sea, a comfortable solar with ample seating, a wet bar and a glossy black television, and a marbled bathroom complete with double sinks and a claw-footed tub.

With just the lady’s maids scurrying around and speaking to each other in hushed tones as they work, Sansa’s as alone in this place as anyone possibly could be. She steps down into the sunken solar and takes a seat in a low-profile armchair, tilting her head back and closing her eyes.

She and Daena have a lot in common, actually. The tabloids seem to come up with new stories every other month about the Stark family, and Sansa in particular. Gossips from the Wall to the Broken Arm think they know what truly happened to the Stark daughters in King’s Landing, or what Lord Stark’s mysterious illness is. Every time Sansa or Arya venture out beyond Winterfell’s walls, the rumor mills kick up again.

Did Sansa Love Joffrey? The Real Reason She Stayed In King’s Landing

Lady Sansa In Crimson: A Lannister Homage? Stannis Furious

Lady Arya Hitchhiked To Winterfell, Innkeeper Says

Blonde Infant In First Keep: Why Stannis Banished Sansa After Blackwater Battle

That last type of story is usually accompanied by a barrage of photographs of twenty-one year old Sansa in heavy jackets or belted dresses, red circles drawn around her belly. Arya hates those, and has been known to buy copies just to set them on fire.

But cathartic infernos aside, Arya and Sansa can handle those stories just fine. Whether by Syrio or Queen Cersei, they’d each learned to grit their teeth and bear it. The stories that made them want to scream and shout, and maybe sue some papers for defamation were of a completely different vein:

Lord Stark Kept In Padded Cell: Source Reveals All

Hot Robb Fills In For Lord Stark Yet Again: Will Ned Ever Reclaim His Former Glory?

Lady Stark Out With Mystery Man—Northern Marriage In Shambles!

Maybe one day, in twenty or fifty or a hundred years, someone will try to tell Sansa’s story. Arya’s story. Their lord father’s story. But they'll never get it right. Just like they can make a dozen movies about Daena the Defiant and never reach the absolute truth. For the Seven’s sake, Sansa is sitting inside the Maidenvault right now, but it’s been retrofitted for electricity and water, and it’s been redecorated with expensive furniture and linens. She herself lived in the Red Keep, was all but the next Princess of the Seven Kingdoms, and still she cannot truly grasp the ache that would settle in one’s stomach after years of confinement within this single building.

Just like a multi-million gold dragon costume budget and the best cast that Westeros has to offer will never be able to replicate staring down the real King Joffrey and Queen Cersei.

“Lady Sansa.” Danyelle stands at her shoulder, hand hovering over Sansa’s wrist where it’s draped over the arm of the chair. She give Sansa’s jeans and blazer a meaningful look. “Your appointment with the King is in half an hour.” Sansa nods and rises to her feet.

On goes a navy sheath set and a pair of nude pumps. Sansa taps out emails while Jenny teases the crown of her auburn hair and twists it into place at the nape of her neck. Her mascara is the only thing left to apply when Devan Seaworth knocks at her door to escort her to Maegor’s, so she skips her usual double coat. It’s probably best that way, anyway. King Stannis is too old-school to approve of such vanity.

Her suspicious are confirmed as she and Devan enter Maegor’s and her eyes pick out the voids on the walls.

“His Grace is changing the furnishings to his tastes?” Sansa asks as they walk through the corridor. “A Fossoway used to hang just there—Florian and Jonquil. It was one of my favorites when I lived here.”

Devan hums. “I’m not sure about that one, My Lady, but King Stannis did auction a lot of the movable art or loaned them to museums to offset the rebuilding costs. If you’d like, I could check on it, though,” he offers, gesturing for her to go ahead of him around the corner. They were headed towards the Small Council room, and Sansa notices the twin sphinxes that flanked its doorway are gone, too.

Plenty of art remains, no doubt, but it's still a shocking view for a girl raised among Lannisters.

“I’d appreciate that, if it’s not too much trouble. It was the first think I would see when I walked through the doors,” Sansa tells him, smoothing her hands down the front of her skirt when they stop at the doors.

Devan knocks, listens, then opens the door. “The Most Gracious Lady Sansa, First Daughter of House Stark,” he announces.

He’s still using full titles , she thinks, and takes a deep breath before stepping carefully over the old threshold and into the Council Chamber.

***

His Grace, King Stannis of House Baratheon, Second of His Name, sits at the head of the Small Council chamber. He’s alone, save for Ser Davos Seaworth just to his right, who stands respectfully when she answers. Sansa’s jaw loosens; she’s had enough of “private” audiences with a King of Westeros to last her a lifetime.

Stannis hasn’t changed a bit since Sansa last saw him, save for extra lines in his forehead and around his eyes. He watches her approach him with his fist pressed against his mouth. He’s in a simple charcoal three-piece suit and a red tie, his crisp white shirt buttoned to his throat, his sigil ring gleaming in the overhead lighting. Everything about Stannis screams sharp lines and hard edges. Ser Davos and his soft brown suit fade in the background behind him.

The sign of a good hand , Sansa supposes. Ever present, never overbearing .

She tucks one foot behind the other and sinks low before the King. “Your Grace,” she murmurs, relaxing her shoulders and dropping her head. There’s silence for a beat, then another, and another. Sansa locks her knees, tightens her thighs, holds her curtsy. Finally, Stannis lowers his fist and rises to his feet.

“Lady Sansa,” he greets her, as she pulls herself back upright. “I presume your accommodations are to your liking?”

“Very much so. My Lady Mother would like to pass along her thanks for offering to provide lady’s maids and dressers as well. I’ve already met them and they’ve been welcoming and helpful so far.”

Stannis frowns. No, that does him a disservice. His face simply doesn’t change from its resting scowl. “It makes no sense for the Keep to quarter every House’s servants for two weeks when we have workers to spare and double-digit unemployment in the city.”

“Still," Sansa dips her head politely. "We thank you, Your Grace. I have no doubt that I will be well tended to for Princess Shireen’s wedding.”

“The moment you’re not, let Davos know. He’ll see to it,” Stannis tells her. He crosses the room in long strides to where two couches sit facing each other. He gestures for her to join him, and Davos resumes his seat, watching them from across the table, pen at the ready over his notepad. “We have a more significant matter to discuss, and there’s no point in beating around the bush about it.”

“If this is about the timber stocks, we’re still waiting on Lady Mormont to sign off on the lease,” Sansa says, lowering herself onto the couch and crossing her ankles.

Stannis waves his hand. “She did. Robb sent it along a few hours ago. You did email that contract back to him, didn’t you, Davos?”

Davos nods. “Yes, Your Grace.”

The timber issue had been the only significant matter Sansa had been briefed on the night before her departure this morning at 5:00 AM. The hair on the back of her neck starts to prickle even before Stannis turns his icy gaze back onto her. Still, she keeps her eyebrows neutral, the corners of her mouth turned up. It’s a pleasant and blank expression that had seen her through years in this very Holdfast.

Stannis leans back. “I’ve made the decision—not officially, not before Shireen’s wedding—to give Storm’s End and it’s Lordship to Edric.”

Storm’s End and Edric as something to discuss with Sansa? Her heartbeat quickens, but her brain keeps going. It feeds her information she could process even if she’s not sure where Stannis is going. Edric…Edric…Joffrey’s father, the old King Robert, had an older son named Edric from his college days, didn’t he?

“Edric…Baratheon? Your brother’s son with Lady Delena?” Sansa asks, and Stannis nods once. Sansa’s mind sputters, flips, reverses. King Robert had died with no legitimate heirs. The three royal Baratheon children—Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen—were all the products of incest between the Queen Regent, Cersei Lannister, and her brother, Kingsguard Jaime Lannister. That had been the whole point of Stannis’ undertaking a war against Joffrey for the Iron Throne after Robert had died.

“But…legitimizing Edric would place him ahead of you in the line of succession—” Sansa starts.

“I didn’t say a word about legitimizing him,” Stannis interrupts, and Sansa snaps her mouth shut so quickly she’s sure she hears her teeth click. “But Shireen cannot hold the Iron Throne, Dragonstone, and Storm’s End. And I’ll not see the Crown’s ancestral seat passed to some middle-management fifth-cousin thrice removed. As unsavory as I find the prospect of Storm’s End going to a boy born on the wrong side of the sheets, Edric was raised there. He has the Baratheon name, Baratheon blood. His sons will have the Baratheon name and Baratheon blood.”

Claxons ring in Sansa’s ears, even as she demurs. “A sensible plan, Your Grace.”

“It’s the only plan.” Stannis shifts in his chair and levels Sansa with the same stare his father used to give her when he’d made a decision and would not be swayed. “You will attend Shireen at her wedding to Quentyn Martell. You will accompany her on her honeymoon to Dorne. And after a reasonable amount of time, say, two or three months, you will marry Edric—quietly, without fuss—and move to Storm’s End.”

Chills wash over Sansa in waves, but she keeps her face placid. Her legs feel heavy and restless, but she keeps them primly crossed. But she can’t stop the words that spill out of her mouth. “I can’t.”

Stannis wraps his fingers around the arm of a couch. “Lady Sansa. There are still factions in the North that call your father the King of Winter. They were ready to put a crown on your brother’s head if your father had died in the cells beneath our very feet. Your father had wanted to unite our Houses before everything went to pieces—you and Joffrey, do you remember? Consider a marriage to Edric as a fulfillment of that wish, if that helps you sleep at night. But the separatists must see that your family is committed to House Baratheon, the Iron Throne, all Seven Kingdoms.”

The King’s argument is objectively strong, but it does the opposite of urging Sansa to agree to it. She still remembers when his soldiers broke down her door, not three floors above this one. She’d been terrified, then relieved, to see their sigil: a crowned stag’s head in a flaming heart. Then-Stannis had promised her she was safe, that she would go home, that he’d found Lord Stark and was freeing him from the Black Cells and moving him to more comfortable quarters that very moment. Stannis had been so sincere, then, shell-shocked himself and moved by the highborn lords and ladies who collapsed sobbing at his feet in their finery, thanking him for their delivery from Cersei and Joffrey.

But that was then, and this was now. This is a Stannis in his fourth year of kingship. Justice, truth, and righteousness have lost their shine, and he’s right where his enemies had been before him: clinging to power by the skin of his teeth.

And once again, I am to be held as the figurehead of House Stark , Sansa realizes. Another day, another king. She and Stannis regard each other in silence, until even Davos’ pen stops scratching across the room.

“My Lady Sansa,” Stannis says.

Sansa unclasps her hands and smooths her skirt down again. “I’m sorry, I was just remembering. This is the very same room that I was called to, after my father and all of his men had been arrested and taken to the black cells. Cersei and Varys and Pycelle all accused me of having traitor’s blood like my father and my sister and then had me sit at that very table right right there to write letters to all my lordly relations. I asked each of them—each and every one of them—to come to King’s Landing to swear fealty to Joffrey.”

Stannis has the decency to break eye contact by now. Sansa’s whole body is still on the edge of all-over trembling—though from terror or rage, she’s still not sure.

“I was only twenty years old at the time, but it’s quite a vivid memory, looking back.”

Stannis pushes himself out of his chair and stands behind it, needing to put something solid between himself and the young woman before him. She’s only a scant few years older than his own daughter.

“I—” he pauses and clenches his jaw, searching for the right words. “I appreciate the weight of your time here in King’s Landing. But I have a Kingdom to hold together, and the weight of a crown behind me to do it. Now, unless you have somehow managed to marry without those camera-wielding snakes outside finding out about it, or you are otherwise legally unable to marry, you will marry Edric. And whatever…arrangements the two of you come to after the birth of your first son is between the two of you.”

Sansa barely hears the last sentence Stannis grinds out. Her mind has started working, whirring and spinning so loudly that it drowns him out. In the space of a few seconds, she chases thought after thought until a solution clicks into place.

“I am married, Your Grace,” she says, looking Stannis right in the eye. After Joffrey, after Cersei, after Baelish, Stannis is child’s play. “That’s why I said I couldn’t marry Edric. I’m so sorry about the unpleasantness, making you think I was being selfish. It’s just—we haven’t told anyone yet, no one at all, actually, not even my parents, and I didn’t know how to even bring it up.”

“You’re married,” Stannis repeats, deadpan. His knuckles go white where they grip the back of the chair. His brow furrows over the bridge of his nose. “To whom?”

Her smile is placid. “To Jon. Lord Snow.”

Chapter Text

Tense silence fills the next twenty minutes. Sansa thinks she can hear Stannis grinding his teeth all the way over where he stands at the window, watching the Blackwater spill into the Bay. Davos asks Sansa if she’d like a glass of water, and yes, that would be nice, thank you, Ser, because her mouth is as dry as Dornish sand dunes. The glass she sips on does little to help, but it’s better than nothing and gives her something to occupy her hands.

While Devan goes to fetch Jon from the White Sword Tower, she prays to the old gods and the new, even Stannis’ Lord of Light. Let Jon catch on, she begs of them. Or let him let her talk. And gods, let him smile, just once.

Jon is a senior member of the Night’s Watch, she tells herself over and over again. He’s smart enough, sharp enough to pick up on what she needs. His order had guarded the the Wall until it fell more than a century back. They’ve since split into two arms, one that patrols the trade and immigration bottleneck between Westeros and the Free Folk Territories, and the other that runs security for House Stark.

Two knocks, then Devan’s announcement: “His Lordship Jon of House Snow.”

Being a member of the Night’s Watch means Jon rarely looks like a lord. But right now? He does. Sansa can tell he hasn’t done more than run his fingers through his dark curls since they arrived, but he’s changed out of his “Brother’s Black” and into a smart navy suit, complete with a slim red tie. She rarely sees him dressed like this, and he had to have been rushed to change quickly at the King’s call. Yet from the relaxed set of his shoulders under his jacket and the measured strides he takes into the room, he seems perfectly at ease.

His eyes instantly seek her out, and she says, “Oh, darling, there you are,” before Stannis can get a word out. It breaks about ten types of protocol, so she’s not surprised when the King’s nostrils stay flared even when Jon takes a few steps forward and bows at the waist in greeting.

“Your Grace.”

“Lord Snow.”

As soon as those words are spoken, Sansa crosses to Jon’s side as casually as she can. “Jon, I’ve had to tell His Grace about us. About our wedding.” She doesn’t know how he’ll react to her taking his hand. She loops her hand around his forearm instead and breathes a sigh of relief when he doesn’t immediately startle. “I know we’ve been waiting for the right time to tell Papa, but His Grace offered his nephew Edric to me as a husband, and, well, I simply had to tell him.”

To her relief, Jon’s expression stays carefully concerned. He drops his hand over hers, gives her a comforting—if surprising—pat, before returning his attention to Stannis. “Our apologies, Your Grace. We’ve been thinking about going public, but we didn’t want to overshadow the Princess’ wedding.”

“You haven’t told your father? Your mother? Your brother? No one at all, not even friends?” Stannis asks, disbelieving, his arms crossed.

The lie jumps easily to Sansa’s lips, as does the anxious furrow to her brow. “With Papa…as he is, we wanted to wait. But the right time never came up.”

“It never does,” Jon agrees. He’s playing along, and well, at that, and only years in the Red Keep keep Sansa’s eyes focused on Stannis instead of whipping to meet her bodyguard’s.

“So, you two decided on a conjugal trip, then?”

“Of course not, Your Grace,” Sansa says, picking up from Stannis’ tone what the correct answer should be, right as Jon says, “Oh, no, Your Grace. I was assigned this detail.”

Stannis’ eyebrow rises on his forehead, and Jon tells the truth: “I’m the only S-2 guard who hasn’t accompanied a member of the family beyond the Neck. The House felt that the princess’ wedding was ideal for me to practice coordination with outside security detail. No offense intended, Your Grace,” Jon said, looking convincingly like he had just realized the implications of ‘practicing’ on the royal family.

Stannis glances at Davos, who looks back at his King. Stannis’ face is as thunderous as the Storm Lands themselves. Sansa thinks he looks strangely like Robert, back when the old King would get drunk off triple scotches and Cersei would push his buttons in front of the children with an impertinent comment and a sideways smirk.

But she knows better than to tell him that aloud. The three royal brothers had never shied away from hiding their disdain for each other even for the press.

Finally, Stannis runs the back of his lips and braces his hand on the mantle of the fireplace. “I don’t like secrets, My Lady. I think the kingdoms have had quite enough of that for a lifetime. The fact that your father is ill doesn’t excuse you from informing interested parties of your status as a married woman. Instead, you’ve gone forward with a secret marriage that is completely beneath your station as the First Daughter of a Great House.”

Jon stiffens. Sansa squeezes his elbow to settle him, casts her own eyes downwards and lets the chastisement roll over her. Jon tries to catch her eye, but she gives him a minute shake of the head. Three kings she’s shared a castle with, after all. They have short attention spans, she’s learned, and one simply has to ride them out.

Sure enough, Stannis huffs, tells Ser Davos to have the appropriate arrangements made for Jon, and dismisses them.

They bow low as they exit through the door, and she thinks they’re in the clear until she overhears Stannis mutter to Davos, “Get me the marriage certificate.”

Under his breath, Jon curses. Sansa’s face freezes in panic, but Jon shakes his head reassuringly. “I’ll take care of it,” he says out of the side of his mouth, where Devan can’t hear. Then he jerks his chin at Davos’ son and tells him, “I’ve got it from here, mate.”

Jon moves across the courtyard with swift strides. If Sansa were much shorter, she might’ve needed to jog to keep up with him. Only thanks to years of practice can she keep pace in her heels. The rest of the way to the Maidenvault, he’s silent and focused.

Danyelle is still in the room, laying the last of Sansa’s jewelry in a velvet tray. Jon clearly expects Sansa to dismiss the other woman right away. But she hears Varys’ silken whisper in her ear, and she doesn’t want to give the other woman anything interesting to sell. “You knew,” she says instead, vaguely.

Jon’s eyes dart from Sansa to Danyelle, then back to hers. He shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it across the back of a chair. “Devan is a gossip,” he says with a casual air, but his gaze shifts restlessly from the bed to the window to the solar.

Conversational buffer laid, Sansa tells Danyelle she can finish on her own and dismisses her with a smile. As soon as the door closes, leaving Jon and Sansa alone, apologies tumble from her lips and trip over themselves in her haste. “I said it before I thought it all the way through—”

“Where’s your laptop?” he asks, cutting her off. She pulls it from her tote, where it’s sat since she arrived. It’s password protected, but like all of the men of the Night’s Watch, he’s memorized the log-in information for all of the Starks.

Within minutes, he’s opened some program and shoots through lines of code, entering commands into unfamiliar screens. Sansa’s heart pounds and she has to turn away to pace around the room with her fingers twisting together.

She was so stupid, how could she have forgotten about the marriage certificate? This wasn’t the old days—they couldn’t just say they’d married in front of a heart tree and dare Stannis to contradict it. And now she’s dragged Jon into it, made him an accomplice without thinking it through.

But moments later, Jon’s voice pulls her from her thoughts. “All’s left is the date.”

The date? Sansa thumbs the stone of her ring, her thoughts racing. Too recent and it wouldn’t make sense—any decent researcher could show they’d barely crossed paths in the past few months. The trips the family had taken unspool in her mind, fragmented and hazy, and her palms start to sweat. She wipes him on her skirt, sharply aware that the clock is running against them.

A flash of blonde curls and sharp green eyes cut through her mind’s eye. The best weapon is between your legs.

She needs to stop thinking about romance and think about sex.

“Make it about four months after I first came home from King’s Landing,” she tells him. His eyebrows pull together in confusion, and then his grey eyes go dark and stormy. He turns back to the computer and keys in a date.

“Done.” He sounds resigned. She walks up behind him. They’re looking at the Northern registar’s website, and there it is: a digital marriage certificate with Jon, Lord Snow, listed as the first spouse and Sansa, House Stark, listed as the other.

“Thank the gods for going green,” he remarks quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Sansa murmurs. “I don’t even know if you’re…seeing anyone.”

Jon sits in silence, staring at the screen with his broad back to her. She wants to touch his shoulder, apologize again, but she curls her fingers into the fabric at her hips instead. “I’m not, but it wouldn’t matter now,” he says, running his fingers through his dark curls. He closes the laptop and spins the chair around.

His gaze falls on the bed across the room. “I’ll sleep on the couch,” he offers, eyes taking in the plush duvet and pillows, even though there’s hours yet before bedtime, “and get up before the maids come back in the morning.

Sansa nods and Jon tugs his tie loose with a heavy exhale.

Then there are footmen knocking at the door with the first of Jon’s suitcases. Sansa invites them inside with the corners of her lips pulled into a smile.

One of them has to, at least.

***

It takes barely two hours for the news to leak from ‘a source inside the Red Keep.’ It starts with a ticker underneath the afternoon soaps, and soon after, her phone starts to vibrate with calls from Winterfell. First up is Sansa’s childhood friend, Beth Cassel, who works now as the House’s junior press secretary.

Sansa’s hand hovers over the phone, old habit urging her to pick up and her mind holding her back. What was she even going to say? And considering where they were…Sansa eyes their surroundings. Jon had swept the room for listening devices before allowing her suitcases through the door, but there’s no telling who could be monitoring their cellular data or listening in on their telephone calls.

And Beth always knew when Sansa was lying.

Her phone’s screen goes dark, the call ending without going to voicemail.

At the other end of the crushed velvet sofa, Jon bounces his knee. According to the tickers on the news channels, the House hadn’t yet responded to requests for comment.

Have you seen the news? Call me ASAP., Beth texts her. It’s a relief, actually. Texting is better. Easier. Revisable.

Sansa unlocks her phone and opens her text messages.

“What’re you going to say?” Jon asks lowly. He’s turned his attention to her, and the phone in her hands.

“I’m…I’m going to say it’s true.” As soon as she says it, her stomach flips into a knot. Up until now, she’s only thought about the King, and the Red Keep, and slipping free of the both of them. She’d known it would hit the airwaves sooner or later, that her family would eventually hear the news.

And…once she confirms the reports, she’ll have to face her family. And she can’t just not take their calls, not indefinitely. She wants to run to the bedroom, hide under the covers, and pretend like this wasn’t happening. But she’d put herself into this situation. She’d started this.

Yes. Jon and I got married a few years ago. With papa ill and Jon in the NW, we kept it very secret. Sansa replies. Her stomach roils.

Beth opens the text within a few minutes. Sansa’s message sits on read and her phone lies dark and silent for the next half hour, while the soaps wrap up and news clips running during the commercials tell viewers Sansa Stark, Bodyguard married, Winterfell confirms.

Her mother calls. Her brother. Even Bran. Samwell Tarly calls Jon, and Jon mirrors Sansa by sending it to voicemail. He’s following her lead, but she doesn’t even know what her lead is yet.

Her family is going to have questions. Too many questions.

The swirl of dark, complex thoughts is thankfully interrupted by the arrival of their dinner. It’s good, she thinks, poking at her slice of cheese and onion pie and buttered carrots. Jon wisely switches the television over to a renovation channel’s show about young couples looking for vacation homes in the Summer Isles.

Slowly, methodically, Sansa clears her plate of food. After the cute blond couple picks the two-bedroom condo, she re-piles the dishes on the trays and sets them out in the hallway. Then she ducks into the bathroom, leans back against the door, and sucks in a few deep breaths.

She’s more dazed than ill—relishing the quiet, the solitude, moreso than the chill of the porcelain tile. Jon’s smart; he’ll leave her to her own devices so long as nothing sounds out of place. So Sansa drops onto the toilet and leans back into the hanging towels and closes her eyes.

***

Jon’s turned it to an entertainment channel when she comes back into the solar, her head clearer, her nerves calmer. A split panel of three talking heads jabber away. He’s put his glasses on, and the colored lights from the television reflect off the lenses.

“—They’ve been married for years, Larynt!” the blonde woman says, gesticulating with a sharpie. “How have they kept this under wraps?”

Jon lunges for the remote when he sees her, but she holds her hand out and shakes her head. “It’s fine.” He settles back into the cushions uneasily, but doesn’t insist.

“For those just just now tuning in,” the sole male commentator butts in, pushing his own sleek frames up his nose, “this is breaking news from the Red Keep. Lady Sansa Stark and Lord Jon Snow married less than one year after King’s Landing and House Lannister fell to King Stannis’s forces at the Battle of the Blackwater. So they’ve been married for four years, folks. Four years. Now, we all know about Lady Sansa—the First Daughter of House Stark of Winterfell, her parents being Lady Catelyn and Lord Eddard, who was the last Hand to King Robert Baratheon. Sansa was formerly engaged to Joffrey ‘Baratheon’—” Sansa’s eyebrow quirks at the air quotes the man puts around Joffrey’s last name. “—but this Jon Snow, he’s the one we haven’t heard about in quite a while, right, Samara?”

Images of a younger Sansa had been flipping across the screen—standing alongside Joffrey at the opening night of the Opera, clapping as he christened a warship, cheering in the Baratheon’s box at the football stadium—and Sansa’s happy to see them go in favor of the dark-skinned woman wearing a colorful headscarf and nodding emphatically.

“You’re right, Larynt. He’s from a minor Northern house, House Snow. Their seat was far North, practically Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. It’s a place more known for their timber and shellfish than their arts, so he’s an interesting choice for Sansa, who has always been quite feminine and fashionable.”

Jon and Sansa huff in tandem. He cocks his head with a really? And Sansa shakes her head with an Oh, I know.

“But you know,” Samara continues, “Lord Snow was raised at Winterfell after his parents were killed in that horrible, horrible fire—”

“A terrible tragedy,” Larynt intones gravely. “And he should have died too, correct? Or—”

“No, you’re right. His nursery was being repainted for his fifth birthday, so he’d been put in with his nanny for the night. He was on the far side of the house.” A wide-angle helicopter video of a half-charred, smoking wreck of what had once been a stately manor home. Sansa snaps her gaze to Jon, who barely glances at aristocratic tabloids and is mentioned in their pages even less. “Lord Stark took him in. The Snow’s seat still sits ruined. Jon Snow works as an agent with the Night’s Watch now—the Stark’s semi-autonomous security detail.”

“Easy access, then,” the blonde says slyly, waggling her brows. “And I just can’t get over the timing. I think we all know what happened there.”

The other panelists hum, demur, not willing yet to cross that line, not on night one of this dynastic drama. Jon rises off the couch and crosses to the small bar wedged into a tiny alcove. He unstops the decanter of bourbon, and Sansa calls over, “one for me, too, please.”

She takes a big swallow when he comes back. It’s spicy, stings her throat and makes her wince. That doesn’t stop her from taking another swig as soon as the first one is down.

“Winterfell has confirmed that Sansa and Jon are indeed married, but they’re refusing to comment further,” Larynt informs the viewers. He looks down at his cards and gossips a little longer. As he talks, more familiar faces flash across the screen: Sansa, pale and drawn in the grey light of Winter City, Arya at her elbow, staring impassively at the paparazzi’s camera. Then a shaky video of Jon replaces that one, striding down a side street at night with Robb, both of them laughing at something off-camera and Robb lifting a lighter to the cigarette in his mouth. They were younger here, in this clip from the time before the war. They’re no more than nineteen or twenty, their beards still light and downy on their cheeks.

Jon mutes the television. “So, what’s the story?”

“For them? Or for my family?” No matter the reply, Sansa was going to need to get creative. She took another swallow of her drink.

“Your parents.” He braces his elbows on his knees and rotates the glass in his hand. The amber liquid swirls towards the rim of the glass, but Sansa says nothing. He’s playing with it, trying to see how close he can get without making a mess.

She takes another sip—a big one—and balances the glass on her thigh. “I was struggling with coming back home,” she starts. The story had assembled itself in her head while she was closed up in the bedroom, but the words catch in her throat when she tries to give it voice. But she’s going to have to tell this to her mother, so she forces herself onwards. “And you and I started a tryst. An affair.”

“Why?” He interrupts. “Why would you have picked me?”

“Because…because you were nearby? You’ve been out in Winter City lately but back then you were always around for Robb. At the beginning, when Papa…came home.” Jon hums; back then, part of being Robb’s best friend was being an always-confidante during smoke breaks and in dim solars after long days of conference calls and doctor’s evaluations. Without an objection to her premise, Sansa continues. “And because I knew you’d be discreet and quiet. Because I…trusted you.”

He looks over at her with one eyebrow quirked up. He seems surprised, which doesn’t surprise Sansa. Of all the boys that rocked and rollicked through the halls of Winterfell during their childhood, Jon had always been the most humble. It was clear he knew he didn’t belong, not like the rest of them, and was always looking for ways to prove that the Stark’s hospitality wasn’t being spoiled away. That’s not to say he was an angelic child who never found trouble; Sansa thinks immediately of the time he and Robb dumped flour on themselves and pretended to be ghosts, scaring the daylights out of Arya and herself.

But where it mattered, he’s always come through. The Night’s Watch is dedicated to the protection of House Stark, and Jon had joined up with them well before the war. When Robb had decided to take the Stark militia south, Jon’s familiarity with the family—and Robb in particular—had earned himself a spot on the front lines, alongside the North’s First Son.

He might not have the Stark name, but he’d shed his blood for the Starks. And even in this world, that still means something.

She clears her throat. “Anyway. We started seeing each other, secretly, and then I got pregnant, but that…didn’t work out.” Sansa’s careful with her words, but he knows what she means, and frowns into his bourbon. “And we’ve been keeping it quiet because we haven’t wanted to upset my family.”

Jon nods. “Let’s keep it simple like that, and vague. The press can run wild with it if they want, but it’ll all be speculation. So. Happily married then?”

“I think that’s the best approach.”

The entertainment channel seems to suddenly remember that the Crown Princess was getting married in a week. Footage from a recent walkabout rolls on the screen. Even at the official event marshalled by strict protocol, Shireen and Quentyn sneak starry-eyed glances and secretive touches, while Stannis carries himself along the line of smallfolk with grim and practical efficiency.

“How long?” Jon asks, after a long minute. “How long do we keep this up?”

“Through the wedding. The honeymoon in Dorne. Two weeks.” Sansa says, with clinical precision. His nod is sharp. Perfunctory. He exhales and drains the rest of his drink.

Sansa softens her voice. “I’m sorry. I really am. You didn’t ask for this.”

“You didn’t ask for this, either.” Now she’s the surprised one, but she’s handling it better than he had, even in the comfort of a private room and a drink in her veins. He doesn’t notice, which was the point, and just toasts her with his empty glass. “Happily married it is, then.”

She clinks her glass with his, and takes the natural break to close out the conversation and retreat to the bedroom.

She calls her mother, and it’s a shorter conversation than she’d expected. The woman is uncharacteristically silent for most of the five minute call. Her mother is clearly in shock, and Sansa sits on the side of the bed, sets her forehead into her hand, guilt crashing over her for giving her mother yet another burden to bear.

But she also notices that Catelyn doesn’t mention Stannis, or Edric Baratheon, nor does she complain about plans being ruined. Sansa realizes that the idea of her marrying Edric must not have been presented to the House before commanding it of Sansa herself. If that’s the case, that would violate one of the core principles of the feudal relationship between the Great Houses and the Iron Throne—that respect flows from the lord to the vassal in equal measure to the loyalty that flows from the vassal to the lord—and that’s what really sets Sansa’s teeth on edge.

Her hand might have been forced, but it had been forced. Which means King Stannis is being either ruthless or desperate, and she’s not keen on finding out which.

In the bathroom, she turns on the bathwater with a twist of her wrist. The water is deliciously hot; the epsom salts she finds under the sink get to dissolving quickly, and she hums in pleasure as she lowers herself into the deep tub.

No matter the reason for Stannis’ proposal, she and Jon need to tread lightly and keep their heads low, Sansa thinks, tracing her eyes along the grout lines in the tilework. King Stannis II might be the sixth—no, the fifth consecutive Baratheon to sit on the Iron Throne, but discord and tension still swirled under the Seven Kingdoms. He’s only been king for four years, and most of his work spent on physically and economically rebuilding Westeros.

Stannis’ victory at the Battle of Blackwater Bay had finally ended the War of the Five Kings, which had broken out before King Robert II’s body was cold in the ground. Sansa had moved to the court of the old King at age sixteen, along with fourteen-year-old Arya, after their father had accepted the appointment of Hand of the King. Ned and King Robert had been best friends at the same private prepatory academy in the Vale of Arryn. The school was infamous for it’s rugged, disciplined approach to education; if Sansa had heard one story about young Robert and Ned taking on a three-day trek through the Mountains of the Moon, she’d heard a hundred.

Cersei Lannister had been King Robert’s queen, and through her, House Baratheon gained three new members: Crown Prince Joffrey, Princess Myrcella, and Prince Tommen. All three of them were blonde-haired, green-eyed children with their mother’s high cheekbones. It had made the tabloids go crazy any time they went anywhere, looking like a family of fashion models. Those particularly good looks, which had everywhere else drawn an admiring eye, had only elicited from Ned a creeping unease. His suspicions intensified when he started paying attention to the comings and goings of the queen and her brother, Kingsguard Jaime Lannister.

Two weeks after Robert’s death, and mere days after Joffrey began official plans for his coronation, Lord Stark made a public announcement that he was opening an investigation into the paternity of royal children. Given what the next two years would bring out of Cersei and Joffrey, no one has ever blamed Lord Stark for starting the war. But most everyone agrees that his speaking out was the point of no return.

He was arrested by Jaime Lannister himself that night, hauled out of the dining room in the Tower of the Hand right in front of his screaming daughters. The man had helped himself to two forkfuls of Ned’s apple pie as the man’s shouts faded down the corridor, free hand hooked into his gunbelt. I wouldn’t wait up for him, girls, he’d said, a too-genial smirk on his lips, and left them sobbing on a horrified Septa Mordane.

Sansa slides down to her nose in the water and watches the ripples carry out swirls of her red hair.

King Steffon’s second son, the then-Prince Stannis of Dragonstone, declared himself to be Robert’s true heir, the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms. The country was already reeling from that alone, but then the youngest Baratheon son, Renly, got it in his head to challenge his brother for the throne.

Why not? If there’s to be a war for the throne, why not throw my own hat in the ring? Make it a true test of will, like the Rebellion, eh? Renly japed once to a camera. It had been a reference to  the civil war between House Targaryen, the former royal family, and several of its vassal Houses. The war ended with the brothers’ great grandfather, King Robert II of House Baratheon, on the Iron Throne and in possession of Dragonstone, while the remaining members of House Targaryen fled in exile.

By the time both brothers started moving their armies, Joffrey had been crowned and called up his army to hold off his uncle’s forces. He’d laughed out loud when House Stark had demanded Ned’s release and declined to let anyone speak to Sansa or Arya.

So Robb had called the North’s banners and marched south, too.

Some in the North had wanted to turn it into a full-on war of secession and return to the old days of Kings of Winter. But when Robb left Winterfell, he made the choice to leave King Torrhen’s crown in the Stark vaults, right where it’s sat for a thousand years.

The fifth of the Five Kings was Balon Greyjoy. As with most of that House’s history, Balon’d had grander ambitions than he could actually achieve. Declaring himself King of the Iron Islands, he’d set about raiding along the Riverlands’ coast. But his moderate success was only because the Riverlands’ coastguard and riverguard boats had been diverted to assist its kinsman Robb’s march south and his battles against Joffrey’s forces.

Once Stannis knocked down his little brother’s army, and Houses Stark and Tully had joined his forces at the Battle of Blackwater Bay, swearing fealty to him after Joffrey’s arrest and his family’s release, Balon’s pitiful effort at independence was quickly smashed down.

The water is starting to cool off now, so Sansa pulls herself up out of history and starts to lather up her hair.

There had been a binder on events, guest lists, and ceremonial protocol set on the counter marker for her review. She hadn’t attached much urgency to it this morning when she first arrived at her room in the Maidenvault, but now? Consider her inspired to give it a read-through.

The lights are off when she leaves the bathroom; Jon gave up the ghost for the night while she’d gotten lost in her own head. She looks into the solar and sees Jon lying out on the couch. It hadn’t seemed so small just an hour ago, but now she can see he’s simply too tall for it. Even with his head propped up on one arm, he still has to bend his legs to fit.

The thought of him spending a week like that tugs at her heartstrings. It can’t be comfortable, and it’s not like the bed behind her is particularly narrow. She sighs.

In for a penny, in for a gold dragon.

He looks blearily over his shoulder at her when she shakes him. “Jon, come on. The bed is big enough,” she whispers. He makes to protest, insist he’s perfectly comfortable, and she shakes her head. “How’re you going to guard me if your back is messed up?” Only that convinces him to let her pull him to his feet.

The flannel pants and white tee he wears keeps her from stammering. She hadn’t even thought about his dress (or undress) when she’d decided to let him sleep in her bed. But Jon settles any awkwardness without even knowing it, thanks to the funny way he pats the mattress with one hand as he groggily walks around it, going off off-balance once or twice.

“You’re sure?” he rasps at her, hesitating one last time before turning down the sheets on the other side of the bed.

He’s more awake now than he was a moment ago, but he’s still squinting at little and pushing his curls out of his face, which is where they want to tumble after being rubbed against the arm of the couch. This is the most…casual she’s seen him in years, since they were at least children, running around the castle in their pajamas until lunch every day. They’d all still been half-grown when she and Arya had left for King’s Landing with their father. Even at nineteen back then, Jon had still been a beanpole drowning in cords and sweaters.

He’s not a beanpole now, though, not in the slightest. Whatever workout program the Night’s Watch has him on, it works. She can only nod and say, “It’s fine, I swear.”

Almost in sync, they slide beneath the covers. Jon immediately turns to his side, giving her his back. For her part, Sansa unwraps her hair and drapes the towel over her pillow before she lies down, and then she turns out the light. Only the slightest bit of moonlight creeps through the windows at the far end of the room, and the darkness puts her at ease. She shifts, turns, finally finds a comfortable position. Morning will come sooner rather than later, and she’ll need to have her mask ready to play her part.

Masks. They seem to be required for King’s Landing, she thinks hazily, and it’s the last thing she remembers until morning.

Chapter Text

The clang of sept bells jolt Jon from his slumber. His eyes snap open to darkness, but everything screams foreign and different and not-home. His body seizes for a heartbeat in the too-soft sheets on the too-soft mattress, hearing—distantly—the unfamiliar bird calls somewhere out there, beyond plate glass and masonry.

Then an electric trill goes off and another body in the bed shakes to life, a hand patting around beside him until skin slaps plastic.

Now he remembers exactly where he is.

Sansa Stark groans and sloppily taps her password into the touch screen phone, rubbing at an eye and yawning just as the bell re-starts its clamoring. Her profile glows blue in the artificial light; the pile of auburn waves on her pillow go slightly violet. Jon stretches his legs out, flexes his feet, and now it’s Sansa’s turn to go suddenly still. Her head rolls on her pillow and she gives him a confused blink, then another. Her eyes are wide and owlish, a deep blue in the low light of the bedroom.

For a long minute, they look at each other, the both of them waiting to blink and the other to disappear. Sansa breaks first and rolls off her side of the mattress.

“Morning, Jon,” she says, chipper and morning-husky at once. Waking up with a bedmate seems to have done a better job of waking her up than her alarm, because she crosses to the window now with swift, sure steps.

Jon tries very hard to not notice the sliver of skin her twisted-round pajama top reveals.

It’s wasted effort though. She pulls the curtains open, and Jon can clearly see the dip of her waist thanks to the blast of early morning light through the loose weave of her sleeping clothes. She clasps her hands and stretches them up and over her head, bending a little to the left, a little to the right. She’s trying to spin out these early morning moments until they feel less awkward, he can tell, because he knows her, but her hair happens to shift over her shoulder and spill down her back and—

Coffee. He needs coffee.

He lets her duck into the bathroom first, neither of them quite able to meet each other’s eyes as she goes. There’s a coffee pot in the solar, and Jon pokes around the sideboard to find supplies.

He grew up spoiled at Winterfell along the other Stark kids, where Miss Bea had the pot full and piping hot when they stumbled into the kitchen with bleary eyes and bedhead. The Night’s Watch guys put him on coffee bitch duty the minute they’d learned about all that. So now he can efficiently get the parts of the machine properly locked and loaded, and within a few minutes the contraption is huffing and sputtering merrily.

On the television, the early-morning news programs are discussing his and Sansa’s surprise “wedding,” albeit with a far more restrained, journalistic tone than the salaciousness of the entertainment reporters from the night before.

It’s Saturday—There’s still a full week to go before Shireen and Quentyn’s wedding, and Jon hopes the fervor around him and Sansa dies down soon. And if that’s true, they can coast through the honeymoon in Dorne and get back North without too much of a fuss.

Jon’s slurped down about three-quarters of his coffee when Sansa emerges from the bathroom, her morning ablutions finished and changed into a sunflower-blue linen shorts-suit. “All yours,” she calls out.

He tells her about the fresh coffee, ignores the zing affection in his chest when her face lights up at the information, and takes his tidy stack of clothes on into the bathroom just as one of the lady’s maids announces herself at the door.

Folklore would have him turn the water to cold, but Jon indulges himself with a hot shower. Winter would be here soon enough, so he might as well enjoy the warmth. Besides, he’s not so easily swayed that he would need a cold shower each time he remembers he’s around a beautiful women.

To say Sansa is pretty is like announcing the water is wet. The only proper reply is yes, and? It’s the and? that Jon always has to remind himself of. Not only is Sansa his best friend’s younger sister, and the daughter of a man Jon very deeply admires, she’s also literally the reason Jon gets a regular paycheck.

He’s a man of the Night’s Watch. He is tasked with the security and safety of the members of House Stark. Jon’s job is Sansa’s safety. Her protection.

It’s like she said the other night: how’s he gonna guard her well if he kept getting distracted by the freckles on her cheeks, or the curve of her back under his palm?

He dunks his head back under the spray and—honestly?—welcomes the sting of the shampoo in his eyes.

***

Having lady’s maids coming in and out of Sansa’s chambers is a great way to explain away why Jon emerges from the bathroom fully clothed.

His wife is seated in front of the vanity and the blonde maid, Jeyne, is teasing the bird’s nest she’s created into a twist. Tendrils of hair wave around her eyes, which are presently skimming the lines of text in a three-hole punched binder. He’d flipped through it the night before, but it didn’t have anything Jon didn’t already know about: the lodging information for the wedding party, the schedule for the week, the staff details for each event, and so on.

Through the mirror, Sansa watches him drop onto the edge of their—their—bed. He untucks his socks and pulls up a foot to pull it on.

“I’ve been thinking,” Sansa tells him. Her expression, reflected back to him, could have told him that on its own. Her brow is eversoslightly furrowed, and her eyes drift to focus on something in the mirror that’s a thousand miles away. She twirls her garnet ring around her finger twice. Folds her fingers in her lap. Closes her eyes while Jeyne presses the hairspray nozzle.

“And?” Jon prompts.

Jeyne’s grey eyes dart from her tin of bobby pins to Sansa, to Jon, to Sansa, and back to the vanity’s workspace.

They’ll have to keep their eye on that one.

Sansa’s seen it too. Her blue eyes linger on her maid’s ears, taking in the stylized antler earrings hanging from the lobes. She spins her ring again. “You’ve been added to the guest list of a lot of my—our—upcoming appearances. But you didn’t happen to bring your tails, did you?”

“No.” Jon can’t help the little laugh that slips out. “I brought…two? Yeah, two suits. Navy and black.” A glance at Jeyne. “I didn’t think I would be outside my staff position.”

“No, you were right,” Sansa reassures him, perfectly in character. Jeyne turns away to pick through the jewelry tray, and Sansa’s eyes bounce to Jon’s eyes in the mirror. “But just now—I have a dress fitting this morning—Rhaegar Burnsmen—and he’s also doing all of the groomsmen suits. He’s got a great menswear line, now that I’m thinking about it.”

“Think there’s time to squeeze me in for something off the rack?” Jon asks, knowing exactly who Sansa is talking about. The couturier had been harassing Beth and Sam for ages about the security set up at his studio. But in Jon’s opinion was worth, that wasn’t a hassle, that was the sign of someone who knew the risk having such an aristocratic clientele would bring.

“Yes,” Sansa says. “I thought—that’s as good a place as any to pick up some…suitable things for you.”

Working on his second shoe, Jon nods. “Works for me.”

“Great,” Sansa says, chipper. “I wish we would have known the news would break so we could make an appointment—but maybe we can get there early, hm?”

“Sounds great.” Jon gives her a winning smile. He makes sure Jeyne catches it.

***

They’ve barely taken three steps out of their chambers before a chiming, rich voice calls out: “Oh, Sansa, is that you?”

Lady Margaery of House Baratheon, as he lives and breathes.

The First Daughter of House Tyrell had lived a fairly boring gentry childhood, but as soon as she’d married Renly Baratheon, tying herself to an enemy combatant who’d declared himself the King of Westeros, she’d gotten her own individual file and morning briefing at Night’s Watch headquarters. But only now, in this very moment, does Jon understand the saying, “pictures don’t do her justice.”

She leaves the small army of Keep servants moving her designer luggage into a set of chambers at the end of the hall to walk towards them, black patent heels clicking on the stones beneath their feet. Beside Jon, Sansa takes a deep, bracing inhale.

“Margaery,” she trills back, turning her head to the side to accept the kiss Margaery places there. “You look so…different from when I saw you last.”

“Well, we were both younger then.” Margaery lifts a shoulder. Her black dress ruches fetchingly across her collarbones. “And I was in colors, enjoying the sunshine and nightlife.”

Sansa’s face turns appropriately sympathetic, and she reaches out to take Margaery’s fine-boned hand in her own. “I am so sorry about Renly. I know how much you two loved each other.”

Margery has been in full mourning for her husband since he died by an assassin’s hand during the war. It’s been at least five years, yet she’s still in a black dress and a black bird-cage veil that sits cocked over her heart shaped face. It highlights the green of her eyes, and Jon’s pretty sure that’s part of the appeal.

Lord Renly left everything to his wife in his will save for the seat of Storm’s End—his Baratheon pension, his ownership of the King’s Landing Greatswords, his film production company, and all of his controlling interests in different corporations around the capital and the Stormlands. Six months of marriage and here she is, set for life.

Margaery’s eyes glisten behind the netting of her veil. She rolls her eyes to ceiling and blinks the wetness away. “We did love each other. Very much so,” she replies, giving Sansa’s fingers a squeeze. “But I’m raining on your parade, Sansa. Congratulations, darling, from the bottom of my heart.”

She tilts her head at Jon and offers him her free hand. “And you must be Lord Snow.”

Jon presses a kiss to the back of her fingers. “Jon, please.” He puts a hand low on Sansa’s back and keeps it there even when he feels the surprise stutter of her inhale. “We’re just upset that everyone had to find out like this.”

“Handsome and polite.” Margaery’s quick eyes dart back to Sansa’s face. “I can see why you snatched him up. Where are you two off to?”

“To Rhaegar’s,” Sansa replies. “Jon only brought his work suits, and with…everything that’s happened, he’ll need some more formalwear. I’ve got my fitting today, anyway.”

“Oh, that’s fun! I’ve got mine today, too, at eleven.”

“The same for me. But with Jon being a walk-in I thought it would be good to get there early.”

“’Get there early?’ It’s not like it’ll be a bother for Rhaegar, you know. Jon’s the hottest fashion mannequin in the city right now.” Margaery tells Sansa, lips twisting wryly. She sizes up the couple in front of her. “Honestly, Sansa, if your husband wears even one of Rhaegar’s suits over the next week and the man doesn’t send you a triple bouquet of roses and a perfumed thank you note, I’ll give you twenty gold dragons. No, let’s all go get breakfast instead. I know a little place, actually…”

And with that, they’re whisked off in Margaery’s wake. Once, while on the elevator down to the garage, Margaery chattering benignly to a young man with a rose pinned to his lapel about her schedule, Jon offers to take separate cars. Margaery trills a laugh and waves her hand in dismissal.

“Trust me, it’s better to just go with the flow,” Sansa whispers as soon as the doors open and the other woman leads the way towards the towncar crunching to a stop in the drive.

They end up at a little cafe off of a side street on Visenya’s Hill, dropped off curbside by another rose-pinned staffmember. Jon comments about Stannis’ order to leave their servants behind and Margaery scoffs. House Tyrell has plenty of apartments here in King’s Landing and more than enough money to pay for good help, she explains.

Well, both of those things are true, Jon knows.

Margaery picks seats by the window. A star-struck waitress brings them a carafe of coffee and mugs, her hands shaking only a little bit as she sets them out.

“Sometimes I come here in a wig and sit out on the patio,” Margaery tells Jon and Sansa. “It’s a lovely view of the Great Sept, see?”

They follow the line of her finger to the white spires of the Great Sept of Baelor, which look as though they’re shooting out from the staggered roofline of the buildings uphill to spear the blue sky. The midmorning sunlight twinkles off the Sept’s seven massive brass bells.

It’s where Shireen and Quentyn will be married next weekend. And that’ll be Jon’s first time inside the Great Sept. He’d done a few stag weekends in King’s Landing over the past few years for some Night’s Watch buddies, and unsurprisingly, holy sites hadn’t happened to pop up on the agenda. Jon’s not particularly religious himself, but whenever he’s needed to call on the divine, it’s the heart tree in Winterfell’s godswood that’s called to him.

And over the past few years, that’s been the best place to find Lord Stark. His foster father likes to sit by the little pools of water, and Jon likes to sit beside him. Lord Stark is quiet these days, but he always lays a comforting hand on Jon’s knee or squeezes his shoulder with lips pressed tight together under his beard, and it’s enough for Jon.

Thinking of Lord Stark makes Jon think of Sansa. She’d had to live for years here, so close to her imprisoned father but unable to do anything to help him…Jon peeks at her from the corner of her eye, taking in her proper posture and crossed ankles, a wholly different woman than the one that had sprawled on the couch and tossed back bourbon with him.

Something outside has caught her attention. Some paparazzi have followed them from the Keep, but a set of Tyrell men have taken up strategic posts to block their cameras. Jon watches Sansa watch them try to get a good shot, her expression thoughtful, distant. Whatever she’s musing drags her gaze to meet his, and simultaneously, they break eye contact, shift in their seats, and pretend to be very interested in what Margaery is saying to their waitress.

“No more for me, thank you so much, sir.” Margaery fixes him with a beatific smile and delicately unpins her veil so that she can eat and drink without catching it of it with her fork. “Shireen is so lucky, to married in Baelor’s by the High Septon himself. When I was little, I imagined that I would be married there. I had it all planned out in my head. I didn’t even want to wear my mother’s maidenveil, even it’s like, the one thing that separates us from the midfolk these days. You know how the High Septon’s crown sends those little rainbows across the couple’s faces? I wanted the photographer to have perfect shots of those.”

Sansa’s always been a good listener. She watches Margaery’s face intently as she sips her coffee and brings forkfuls of eggs to her mouth. “It was a beautiful wedding, though, Margaery. It was your grandmother’s dress, right?”

“Yes, on the Tyrell’s side, Renly insisted.” She rolls her eyes. “I loved him dearly, but the man was a snob that way. What about yours?”

The question surprises both of them. Their eyes meet over their coffee cups, hanging midair. Jon stomps down the urge to check on Margaery. Instead he dips his head at Sansa with an affectionately-sardonic smile and lifts a hand in deference. “My secrecy is sworn,” he hedges.

She feigns a good huff. “Jon takes his vows very seriously,” Sansa tells the other woman. Another sip of coffee stalls her for another heartbeat. “I just wore one of my white dresses. It was…very secret. We didn’t want anyone to know anything. So. I picked a sheath from my closet. The least detailed one, actually. But I did wear my hair down, just like you like.” She turns her smile to him, and he drops a hand atop hers.

“You looked beautiful,” he lies. And Margaery, who’s been watching them both with her cat-green eyes, smiles too, accepting the lies without a blink.

She pops a grape into her mouth and turns her head back to the Great Sept’s spires. “Well, in any case, as beautiful as it is and even with all of my girlhood dreams, I’m still so glad Papa turned the Lannisters down when they offered me a crown for our army when Renly died. I could have been married in the Sept, but—”

“That was real?” The words are out before he can stop them. The womens’ heads swivel towards him. His “wife,” who’d just lovingly described the dress she’d worn to their “wedding,” pins him with the same look she’d used when they were children trying to keep secrets from Lady Stark. Margaery’s lips just twist to the side.

“We were trying to trace communications out of King’s Landing back during the war,” Jon explains, eyes flitting between Sansa’s glare and Margaery’s arched brow. “We saw connections between the Keep and the Reach. An informant told us about and offer…”

“The Night’s Watch has informants so far south?” Margaery is both amused and surprised. But she shrugs and spears a berry. “Well, once upon a time, the brothers of the Night’s Watch were welcome in every keep in the Seven Kingdoms. I suppose it’s not so far-fetched. But, to answer your question: Yes. It’s true. Nearly the same week that Renly passed away, certain…overtures were made in regards to my marrying Joffrey.”

Sansa had still been engaged to Joffrey at that point—not like she’d particularly wanted to stay in the arrangement, though. Jon had never seen Sansa so deliriously happy as when she was half-carried, half-walked off the of the jet that had carried her, Jeyne Poole, and Lord Stark home. For once, Jeyne was more composed than Sansa, who was grinning and laughing through pouring tears as she collapsed against her mother and Robb in equal turn. Seeing Arya had sent her over the edge, her knees giving out on the tarmac in hysterical sobs while her younger sister sprinted to wrap arms around her shoulders.

She hasn’t cried outside her bedchamber, Jeyne had told Robb, only feet from Jon. This whole time.

Still he sneaks a look at her face, gauging her reaction. She’s not upset, just perplexed. “Why did you turn it down?” she asks, tapping her nude-polished nails on the handle of her coffee mug. “You would have been Queen. The Reach’s army would have easily outnumbered Stannis’ fleet.”

“Oh, yes, we would have won. No doubt about that,” Margaery concedes easily. “But then, what? Wait for some random journalist to get a hold of Joffrey’s toothbrush? There’s no joy at being at the top when you can already see how you’d fall. We’re very lucky, Sansa. You and I.”

Margaery’s smile is grim now. Sansa meets Margaery’s eyes with her own and nods slowly. Both women lift their mugs to their mouths and draw down sips in tandem. Jon has the distinct feeling that he’s intruding on a private moment, a private space between these two veterans of the War of the Five Kings.

Then, just as quickly as she instigated the calm, Margaery breaks it.

With a perky well, we’d best get a move on!, she waves over her shoulder for the check and flips her veil back into place. They all rise, and Jon sees that the group of paparazzi outside has grown three-fold. Sansa sees them too. He squeezes her elbow; she pulls a tube of lipgloss from her pocket and swipes some on.

The Tyrell bodyguards have seen them move, and one comes to the door to talk to Margaery. “Not too bad of a crowd out there, m’ladies, m’lord,” he tells them. “The car’ll be around in a minute.

It takes Jon a beat to realize that, for the first time in a long time, he’s been included in the headcount. He’s done this exact same thing for House Stark since he was eighteen years old. And now he’s back on the other side of it, only his place amplified tenfold. He’s not just Jon Snow anymore, the orphan lordling with a tragically-departed family, tagging along with the family that took him in as a ward…

He casts a glance to his right and catches Sansa’s face in profile. Because they grew up together, he forgets who she is from time to time. Lord Eddard Stark’s eldest daughter. The girl that would have been Queen if everything had just gone according to plan. And now, he’s the husband no one saw coming, not for years yet, and not the rank anyone could have expected.

Nothing is going to be the same again.

But when the silver car whips around the corner, Jon wraps his arm around Sansa’s waist, like he’s done dozens of times before to guide her through the press in Winter City. They follow Margaery and her bodyguard out of the cafe and make a dash to the car. He sees Sansa’s shiny pink lips curl into a smile. Her hand lifts to wave to the photographers.

He follows her lead, letting one side of his mouth lift under his beard, trying to keep his face from settling into his Night’s Watch security glare. The reporters shout at Margaery and pepper Jon and Sansa with jumbled, frantic questions, but he urges her towards the open back door of the sedan. She doesn’t resist. She slides in first, ducking her head and swiveling on the corner of the bench seat with her knees and ankles expertly pressed together.

As soon as Jon closes the door behind him, the car lurches away from the curb. Margaery laughs gaily and pulls her visor down to check her make-up. “Not many for King’s Landing in the mid-afternoon, but certainly a crowd for an early weekend morning!” she exclaims. “If we’d stayed another ten minutes, it probably would have been a mob scene. The gods only know what those photos of you two are going to go for. You didn’t happen to take photos at the ceremony, did you?”

“It was a secret ceremony, Marg,” Sansa replies. “So, no. No pictures.”

“What a shame. This would be the prime time to sell them. That’s what Renly and I did with ours, you know. Seven million gold dragons. Half to the Faith, half to the Wounded and Fallen Soldiers Fund.” Margaery shrugs and pops the cap back onto her lipstick. “Oh, well. Baby pictures sell for so much more, anyway.”

Jon’s head jerks sideways. Sansa’s already looking back at him with wide eyes. It lasts for only a second, though. Sansa blinks, and the calm returns. She lets out a charming laugh. Completely fake, he knows.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she says, gracefully deflecting the remark.

The car hooks a left at the giant interchange at the bottom of Visenya’s Hill and heads towards the glittering towers across the Blackwater Rush. To the east, the Red Keep looms above the valleys like Flea Bottom that used to be slums. Now the poor live outside the city walls, in massive, blocky apartment buildings, and the old neighborhoods have transformed into artsy communities and museum districts. And with modern technology comes modern engineering, and the height of the Keep is matched—nay, exceeded, by the posh business districts across the rush.

Eventually, the car passes through the shadow of the Keep. When Jon peeks out the window and peers upwards, all he sees in a cluttered hillside sloping down from the base of the walls, and the sheer faces of pale pink stonework slicing straight up, as though dropped down from the sky.

Then they’re past it, back in the sunlight, and the car hums across the Blackwater Bridge. Margaery chatters away about the renovations at Highgarden that her father has finally agreed to undertake now that she’ll be away for weeks, and how she’s so happy to be tied to King’s Landing for a while because she needs to stop by the Greatswords’ stadium and check on the redecorating efforts there, too. Every now and then, Margaery shoots a question his direction, always unfailingly polite and precise. Still, Jon gets the sense that he’s being evaluated and weighed, not unlike his experience with Lord Commander Mormont.

The avenues in South King’s Landing are wider and straighter than those in the historic North District. The sidewalks are roomier, the storefronts more spacious. It has a decidedly un-cramped feeling that reminds Jon of Winter City. Just—bigger. Margaery points out the shop’s sign to the driver, who nods and puts on his blinker before veering to the curb.

This isn’t the first haute couture studio Jon has ever been to, not by a long shot. Lady Stark had taken him for his first custom suit on his fourteenth nameday. It had been the first time he’d gotten something so special before Robb, who may be the future Lord of Winterfell, but is younger than Jon by three whole months. She’d stood off to the side, either hmming in agreement or shaking her head firmly at the selections the tailor made. Afterwards, the two of them went to lunch, alone, and Lady Stark let him pick whatever dessert he wanted, even though they were all to have cake after dinner as well.

She’d never felt more like his very own mother than on that day.

The designer, a fit forty-something with close-cropped blond hair, takes Sansa and Margaery’s air kisses to his cheeks with aplomb. “Beautiful women, both of you, look at you!”

They titter happily, Margaery getting passed off to a waifish assistant and swept behind a curtain, while Sansa leans into his ear and points at Jon.

“Of course, of course, not a problem at all, my love,” the short man murmurs. His eyes run over Jon, crown to toe, toe to crown. Sansa is then urged away by a second assistant, and it’s the designer himself who takes Jon’s elbow in a firm grip, steers him towards private fitting room with a tall mirror.

The designer’s name is Rhaegar Bonson, but—Call me Rhae, he tells Jon. Hell of a reputation to put on a baby, don’t you think? My mother loved her songs, though, and he had some pretty ones. He measures Jon’s inseam and fiddles with the hem of his jeans, and Jon pulls his phone from his pocket.

His thumb hovers over the ‘call’ button in Robb’s contact page. C’mon, Snow, he urges himself, and starts the call.

It rings four times and goes to voicemail once more. Jon watches his reflection in the mirror, Rhae tapping measurements into his tablet, listens to Robb’s greeting, and hates how worried he looks.

The message he leaves for Robb is short, but certainly more upbeat than he feels. “Robb. It’s Jon. Again. Sansa and I are out running errands, but we should talk. Later. Call me back.”

Rhae says nothing about the call, acting as though he hasn’t heard anything at all. Jon doesn’t expect any less. If you’re styling the royal family’s wedding out of a storefront on Jaehareys Avenue, it’s because you’ve earned it, not because the House stumbled into your shop one afternoon and never left. Rhae smoothly tells Jon that he wants to put him in dark grey, and accuses him of being in mourning like Lady Baratheon when Jon says he prefers black.

“Black is so monolithic,” Rhae says with a roll of his eyes. “In grey you can at least see the cut of the suit.”

In the end, Jon realizes that he’s going to be buying three or four suits today, so a few different colors probably wouldn’t be a bad idea. Rhae’s going to do the grey custom, since that’s the color Jon likes best of the swatches he’s pulled—a stormy, bluish-grey that Rhae swears will bring out Jon’s eye—isn’t available to walk out with.

And the more that he talks about what he wants to do with Jon’s suits, the more excited Rhae gets. “Sorry, my lord,” Rhae says, looking very un-sorry, “I just don’t get a set of shoulders like yours walking in here every day of the week.”

Sansa slips through the door when they get to the ready-made suits, and Rhae steps out to put away his toolkit. She’s got a navy suit in one hand and a black one in the other, and she brushes past him to hang them on a hook in the wall. “I almost pulled a brown one, but we both have that pale Northern skin. It would just wash you out.” The little smirk in the corner of her mouth softens what was surely a metaphorical jab to his ribs.

She seems much more at ease now, much more like her usual self. Sure, she’s quiet and polite, but the ice that had settled over her face and shoulders as they’d crossed the Neck into the South during the flight from Winterfell seems to have melted a bit. She rarely talks about what happened during her time in King’s Landing, and Jon doesn’t want to ask her outright about it. Still, Jon was old enough to remember the bright, talkative, starry-eyed sixteen-year-old who had gone South, and that was not the same Sansa who stepped off of the jet in the middle of the night six years later.

“Well, we don’t want that,” Jon agrees. Sansa reflexively smooths down her shorts and steps over to the cloth samples that Rhae had left out while Jon slips into the navy jacket. “I didn’t know that you and Lady Margaery were such good friends.”

“We’re not, not now.” Sansa shrugs noncommittally. “When I first came to King’s Landing, she came to at court with her family fairly often. Every now and then, she’d stay a few weeks and it would be me and her and Myrcella running around the Keep together. It was fun back then and Cersei was…accommodating. But once King Robert died, she ran off with Renly, obviously.” She reaches up and fiddles with the collar of his shirt, frowning at the way it refused to be wrangled into place. With the furrow between her brows and the purse of her lips, she looks very much like her mother. But Jon…doesn’t find it unattractive. “This is the first time I’ve seen her since before the War. She’s always been nice, though.”

There’s still a distant edge to her voice, one that she’s trying to hide with all of her twitches at his clothes. “I just—“ Jon starts, and then catches himself, trying to think about what he wants to say. Sansa pauses and lifts her eyes to meet his, fingertips skimming along the edges of his lapels. “I know you didn’t want to come back here at all. And I know that there are people here that you don’t want to be around. Just—let me know and I can figure something out. That’s my job, anyway.” Or that had been his job.

She swallows and drops her gaze. “Thank you, Jon,” she murmurs, and he knows she means it. “And I will. But Margaery isn’t one of them.”

Rhae bustles back in, holding about ten suits over his arm. “Oh, good, a second opinion,” he exclaims, laying the suits out over a bench. “There’s a chair over there in the corner, Lady Sansa. Make yourself comfortable and let me know if you want any tea or coffee.”

And that’s how Jon finds himself stripped to his underwear in front of his “wife” of four years.

***

Later that afternoon, they part ways with Margaery and head back to the castle. As much as they feel under the microscope in the rest of the city, the Keep itself feels peaceful. Tranquil. Like at Winterfell, there are parts of the royal household that are open to visitors. Here at the Red Keep, it’s the outer yard and the main hall, where the ceremonial throne room and Iron Throne can be gawked at by out-of-towners. But back beyond the middle bailey, in the deep belly of Maegor’s and the Tower of the Hand, they’re left undisturbed.

As they ascend the stairs back to their rooms, they run into Oberyn Martell and Ellaria Sand, who’ve just arrived in town and are swathed in orange and black silk, a pair of long-haired hounds circling their legs. They’re headed to the Godswood, they tell Jon and Sansa, to let the dogs stretch their legs after a long flight.

Sansa is polite enough that she keeps her gaze locked with Ellaria’s and squeezes the other woman’s elbows where they’re cupped in her own. “Oh, yes it’s lovely,” Sansa says, a pretty smile pulling her mouth wide, “there’s lots of space for them to run around.”

Once they turn the corner in the stairwell, though, her voice floats back to Jon over her shoulder: “Funny how they only see their own sites as sacred.”

“That’s why they’re called the old gods, obviously,” he replies, and her bitter laugh bounces off the stonework. He lets his hand rest in the small of her back on the long walk down the corridor to their chambers, and she lets it rest there.

They eat their dinners in front of the television, Jon’s phone finally rings. He snatches it from his pocket, but it’s not Robb’s name flashing across the screen. It’s Arya’s.

Numbly, he hits the green ‘accept’ button.

“So, were you ever going to tell me?” Arya’s voice is accusatory and barbed, but Jon can hear the hurt underneath it. He sits down in one of the wingback chairs in the bedroom with a heavy sigh.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Arya. I swear it.”

“Whatever.” They sit in silence for a few minutes. He can hear her clacking away on her keyboard on the other end of the line, and he’s sure she can hear the muffled television on his end. “I just don’t get it. You and Sansa. That’s like…a Mormont marrying a Frey.”

Jon rolls his eyes. “Sansa and I never hated each other, Arya.”

“Well, you’ve never liked each other.”

“That’s not true.”

“Right, because you were always so keen to play house with her and go to her tea parties, huh?”

Jon nearly hangs up the phone. Gods, he and Sansa aren’t even actually married, but he’s still annoyed at Arya digging up old sister-on-sister dirt. He’s always hated their fights. What is it about girls? They always know how to hit right where it hurts.

“We’re not kids anymore, Arya,” he says, his voice devoid of the apologetic tone that he’d answered her call with. “I’m sure you saw yourself with a mechanic when you were a little kid, too, didn’t you?”

Another silence, longer this time. Finally, Arya breaks first with a whoosh of breath that crackles in Jon’s ear. “Robb’s really angry at you, anyway. That’s what I was calling to tell you. He’s not going to call you back.”

A weight settles on Jon’s chest and he slumps back into the couch cushions. The ceiling is patterned with a mosaic of tiles, and he runs his eyes along the seams. “I figured.”

“Yeah. I mean, Mama and Papa are upset but…Robb’s pissed.”

Jon doesn’t really know what to think. He’s not even really thinking, just…remembering. All he sees in his mind is him and Robb growing up together at Winterfell. Calling each other “brothers” even after Lady Stark explained to them that Jon had different parents, so they weren’t brothers, not really. Learning how to drive together, sneaking their first cigarettes and beers together. Robb telling him that he didn’t give a fuck that Jon was buying a condo in Winter City, that Jon was still going to have his own room at Winterfell, right next to Robb’s, for whenever Jon needed it. Sharing late-night drinks after long days of Robb politicking with the minor lords in the North and Jon standing watch close by.

Sansa appears in the doorway and tilts her head at him, her braid slipping over her shoulder like a red banner. Everything okay?, she mouths, and Jon makes himself nod in response.

But all that’s really going through his mind is, Fuck.

Chapter Text

“Quickly, quickly now.” The aide at the end of the corridor waves her hand at Sansa and Jon, checking the watch on her other wrist. “Travel time is ten minutes, and there’s a press corridor you’ll have to run.”

Just a few more steps and they’re through the Maidenvault’s easterly door and in blazing sunlight. Their sedan rolls forward to the bottom of the steps as the car just ahead of it turns ‘round in the drive and heads out towards the gate. Its occupants are the straggling members of House Tyrell: Elinor and Loras, who’re trailing Margaery Baratheon and family matriarch Olenna Redwyne, already departed and en route. Jon and Sansa’s car taps its brakes at the Goldcloak’s signal and unlocks its doors.

Jon’s become old hat at the routine over the past few days. He opens the door for Sansa, holds her hand for balance so she can duck her head, bend her knees, and smoothly pour herself in and across the car. City sidewalks aren’t any trouble at all, but the crushed oyster shells in the turnabout shift like sand under Sansa’s stilettos—she wobbles, and Jon’s grip tightens, steadying her.

Someone chooses this exact moment to call her, the ringtone muffled by her clutch. She uses one hand to hold the phone to her ear and the other to buckle her seatbelt. “Hello? Hello?” The driver lets off the brake and her clutch slides back on her thighs and then tumbles onto the seat, its contents rolling out.

“It’s Robb,” her brother says, sounding just as distracted as she does. Jon turns her clutch upright and pops her lipstick back in. There’s not any unmentionables, but his handling of her mysterious girl objects is perfunctory and brief. He passes her clutch back as soon as he’s done. “The charity visit go alright?”

“Swimmingly. The photos should have already come through to Beth—“

“They have. She sent them on to me. Was that a new dress?” Papers shuffle in the background. Robb must be in his—their father’s—office. “It looked nice.”

“Thanks.” The driver wheels away from the gate flanking the small royal sept and towards the private road just outside the Keep’s walls. It’s an exit-only alley precariously balanced over the Blackwater, but it saves time from rolling through the Keep complex at five miles per hour. “After we met the kids, the hospital board showed us a bunch of new medical equipment. It’s really amazing, the way the technology is advancing.”

Jon fiddles with his sleeve’s cuff, wrestling with something. Sansa tucks the phone against her shoulder and bats his fingers away, turning his hand under hers until she sees that his cufflink has slipped out of place. Its a set of enamel-capped ones they’d picked up at Rhaegar’s against Jon’s protestations.

He’d insisted that the gold and silver pairs were more than enough for the week, and that it was unlikely he’d ever wear them. Robb chats away in her ear about the charity fund dividends while she slides the link home. They’re going to have some more money than they’d planned because the markets are doing so well, and Bran’s been nudging him about adding on some disability access charities, so could she ask around while she’s in the city?

“Jon and I will look into it,” Sansa says, cutting off her brother’s rambling. He grunts in her ear at his best friend’s name, Sansa closes her eyes in frustration. She and Jon have been traveling around the city as a unit for days now, and she’d hoped it would make it all feel more normal for her family.

Her mother and father seem disappointed but resigned. Bran and Rickon think it’s the best thing to happen to the family in years. But…Arya still isn’t replying to her texts, not even noticing the breadcrumbs Sansa’s been folding into her unanswered daily updates. And while Robb needs to talk to Sansa for House business, he seems dedicated to his effort to forget Jon ever existed. “We’re on our way to the museum opening and Jon’s here with me—don’t you want to say hello before I hang up?”

Robb makes a half-hearted excuse about a meeting before getting off the phone, promising to give her love to their parents.

Jon shrugs when Sansa tucks her phone away and offers a quiet apology. “It’s not a brother thing. It’s a friend thing,” Jon explains. And Sansa gets that—men are just as bad as women when it comes to secrets and loyalty. After all, she has Beth, too, whose distant and vauge replies to Sansa’s emails and texts are worse than Arya’s stony silence.

She glances at Jon. His elbow is propped on the door, his fist over his mouth and sunglasses over his eyes concealing most of his expression. But…it’s not like he’s hiding a smile under there. Sansa taps out a text to Robb while their towncar weaves in and out of traffic in the hipster neighborhood of Flea Bottom.

Hold this grudge much longer and you might as well ask the Greyjoys to adopt you.

Maybe that’ll get his attention. A century ago, House Stark took a Greyjoy son hostage after an ill-conceived rebellion against the Crown. House Greyjoy started the whole war that ended in the unsurprising forfeit of their kinsman, yet the  yet Sansa’s sure that they still refuse to even look in Winterfell’s direction. Robb and Jon and Theon Greyjoy had all ended up at the same private school, and the older boy had even used the Starks’ help in putting down the rebellion and the hostage taking as his justification for refusing to be friends with the Northern boys for well over a year.

At the top of Rhaenys’ Hill, public traffic has already been blocked off by the City Watch. They wave the Red Keep sedan through without issue, nodding to the driver as he passes by. The car takes another windy turn, then rolls onto the plateau of Rhaenys’ Hill at a leisurely pace. Jon leans down to look through the windshield and gives an impressed hum.

Sansa’s familiar enough with the Dragonpit’s sharp lines and grisled buttresses, but it still looks ominous to her. For hundreds of years, even before the first Robert Baratheon led his rebellion against the Dragonlords’ progeny, the pit had been abandoned, left to the elements for them to do with as they please.

Shireen Baratheon has been the breath of life this ancient relic had been waiting for. She took on its restoration as her centerpiece project within the first six months of her father’s reign, saying it was her duty as Princess of Dragonstone. The surrounding avenues have been newly paved and striped, sidewalks freshly poured. A massive parking lot stretches across the Hills’ plateau, boasting hundreds of parking spaces and dozens of bus lanes. They’re filled with news vans now, press cars, city government sedans, and shiny luxury models suitable only for the regional celebrities and philanthropists.

“Just a few more minutes, m’lord, m’lady,” the driver says, pulling into the wide circle of cars waiting patiently to let out their passengers.

Sansa touches up her lipstick and smooths her flyways while Jon adjusts his tie and tie clip. The white capped cufflinks catch her eye again. “I thought you didn’t like those when we got them.”

“What? These?” Jon raises his wrist. “Well—They match your pearls. Right?”

Her hand drifts to her neck. She’s wearing her grandmother Lyarra’s pearls. “That’s right,” she says slowly. “You wore the silver ones to the hospital—“

“Yeah, to match the silver bows in your ears.” Jon’s brow suddenly furrows. “Is it too—should we not match?”

“No,” Sansa assures him, suddenly and strangely touched. “No, it’s perfect.” She reaches out and grabs Jon’s fingers, where they’re worrying . Sansa has a team of lady’s maids to help her get ready, but Jon has been dressing himself. The staff of the Keep are stretched thin by all of the activities; Jon would have a valet only for the rehearsal gala and the wedding. Until then, he’s making all of his own choices.

Jon looks like he’s about to respond, but then the door opens, and the din of the press line breaks in. He helps her from her seat with a steady hand and then falls back, letting her take the lead as they step onto the red carpet that stretches from the asphalt to the front door of the Dragonpit.

Journalists press in on the right side; citizens on the left, waiting for signatures and photos with the social elite of King’s Landing and Westeros. Halfway down the carpet, Margaery Baratheon speaks animatedly into a young woman’s microphone, smiles charmingly, tosses her hair as she laughs. Loras Tyrell signs autograph after autograph just behind her and goes cheek to cheek with fans for cellphone selfies. Far ahead, nearly at the Dragonpit’s door, she sees the whirl of glittering silks and dark skin that herald the members of House Martell.

Most of the press line passes in a blur of lightbulb flashes and cheek-aching smiles. Sansa turns on her courtly charm for the repetitive, mundane questions and jumps in for Jon whenever a journalist mistakes his distance from the microphone for shyness. If Sansa is asked about her take on King’s Landing since her return once, she’s asked ten times. Yes, it is quite nice to wear short sleeves, thank you, and doesn’t this weather bode well for the happy couple?, x 5. House Stark is more than happy to support the renovations and the museum, it being an educational facility and all, x 7. No, she hasn’t spoken to the Princess Shireen alone yet, but she knows the wedding will be lovely, x 4. Pose by herself, pose with Jon, quarter-turn and another pose with Jon, pose by herself, rinse, repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

Her head starts to pound from the flashing lights and the never-ending chatter of voices, but she still has a little way to go. A few large steps to her left take her face-to-face with a video camera and a microphone, so she puts on her best Riverlands grin and shakes the reporter’s hand.

“You’ve been gone several years—how are you finding King’s Landing?” The young reporter whips the microphone to Sansa’s mouth and tilts his head as he waits for her answer.

“Quite well. I thought it would be so different, but, you know the old saying — ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same.’”

The reporter nods and brushes a lock of dyed-black hair off his forehead. “Everything is different for you, now, though. You’re married now, Lady Snow, no longer the pretty young fiancée to the Crown Prince.”

Sansa feels her smile slip just a bit. With his naturally downturned mouth, she can’t tell if the reporter is being flat-out rude or just poorly-spoken. Her eyes drop to the microphone, taking the “WPOP!” logo repeated around the bottom of it.

Ah. Westeros Pop Life is a celebrity tabloid, and a new one at that. Their reporters are likely to have less etiquette training. Sansa reenergizes her smile and gives a light laugh. “Yes, being married and a bit older has had an influence on my preferred venues in the city. I’m much more interested in museums and charity functions this time around!”

“Lady Snow, you only recently revealed your secret marriage. Your own House and the Night’s Watch have refused to comment on the union. Given your father’s absence from the public view and your younger brother’s health, are you worried at all you’ve given your House more heartache than it can handle?”

Sansa’s brain stops when the reporter mentions her father and Bran, and it refuses to process the rest of the question. Eyebrow arched, the reporter wiggles the microphone, as if that will tempt her to respond, but all of Sansa’s words die in her throat.

Say something, you idiot, she hears Arya hiss in the back of her mind, but — she can’t —

“It’s ‘Lady Sansa,’ Veran,” Jon corrects the reporter, having taken note of the media lanyard around the reporter’s neck. His palm settles on Sansa’s hip and he presses his chest against her shoulder. “I mean, sure, technically she is Lady Snow. But since she married into a house of a lower rank than the one she was born in, she gets to keep her higher title. ‘Lady Sansa of House Stark.’ I’m surprised that such a…reputable publication like WPOP! doesn’t make sure their reporters get the appropriate etiquette training before sending them out to cover royal press events.” The reporter’s face has gone positively scarlet. His hand, and the microphone held in it, are starting to shake. He was getting his ass handed to him, and on camera no less. “Veran Hillson right? I’ll remember that name. I’ll even tell Lord Stark that you asked after him.”

And with that, Jon tightens his arm around her waist and spirits her away from the press line. Chin up, she instructs herself. She takes a deep breath and pulls her shoulders back, straightens her spine.

“Thank you. You didn’t have to…intervene,” she tells him, voice low, as they approach the massive wrought iron gates of the Dragonpit’s outer walls. They’ve been repaired and oiled shiny black, but they’ve secured to the building’s outer walls with bolts the length of Sansa’s arm. The true doors are modern—sliding panes of glass etched with a crowned stag.

“Journalists have always been overzealous with you,” he says. “It’s always made me angry. I just get to say something about it now.”

They pass by Olenna Tyrell, one of the few remaining grand dames of the realm, whose Margaery’s football star of a brother was assisting inside. She paused, unashamed, in her slow steps to give Jon an up-and-down with her keen eye.

Against Sansa’s side, Jon’s chest putters with a smothered laugh.

Jon drops his arm from her waist once they’re in the lobby and pivots to face her. Few people linger here, moving swiftly past the closed ticket counters and into the museum beyond. An usher notices them and motions for duo to follow suit, peeved at the break of flow in the traffic. Jon pretends not to see him and fusses with the perfectly-fine gossamer sleeve her gown.

“Your family isn’t in the business of weighing disappointment against pride, you know,” he says. His fingers are long, his nails short and clean, and there’s a scar that stripes across the back of his hand. “They love you, Sansa. All of them. That’s not going to change because they think you fell in love, of all things.”

Under Lyarra Stark’s pearls, Sansa’s heart skips a beat. Then he clears his throat, self-consciously tucks his curls behind his ears, and offers her his arm. “C’mon. We shouldn’t miss Princess Shireen’s speech.”

(And it does sound ridiculous, when he puts it that way.)

***

Sansa has been inside the Great Sept of Baelor, and Jon has climbed to the very top of the old watchpost at Castle Black, yet the both of them are still struck dumb at the full display of the Dragonpit beyond the lobby doors.

There’s a broad landing on which visitors are milling, but visitors have to take one of the ramps down to the sunken main floor. They take the eastern ramp and make their way down, stopping to investigate the busts and weathered statues lining the way. At the bottom, they’re gracefully spilled out near the foot of a behemoth of a bronze-cast Nymeria of the Rhyonar. Jon can see clear across to the other side of the floor, and all the way up to the curved rafters three hundred feet above his head. Glass skylights have replaced the open holes that had allowed light and air inside the ancient building. Through the panes, he sees the spikes of the Dragonpit shooting towards the sky.

The walls have been cleaned and repaired, but not completely replastered. They’re still rugged and cragged, bringing ancient weight to the new marble floors, the modern chandeliers, and the state-of-the-art exhibits.

Following the orders of the ushers, Jon and Sansa cluster in with the other guests before a small stage at the foot of a gargantuan crouching dragon. A brash laugh to Jon’s left announces Asha Greyjoy’s presence; off towards the right, near where an oil portrait of Argella Durrandon, Garlan and Loras Tyrell clap each other on the shoulders and pose for a picture taken by Garlan’s wife Leonette.

Then there’s a murmur, and Shireen, First Daughter of House Baratheon, Princess of Dragonstone makes her way to the podium. Jon catches Sansa’s eye; they’ve only caught glimpses of the Iron Throne’s sole heir since arriving in King’s Landing. Sansa raises her eyebrows at Jon and claps along with the crowd as the Crown Princess steps up to the microphone.

“Welcome to the Dragonpit Museum of Westerosi History.” Shireen’s dark hair is twisted back to her nape, and a delicate gold tiara studded with pearls and diamonds shimmers among her curls. Her blue eyes twinkle as she basks in the applause, and when paired with her burgundy dress, Jon barely notices the greyscale scar on her cheek.

“Or, should I say, ‘welcome to my obsession for the past three years’!” The princess laughs. “As a young girl, I devoured stories about the Heroes of years past — I would be lying, of course, if I pretended the Storm Kings weren’t my favorites.” On cue, the audience titters. Jon can’t deny that Shireen’s enthusiasm is infectious. Standing at the back of the stage, Prince Quentyn watches his fiancée address the museums attendees with an affectionate smile.

“I adored my summers with my Uncle Renly at Storm’s End. To this day, I consider myself extraordinarily privileged to have been able to wander the halls of such an ancient and legendary keep. I grew up playing in the very corridors walked by the Storm Kings. And on Dragonstone, I learned to read and write in the same library where Aegon and his sister-wives plotted their conquest of the Seven Kingdoms. I want to be able to give other children, other citizens, that same feeling of living among history.

“So, what you see before you represents the culmination of that dream — a museum on the Age of Heroes within the famous Dragonpit, open to the public and free to children under the age of twelve…”

Jon’s eyes snake up the body of the carved dragon hovering behind Shireen as she continues to explain the nuts and bolts of the museum. One stone wing curls along its body, the other reaches up towards the Dragonpit’s rafters as if to say, this is my home.

“Do you think they really kept dragons in here?” He murmurs in Sansa’s ear.

She slides her eyes along the curving, weathered walls of the Dragonpit, lingering on the scorches and slashes marring swaths of stonework. “They kept something in here.”

At the conclusion of Shireen’s remarks, she answers a few pre-approved questions from the handful of journalists allowed inside for the opening. “Please, explore and enjoy!” She finishes, dipping her head at the final round of applause. A slew of waiters burst forth from a side door with trays of champagne; Jon snags two flutes and hands one to Sansa. It bubbles pleasantly in his mouth and when Sansa takes a sip, her eyes close in appreciation.

The exhibits closest to where they stand feature the Children of the Forest and their few known artifacts. Reportedly magical and nomadic, the stray pieces of pottery and scraps of fabric, accompanied by an artist’s rendering or two, do little to contradict or confirm any of the stories that Old Nan had told them as children. Extinct, their plaque reads, but Jon isn’t so sure.

“The free folk have similar legends,” Jon explains, once he’s realized he said the last bit out loud. “There’s a lot of unexplored forests up there, and a lot more acceptance of magic and strange happenings. Who knows — Sam might find a village of them the next time he and Gilly go on a camping trip.”

She gives him an intrigued smile, and they move on to the pieces on display for the Kings of Winter, supplied by House Stark itself. Scattered among a series of exhibits on Bran the Builder and the Wall there’s a large model of Winterfell’s First Keep, a delicately-preserved banner with one of the early representations of the Stark direwolf, and a few of the heirlooms worn by the Princesses of Winter of old.

Maester Luwin had packed them all himself with extreme care, and he’d taken no qualms in denying some of Princess Shireen’s requests. Apparently, she’d asked for a sword from the lap of a King of Winter. That would have meant going down into the crypts and disturbing the rest of those who slumbered there, to take away the swords meant to guard them in the realms of the dead, and Maester Luwin had nearly suffered a stroke when he’d read the princess’ letter.

“At least they didn’t ask for Ice.” Sansa runs her fingertips over a plaque describing Northern weaponry. “Of course, it’s not the same Ice from the Age of Heroes, being Valyrian steel and all, but…I’m glad Stannis gave it back after he took the city, so that Papa didn’t have to leave anything else behind.”

“How did Stannis find it so quickly?” For a moment, Jon is back on the tarmac, the horizon still shimmering green. Sansa is still clinging to her father, her frail arms around his waist, her fingers stroking over his greying beard, and someone is shoving a long, velvet-wrapped package into his arms. In the spotty airport lighting, Jon pulls back the corner and sees the burnished pommel of Lord Stark’s greatsword.

“I told him where Ice was.” Sansa drains the rest of her champagne. “It was in Joffrey’s chambers. He kept it hung over his bed after Papa’s arrest, like it was some sort of hunting trophy.”

He waits for her to continue, but she’s Sansa. Always stopping herself short of revealing too much, showing her underbelly. A waiter comes by, and Sansa drops her empty glass on his tray and picks up a freshly poured flute. She’d picked out a champagne gown tonight—a slick sheath with sheer sleeves and a slit in the back of the skirt from the floor to her knees. Her auburn hair has been pulled back into an undone chignon at the base of her neck; the only sign of a casual attitude in her look.

And still, Jon sees the faraway look in her eyes as she looks over the model of the First Keep. “Listen, Sansa.” He draws close, leaning in like he’s telling a secret. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell your family? Lady Stark? Robb? They’d understand—”

Her blue eyes snap to his. “Yes, and implicate the entire House in my treason?” Close as they are, he can smell her perfume, feel the curve of her hip against his own, see the quick beat of her pulse in her neck.

Treason. That’s what they’re doing, if you want to get to the point of it. Their king wants Sansa to marry Edric. Sansa and Jon are lying to him to avoid it. Lying to their sovereign. Lying to the throne. To the crown. The two of them can carry it off—Sansa for sure, Jon if he kept his wits about him…

…which clearly, if that question was any sort of measure, he currently was not. But she’s not wrong. A secret is strongest when the fewest know the truth. For now, only Jon and Sansa know the truth. As much as Jon knows that Lady Stark and Robb would bring the weight of the House to bear for Sansa…more insiders means more input, which means more chances to slip up, which means more chances to get caught.

He squeezes her hip. “Alright. Alright, then.”

They share a long look, then Sansa clears her throat. “Look—there’s Elenei and King Durran…”

They weave in and out of the exhibits, remarking on the artistic representations of the Heroes and Legends they’d grown up hearing. Few true artifacts exist from so many centuries ago, a time when gods laid down with humans and giants built walls of ice, so paintings and speculative models do a lot of work for the museum. Still, the Great Houses have all loaned precious items for dispay. Even an old Greyjoy longship has been hauled indoors and rigged up with full sails for visitors to explore.

Sansa pauses in front of the exhibit for Lann the Clever and the Fall of House Casterly. She tilts her head at the display case and gives a quiet scoff. Jon peers into the display case—she’s looking at a series of golden jewelry pieces, all of them cast from Casterly Rock gold, on loan from House Lannister.

“What is it?” He asks. A small smile has taken up residence at the corner of her mouth, uncharacteristically cold.

She points to a circlet. “That’s Cersei’s.” A cloak pin set with rubies. “Joffrey’s.” Heavy golden hoops and a matching chain with a thick medallion. “Cersei’s.” The rings and bracelets are Cersei’s too; the dagger with it’s rubied hilt and gold-leafed sheath was Joffrey’s. “‘On loan’ is quite a politically correct term for King Stannis,” Sansa muses.

“Well, this isn’t Stannis’ project, it’s Shireen’s,” Jon points out. “But she did put them quite close to House Targaryen, didn’t she?” He jerks his chin at the next free-standing exhibit. It begins with a larger-than-life oil painting of Aegon, Rhaenys, and Visenya taking flight from Dragonstone to conquer the Seven Kingdoms. Balerion’s wingspan dominates the middle third of the field, with Rhaenys and Visenya flying above their brother-husband.

Next to the painting, three unhatched dragon eggs — black, green, and cream — lie encased in what Jon knows has to be bulletproof glass.

“On loan from the Targaryen Trust,” Sansa reads.

“There’s Aegon the First’s circlet.” Jon hunches down to get a better look at the rough-hewn rubies and hand-pounded Valyrian steel. “I didn’t think that lot would have anything to do with a Baratheon-run museum.”

“Politics is a…delicate game.”

“Still.” Another stone dragon crouches on a rock above a model of Dragonstone. “It’s been almost a century since the Rebellion. Yet Viserys still insists on being called ‘Prince’ everywhere he goes.”

“Oh, I know. He sent a formal objection to mine and Joffrey’s engagement announcement. He said the only ‘Crown Prince’ of Westeros is his brother, Rhaegar.” Sansa’s mouth curves into a small smile. “Well, he was right about Joffrey, at least.”

A surprised chuckle bursts out of Jon. Sansa hides her pleased flush behind a sip of champagne.

Swords of shimmering Valyrian steel, dragonglass daggers with bejeweled golden hilts, circlets and rings a plenty, and three delicate pages from Signs and Portents, all topped by a magnificent House Targaryen banner. “The shipping from Mereen must have been atrocious,” Jon muses.

“The price of good advertising.” Arianne Martell appears at their side and peers up at the three-headed dragon prancing above them. “An entire generation of school children will leave here with that image in their head.” She winks one heavily-lined eye. “Or so one may theorize. I wouldn’t know, of course.”

Sansa dips her head. “Princess Arianne.”

“Lady Sansa. Lord Snow.” She clasps their hands in turn and gives them a wry smirk. “Please forgive my lateness in extending my House’s congratulations on the wedding.”

She sweeps her curtain of inky curls behind her shoulder with a flick of her heavily-bangled wrist. The rest of Westerosi nobility only wear their crown jewels on special occasions, but the Dornish have turned theirs into daily accessories. Today, a flexible three-stranded circlet glimmers atop her loose waves, with the middle piece nestled in her center part and joining the side strands at the middle of her forehead in a sunburst of fire-opals. It’s a pointed style choice. Paired with her one-sleeved gown, her dusky skin, and her dark hair, anyone’s eye that passes over the heir to Sunspear would notice the sunburst straight away.

“No need to apologize. You’re in good company,” Jon says evenly, cutting Arianne’s dryness with some of his own.

Arianne gives him one last lingering look and turns on her heel to examine the model of Dragonstone. “You’ll be at the luncheon at the Greatswords game, Lady Sansa?” She asks as she waves Lady Nym over from the ramp of the Greyjoy longship.

“The one Margaery is hosting in the Baratheon box?”

“The very same.” Arianne sets her empty champagne flute on top of the case holding the dragon eggs and hooks her arm through Lady Nym’s. “We’ll toast to your future happiness then.”

As quickly as she came, Arianne leaves Jon and Sansa, and without a backwards glance as she goes.

***

By the time dinner arrives back in their rooms at the Maidenvault (lemon-garlic salmon, spinach salad, grilled vegetables, a tart white wine from the Summer Isles), the evening news has switched over to the entertainment segment. A helicopter had taken long, sweeping passes over the Dragonpit; a reporter’s voice-over details the years of work and gold dragons that the Crown has sunk into the completion of the museum. Over the rim of his wine glass, Jon watches Shireen give her speech for a second time, this time in close-up and high definition.

Then, a new voice: “The path through the museum ends with Aegon the Conquerer’s flight from Dragonstone.” Viserys Targaryen sits on a sofa in a spacious and airy Mereenese manse, perfectly groomed and coiffed for his interview. “It’s all but an admission that we, House Targaryen, are the rightful rulers of the Seven Kingdoms. Why, Stannis Baratheon wouldn’t even have a throne to sit on if it weren’t for Aegon and his sister-wives.”

The scene cuts to a reporter on location meandering along a winding and picturesque side street in Mereen. “The remaining members of the exiled House Targaryen live here, in Mereen, nearly three thousand miles from the Red Keep — a castle their ancestors built after conquering Westeros. Centuries later, the first Robert Baratheon expelled the King Aerys II from the Seven Kingdoms. The Mad King’s great-grandchildren, Rhaegar, Viserys, and Daenerys, have built as much of a noble life for themselves here as they can as they run the family business, Dragon Manufacturing.”

“Stannis isn’t going to be happy with this news cast,” Sansa notes, spearing a carrot on her fork.

Onscreen, Rhaegar Targaryen walks along the prow of a yacht, a slim dark-haired woman in a black one-piece reclines in the shade, and two teenagers jet-ski in the crystal-clear water below them.

“The upcoming marriage to Shireen, Princess of Dragonstone, won’t the first time in recent years House Martell has married into royalty. Shown here on vacation in the Summer Sea, Princess Elia of Dorne, younger sister of Prince Doran, met Rhaegar Targaryen at Fashion Week in Myr twenty years ago and married him weeks later. Though Elia and Doran reportedly stay in close contact, she and her children, Aegon and Rhaenys, are notably not on House Martell’s guest list for the upcoming nuptials for her nephew Quentyn.”

The camera returns to the meandering reporter, who smiles widely at the camera. “The final member of House Targaryen, Daenerys, was the driving force behind the House Targaryen loans to the Dragonpit museum. She’s an outspoken proponent for universal early education here in Essos, and said in a statement that she and her brothers are more than happy to provide in this small way for the education of Westerosi children. Back to you in the station.”

On the King’s Landing soundstage, Larynt and Samara shuffle their cards and joke lightly with each other. “More wine?” Sansa asks, standing and taking her wine glass to the bar. In her leggings and an off-the-shoulder knit sweater, she’s a far cry from the Lady Sansa of this afternoon. But she looks cozy and far more at ease as she brings the bottle back. She tucks a foot under herself as she sits down again and tops off his glass.

“Tell me when.” There’s a teasing lilt to her voice.

A few seconds later, he tells her, “When,” and raises his glass for a casual toast. She taps the bells of their glasses together for our health and joins him in a deep swallow.

The next story isn’t a surprise to either of them, but Jon sighs anyway, and Sansa’s smile deflates. “A little bit of a scuffle on the carpet today, though, Samara,” Larynt says, and Samara nods along, wearing a hot pink headscarf today. “We already talked about this on our afternoon broadcast — Lady Sansa and Lord Snow had a war of words with a journalist from WPOP! on their way into the Dragonpit.”

The footage is grainy and the audio echoes because WPOP! had certainly not submitted their own video for broadcast. Instead, the footage comes courtesy of the journalists stationed next to WPOP!, who had swiveled their cameras to catch it. Jon watches himself step up behind Sansa and wrap a protective arm around her waist before the video cuts off.

Sansa turns the television off and drops the remote onto the coffee table. “I miss Winter City,” she says. “Where people only care about weather reports and whether the elk are over-hunted this year.”

Jon chuckles. Her knee is close enough to his hip that he can drop his palm onto it and give it a comforting squeeze. “We’ll be back soon enough.”

Her hair is in a high ponytail; it pools against the back of the couch when she leans back down next to him. Paired with her thick woolen socks and the plush sofa, she looks like she’s modeling for a fall catalogue. She gives him a careful look. “Do you…remember picking me up from that flat on Greywolf Avenue?”

He chuckles. “Yes. I remember.” His phone had buzzed on his pillow past midnight about a year after Ned and Sansa had come home from King’s Landing. On the other end, Sansa’s voice was small and nervous, whispering her request from a bathroom while other voice laughed and shouted in the background. He had duty call in a few hours, but he shoved on his glasses and shoes and drove across town to pick up a mini-skirted and high-heeled Sansa from a luxury condo building.

The penthouse suite had still been aglow at two a.m., but Sansa was grabbing for the door handle and sliding inside before he even had the car in park. Thanks, she’d murmured, snapping on her seatbelt, will you take me home?

Nothing was out of place, and her elaborate winged eyeliner hadn’t been smudged by tears or swipes of her hand. But she sat still and quiet the whole way back to Winterfell, arms crossed over her body. Only when he pulled up at the service entrance at the back of the keep did she speak again. Please don’t tell anyone, she’d asked, her hand reaching and hesitating for the handle. He assured her he wouldn’t, and he never did.

Back in the Red Keep, Sansa covers her blushing cheeks with a hand. “I haven’t ever thanked you again for not ratting on me.”

“You don’t need to.” Jon shrugs. “You’re not the person ever to give her detail the slip. And nothing happened. You were just…embarrassed. I understood. I didn’t want to add to it by writing an official report tattling on a twenty-two year old.”

She smiles at that, and uncovers her face. “After—after the Battle, it was just so refreshing to be home. The paparazzi were way too concerned with Shireen and Melisandre to hover around Winter City. I thought I could go and do whatever I wanted without people watching me. The problem was…I thought partying was what I wanted to do. Turns out I don’t actually like it that much.”

“We’ll be in the Water Gardens in Dorne. It’ll be better there.” Jon knows from security plans that there’s a no-fly zone over the grounds and the paparazzi’s long-range lenses are blocked by natural hedges the whole way around.

There’s still a line between Sansa’s eyebrow’s though. She studies her wine glass with an intensity Jon knows can’t be just about whether or not she wants to finish it off. Sure enough, she sets it on the tray that the lady’s maids will take away in the morning, rises to her feet, gives him a line about brushing her teeth before bed.

When they’re both tucked into bed and have said their goodnights, and Jon has become warm and snug under the coverlet, and the darkness closes in on his consciousness from the edges, Sansa’s voice drifts to his ears from the other shore of a star-dappled ocean.

“The day after they arrested Papa, I had to go to a fashion show with Joffrey.” He’s instantly awake. Her fingers rustle along the sheets, worrying the stitches at the hem. “It was just like that reporter today. Asking me about Papa, I mean. Whether Joffrey was right or wrong, whether my father really had conspired against the throne, which of the two of them I believed. All shock value questions, of course. Wanting a story at my expense.

“I was so embarrassed. And I was…stupid enough to say ‘Joffrey’ at first, because I—I did believe him. At first. I even asked him to let Papa confess, and Que— Cersei wanted to exile him beyond the Wall. And Papa did. Confess, that is. To saying Joffrey was illegitimate.”

Jon knows all of this. He didn’t debrief Sansa when she came back, but he’s read the non-redacted portions of her transcripts. Her words spill across the space between them, so quickly that they nearly tumble over one another, and Jon thinks that perhaps this is less for him, and more for her.

“I was there. In the dungeons. There’s a jail in King’s Landing but Joffrey liked using the old Targaryen cells. I thought that Joffrey would let Papa go, and that it would all be over and we’d go back to being in love—“

Her voice breaks there and she gasps to cut off what sounds like it was about to be a sob. Jon rolls to his side; she’s pressed the backs of her hands to her eyes in the darkness. Without his glasses, he has to squint to make out where her palms end and her cheeks begin. He doesn’t want to touch her stomach—too private—or her hair—too patronizing—so he just waits for her to lower her hands, and then he clasps his fingers around hers and gives her hand a gentle squeeze.

“Like I said, I was stupid.” Her voice is bitter now, sharp, and Jon misses the warmth it had earlier today when she’d teasingly corrected him on the sail riggings aboard the longship. “He just kept Papa down there. Caged up in the dark, with just a bucket and straw, because he wanted to. And I had to go everywhere with Joffrey and smile and clap for the cameras and pretend that I couldn’t wait to marry him and sleep with him and have his children.

“He found out that I would go down and visit with Papa and talk to him early in the mornings, before anyone was awake. He threatened to melt down Ice for a wedding gift if I kept going. He would name one of the new swords Widow’s Wail and send it to Mama with Papa’s bones. So I…stopped. I stopped going to see him. For a sword.

“And now he doesn’t talk—“

She breaks off again and rolls away from Jon. He goes after her, touches her shoulder and realizes she’s shaking to keep silent.

“Oh, Sansa.” Jon wraps his arm around her torso, and pulls her tight against his chest. She’s got her hands over her face again, and again he lets her keep them there as long as she wants. “It’s not your fault, Sansa. It’s not your fault, I promise.”

Her sobs break the quiet of the room then, raw and aching, surging forth from deep in her chest. He tells her again and again that it’s not her fault, that Joffrey did it all, and Cersei too, and that no one, no one, blames her for anything. He’s sure it all passes over her ears without sinking in while she cries. So he just tucks his knees up behind hers, presses his forehead into her hair, and lets her cry as long as she wants.

It’s the least he can do.

Chapter Text

Everyone in the stadium holds their breath, frozen in place. The ball arcs high over the heads of the players scrambling for position. It sails true, lands neatly in the cradle of the runningback’s hands and is spirited the last few yards to the end zone.

Raucous cheers rip through the stadium.

“Yes!” Margaery jumps to her feet, Garlan following suit with a shout. Their brother, Loras, is the quarterback for the King’s Landing Greatswords, and is the player who’d shot the ball down the field to his teammate. Elinor Tyrell-Ambrose and Leonette Fossoway clap politely, not breaking their conversation with Myranda Royce.

“Another round of mimosas, please!” Margaery trills out to a passing server. She raises an eyebrow at Sansa, sitting at the far end of the couch, but Sansa shakes her head and takes a pointed sip of her iced coffee.

“Make mine a Bloody Mary,” Lady Olenna corrects. She seems only mildly impressed the seven points her grandson’s added to the scoreboard.

Margaery, the old woman’s unashamed favorite, smiles indulgently at the server. “And a Bloody Mary for my grandmother, thank you.”

“Yes, ma’am, Lady Baratheon,” the server dips her head and slips off to the kitchen at the far end of the owner’s box.

She has to bob and weave as she goes, given how packed the box overlooking the fifty-yard line is. Sansa takes another draw on her coffee and takes in the mill of bodies, impressed as ever at Margaery’s social acumen.

Renly might be several years dead, and he might have openly challenged Stannis for the throne, but Margaery is perfectly aware of how closely tied she is to the royal family. She’s got a gold crowned stag pinned to the lapel of her black skirt suit, and nearly all of the wedding party is present to watch the Greatswords and the Gulltown Stone Crows face off.

The groom’s wedding party is well represented this morning. Garlan Tyrell and Trystane Martell are here, as is Edric Baratheon, though he’s hugging the far end of the box and is steadfastly avoiding Sansa’s eyes. Dickon Tarly, Devan Seaworth, and Erren Florent were picked to represent the houses that had been loyal to Stannis and Selyse from the beginning of the War. And Edric Dayne, Quentyn’s best friend from childhood, hasn’t left the taciturn groom’s side since kickoff.

Shireen’s bridesmaids aren’t so strongly populated up in the Baratheon box. Sansa and Margaery are there, of course, but Arianne isn’t attending alongside her brothers. Selyse had personally invited the heir to Sunspear to a luncheon in her private solar, so the princess had begged off. But the problem with the Crown’s demand for social tribute from the Great Houses of the realm following a war is, well—there’s been a war.

House Lannister isn’t dead yet—there’s some distant smallfolk cousin lined up to take over the Rock once Stannis lifts the moratorium and terminates the post-war administrative trust—but there isn’t a Lannister to be seen in the Baratheon box. Wartime-privateers House Greyjoy has kept itself in the throne’s good graces for the time being, and Asha Greyjoy is technically to be a bridesmaid on Saturday morning. The brash heiress apparent arrived at the Maidenvault the night before, and social queen Margaery likely extended her a polite invitation. But Asha has shown neither hair nor hide this morning.

Probably a good idea, Sansa thinks. The Greyjoys had raided along the Reach coastline and deep into the Riverlands during the war. And that’s not even mentioning Theon’s decision to break off his friendship with Robb in favor of his family’s push for independence. Asha’s wise to keep her distance from the half-dozen Tyrells and Starks this morning.

Like Quentyn, the rest of Shireen’s bridesmaids have been plucked from lesser houses to take the wedding party from lovely to grand. Elinor Tyrell-Ambrose is officially representing House Tyrell along with her cousin Garlan. Wylla Manderly is serving as the face of the uber-rich and mercantile House Manderly. And there’s the loud and vivacious Myranda Royce who was put forward by Lysa Tully instead of her darling, ill, it’s-honestly-best-he’s-not-here Sweetrobin Arryn.

Down on the field, the Greatswords line up at the Stone Crows’ end zone. Jon leans over the back of the couch to whisper in Sansa’s ear, “Field goal, right?” Sansa hums and nods. Jon straightens to watch. Loras sets up the ball, and again the stadium breaks out in cheers when the kicker sends the ball through the goal posts. And just like that, the Greatswords are up another three points. 18-6.

The server returns with her tray of drinks. Olenna holds out her hand for her Bloody before she comes to a full stop. Sansa can smell the vodka from the other end of the couch. “Pedal to the metal, I see,” Myranda Royce says, grinning.

“I’ve been watching this…game for over an hour now.” The older woman wraps her lips around the end of her straw and drinks again. “Now, don’t you worry about me, Margaery, I know that look. I plan on dying properly in my sleep, not going slowly from cirrhosis. You can leave that to your great uncles. Men these days have no concept of dying with dignity. They spend their lives making the women in their families miserable. But when they get older, they seem to think they haven’t met their quota and embark on making up for lost time.”

“Speaking from experience, are you, Lady Olenna?” Myranda drawls, amused. She and Olenna have hit it off splendidly, the both of them relishing the shock their irreverence sends rippling through the crowd around them. On the other side of Myranda, Sansa’s just enjoying the eavesdropping while she watches the game.

“Just look at my son, Myranda!” Poor Lord Tyrell is having a perfectly congenial chat with Quentyn, chuffed beyond measure to be speaking to the future Prince Consort. “He’s forever a slice of cake away from diabetic shock. And my own husband took three whole years to die from lung cancer.” Olenna leans forward to look past Myranda at Sansa. She jerks her chin at Jon, and doesn’t lower her voice to say, “Enjoy him now while he’s young and strong, my dear. It’ll be a blink of an eye before you’re dealing with feeding tubes and diapers.”

Sansa glances over her shoulder. Jon’s pretending to watch the game, but she sees his cheeks redden. He’s not familiar with football but he’s using watching the game as an excuse to not have to talk much with the other guests in the box.

When Olenna turns to chastise Elinor—apparently it’s time for her to circle the room again, i.e., collect snippets of conversation and bring them back for Olenna to store in her hoard of gossip—Sansa stands up and moves over to the buffet table. Jon follows at her heels. But instead of hovering at the periphery like he has as her security detail, he sidles up right alongside her to look over the pastries and fruit trays.

“You hear that? You’d better stay healthy and not die before me,” she winks, bumping him with her elbow.

“It’s a shame we’re not still in the Age of Heroes. I wonder if Lady Olenna would consider fighting and dying for your honor a ‘proper’ way to go out,” he replies, lifting a bear claw to his mouth.

Sansa laughs lightly, imagining Jon in chain mail and with a sword in hand. It’s not a terrible picture, she thinks, looking at his tidy beard and square jaw and imagining it over the fur collar of a cloak. It’s a far cry from the sleepy blinks he gave her this morning over the stretch of their pillows. Feeling better?, he’d mumbled, chafing her arm with a sleepy, clumsy palm. I am, she’d replied, focusing on the broad plane of his palm around her shoulder rather than the creases the pillow had surely left on her cheek.

Coffee. She’s had too much coffee. It’s making her imagination run wild. She sets her half-full third cup on the table with a decisive thud. Jon quirks an eyebrow, but just clears his throat and nods down at the field where the Greatswords block yet another run attempt by the Stone Crows. “It looks like the Stone Crows could have used some more scrimmage time,” he remarks.

“A few of their starters are out with injuries,” Margaery says, appearing beside them and transferring a few mini quiches onto her plate with tongs. She’s been snacking on the spread of appetizers alongside everyone else, but has nary a crumb on her sleek black skirtsuit. “You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not terribly upset about it.”

“Not one for level playing fields in the pursuit of the challenge, are you?”

Margaery laughs and shakes her head. “No. These people here?” she gestures at the clusters of unfamiliar faces. “They’re investors, not fans. I’ll leave the art of the game to my players. I’m here to win.”

Jon shrugs. “Can’t argue with that.” But when he takes another swallow of his beer, his eyes dance sideways and meet Sansa’s. She knows what he’s thinking—he’s been watching the news right alongside her. And each time their friend’s name is mentioned, it’s followed by a slick comment that not too long ago, she’d been calling herself Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.

***

The second quarter pushes onwards. At a commercial break, the players drift back to their benches. Sansa catches a glimpse of Loras’ bright blond hair when he pulls off his helmet and guzzles from a water bottle. The guests in the stadium take advantage of the spare moments to dash off to concessions and the bathroom. On the jumbotron, the Iron Bank advertises interest-free financing.

Jon’s hand drifts to her lower back and he passes her the water she’d asked for. “Good game so far,” he says, eyeing the scoreboard. They’re still up by a healthy margin.

“Well.” Sansa wrinkles her nose. “We’re winning. But their linebackers are letting us go right through them.”

“And the linebackers are…”

She laughs a little. “The ones that line up against each other. They’re there to block the other side’s play.”

“There’s too many terms to learn with this sport,” he gripes. It’s too cold in the North for football to be a popular sport. And while Sansa doesn’t love football as much as she had as a young girl—hello, head injuries and bloodsport—attending games is an integral part of the social life in the South. After attending hundreds of games alongside Robert and Joffrey, Sansa knows the game inside and out.

The kiss cam has started up on the jumbtron. This had been Sansa’s favorite part of the games when she was younger—watching couples, young and old, turn into each other to exchange a sweet kiss for the crowd. A middle-aged pair of men appear on the screen. They grin and peck each other on the lips, and one raises his hot dog in a salute to the crowd.

Then the camera cuts to a father bouncing his toddler on his knee. He points at the screen and grins when her mouth drops open in awe.

“Cute choice,” Jon comments. Sansa hums in agreement, her mouth quirking up at the corners.

The dad plants a series of quick kisses to his daughter’s cheeks until her mouth opens in silent laughter and she squirms against his tickling fingers. The image switches to another couple, and it takes a moment for understanding to dawn.

The couple on the screen is them. Them. Jon and Sansa. A giant cartoon heart surrounds their faces. Her thighs tense, willing her to take flight.

Jon stands frozen beside her in front of the crystal clear plate glass, beer halfway to his mouth. The both of their twenty-foot selves look shell-shocked and horrified. Sansa immediately lets a calmer smile slip into being, annoyed that she’d forgotten her cardinal rule: never forget that there is always a camera.

Still, it’s a moment too long. The turn she makes towards Jon is belated, even she can see, so she commits: wraps an arm around his middle and tilts her face up towards his. He comes to life against her, letting out a convincing laugh and pulling her tighter against him. His shirt crinkles against her dress, his lips and whiskers press against her cheek. He gives a silly shake of his head and Sansa responds with a feminine scrunch of her nose and a push to his chest.

The stadium’s response is jumbled—half awws, half boos. They want tongue, she’s sure. She just wants it to be over.

Seconds, agonizing seconds later, the logo for the Greatswords replaces their faces. Sansa lets herself slump against Jon in unfeigned relief. Everyone in the skybox is still watching them, of course. She uses the pretense of affection to press her face into his neck and take a deep breath. His clean man smell—part soap, part aftershave, part laundry detergent—is as good an anchor as anything. Better, even. She takes another steadying, savoring breath and straightens. Jon’s arm stays wrapped firmly around her shoulders, and he gives her arm a light squeeze. “You good?”

She smiles, wide enough for her dimple to crease into being. “I’m great.”

Across the room, Margaery takes another sip of her mimosa. Her winged liner only accentuates the catlike gleam in her eyes.

“What is it, turtledove?” Olenna asks, leaning in with the quiet question.

Margaery turns an innocent expression on her grandmother and shrugs. “Oh, nothing in particular. Just…thinking.”

***

The Stone Crows have snagged two touchdowns by the top of the fourth quarter. Unless there’s a miracle, the Greatswords will keep the lead they built through the first half. Margaery’s boys have the ball, but there’s still thirteen minutes on the clock.

The players line up along the 50-yard line. Loras scuffs his cleat into the turf. He points right, left. The clock starts. The ball snaps cleanly into his hands. He dances back a few steps. Sansa’s eyes dart up the field, looking for his receiver. Vincent Riggins is sprinting past the thirty-yard line, looking back over his shoulder.

Then: a whistle. Margaery sees it first and shouts in frustration. The wind goes out of the players’ sails; in slow unison, two dozen players slow to a stop on the turf. Loras has been sacked, and yards behind the line of scrimmage at that. Sansa lets out an annoyed huff; Jon squeezes her shoulder in sympathy.

The Stone Crow linebacker heaves himself to his feet. But Loras doesn’t get up, even when the Stone Crow offers him a hand. He reaches instead for his helmet and unsnaps the chin strap. The linebacker waves at the coaches and medics on the sideline and drops to a knee beside Loras.

Margaery leaves her seat to join Sansa’s other side at the window. Her mouth has turned down in worry and her crossed arms have bunched her jacket at her shoulders. “I’m sure he’s fine,” Sansa tells her. “He’s probably just winded.”

“Rothson hit him in the knees,” Margaery mutters, voice tight. Staff jog out onto the field. The stadium holds its breath, waiting for Loras to jump back to his feet and declare it all a harmless joke.

But seconds, minutes tick by, and the swarm of people around Loras grows until totally disappears into the huddle of polo shirts and blocky headsets. A hum begins among the guests behind them.

“What happened? Did you see it?”

“If Loras is out, the Greatswords are fucked for the rest of the season.”

The Tyrells start moving slowly, and then all at once. Elinor unzips her purse and starts digging. Leonette turns to murmur to Garlan, who’s tapping away on his phone. He’s got the number of the defensive line coach—the only coach still on the sidelines with a cluster of players.

A trolley rolls across the field, a stretcher on its back. Margaery bursts out of her stillness. “Can he not walk?” she demands of Garlan. He holds up a finger, still typing. She doesn’t like that. “Garlan!”

The hum behind them has stopped now; Sansa doesn’t give them the satisfaction of looking their way. She knows the reason. She cups Margaery’s elbow and squeezes it firmly enough to be felt through the thick fabric of her blazer. The other woman whirls on Sansa, her eyes blazing with fear, worry, terror.

“Margaery.” Sansa keeps her voice quiet and firm. “People are watching.”

As though shot with a tranquilizer dart, Margaery stills. She takes a deep inhale, blows out a long exhale. The shaking of her body calms and she smooths her frenzied expression into a mask of calm concern. Her eyes give the slightest flick to the side, where her guests await news from the field.

Then she turns to Sansa and says, “thank you,” all cool, calm, and collected once more.

“It’s broken,” Garlan confirms, finally, scrolling up and down on his phone. “They’re taking him to Queen Alysanne General in an ambulance from the Western gates.”

Out on the field, the trolley putters across the turf, Loras reclined in its bed. The camera for the jumbotron has zoomed in on his face. He makes eye contact with it, grimaces a brave smile, and waves to the crowd.

It goes wild with applause.

Chapter Text

“Wait—How is that not intentional grounding?” Jon asks, pointing an accusatory finger at the television screen.

Sansa lowers her book and glances over to watch the replay. “Because there’s a receiver sort of close by. Robbins—there, number 32—getting blocked at the last minute by a fullback. It’s only intentional grounding if there isn’t anyone around at all.”

He grunts, dissatisfied. Not with her, but with the strange rules of the game.

They’d stayed until the end of the fourth quarter. The Longswords held onto the lead Loras had won them, but barely. They were a team better known for their Baratheon ownership and Tyrell quarterback than for their defensive line. Once back at the Maidenvault, Sansa promptly switched her snug sheath for a comfortable pair of crushed velvet joggers and a soft sweater. Then she’d cracked open a new romance novel and put the Sunspear Sand Steeds’ game on mute, having the best of plans to coast herself down into an afternoon nap.

But then Jon had wandered in. His turning on the sound didn’t bother her, nor did his interest in the game’s admittedly-confusing and arcane rules. No, it was the way he’d casually picked up her ankles and dropped her feet into his lap that had made her mind short circuit. Even now, she can replay the easy way he’d lifted her crossed shins with one hand, the first shift of his thighs under her calves, as clearly as the plays on the TV’s screen.

Sansa’s read Jenny and Duncan’s story told ten different ways and is proud of it. Yet, for some reason, she’s been stuck on pages 32 and 33 of STONES OF OLD for a solid five minutes now.

Her phone emits three double pings in quick succession. No nap, then. She holds out her hand with an entreating huff, and Jon leans forward to pick it up. The movement presses his torso into her legs and, not for the first time, Sansa is given an opportunity to feel exactly how firm his chest is.

Margaery T. Baratheon (3:32 PM): Loras is still in consult with the surgeons. Going to be here for a while.

Margaery T. Baratheon (3:32 PM): Giving you and Jon our reservation at High Table for 7 PM. Already called over. You two deserve a nice night out… alone .

Margaery T. Baratheon (3:33 PM): Wear something nice for the paparazzos ;P.

Sansa glances over at Jon. There’s a reason she changed so decisively into lounge clothes and started a new book. There’s a reason she and Jon aren’t talking about what’s to come, what they need to prepare for in the next few hours. And that reason is that it’s the night before the rehearsal gala, one of their few nights here in King’s Landing without an evening engagement.

Jon knows it, too. He’d shucked his suit and tie almost immediately for gray sweats, and Sansa’s pretty sure that explaining defensive line strategies to Jon is one of the first conversations they’ve had in a few days that isn’t about scheduling. She’s actually a huge fan of staying right here in her pajamas, feet in Jon’s lap, talking sports with him all night.

Sansa Stark (3:35 PM): I’m sure everything is going to be fine. The doctors at Alysanne are the best. They took care of Papa before we went back home.

Sansa Stark (3:35 PM): And that’s so thoughtful but you don’t have to do that! There’s still time to cancel it altogether, right? Or maybe Elinor and Alyn want it?

The ellipsis bounces a few times, then blinks out of existence. Sansa taps out of her texts and into her emails. Grade-school girlfriend Mya Stone has sent her a video of a puppy howling in time to emergency sirens, and the tinny howling makes Jon tear his eyes from the television. She turns the screen so he can see, and all of a sudden she can’t hear the sweet pup—all she knows is the feel of Jon’s hand curling around her ankles as he leans in.

It’s warm and broad, raspy at the base of his fingers where years of handling his handgun has brought up callouses. Sure in the way it wraps around the circumference of her left leg at the lowermost, slimmest point. Disarmingly casual in letting the bony bits of her ankle joint fit between his first two fingers.

“That makes me miss Ghost,” she nearly misses him admitting, just like she nearly misses the double ping of a new text message.

Margaery T. Baratheon (3:50 PM): They don’t want to take it. They’re here at Alysanne’s with me. And they’ve already closed the restaurant for the reservation. :( Please take it! It’s on me! Consider it a wedding present.

“What’s Margaery got to say?” Jon asks, watching her face.

She drops the phone onto her belly and folds her fingers over it with a sigh. “Margaery’s not going to make her reservation at High Table tonight. She wants us to take it.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” he shrugs.

She taps her nails on the back of her phone. “It’s pretty fancy. Five Stars from God’s Eye Quarterly. You’d have to dress up. And it’s only going to be the two of us. Margaery says it was a private reservation meant for her and Loras and the rest of the restaurant has been closed down.”

But he’s unfazed by the information. In fact, he seems a little eager to get out of their suite and she understands. Private quarters are a safe haven for bluebloods like Sansa, but they can feel like a cage to civilians who’re used to a less structured lifestyle. Jon calls down to the garage for a car, then phones the restaurant to talk security matters. Unlike Jon, Sansa needs to wake herself up to get ready for a night outside among the public.

Jon gives her a sour frown when she turns on her pop music and links it to the suites wireless speakers. His utter disdain for the sugary lyrics makes her laugh and turn up the volume before she heads off to the wardrobe to flip through some outfit choices.

And yet she catches him swaying to the beat a few minutes later while he considers his own belt-and-shoe combination options. Instead of calling him out as the hypocrite he obviously is, however, she surreptitiously films him and sends it to Bran.

***

High Table sits tucked into the exclusive neighborhood of the Rush’s northern bank. Once upon a time, the manse belonged to some minor lordling, his name only remembered now because of what his home has become. Today, the estate is a sprawling, multi-room restaurant complete with its own courtyard and a menu featuring classic Westerosi dishes. It’s also a popular wedding venue for the midfolk of the Crownlands—Sansa knows this now thanks to Jon’s earlier call to the establishment, conducted while the both of them were still sprawled across the couch.

He’d peppered them with questions about doors and windows and dead-ends all while making soundless faces at the televised game. It had been amazing to watch, seeing Jon use his Work Voice while not looking at all like he was working.

Someone—the maitre d’ or Margaery, Sansa’s honestly not sure—has slipped a tip to the city’s local photographers. When their car pulls up to the curb, there’s a gauntlet for them to run of flashing cameras and shouting fans.

Even after Jon helps her from the car, he keeps a hold of her hand. A woman screams out his name, and he surprises Sansa with an easygoing smile and wave. The paparazzi call out to them, peppering them them with salacious questions and demands for a kiss, but Sansa follows Jon’s lead. Figuratively, in that she smiles into the middle distance for pictures, and literally, in that she presses close to Jon’s arm and lets him lead her towards High Table’s wrought iron gates.

“Any news on Loras?” one of the reporters calls out, shoving a microphone in her face as she passes by.

“He’s getting the best of care at Queen Alysanne’s,” Sansa replies politely. She’s willing to throw them that bone.

They push past the last of the photographers, keeping their eyes on their feet to avoid going blind, and then they’re through the arched entryway. Attendants swing a set of wrought iron gates shut behind them, and then pull closed a set of obscuring curtains, blocking the couple from view.

The open-roofed courtyard has a large fountain in the middle. The maitre d’ is hailing them from the doorway beyond, but Sansa can’t help dropping her fingers into the bowl of cool water and and casting her eyes up to the stars for the brief moment they’re overhead.

“Lady Sansa, Lord Snow,” the man greets once they’ve gotten within speaking distance, “welcome to High Table. We’re honored you’ve chosen to dine here this evening. My name is Tomas Whitecap and it’s my distinct pleasure to serve you this evening. Please, follow me.”

Jon steps out first into the wake of Tomas’ outstretched arm and the movement reminds Sansa that their hands are still held together. He hasn’t dropped her hand yet. Maybe he’s forgotten, she thinks, even though the realization doesn’t prompt her to pull free either. They follow Tomas through the door, foyer, and Great Hall, their steps echoing off the tiled floor. Jon’s grip remains warm and steady as they pass by the empty, silent room that could easily accommodate more than a hundred diners.

He only drops it as they reach the rear of the hall, and only then after giving the fine bones of her hand a light, reassuring squeeze when he catches sight of servers clustered in the service doorway.

“Our private dining room is through here,” Tomas tells them, distracting Sansa from the squeeze mirrored in her chest. He pushes open a sleek modern door retrofitted into the old stonework. Just beyond is a narrow room, what used to be a side hall with the manse’s main staircase. The original owner had to have known that grand, open-air staircases were becoming fashionable, judging by the intricate scrollwork on the marble banister and each riser’s smooth, sanded lip, Tomas explained as they made the walk down the hall. But for whatever reason, the choice was made for wider, more open central great hall over a centerpiece staircase.

It was a thing of beauty anyway, designed to only take up the back half of the side room, leaving the front half open. It was the perfect size for a private party, with the length for a long trestle table or the width for a handful of staggered round tables. Twenty-five to thirty guests could fit in here if pushed elbow to elbow, she surmised

She paused her thoughts with a stifled laugh, amazed at her own estimations and not wanting to insult Tomas’s overview of the room. I’ve planned too many charity dinners , Sansa thought.

But for tonight, only one small round table has been set for two. Centered near the foot of the staircase, it’s draped with a crisp white tablecloth and a cluster of peach peonies sit in a wide glass bowl at its center. And rather than allowing Tomas to seat Sansa, Jon follows her to the far side of the table and pulls out her chair for her.

“Arbor Gold?” Tomas asks Sansa after Jon settles himself. There’s a bottle chilling in ice close to the table, resting on the bottom stair and giving the pretense of a casual air. She agrees, and he sets to work removing the foil and wire cage from the bottle’s cork. “This is a true vintage. 622 A.C., from the Citadel’s old vineyard. Both fermented and stored in weirwood barrels, which I’m sure both know gives that lovely fizz finer than what you’d get out of your typical oak. And with so little color leeched into the wine during the fermentation, the wine is still only the palest of gold even after decades in storage.”

Sansa sips the proffered flute and feels the bubbles agitate and burst on her tongue. “Beautiful,” she agrees. Once the two glasses have been filled, Tomas quietly slips out the side door, leaving them alone for a few minutes.

A small bowl of olives has been set out for them. Sansa spears one and pops it into her mouth, chasing the briney taste with a sip of the truly crisp Arbor Gold. She lets the different flavors swirl against her taste buds as she looks around their dining room at the art on the walls. The designer has kept the hall from looking dated by updating the frames even on the classically-painted oil portraits. It lets the tableaux themselves stand out, drawing the observers eyes to the scenes presented rather than what they’re kept in.

Jon follows suit, leaning back and taking a moment to look around their surroundings. “Beautiful place,” he compliments. “Are you feeling better about getting out, now?”

She smooths a hand over the drape of her skirt. “Well, you know. Getting off the couch is the hardest part.”

The candlelight casts his skin in a warm glow, renders his dark eyes inscrutable. His fingertips rise and fall against tablecloth, a relaxed wave of movement. “You were quite happy over there at your end of the couch.”

She can’t help the curve of her mouth or—gods help her—that she holds his gaze as she lifts her glass to her mouth. “I had comfortable footrest.” He chuckles, and that or the wine that sends warmth coursing through her stomach.

Their first course is a beef stew. It’s thinner than the hearty stuff they serve in the North, but the root vegetables are still firm and the meat tender. The chef has brought the dish into the modern era with Essosian spices, and Tomas tells them the beef is sourced from free-range, grass-fed family farms in the Reach.

“It’d better be for what they must charge for it,” Jon mutters under his breath when Tomas leaves them again.

“I think we’re having something similar for the rehearsal gala tomorrow night. But—that may be venison, now that I’m thinking about it.”

“Venison? Like ‘a Baratheon stag we killed in the Kingswood’ venison?”

“I wouldn’t put it past Stannis.”

He raises an eyebrow. “A little macabre for his only daughter’s wedding , don’t you think?”

She laughs at that. “Royals do love their symbolism. Probably to a fault.”

He stirs his stew and takes another bite. “So what did we have at our wedding feast? A wolf? I suppose I could have hunted it myself.”

“Not just any wolf,” Sansa muses, catching his light banter and carrying it forward. “You took a trip beyond the Wall and found a true direwolf—”

“Mm, a rare beast.”

“—and brought me its pelt for my maidencloak.”

“A Stark wolf for a Stark wife.” It’s an easy, overdramatic jape, but the low timbre of his voice rakes down her spine.

“And where have you decided to keep my wolfskin maidencloak all these years?” she asks, pushing onwards, eating the stew that has no taste now. All she notices now are Jon’s stormy eyes and the tilt of his head, the quiet of the hall and whisper of the tablecloth against her ankles as she uncrosses, recrosses her legs.

Jon’s eyes drop, looking through the table as she shifts her weight and swallows his bite of stew. “On our bed, of course. Where it belongs.”

Tomas swings around the corner, and the both of them lean back like they’re teenagers, caught flirting by a teacher.

“Right, tomorrow,” Jon says, clearing his throat. “That’s going to be a pretty crowded affair. Trystane was complaining to me yesterday about the conflicting details and requests from the Houses and the Keep’s endowment. Sounds like a bloody nightmare.”

“He was complaining to you about that?” Sansa wrinkles her nose. Tomas clears away their bowls, the movements near silent in well-trained deference to his guests’ conversation.

“Night’s Watch, I guess,” Jon shrugs, gesturing at himself. “Probably didn’t know what else to talk about with me.”

“True.” Sansa, too, had been subjected to relentless repetitive conversations about Shireen and Selyse’s gowns during the Longswords game earlier in the day. Boring, but she hadn’t minded too much. The other options had been her father or her not-husband, and Sansa’d been relieved to not be on the receiving end of probing questions on either of those topics. Jon takes a long, cleansing swallow of Arbor Gold, biding his time as Tomas retreats.

“The High Septon and Melisandre were going at it so bad Shireen had to go talk everyone down.” Jon relays. Is it a trick of the light, or does an amused curve play at the corner of his mouth? “They’re putting the priestess at the high table and...he’s not happy about it.”

“Oh, I bet he’s not.” Sansa doesn’t like it either. She remembers Melisandre. She remembers living through years of Cersei and Joffrey, through Stannis’s bone-shaking shelling of the city, through the days of throat-clogging smoke from the Blackwater. She’d endured it, knowing how slim the sliver of hope was that she held in the face of all that.

She remembers, too, the door swinging open and the Queen’s Ballroom filling with red.

Knowing Stannis had conquered the city and taken the throne with that woman at his side? She glanced up at Jon, eyebrow arched. “If I were the High Septon, ‘bloody pissed’ wouldn’t even begin to describe it. You know what she did on Dragonstone.”

Footsteps approach again. Jon’s eyes flick over Sansa’s shoulder and follow Tomas as he brings their entrées to the table.

“Everyone knows what she did on Dragonstone.”

***

“There’s…quite a crowd at the front gate,” Tomas tells them as they’re scraping up the last bits of blueberry tart. “There’s a different way out, but it is through the kitchens.”

“Won’t moving the car attract attention?” Jon asks.

Tomas shakes his head. “Our valet sent your driver to the back garage. It won’t be a problem.”

Tomas leads them through the door he’s been using all night, and down a corridor that opens into a kitchen. The skeleton crew stands clustered near the stovetop, clearly instructed not to press close to the bluebloods gracing the the commonfolk with their presence. Sansa breaks her stride to address them. No matter the worries of restaurant management, she never considered the people who'd cooked her meals to be afterthoughts.

“Thank you all so much. Dinner was delicious. Who made the tart?” A portly Dornish woman raises her hand, dips a curtsy. Sansa lifts her hand to her heart. “It was divine. I haven’t had a such a flaky crust in a while.”

“The rack of lamb,” Jon adds, “was superb. Thanks, guys.”

There’s a cargo elevator beyond the walk-in refrigerators and freezers. Tomas pulls the lever, sending the trio into a slow, unsteady descent. It’s a contraption built to haul cartloads of food, not transport gentlefolk in heels.

Jon edges closer and curves his arm around her waist. It gives her something solid to lean in to. And when the freight elevator jolts to a stop, she ends up rollicking into her bodyguard’s solid chest rather than sheer open air.

The elevator spits them out into a wide, concrete corridor with a set of steel double doors at the end.

“Your car should be just outside,” Tomas says, flipping the deadbolt and twisting the knob. He peeks around the back door to make sure the coast is clear before stepping into the darkness and swinging the door wide for his guests. “Have a wonderful night, Lady Sansa, Lord Snow.”

The air is cooler now that the sun has set. The breeze in the air ruffles Sansa’s curls. Their car sits at the end of the alley, the driver waiting for them with a hand on the door handle. Just beyond, the Rush gleams silver under the half-full moon.

She pauses at the car door, taking in the skyline rising along the southern bank. “I’ve forgotten how beautiful this city is at night.”

“Should we walk for a bit?” Jon asks. He jerks his chin at the flight of side stars that curves around and disappears over the edge of the hill. “There must be a path down there, right?”

“Oh, can we?”

“Of course.” He closes the door for her and starts around the back of the car. “Lady Sansa wants to take a walk,” he tells their driver. The driver makes as if to follow them, but Jon pats the side of his chest. “I’ve got it.”

She always forgets about the gun he keeps tucked away there.

“Take the car around and lure the press away. They’ll figure out you’re dry eventually. Meet us at the top of those stairs in twenty,” Jon instructs. His orders are clear, succinct. The ease and certainty he speaks with sends a shiver up her spine. The driver nods and hurries back to the front of the car.

The engine revs loudly before easing the car up the alley’s steep incline. “C’mon,” Jon takes her hand lighty in his own and they dash across the street.

By the time the car turns the far corner and starts blaring its horn, they’re down the first few steps, slipping into the dark anonymity of the riverwalk. The echoes of shouts and engines revving to life fade quickly as they descend through the muffling foliage lining the stairway and path below. Soon enough, all they hear is the river’s gurgling whisper and the nightbirds’ songs. The North Bank’s steep and rocky geography makes it hard to see anything on the northern side of the Rush. The Red Keep rises bold and strong ahead of them in the east, the southernmost walls glowing pale pink under artificial nighttime lighting. It’s easier to see the South Bank from where they walk. Lighted windows pepper the buildings' black faces sleeping under massive, colorful marquees. The nightlife is beginning across the river, taxicabs inching along the quai and live music flowing out of the cafés and restaurants lining the Rush’s flatter, broader South Bank.

And still, Jon’s hand has stayed on her waist. She’d thought the way he’d held her hand had been a mistake, a glitch, but if it was, it’s a mistake twice over, now. His hand is warm and heavy, riding the curve of her hip. His thumb’s tucked itself into her skirt’s waistband, just barely, holding a precarious perch rather than working its way inside.

Sansa takes in a deep breath of the night air, cool and light after the heat of the late summer day, and sighs it out. Jon hums, too, and gives her waist a light squeeze. “Not a bad wedding present,” he remarks. “Probably better than what we must have managed as our first dinner as husband and wife.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of pulling together a dinner on short notice?” she asks, feigning offense. “You know better than that, Jon Snow.”

The rumble of his chuckle rolls through his side and into Sansa’s skin. “You’re fully capable. But even you wouldn’t have been able to work a miracle on my humble Night’s Watch salary.”

A flashing light approaches from the darkness ahead, swaying low to the ground. It’s a woman with a jogging stroller, the reflective strips on her feet bouncing against the ground. Jon and Sansa meander to the right to let her pass, catching a few notes of the pop song warbling in her earbuds.

“I would have at least stolen a bottle of Mama’s wine,” Sansa proposes. “And baked you an apple pie from scratch.”

“Apple pie? No lemon cakes?”

“When you’re cooking for someone else, you make their favorite, not your own.”

She hears his huff in the dark as he, too, remembers the night years ago when he kept her company during one of her early-morning insomnia baking marathons. His arm squeezes her close again. “You know, you have quite the memory.”

“Thank you.” A small smile creeps across her lips. “It’s actually one of my favorite things about myself.”

“It should be. I bet it’s gotten you out of a fair number of scrapes.”

Sansa nods, remembering. “It has.”

They walk along a little further, following the curve and bend of the pathway, somehow staying step in leisurely step with each other. The Rush chatters at them to their right, and late summer insects call to each other to their left.

“I was always so impressed with you, you know. Surviving down here,” Jon says. His voice comes quietly from the darkness, sneaking in at the edges so as not to startle her away. It makes her breath catch, anyway. “Keeping your shit together here at court. In front of Cersei. Joffrey. I can’t imagine how scared you must have been.”

“You don’t think I was stupid, not running like Arya?” It feels like self-betrayal, voicing hersef what she’s heard whispered around her for years.

And yet, she wants to know. Know what he thinks about her, and her choices. 

“No." He sounds sure. "Arya...she'd already slipped the guards, right? She ran because she could. You were still...inside. In sight. It would've been impossible, I think. Or maybe just a fast way to end up next to your father.”

“Maybe it would have been better, the two of us together,” she murmurs. The dark of the night and Jon’s arm around her waist make her tongue bravely honest.

“Maybe.” Now he's grudging, less sure. The path splits, and Jon takes the fork leading to a viewing ledge. “But maybe not. What happened to you, it was terrible, unspeakable. But it…tempered you. Like a sword. I could tell you were different, when you came home. Not just older and quieter, or sadder. Something deeper inside of you had shifted. You noticed more, listened more. I think living here, day after day, living day after day, heated you and bent you. Hammered you and sharpened you to a…truly deadly edge.”

Sansa steps away from Jon’s arm when they reach the viewing platform and wraps her fingers around the top bar of the railing. His speech has set her stomach on fire and turned her knees to jello. Still, she aims for light teasing when she speaks her words to the skyline of the South Bank. “King’s Landing turned me into a sword? I think you’ve read too many of the old Songs, Jon.”

He mirrors her in her periphery, bracing a palm on the railing and tucking the other hand into his pocket. “Well, whose room did I sneak them all from, huh?”

She can’t help the dart of her eyes to his face then, and her heart jumps to her throat to see the corner of his mouth crooked upwards affectionately.

She takes a step forward into his space and rests her fingertips on his arm. He’s solid, has been solidly by her side this whole trip. In her heels, she’s nearly his height. So, she leans in and waits. Watches his brow first furrow in confusion, then smooth into understanding. Hears his deep inhale and thinks about the perfume she’d dabbed behind her ears before leaving the Maidenvault.

His hands settle on her waist, warm and secure, and she tilts her head, and then they’re—

—No, they’re not , because he’s turned his head away, scanning the path over her shoulder. “Where are they?”

“Who?” she asks, dumbly, skin is still buzzing in anticipation.

“The press.”

The press . He thinks the press is nearby and that she’s—

Her stomach turns to ice. A burning sets up behind her eyes.

“Nowhere,” she says, stepping decisively back and away from him. He’s confused again, she can see it, so but she can’t bear it, to watch him realize the fool she’s made of herself.

But he’s seen it, the flash of shame and humiliation that’s flashed across her face. He reaches for her hand. “Sansa—”

She whips it out of her reach and heads back the way they came. “Just the wine rushing to my head,” she explains, dismissively.

“Sansa, wait!” he calls out.

But she’s already brushed past him and doesn’t wait for him to catch up. She crosses her arms across her chest and looks up at the moon, quarter-full and gleaming, oblivious, among the stars.

Chapter Text

Oh, fuck.

Fuck. FUCK.

He calls out her name, but she doesn’t turn around. He’s not surprised. He wouldn’t turn around for himself either.

He wants to take it back, his stupid question. Where are they? The press??   It was ridiculous, after everything they've shared over the past few days. And yet -- It’d been the only thing that made send to him, only seconds ago. Playing for the cameras had been the only sensible reason why Lady Sansa, First Daughter of House Stark, would want him to kiss her.

The pretense. The charade. The show.

It’s one thing, to flirt. To banter and joke with a beautiful woman over a glass of wine and good food. To make light of the insane lie the two of them are spinning out to keep her out of an antiquated arranged marriage just to make a king to feel more comfortable on his throne. But it couldn’t be real. Or so he’d thought.

Because then her beautiful, hopeful face collapsed in shame and humiliation and he’s never regretted something so quickly, so sharply in his life. The time Val slipped her room key into his hand during a conference at Frostfangs barely ranks. Turning down Ygritte’s offer to take a long weekend to the Summer Sea to reconnect was closer. He’d known by then that he needed to break it off. Now and then he lies awake at night and recalls Ygritte’s soft, cajoling brogue promising fun and adventure, and he wonders what could’ve been, what they could’ve been, if he’d gotten on that flight with her.

But watching Sansa stride away from him, arms protectively crossed around her middle, makes those events pale in comparison. She’s quick, and has long legs, too.

Then he’s cursing himself for letting her get so far ahead of him. He jogs after her. “Sansa,” he calls out when he’s a handful of paces away from her. Still, she doesn’t break her stride.

“Don’t.” She says, cold as a Northern gale.

“Sansa, I’m sorry,” he calls back, and then winces. They’re being too loud, especially for this conversation. He keeps his distance, but reaches into his pocket for his cell phone.

When the device blinks to life, his heart stops. He'd turned it off for their dinner but now--a slew of notifications crowd his home screen. There are two missed calls from Robb, one from Arya, another from Samwell, and unread text messages from the same.

His confusion gives way to horror and alarm. 

“Sansa,” he calls out. His voice sounds terrible, dark warning dark at its edges. She’s at the foot of the stairwell now, with the lamplight burnishing her copper waves. Elegant even in her anger, her fingers alight ever so lightly on the railing. Her Tully blue eyes slice back through the night, chill him to the bone. Still -- he knows something is wrong, and he warns her: “Sansa, wait for me, please.”

She takes flight, taking the stairs two at a time easily. Jon belatedly remembers her equestrian hobby, begrudgingly remembers that she spent hours out riding across the Moor Parklands and into the Wolfswood. He curses under his breath and gives chase. But she has the jump on him and, even in her skirt and heels, he knows within seconds that he won’t be able to close the gap.

He tops the stairs embarrassingly late, using the railing to lever himself out onto the street just in time to see Sansa’s nude pump disappear behind the closing sedan door. The car moves immediately into drive and turns left at the end of the street, leaving Jon behind.

The sprint up the stairs has put a sharp hitch in his side. Anger and frustration piggy back on the pain to sweep through him, and he wants to scream. He wants to hurl the time bomb that is his phone on to the street and even if just for that half-second of delight from the a destructive clash of plastic, glass, and metal against pavement.

Instead, he turns and flees halfway back down the Bank stairs. It’s dark and secluded there, away from prying eyes and hidden lenses. Jon grabs a hold of the cool railing and takes a deep grounding breath.

“Fuck,” he finally allows himself. Breathes it into the late-summer blooms that line the stairway down to the riverwalk. “Fucking Gods. Gods damn it.”

He looks down at the black mirror of his cell phone. If he has all those missed calls, then Sansa’s phone probably has similar alerts from House Stark and the Night’s Watch. Which means something has happened. Which means when he sees her again, they’ll need to debrief together.

Debrief. Jon takes another breath and reminds himself who he is. Jon, Lord of House Snow. A fostered son of House Stark, whose Lord and Lady raised him among their own children. A man of the Night’s Watch, with oaths sworn to protect and serve the family who took him in.

He listens to the rumble of the river, the hum of the summer insects. His thinking comes to him more clearly now.

His immediate concern is Sansa. She’s unlikely to answer a phone call or text from him at this point, so all he can do is hope that the only place a competent driver would take her without a security guard is the Red Keep. With the paparazzi scattered by their earlier ruse, her route home should be as direct and routine.

His next task, then, is to get back to the Keep. He can call a cab, but … he peers back through the trees to where the Red Keep sits atop Aegon’s Hill. It's far enough off that he thinks about calling a cab but...city cars are turned around at the gates. He squints at the Keep's towers, counts lamplights, and realizes, hell, the walk back will take him 20 minutes, tops.

Alright, then. Jon turns back to the street and steps back out onto the North Bank’s noted historic cobblestone roads. Everything through here was one-way, once upon a time, and the sidewalks only wide enough for two tightly abreast. Apparently the oil lamps are original, he remembers Sansa commenting in the car. He squints up at one as he passes by and, sure enough, a real, true flame flickers atop a wick the size of Jon’s thumb.

It’s a long walk back to the Red Keep, but it’s a good one. He hasn’t been alone for a long while. The sound of the Rush fills his ears and his head, grounding him as he walks along its bank. He replays it over and over in his head:

the weight of her hand,

the smell of her perfume,

the tilt of her head,

the way her lips had parted,

his out-of-body thoughts of this isn’t happening, not for real.

He pauses.

The Rush’s water collides with the concrete pilings of the bridge. He can feel the vibration of it through the soles of his shoes.

It’s white noise, letting him close his eyes and dream up the sound of her breathing softly, slowly, when she lies beside him in bed. Rising and falling, slow and calm. How natural it feels to match his inhales and exhales to hers. He’s always been an early riser, but lately he’s been content to stay between the covers in the gray morning light, listening to her breathe, knowing that when he shifts his legs, that there won’t be cold spots to shock his knees and toes. Not with Sansa besides him, helping to keep the bed warm.

She'd looked so pretty tonight. She done something to her hair to make it look glossy and soft. Her lipstick had been a daring berry shade. He hadn’t been able to look away from her mouth when she’d laughed. And the candlelight warmed her skin, uplit her face so Jon could trace the crinkles in the corners of her eyes each time she smiled.

Jon makes himself move, again. He reaches into his pocket for his phone.

Robb’s number rings twice and goes to voicemail. Sam’s gets to at least the fourth ring before his voice recites over the line, This is Agent Samwell Tarly, with the Stark Branch of the Night’s Watch...

Jon hangs up and tries to satiate the dread curling up his spine, the sweat breaking out under his jacket. His thumb hovers over Arya Stark for a long moment. The two of them used to talk daily, up until the whole “secret marriage” news. The sudden distance between them was new, unwieldy, and he’d be lying if he didn’t admit he wasn’t sure if they could ever go back to the way they were before.

But after a week of near radio-silence, she’s called him tonight. Twice.

It terrifies him.

He taps the call option. She picks up right away. “Jon? Jon? Is that you?” Her voice is high-pitched and desperate, just this side of hysterical, and oh, gods, he’s going to throw up.

“Arya—Arya,” he forces his own voice to stay firm and calm, to cut through her too-quick rambling. “Slow down. What’s happening?”

“Where have you been?” she half-wails. “No one’s been able to get through—”

“At dinner with Sansa—”

“—calling you over and over—”

“I know, I know—Arya, please, please breathe, I need to you tell me what’s wrong. What’s happened?”

“It’s Papa, it’s Papa, he had an accident and they—they took him into Winter City. To the hospital.”

And just like that, Jon finds himself sitting on the curb, fingers shoved into his hair. A car swerves, narrowly avoids sideswiping him. He barely registers it. His chest aches. He can’t breathe. His ribcage refuses to expand, his diaphragm won’t move.

On the other end of the line, his little sister takes little gasping breaths. He imagines her perched like a little bird on the edge of a sofa, hand covering her face.

“When—when was—when did this happen?” Jon asks.

“An hour ago. Maybe two?” There’s a glug of liquid in the background.

“Are you drinking?”

“Of course I am,” Arya half-cries, half-laughs.

“Okay.” He takes a breath. Arya’s had the presence of mind to find booze. The immediate emergency has therefore passed. He’s able to inhale, exhale a little better now. The adrenaline simmers quietly in his veins. “Lord Stark—Who’s with him?”

“Mama. Robb. They went with the ambulance. Edd and Sam, too, tearing down the Kingsroad behind them like bats out of hell.” She swallows her drink on the other end of the line. She’s clearly halfway to drunk. And... he can’t blame her. Maybe he’d be handling this a little better himself if he’d had another two glasses of wine at dinner. (Fuck, that Arbor Gold really was phenomenal.) “They, uh, they messaged me right before you called. The doctors have seen him, they’ve sedating him—”

“So he’s conscious? He’s awake? He was awake when they took him?”

“Yes, he was, he was. But—Jon, he was bad all the same. Bad. Ranting. Raving. I—I…I hadn’t seen him like that…the EMTs had to strap him down…” she trails off, swallows twice.

“It’s okay, Arya. It’s okay. You don’t have to be the one to tell me. Is Gendry with you? Miss Bea? Where are Bran and Rickon?”

“Gendry’s with me. Miss Bea is with the boys.”

“Good.” Jon’s still shaken, worried, but relief creeps in at the edges. Everyone is accounted for. Men of the Night’s Watch are with Lord Stark, who is already at the hospital. Bran and Rickon haven’t gotten lost in the fray. Knowing Miss Bea, they’re in the best care of them all, wrapped up in blankets and getting stuffed full of comfort food. There’s no need for him to be sitting on a curb like a vagrant. He pushes himself to his feet, dusts himself off. “And Sansa? You haven’t heard from her yet?”

A pause. “Isn’t she with you? Weren’t you just at dinner?”

“It’s, uh. Well. We fought. She took the car and…left me.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It’s bad.”

“She’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”

Jon winces. “No, this one’s on me. I really messed some things up.”

A dry laugh. “It’s not every day that Sansa and I agree on something.”

That pulls a small smile from him.“I’ve missed you, you know. Everyone here fakes their sincerity. It makes me homesick for your cynicism and sarcasm.”

“Yeah, it’s almost like I have a reason to be upset with you.”

“See? That’s what I’m talking about,” Jon says. And Arya can’t help herself; she laughs on the other end of the line. “Anyway. I could keep saying ‘I’m sorry’ forever, you know. Even though I am sorry.”

“Personal grudges are sort of my thing. They keep my expectations of humanity nice and low.”

He rolls his eyes. Arya does far more charity and volunteer work than anyone gives her credit for, but he lets her comments slide. “I wish I could explain everything, but it’s…a hell of a long story.”

 Arya huffs. “You have a long walk home by yourself in the middle of a city, Jon.”

“Just—seven hells.” His little sister’s snippy demeanor has always been one of his favorite things about her. But like a feral cat, she also has a habit of turning those needle-sharp teeth on her favorite human when annoyed.

He knows he owes her something, a kernel of the truth, a bone for her to worry and gnaw on, maybe crack herself and get to the marrow on her own. But he can’t blurt out the truth, not unless he wants to upset the status quo and get even further over the line on Sansa’s bad side. He takes the length of a crosswalk to figure out how to phrase what he wants to say.

He steps up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the road and begins. “Me and Sansa…there’s more to it than what everyone is saying. It’s complicated. Messy. But I can’t get into it because of where we are. The people we’re with right now.”

“Where you are? The Keep?” She asks, thoughtful, wondering. “At…Court?”

“It’s the kind of stuff you and I have never been good at,” he says, careful to not correct or reward her either way. “The stuff that comes naturally to Sansa and Lady Stark. I’m just—I’m letting Sansa take the lead on this, okay? And even that is probably too much to say.”

Arya’s quiet for a long moment. He doesn’t ask if she’s there. He can hear her breathing on the other end of the line. A male murmurs lowly in the background, asking what’s wrong. She’s thinking.

Finally, she responds, simply. “Okay. Alright.”

A strange euphoric buoyancy rushes through him at that. She doesn’t sound spiteful or angry, simply accepting and trusting. And all of a sudden, he feels like he can cry. It’s a good feeling, being able to let the frustrated and terrified tears he’s kept shoved deep down behind his sternum rise and be free.

She surely can hear how they thicken his thanks, Arya, but she—wisely, benevolently—doesn’t say a single sarcastic thing about it.

They hang up as Jon has to start the steep steps up to the gates of the Keep. Sansa's driver must have told security that Lord Snow had been left to hoof it back home, because the guards wave him through with only a brief pat down and a pass through the metal detector. His sidearm sets to buzzing, but, well, that’s to be expected. The civil staff is finishing out their late night tasks: carrying trays to the kitchen, pushing carts between buildings, lugging garment bags from the laundry facilities to the living quarters.

The crushed oyster of Maidenvault’s bailey yard crunches underfoot. Jon looks up at the building, counts up three floors and all the way to the right and sees that the three windows of their chambers are aglow. Sansa’s dark, willowy silhouette shifts against the pane. She lifts a hand and lets it rest against the glass. He wishes he could make out her expression, figure out if she’s heard the news and how she’s taking it.

But as usual, she remains enigmatic. Just out of reach.

Other than the guard at the front door and the concierge reading an Age of Heroes bodice ripper, the main floor is quiet. He checks his watch on the stairs — just a few minutes past 9 o’clock — and peeks down the silent corridor off the second floor landing. He holds his breath, listening.

Overly giddy babbling from the Oberyn and Elia’s suite—likely a cartoon chosen to amuse their grandchildren—and the whistles and jeers of sportscasting from Garlan and Leonette’s door. The news hasn’t, well, made the news yet, it seems.

Jon notices the security guard outside their at the end of the hall the second he steps into the third floor corridor. He forces himself to keep moving, to not give away his surprise. He could have been assigned to Sansa when she arrived without a guard, Jon tries to reassure himself. The man sees him but stays at ease, making no move to stop his approach.

Jon fishes out his entry card as he approaches. “Evening.”

“Evening, m’lord.”

He looks the other man up and down. A simple black suit, no tie, no attempt to hide his chest and thigh holsters. “What’s your name?”

“Izac Busheart, ser. I’m with the Kingsguard.”

“I figured as much. Who assigned you to this post, Izac?”

“Davos Seaworth, ser. He’s in the Small Council chamber with the King.”

Jon nods. He’s wrong, then. The King knows about the Northern emergency. But neither Izac’s face nor name rings a bell from his research on the Kingsguard’s upper ranks and the coordination memoranda in force between the two security forces. He’s in the uniform of a foot patrol officer, not dressed for combat. “Is anyone else inside with Lady Sansa?” He asks, giving the key card one last flip between his fingers.

“No, ser.”

He still feels like he was working with half as much information as he needs. But no matter why Izac is there, Jon needs to be at Sansa’s side. He swipes his card and pushes open the door.

***

She’s still at the window.

She looks back over her shoulder at him, eyes bloodshot and mascara ruined, and the sight of him sends her into another sobbing fit.

He crying is oddly silent. He sees her face crumple, a tear roll down her cheek before she turns away again. But the only sound she makes is that of her ragged breathing. Her shoulders shake with her suppressed sobs.

Jon drops his suit jacket on the bed and makes his way to her, slowly, tentatively, like you would approach a skittish dog. The carpet is plush, muffles his footfalls, and so he murmurs her name when he’s close behind her. She doesn’t move, but she doesn’t order him away either. So he reaches out and touches her shoulder lightly before running the broad plane of his palm across her shoulders.

Only then does she shiver to life, turning in place quickly, her long red hair brushing against him. He prepares himself for a slap, a hit, either in retribution for how he embarrassed her on the bank of the Rush, or as a paroxysm of grief and anguish. But Sansa surges forward, pressing her face into his neck and winding her arms around his shoulders. She clutches him to her with surprising strength, and he responds in kind, wrapping his arms around her waist and holding her fast as she gasps hot, ragged breaths into skin.

Jon runs a hand over her hair and presses a kiss to her temple. “I’m so sorry, sweetling,” he says, because what else can he say to her? Lord Stark took Jon in, and Jon loves him like a father, but he is Sansa’s father. She’s idolized him since they were children, always eager to earn his rare smiles and praise. Her words come back to Jon: I stopped going to see him. For a sword. He tightens his grip on her waist, kisses her head again. “I’m so sorry.”

“They won’t let me leave,” she tells him, when they finally pull apart.

“What? What do you mean?”

“After I talked to Mama—I said I wanted to go home. That I should be with my family. I called for a car, but the person said I wasn’t…I hadn’t been cleared to leave the Keep again tonight. And when I opened the door,” Sansa’s eyes moves from Jon’s face to the locked door behind him. “That man said I had to stay in here.”

A member of King’s Household holding a Great House’s First Daughter hostage? Hadn’t they nearly just fought a war over the very same issue? With the very same woman? It’s unacceptable. Jon turns on his heel and returns to the door, unsnapping his chest holster and pulling his handgun free as he goes.

Sure enough, Izac moves to block his exit when the door swings open. “Lady Sansa has had a family emergency and needs to return home to Winterfell immediately,” Jon tells him.

“Apologies, ser. That’s not possible.”

“It’s possible. And it’s happening. We’ll leave as soon as we’re packed.”

Izac notices Jon’s holding a gun in the hand dropped casually at his side. He shifts on his feet, wraps his own hand around the grip of the gun strapped to his thigh. “Holster your weapon, Lord Snow,” he orders. “It’s by King Stannis’ order that you and Lady Sansa are to remain inside this room.”

“It’s King Stannis’ order to keep Lady Sansa separate from her family?”

“It’s his order that his subjects remain secure under his protection while the situation develops,” Izac replies. “I won’t ask you again, Lord Snow. Holster your weapon and return to your quarters.”

He made a terrible mistake coming through that door, Jon thinks. He should’ve turned around the second he saw the guard, found a safe, quiet spot and called her from there and figured out a plan. But then he feels Sansa’s hands wrap around his wrist, covering the fingers clutching the gun. “Come back inside,” she murmurs. “He’s just doing what he’s been told.”

The indignity and affront still hums in his ears, but she gives a slight shake of her head and pulls gently at him, tugging him backwards. He lets the door go, and tries to glean as much satisfaction as he can from from the slam it gives when it hits the jamb.

***

“We think it’s best if you stay there in King’s Landing and go on through with Shireen’s wedding,” Catelyn tells them, her voice tinny through the speaker phone after telling them Ned’s stable, sedated, and comfortable in a private suite.

It’s taken nearly two hours to get a hold of her. Two hours of Sansa’s pacing from the bedroom, down the stairs into the solar, around the coffee table, back up the steps. Rinse and repeat. Two hours of leaving the television off, the screen black and foreboding. This is one news cycle both Sansa and Jon could do without passively observing. Lady Stark sounds detached and composed, despite the circumstances. Then again, Jon tries to think back to the last time he saw her uncomposed. Bran’s fall, probably. “It’s important to keep our commitments.”

“’Our commitments’?” Sansa parrots back to her mother, brow furrowed. She’s sitting next to Jon on the couch, the smart phone face up on the table in front of them. “You mean House Stark’s commitments?”

“Yes,” her mother replies. “I think—we think—that this new era calls for inter-House unity. Even in the tough times.”

“Surely you can just talk to Stannis—” Jon starts, but Sansa raises her hand, cutting him off.

“You’ve already spoken with him, haven’t you.” It’s a statement, not a question.

“Yes.” Robb’s voice, now. Low. Succinct.

Sansa’s eyes close. She takes a deep breath. “He told you I was going to have to stay here, didn’t he.”

“Yes.” Robb sighs on the other end of the line. “The threat of Northern secession during the war…he’s very serious about having our House represented at the wedding. It’s not just a show. It’s—”

“Politics,” Sansa finishes for her brother.

“I’m sorry, Sansa, I really—” He doesn’t get to finish. Sansa looks at the ceiling, shakes her head, and ends the call.

Jon waits. Her chest is rising and falling in long, controlled breaths. He can see her counting it out in her head. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.

“Well. There it is. There’s nothing for it,” she finally says, speaking numbly to the wall across the room.

He reaches out and covers one of her hands with his own. She doesn’t turn to look at him. So he shifts off the couch and takes a knee in front of her. “Sansa, if you want to go, I will get you out of here. I swear I will,” he promises, once she drags her blue eyes to his.

She lifts their clasped hands to her mouth and kisses his knuckles. “I know you would.” Her lips are soft and warm against his skin. His mouth is jealous of it. “I don’t want you to get hurt because of me, Jon.”

“That’s my exact job description, you know,” he reminds her. She laughs a little, sounding watery and defeated, but she doesn’t take it back. He runs a palm up her arm and asks, “Is there anything, anything at all I can do?”

She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You almost had a shootout with a Kingsguard and just offered to disobey Stannis and my own family to get me out of here. You’ve already done a lot, Jon.”

“I hurt your feelings, though. Earlier.” She looks away from him, tries to pull her hand back. She wants to curl up in a protective shell, but he doesn’t let her. He squeezes her hand instead, keeping it firmly between his own. “I should’ve let you kiss me. I should’ve kissed you.”

Her cheeks pinken. She shakes her head. “You don’t have to indulge me. I’m not a child.”

“Believe me, I know you’re not a child. And I want to indulge you.” Her blush deepens, and this time it’s Jon who kisses her knuckles. “I messed up. I assumed the worst. And you know what they say about ‘assumptions.’”

Her little laugh is genuine this time. “’They make an ass out of u and me.’”

“Exactly. I made an ass out of myself. Because you’re so far out of my league.”

“You’re a lord, Jon. You grew up with us at Winterfell.”

He nods. “I was an orphan, and your father took pity on me. He didn’t have to. But he did. So. I grew up in a house that wasn’t mine, with parents who weren’t mine. Lord Stark paid for my schooling, did you know that? Apparently my grandfather had a gambling problem. Nearly bankrupted everything. The estate’s fine now, of course. But that’s thanks to your father, too. He took control of the finances until I was 21, part of the wardship, you know. He made smart investments. Conservative ones. Didn’t do anything crazy trying gin up exorbitant returns. Just…kept a steady grip on the helm. And paid for six years of prep school, so that the trust wouldn’t be depleted. House Stark has been so good to me, Sansa. It’s part of why I joined the Night’s Watch. To do my best to pay it back. Because I’m so grateful. For all of it.”

Sansa listens to him talk. Doesn’t interrupt him. Doesn’t try to stop him. Just listens. When he trails off, she lifts a hand and tucks a curl behind his year. “Jon, Papa loves you. Robb loves you. You don’t owe us anything. We all love you.”

It’s a platonic love she means, he knows. A familial love. And yet hearing it sets his heart ablaze. Makes his eyes burn, just a little bit. “And I never want to betray that,” Jon admits. “But it’s there in my head. That I don’t belong.”

She kisses him. No hesitation or waiting, just slides her hand around the back of his neck and leans forward to press her mouth to his. He startles, but her thumb soothes the corner of his jaw, and then the surprise passes and he’s kissing her back. Slow, though, soft, letting her lead. Learning the tilt of her head and the slide of her tongue.

“There,” she whispers against his lips. “No betrayal. I’m the one doing the seducing.”

Always a quick thinker, this one. He tugs her to her feet, telling her as much, and leads her up the stairs to the bedchamber.

After everything tonight, they deserve some distraction.

Chapter Text

The bedchamber is an ethereal grey when Sansa blinks into wakefulness. She’s always been a light sleeper and an early riser, and her habits have only gotten worse in the past few years.

Or better, depending on how one looks at it.

The light outside is strong enough to push through the loose weave of the Braavosi cotton curtains. Out in the Maidenvault’s hallway, there are the faintest rustles of human awareness.  It’s mid-morning, perhaps 8 A.M., she surmises.

She wonders if Izak is still sitting outside their door.

Jon slumbers on behind her. His huffs of breath are warm and soft against the back of her neck, his arm lies heavy in the curve of her waist.

Jon .

She closes her eyes and remembers last night. Their desperate mouths, eager tongues, grasping hands. How they’d shed their clothes and inhibitions along with the fear and worry that’d blanketed them for hours. They’d let loose gasps and groans, moans and sighs. She can still feel him hard in her hand, feel his coaxing fingers between her thighs. She can still hear his encouragement rumbling in her ear, and the plush give of his lips between her teeth.

Her stomach twists, already warm. She closes her eyes to enjoy the quiet white noise of him as he moves into the waking world. The line of his arm is easy to trace—she drags her fingers from the bones of his wrist along along the cords of his forearm to the point of his elbow and back down again. His filling-out is a recent event, becoming a regular visitor to Winterfell’s gym only within the last few years. She thinks back to when Robert Baratheon first came to Winterfell with Cersei and Joffrey to ask Ned to be his Hand. Jon had stood behind her, a little to the right, she’s fairly sure. She’d winced that day, thinking how his haircut had made him look awfully young, and far ganglier than normal.

The reality is that they were both too young, too gangly, to appreciate what was to happen to all of them in the years to come, once Ned had bent the knee to Robert and said he would go wherever his King commanded.

Careful not to rouse Jon too much, Sansa reaches out for her phone. Her home screen is alight with notifications from her family’s group text thread. She scrolls through them, following her father’s progress through tests and evaluations by her mother’s messages. By 4 a.m., the hospital concluded that the Warden of the North had suffered a psychiatric event and would best recover at home, now that his physical heath had been assured. He was tucked back into his own bed by 6 a.m., just in time for Bran and Robb to begin bickering about who had and hadn’t shown up at the gym that morning.

“He’s home?” Jon’s sleepy morning voice startles her out of her reverie. He’s looking blearily at her screen over her shoulder, where she’s paused to expand a pic Arya had sent: her coffee cup in her lap, with Ned asleep in the huge antique bed he insists on keeping in the Lord’s chambers. Through the steam from Arya’s drink, she can see the lines of her mother slumped, asleep, against the back of the wingback chair.

“Yeah, he’s home.” She clicks her screen to darkness and puts it back on the nightstand. “Mama says that the CT and MRI scans came back clean. The doctors say it was all mental.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jon tells her, brow furrowed. His worry confuses her for a moment, because she’d felt nothing but relief seeing her texts this morning. Her father’s illness is so touch and go, a fine line between mental health and medical conditions. She’d been so terrified that this recent bout would trigger a heart attack like a year earlier, or a short bout in a medical coma, like the year before that. But…her husband is right. No matter the final diagnosis, it’d still been a horrific events with ramifications that would continue to spill over for days to come.

She’s still tracing the lines of his arms, sifting through her early-morning thoughts. He straightens out his fingers for her on her downstroke, lets her drift the pads of her fingers up over his knuckles and fingernails a few times before he twists his wrist and catches her fingers between his own. She pulls their interlaced fingers up to her chest, knowing he’ll feel the soft weight of her breasts.

“Thank you,” she whispers. Jon presses a soft kiss to her bare shoulder and gives the curve of it a light nip. The sharp pressure gives the warmth in her belly another churn. It also eases the guilt she’d been feeling for pressing kisses to the the smooth planes of Jon’s chest and shoulders and breathing through the insistent pressure of his fingers on her clit around the same time her father was being transported home from the hospital. “I’m just glad it’s not as bad as it could be.”

He drags his gaze down her face, her neck, the wide swath of bare skin that stretches from shoulder to shoulder above the duvet’s edge. She’s acutely aware of that she’s near-naked below the covers, and that he is too. Her nipples tighten underneath the crisp sheets, her bare arms go to gooseflesh in the cool air in the bedchamber. “It’s important to keep a positive attitude,” he agrees. Now it’s his turn to chafe a warm palm up her arm, over the curve of her bare shoulder, and across her décolleté. His eyes follow the drag of his palm over her skin. She can’t look away from his half-lidded stormy gaze, but she feels how a finger traces over her clavicle, and his thumb drops into the notch of her collarbone.

He’s edging closer to her, getting his mouth within kissing distance and his fingers dragging dangerously near to the top edge of the blankets at her chest.

Then the door beeps and swings inward.

“Good morning, Lady Sansa, Lord Snow,” Danyelle chirrups. Her cheeriness is forced, falsely bright. Sansa knows, immediately, that the castle staff have been briefed on her father’s condition. For his own part, Jon goes still at the lady’s maid’s intrusion, hand frozen in place over the thump of her heart. It rises and falls with her breath. “It’s half-past eight. The bridesmaid’s luncheon is at eleven o’clock in Princess Shireen’s private solar in Maegor’s—”

“I’m feeling dreadful, actually,” Sansa interrupts. Jon’s eyes flit up to hers at her words.

Danyelle abruptly stops fussing with the plastic film covering the dry cleaning she’d brought in with her. “My lady?”

“I don’t feel well. Not well at all,” Sansa sighs, feigning a disinterested drawl. Jon curls his fingers, drags the blunt edges of his nails across the soft skin of her chest. “It must have been something I ate.”

On the other side of the room. Danyelle opens her mouth. Closes it. Waves a hand at the footmen to hurry them out. Sure enough, a strange man’s voice drifts in from the hallway as the younger men leave, asking whether the lordling inside is awake, that he’ll miss the stag hunt if he insists on being a layabout on the King’s dime.

Jon’s eyes flash up to Sansa’s. Her lady’s maid can’t see the expression that rolls across is face, but she can surely hear his annoyance when he adds, “Yeah, it must’ve been something we ate.”

“Would you be a dear, Danyelle, and pass the message along? That Lord Snow and I won’t make it to this morning’s events?” Sansa’s hopes, somewhere at the edge of her awareness, that her contrition comes across as sincere. But a selfish side of her just…doesn’t care. There’s no reason for any of them to pretend—Danyelle knows exactly what’s happened. It’s why she hasn’t said anything about their new babysitter, or about Lord Stark, or about the King’s expectations.

The King’s expectations can go fuck themselves, Sansa thinks. If he wants to treat her like a prisoner, she’ll give him a prisoner. Stannis hadn’t been in the Red Keep when Sansa would beg off engagements, using her monthly cycles or her poor nerves as an excuse to not attend state events on Joffrey’s arm.

Let him feel a woman’s sting now, she thinks. She curls her fingers around Jon’s wrist. Pulls the heel of his palm down, until it’s bunching up against the sheets covering her chest.  

Luckily, Danyelle doesn’t insist too hard upon staying. She fusses for a moment, asking if Sansa is sure, if Jon is positive, and then she’s gone. The door gives a decisive click behind her as she leaves, and then they’re alone again.

Everything’s narrowed—ridiculously, really—to the drag of Jon’s finger across her lips. In any other circumstance, Sansa would think she’d lost her mind, letting one man take over so much of her attention. Between Joff and Petyr, she’d thought she’d had quite enough of that. But Jon is different. Jon’s known her since she was young, sees her when he looks into her face, drags his finger from the corner of her mouth up over her cheekbone.

The silence is killing her.

“What’re you thinking?” she breathes.

His grey eyes snap up to hers, teasing and dark. “That I can’t believe I used to think you were off-limits.”

His hand dips beneath the sheets and covers her breast. She arches into him. “And now that I’m not?”

Finally, finally , he kisses her. And not a moment too soon—she’d thought she was going to have to reach out and drag his face down to hears if he didn’t move first. She opens her mouth and licks into his own, reaching up to grab at his curls. His fingers stroke wickedly at her breast, and she doesn’t care if he hears the moans she can’t care to smother at the back of her throat.

She’d made worse noises the night before, after all. When he’d coaxed her out of her blouse and bra, and then spent what felt like an eternity holding her arching, keening body close to his mouth so he could suck and lave at her sensitive breasts and the soft skin in between. She can still feel the bite of the carved headboard in her palms.

With the sheets pushed to her waist, Jon rolls a peachy-pink nipple between his fingers, encouraging the firm puckering of her areola. The memories of the night before, of sitting astride him, of his hands pulling her against the hard line of his prick in her boxers, urge her to roll him onto his back and let the kinky tendrils of her slept-on auburn hair slip over her bare shoulders.

“You didn’t answer me, Jon,” she hears herself say. Her need has the words more high pitched and desperate than she’d like, but she’s more enthralled with Jon’s torso stretched out between her thighs, his arms up over his head where her hands pinion his wrists to his pillows. His biceps, deltoids flex up against her grip, feeling for her weight behind it. “What’re you thinking, now that I’m not off limits?”

His grey eyes blink up at her. A slow smile curls across his lips. A quick twist of his own hands, and then she’s slipped, fallen, caught herself again—in his own grip, this time. She gasps, delighted, and he bites his lip at the sway of her breasts. “I think…that I’d like very much to take you to bed.”

“We’re already in bed. So, what comes next?” Sansa breathes against his mouth.

He kisses her, slow and deep, letting her arms fall to support her around his head while he slowly, lazily, drops his arms to drape around her waist. “Now I show you how much you deserve it.”

It’s heavenly. All of it.

Sansa’s known Joffrey’s demanding fingers. Littlefinger’s coaxing hands. She’d even searched among the ranks of Winterfell’s staff for a partner, and had only ever found tentative kisses and cautious, conservative bouts of lackluster sex for her efforts.

But Jon.

Jon.

He doesn’t beg her permission to yank her knees into place, or to pull her mouth down to his own. No—he tightens his fingers in her hair until she hisses in pleasure, sucks at the tender skin of her tits until he leaves twin blooms just above each peak of her breasts.

“You’re lucky my dress will cover them,” she says into the pillow near his ear, breathless, as his fingers coax spasms from her cunt once more.

“That’s luck?” He slides his fingers down, up and in , letting out a satisfied chuckle as Sansa whines and shakes around his hand. “Quite un lucky, I think. How about you cut your neckline down a bit, hmm?”

“Jon Snow,” she teases him, leaning back and tracing the paper thin margin of pale skin that lies between his bruises and the puckered flesh of her areolae. “You want all Seven Kingdoms and the Summer Isles to see where you’ve claimed me.”

He sits up at that, wrapping an arm around her hips to keep her close. “Maybe I’ve changed my mind.” He burrows his face into her neck and urges her to keep moving against his erection. “Let’s stay in. It’s what they want, right? For you and me to stay put? Out of sight?”

“They want us to be what they want, when they want. Quiet. Under wraps. Docile.” Sansa leans over and reaches for a condom in the nightstand drawer, no longer offended at the awkwardness of contraceptives in the Maidenvault chambers. A thrill courses through her, instead, not unlike what had rushed through her veins when she’d spoken up in front of Joffrey, showing him he couldn’t control her even when she knew she’d regret it later. “Let’s give Isak something to report, hm?”

Jon’s brow furrows, his expression at odds with the twitch of his prick as Sansa backs herself down his lap. He doesn’t grab her hands, just cups her neck and urges her to look at him even as she palms the length of his cock in his boxers. “You’re sure?” He breathes as she tugs them down. “Sansa, you’re sure—”

His breath cuts off in his throat as she wraps her hand around him, pumps him firmly once, twice, thrice. He whispers nonsense under his breath, pulls her closer, kisses her again, lets her twist her wrist over his head.

“I’m sure,” she breathes. She presses her forehead to his and watches as the slow, steady pumps of her loose fist wrings beads of milky precum from his prick, which brings to her tongue on the pad of her thumb to taste. Then it’s a blur, because Jon’s taken the condom from her and rolled it down over his shaft. He’s gripped her hips, hauled her up and forward—

It’s bliss , having Jon inside of her.

She rises up, falls down, tucks her toes and rises up again with her palms spread over his belly. She feels his hands running up over her arms, across her chest, down her belly, while she works herself over him. He’s a dream— this is a dream. He keeps one hand at her hips, the other at her breast, sighing raggedly in time with her while they fuck each other.

Off-limits . I’m not off-limits. He’s not off-limits .

She cups his shoulders. Drags her palms inwards over his firm chest, feels the heave and roll of his body into her own. Feels for the grab and pull of his hands over her flanks, her thighs, her belly.

“You want me—” she hiccups.

“—damn right I do—” he grunts in reply.

“You want me —”

“Yes—”

And then it’s just white light.

White light, shivering moans, and quake and give of his body under hers.

Chapter Text

Sansa and Jon stride up to Maegor’s, baking in the heat that rolls off the sun-warmed stone walls and from the photographer’s flashing lightbulbs. There’s a carpet rolled out for guests to walk on, a dramatic stripe of red spilled across the white field of crushed oyster. Reporters call out her name, Jon’s name, lob personal questions in their direction. What they want is a glare, a crumpled chin, a furrowed brow that they can say are due to frayed nerves and split loyalties.

Winterfell’s press office has gone quiet. The unanswered emails and voicemails aren’t giving the journalists the frantic energy required to fuel their business, to keep royal watchers tuned in to the entertainment channels, ready and willing eyes and ears for the ads that flicker across the screen. The pundits say it’s as a sign of confusion and worry within the household. They must all have been kept awake through the night, holding vigil at their unresponsive Lord’s bedside.

The truth is that the House has given the press office the long weekend off for the festivities. Sansa had hung up the phone with her father not even an hour ago.

So for Sansa to give them serene indifference, poised elegance, sends them into a thicker froth. But it’s easy for her to ignore their rabid clamoring—the weight of Jon’s palm on her hip is all she cares about. The same can be said for the quirked smile he shoots her in the shadows of the prime time lights as they move along the long stretch of photographers.

Ned had been cogent, articulate on the other end of the line while Danyelle hooked undergarments and zipped grey silk. He’d asked about the recent trip to the Civil War’s new memorial and about Jon’s old schoolmate Theon. Sansa’d blinked back happy tears and told him everything was good, really good, Papa .

Only a glimpse of Margaery ahead of them keeps Sansa from preening in front of the cameras. Loras is still laid up at Queen Alysanne’s with a triple fracture and a torn ligament. His football career seems over and done with—that’s the story being spun on the nightly shows. Of course, he’s a son of a Great House of the Seven Kingdoms. It’s not like he’s ever needed the money. But Sansa watches Margaery work her way up the red carpet with scant words spoken to the television and radio hosts and rests assured that she’s not the only one having to grit her teeth and bear tonight with a happy smile.

“Lady Sansa! We’re reporting that your father is still comatose in Winter City. Is that true?” A W7 reporter with shocking grey ringlets calls out from the carpet’s edge.

W7 is the sole major network that broadcasts to all seven kingdoms and to the Free Folk Beyond the Wall. It’s also one of the only networks with a halfway-ethical newsroom that has honored embargoes and requests for privacy in the past. She takes a step forward. Jon doesn’t hold her back.

“My father is awake and recovering at home, thank the Old Gods and the New. My mother and siblings are keeping him company.” Sansa smiles into the camera lens. The rectangular shape within the circular lens has always confused her—surely cameras would collect footage in rectangular dimensions these days—but she responds politely to a few of Hathor Veille’s follow-up questions before stepping away.

Jon’s fingers brush her wrist in a mimicry of leading her, his old bodyguard habits dying hard. But they’re beyond that now. Sansa twists her hand and threads her fingers through his as they move forward along the line into the Holdfast. Lights pop on the far side of the carpet, shouts of their names increase in volume and frequency.

She lets them fade behind her as they pass through the gate. Out of one lion’s den and into the other—but at least this swirl of hunting beasts has a standing agreement: No journalists.

"Are you sure we're in the right place?" Jon breathes the question in to Sansa’s ear. She takes in the setting around her and smiles.

"Don't let Stannis and Selyse fool you," Sansa says. She keeps her voice low, like the hand Jon has let linger on her back. "Shireen is quite romantic."

They've crossed through the gate into Maegor's Holdfast, done up tonight as a softly-lit space meant to cocoon the royal family’s guests in privacy from the guantlet of shrill screams they’ve just left behind them. Faerie lights twine around tree branches and shrubs. Torches burn low along the path, illuminating the steps up to the pair of heavy wooden doors that are swung wide open to the late summer sunset.

His thumb drifts up and down over her hip. "A little romance isn’t a bad idea."

He’s talking about morale, surely. About the Kingdoms, the smallfolk, and the joy, after years of bloodshed and hardship, of watching a young, happy couple swear to love each other forever. And yet—her heart skips. Her lips, still tingling from earlier this morning, pull into a smile.

Footmen usher them into the black and white tiled foyer. The Queen's Ballroom just beyond is sociably dark, with tables arranged for dinner and topped with candles and bouquets. A string quartet plays in the corner. At the high table, Sheireen and Quentyn have their heads dipped together in quiet conversation. The prince reaches up and tucks a wayward lock of Shireen's hair behind her ear. Two little Florent girls hold hands and spin raucously off-beat on the dance floor. Their hair is dressed with ribbons for the occasion and they amuse themselves with the swirl of their grown-up dresses. Guests mill around them, wrapped in yards of taffeta, lace, wool, twinkling glasses in hand.

"A drink?" Jon tilts his head towards one of the sleek bars lining the walls.

But Sansa’s gaze snags on a familiar male figure on the other side of the ballroom. Her uncle, the Blackfish. He’s dressed in his military blues, red flashing at his shoulders and wrists. He lifts an arm in greeting. “Get me a glass of Dornish Red,” she asks, and parts ways with him with a squeeze of the hand.

Brynden Tully wraps her in strong arms when she reaches his side. He smells like the river itself, like her mother. Sansa lets her nose rest in the crook of his neck for a long moment, breathing in the smell of family and home. The tall, broad-shouldered woman with close-cropped blonde hair that Brynden’d been speaking to quietly slips back into the crowd before he has a chance to introduced them.

“I’ve spoken to Cat already, sweetling,” he interrupts her, gently, when she starts to rattle off the diagnoses and prognoses that have been sent her way over the course of the day. “Your father’s a tough man. And he’s got the best woman in the world looking after him right now.”

“I’ll be sure to tell Mrs. Bea you spoke so highly of her,” Sansa replies, trying for humor. It’s tough, but the joke feels like a better choice than thinking too closely about her family so far, far away.

Her uncle plays along, chuckling and squeezing her hand. “Please do. And here’s another compliment to pass her way: she makes the best beef and bacon pie I’ve ever put into my mouth.”

“You’re just angling for special treatment next time you visit,” she teases.

“I don’t see why the two things can’t both be true. I’m long overdue for trip North, as it were. Catelyn’s said as much, the last few times we’ve talked.”

Sansa shakes her head. “She just misses you. There’s no hard feelings. Edmure and Roslin have needed you.”

“Aye, that little one’s going to be a handful, I can already tell.” The Blackfish’s voice is husky, rough, after so decades of shouting to be heard out on ships’ decks. But his blue eyes crinkle at the edges while he talks about his grandnephew. “He’s already lifting up his head when you come into the room. Looks you right in the eye when you talk to him. Give him a few years, when he’s walking and talking, and he won’t be satisfied with ‘because I said so,’ that’s for sure.”

“Oh, uncle, he’s just a baby.”

“And I’ve seen my share of babes over the years. Arya and Bran — they were the same as Edmure’s little lad. Always watching the world around them with skeptical eyes even from the cradle.”

It’s true, and it makes Sansa laugh. Arya never heard an order she didn’t question, and Bran never met a rule he wanted to break. “At least I was a delightful and quiet child.”

“‘Quiet,’ yes,” her uncle drawls, one salt-and-peppered brow creeping up. “Quiet because you were listening, sometimes a little too closely. Do you remember your father used to bring you to meetings and let you play in his office? He’d meant to make things easier on Cat, with Robb and Jon running amok and her already pregnant again. But then you started repeating state secrets to your nannies and visitors—”

“I don’t remember this at all!” Sansa protests. “Playing in father’s office, yes, but not the rest!”

“It’s the truth. That’s why your mother called South for that septa of yours, Gods rest her soul.”

“Septa Mordane,” she murmurs. It lines up. Not only had the septa watched over her like a nanny, but she’d worked hard to teach Sansa about the importance of her family’s position, and the trust that the Crown had placed in her father as Warden of the North.

Sansa flips through the values Septa Mordane taught her: Modesty. Discretion. Loyalty. Being seen and not heard. Those lessons haven’t just served her well—they’d saved her life.

Her uncle rests his hand on her shoulder, breaking her out of her reverie. His smile is soft under his goatee, trimmed immaculately for the occasion. “Tonight isn’t the night to dwell on the past, my love.” He nods at something across the room. Sansa turns and follows his gaze, landing on Jon talking with Asha and Theon Greyjoy at the bar. “The princess is getting married tomorrow. Go love on your husband — don’t waste your evening with an old fart like me.”

She protests, insisting he’s not an old fart, that he’s charming and entertaining, but he waves her off. He promises to come North soon, but makes her swear she’ll bring Jon out riding with them. Then he all but spins her around and pushes her away from him. She can’t blame him too much—she’d seen Varys of all people creeping in the margins of the room while she’d spoken to her uncle, and Oberyn Martell has been darting his gaze in Brynden’s direction, waiting for an opening.

She leaves the Blackfish to his political machinations and heads back towards Jon. The suits and tuxedos Rhaegar has sent over hug his body like a glove. Sansa can’t help how her eyes trace the line of his spine and appreciate the snug cut of his waist, especially in among all of the rotund politicians of the realm.

She moves between two of the weight-bearing pillars, aiming to cut the corner of her path back to his side, and suddenly draws up short. King Stannis is standing right in her way, his blue eyes cutting up to hers.

It’s an odd pocket he’s chosen, a narrow sliver of a blindspot in the otherwise wide-open space. It’s nearly prophetic. Sansa chances a glance over her shoulder at the front of the ballroom. His Red Woman sits at the end of the royal table, the gem in her necklace glowing red at the base of her throat.

Nearly prophetic.

His voice draws her back. “My condolences for your father, Lady Sansa.”

“Thank you, Your Grace. I would pass them along to my mother and brother, but I’m sure you’ve already done so yourself.”

“Yes. I spoke with them last night.”

She curtseys, holding it an inch deeper and a second longer than needed. “Our House is honored by your attention, Your Grace.”

Courtesy is a lady’s armor, Septa Mordane had told her once upon a time. Only with time has Sansa learned the truth of it. Stannis fought and bled for the crown, but like most kings Sansa has seen in her life, he’s never fully grasped how his status can be used against him. She sees the suspicion glinting at the edges of his sharp eyes, and then the confusion when she waits for him to continue the conversation. He’s as tempered in the heat of the last decade as she is, but his path has been one of making risky moves and winning on them. Hers has been to hold still and calm to survive the political headwinds buffeting the throne.

Stannis, the wartime chancer he is, makes the opening move. “I trust you’ll enjoy our hospitality this evening with as much cheer as you can muster.”

“A party is indeed a party, despite the unfortunate circumstances,” Sansa parries, folding her fingers together in front of her gown. The lavender-grey river pearls in her ears and strung around her neck accentuate the tulle fluttering at her shoulders.

Stannis tilts his head. “I’m glad we have an understanding. The crown princess’s wedding is an important event for the realm, not just the crown. Or for House Baratheon alone. It’s a new dawn for us all, a new future for a new generation.”

He’s not drinking anything, she notes. As if aware of her gaze, he tucks his hands into his pockets. Sansa drags her eyes back up to his and sees they’re settled somewhere far over her shoulder. She follows it back to the high table for a second time in the past few minutes and takes in the sight of Shireen giggling at a whispered compliment Quentyn is coaxing into her ear.

She’s lovely tonight. Her ivory gown is embroidered with golden thread. A coronet set with onyx glitters in her dark curls. She lightly swats her fiancé’s hand, and if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t notice that scarring makes her grin lopsided. Sansa turns her gaze back to the king’s. “How long have you dreamed of this moment?”

“Years.” Something like a smile curves at the corner of his mouth. “Decades.”

“Shireen’s beautiful. She’s a true princess of the realm,” Sansa admits. “You should be proud.”

“I am.”

“She’s been so inviting this whole time I’ve been back in the capital. I like her a lot. She’ll be a good queen one day. It’s only out of respect for her and Prince Quentyn that I haven’t made an outrageously public attempt to escape.” Stannis’s eyes dart back to Sansa’s, his nostrils flaring wide, hands curling into fists in his pockets.

“You would dare—”

“I haven’t dared, Your Grace. I’m here, aren’t I? Surely I’m not in trouble for following the instructions you’ve given me?” she says, giving a facetious blink of her heavy lashes.

“Speak your mind, Lady Sansa. You know Southern dissembling has never curried my favor,” the king grinds out.

“Very well.” Sansa looks out over the thick crowd milling around the Queen’s ballroom. So many bodies. So many souls. Personalities. Dreams. Heartbreaks. “Have you ever thought about your titles, Your Grace? ‘Lord of the Seven Kingdoms’? ‘Protector of the Realm’? ‘King of the Andals and the First Men’ — Whoever they are these days. No mention of the Westerosi. Not the smallfolk. Not even the Great Houses. You rule the land. The land . And that’s an easier job, isn’t it? People have memories, after all. We remember .”

Her eyes settle back on his, Tully blue meeting Baratheon blue. “I’ll remember. Jon’ll remember. Margaery will certainly remember. My brothers will remember. You’re the king, yes. But that means there will be a large cache of memories made over the years. About you .”

***

The next thing Sansa really takes note of is Jon’s palm cupping her elbow and guiding her through the crowd, until they’re standing alongside the Greyjoy siblings. Like all good Ironborn, those two had figured out the alcohol situation before anything else, even the food. Theon stays edged to the side while his sister makes small talk with Sansa and Jon. Robb's done his best to forgive his old school friend for tucking tail and running home when the war broke out, but, Theon has clearly held onto his shame and humiliation.

"Did you hear? They have all of Maegor's open tonight," Ashara drawls. "You can stick your nose wherever you like. Prime opportunity to snoop around."

"I used to live here," Sansa reminds her, still sharp and raw from her conversation with the king. "I don't think there are any more secret rooms left for me to find."

She’s sucked down half her wine by this point, and is warm again from drinking on an empty stomach. Jon thumbs her wrist and leans in when handsome Dickon Tarly makes a pass at an uninterested Ashara. "We don't have to stay long,” Jon murmurs into her ear. “We can make up an excuse. I know you don't have good memories of this place."

His eyes search her face, looking for relief or confirmation. He's thinking about her comfort, about what would make her happy tonight, a night that isn’t about her at all. It takes her a moment to answer, because she'd been so focused on the photographers, on Stannis, on the other guests, on Jonjon jon at her side that she’d…forgotten.

And that’s what surprises her, even more than his offer. This ancient castle had once been the source of her deepest fears and, after she'd left, her most terrifying nightmares. But tonight, it’s laughter, not dread, that hangs in the air. Once upon a time, the ladies of the court had huddled together and trembled at the boom of mortar bombs and rattling gunfire. They’d prayed for deliverance and mercy. Years and kings later, partygoers laugh, offer toasts, lean into selfies with smiles, pose for photographs with cocked hips.

Sansa turns back to Jon. "It doesn't look the way I remember it," she says. It's a vague answer. Cryptic, even. But his nod is slow and understanding. His expression changes from concerned back to warm and affectionate, and when he squeezes her hand, she squeezes back.

Stannis’ angry, clenched jaw flashes across her mind, as does his tight-fisted attempt to keep her in line. A spiteful spontaneity strikes her, and she lets the idea tumble across her tongue before thinking too much about it. “Oh, why not. Let's have a look around, Jon. You've never been inside before, right? I'll give you a tour."

He demurs, satisfied as always to do no more than lurk benignly at the edges of the Great Houses. She wants to show him what it’s like to roll in the decadence and extravagance of it all. So she grabs his hand and drags him out of the Queen's Ballroom and into the corridor. She leads him from room to room, encouraging him to touch the porcelain handles of precious vases and thumb the gold-leafed frames of the priceless portraits hanging in the halls.

It's not the easiest tour she's given, because even as she wants to drag precious collectibles from their shelves, smash them on the floor and laugh at the chaos, her attention keeps getting snagged on the weave of his fingers through hers and each delicious square inch of his skin against hers. If Jon’s aware of her odd mood, it only manifests itself in an attempt to soothe her. His palm makes broad strokes across her waist, his mouth keeps finding the sensitive spots of her throat, her shoulder, her wrist.

Stannis's solar sits in the southernmost corner of the Holdfast, the last of the public rooms on the keep's ground floor. Bound tomes line the shelves. The Baratheon sigil is prominently displayed throughout. Touches of Stannis-the-man peek through here and there: a candid picture of him and Selyse on their wedding day, her veil had caught by the wind, a photo of little Shireen playing in the dark sand of Dragonstone's beaches, a family photo of the three Baratheon princes from their private-school days.

As she pauses to look over a scrap of weathered, aged stag embroidery that had been framed and set in a place of honor on the bookshelves, Jon's footsteps pad up behind her. He walks slowly enough that her heart beats faster in her chest. The stitches are swimming on the fabric by the time his hands settle on her hips, pressing heat through the fabric to the skin underneath. His lips ghost down her neck, and then his warm heat of his mouth sucks a kiss to her shoulder.

"Jon," she half-whines, half warns. The room is set apart from the party, but the door to the corridor stands open.

"I know," he breathes, but his hands spread up and across her ribs.

She can't help herself. She turns in his arms and lets him kiss her there in Stannis's solar. He's greedy from the start, dropping his jaw so he can lick into her mouth and suck on her lip. She shivers and he tries to back off, but she's not done with him yet. She grabs his lapels and pulls him back. He falls into her eagerly, easily, getting a hand around the back of her neck. The calluses on his fingers from his combat training catch on the sensitive skin and she sighs into his mouth.

He feels so good against her like this, pressing her back into the king's bookcase, his hands encouraging her to arch against him. She'd thought the sleepy press of their bodies in bed was enough to drive her mad, and that the frenzied grabs from the other night would set her on fire, but this feeling--purposeful, promising--is even more intoxicating. How can she be expected to ever spend time around him again without wanting his hands always on her waist, his mouth always against her own?

"Oh--uh--" There's startled shuffling in the doorway. Jon and Sansa leap apart, putting a solid three feet between them in half a second. She catches a glimpse of Trystane Martell and Edric Dayne in the doorway, hastily backing into the hallway, nearly tripping over each other, before she whirls to face the bookcase and pat at the neckline of her gown.

"Sorry! Sorry! Don't mind us," one of them laughs--half nerves and half surprised delight--and then they're gone.

When Sansa looks back over at Jon again, his cheeks are pink, and she can feel that hers are too. They hold each other's gaze for a minute, then a giggle breaks through the press of her lips. It breaks whatever suspense had been holding Jon, because he laughs as well, and then walks back over to her and presses a reassuring kiss to her cheek.

"Hold on," he murmurs, giving a firm tug to the fabric of her dress. The zipper shifts back to lie along her spine, and Sansa claps her hands to her hot face to muffle another laugh. “Could’ve told me earlier that a few kisses were all you needed to get into a better mood.”

He's smiling, though, clearly in a good mood himself and she tilts her head and kisses him again, chastely flirting. "It's the wine," she fibs.

"We should get back, huh?" he asks. But he doesn't step away, and keeps his hand on her back.

They should get back. They should mingle and smile and make small talk and represent the family. But Sansa wants . She wants to keep kissing him. She wants his arms around her. She wants to pull his mouth to her neck, her chest, so the stubble of his beard scrapes across swathes of skin left neglected for so long.

"Do you want to see the gardens?" she asks, hearing how breathless she sounds and not caring a whit about it. Nor does Jon, it seems, because his eyes flick down to her mouth and darken.

"Yeah," he nods. "Sounds...pretty."

Out in the hallway, larger-than-life statues of Orys and Argella flank the foot of a stairwell that she tugs him around and through an arched portcullis. Sweet, clean, grassy air fills their lungs, and it's so dark just beyond the open doors leading into the Queen's Gardens. Jon pulls her closer, and she thinks yes, yes, now--

--and then--

"Oh, hello, there," Margaery drawls.

She and Wylla Manderly are tucked into the corner of the small terrace, hovering at the knife's edge of light slicing out into the night. Sansa had already noticed the exquisite artistry of Margaery's black gown earlier tonight. Her lazy lean against the carved railing only emphasizes the skirt's dramatic flare and volume. Inside, near the neon lights backlighting the bars, Wylla had looked sleekly alien in her cream silk sheath and pastel green hair. Out here, though, the dark of the night and beside weathered, mossy stonework, she's taken on a fae, ethereal look. She winks at Sansa before ducking her head to her cupped palms. A lighter pops and the crisp smell of burning tobacco fills the air.

Margaery holds out a silver cigarette holder. "Want one?" Jon takes one. Sansa doesn't. With a shrug, Margaery flips the case closed. "Suit yourself."

Sansa had never picked up the smoking habit like the older boys. Catelyn had disapproved, so Sansa had disapproved, and she's not upset about it. Her lungs will thank her in about forty years. She positions herself upwind and watches Jon pop the filter between his lips.

Has he always held it between his teeth like that?

Jon stops from touching the flame to the end of the cigarette at the last second. He settles a wary eye on Margaery. "Is there anything in here?"

"Are you kidding me? With King Grump in there?" Margaery rolls her eyes and takes a long drag of her cigarette. "I wish."

Jon lights his own and blows out a stream of smoke through his nose in a half-chuckle.

"So, what are you two kids doing out here?" Wylla asks.

Sansa glances at Jon. Jon looks back at her. "Jon's never been inside Maegor's," she decides on saying. "I'm giving him a tour."

The corner of Margaery's lips twitches upwards. Sansa becomes very aware of Jon's hand in hers and the brush of his sleeve against her arm.

A question about Loras dances on her tongue. She wants to deflect, to turn the tables, get Margaery on the back foot like she’d gotten Sansa.

But Margaery has escaped outside for a smoke for the same reasons she has — to get away from those questions. And while the drag of Margaery’s eyes between Jon and Sansa is piercing and amused, it’s not mean, and Sansa takes it with a smile.

Soon enough, Margaery ashes her cigarette over the railing. “Of course. The roses are a must-see." She waves her hand. "Go on, then, before the Septon sees you."

Sansa turns away before Margaery can be sure of her blush. She's glad that the chuckle Jon gives is good natured, far from offended or embarrassed. They step off the terrace and head into the hedgerows, following the crushed-oyster path. The light and noise fades with each step. Within a turn or two, it's as though they're a mile away from the rehearsal gala inside.

She's so content walking in the darkness, listening to the trickle of a nearby fountain and enjoying the silvery light of the moon, that she doesn't realize they've been walking in silence until Jon switches the lace of their fingers and asks, very softly, where she wants to go.

"This way," she replies, nodding at a path to their left. "It's a spot I used to go to hide. To be alone. I don't think they would have changed it, or taken it out."

She's right: it's still there. The small alcove that she used to tuck herself into when she needed time to herself, where no one would watch her, where she could pretend to be reading if anyone happened to walk by. She glances over her shoulder before ducking inside and catches sight of the hungry look on Jon's face. It stocks the heat in her belly, keeping her warm even when enclosed by the cool damp of the stonework.

He crowds her backwards, a hand already palming her hip. Her dress snags on a corner and he whispers an apology against her lips. She'd barely noticed, too intent on getting the buttons of his jacket open so she can get her hands inside and feel the crisp cotton of his shirt, the planes of his chest underneath.

She likes how his mouth tastes, sharp and smoky from his cigarette and the whisky he'd been sipping on. She cups his cheek to keep his mouth on hers, where she can lick the roof of his mouth and suck on his lip. His hands drift up her sides to the curve of her breasts. Her breathing hitches and he mimics her, holding his breath, then humming against her jaw when she flattens her hand over his. He can be firmer with her, she wants him to be, and he picks up on that quickly enough. Everything turns into a haze of his hands stroking and clutching, and her own tugging and pulling, and their mouths licking and sucking and drinking each other down. He lets her pull his shirts from his pants and get her palms on his bare skin.

He hisses at her when she drops to her knees in front of him, but she wants to do this. Last night, this morning…she’s taken from him. Now she wants to give back to him, to show him how giving she can be.

He moans when her mouth takes him in. The grass is soft, damp, under her knees, and his fingers are gentle at the curve of her jaw and around the shell of her ear.

“You don’t have to,” he breathes at her, even as his prick bumps against the back of her throat. She chuckles around him, and he groans, shudders.

“Jon,” she murmurs up at him. The moon hangs in a fat waxing crescent at the edge of her vision. It casts an otherworldly silver glow over the grass outside the alcove, and across the rippling surface of the nearby fountain. She hopes its bubbling ripples cover up the sounds of his imminent pleasure. “This is something I want to do.”

Chapter Text

Jenny Whitecloak’s alarm goes off at 5 AM on the dot.

Her wife groans beside her and grumbles something into her pillow about autocratic monarchies. Jenny doesn’t have the luxury of a lie-in this morning. She wraps herself in her robe, kisses her wife’s cheek, and promises that she’ll be home for dinner.

“Not a minute later,” Shonna yawns. 

Jenny pads down the hall of their flat to the kitchen and flips the switch on the coffeemaker, then makes her way through the sitting room to their balcony. 

She unlatches the lock and pulls it wide. A cool, salty breeze rushes into the flat, ruffling her hair. She and Shonna had lucked out, getting in early on this thirty-floor tower a decade ago, back when air rights on the Rush’s South Bank were still being litigated. The cash payment and liquidated damages clause reflected the risk in the investment. But all anyone had to do at the time was to look at the towering high-rises of Sunspear, Braavos, and Lannisport, to see the writing was on the wall. She’d been a rookie reporter back then, with a modest inheritance from her grandfather and a wild bet that her last name and nerve could carry her anywhere, even King’s Landing. Her knack for family trees and royal protocol bumped her from royal reporter to royalty expert, and her gift for riffing with guests even as producers droned in her ear moved her into play for anchor duties for special events.

All for this, Jenny thinks, wrapping her hands around their railing and breathing in the clear seaside dawn.

There’s not a cloud in the sky, contrary to reports that a front might move in from the Reach and bring late summer showers with it. Twenty floors below, surf rolls in, frothing white as it breaks on the rocky shoreline. The ocean beyond shimmers green-blue as far as the eye can see.

The horizon quivers. Wavers. And then exhales as the curve of the sun crests the eastern horizon.

Inside, the carafe gurgles. 

Jenny smiles.

It’s a gods-blessed beautiful day for a wedding.

“Truly, just a gorgeous day,” ceremony invitee Lady Rechelle Tomkin tells Xavier, the E-Pop!underling who has been dispatched to the streets of King’s Landing for the day. Rechelle gestures behind her—not at the crowds of small folk lining the streets, but at Baelor’s glittering bells and the cloudless sky beyond. “That blue sky, the sunshine, the breeze—gorgeous. Absolutely divine.”

Back at the anchor desk, mics muted, Jenny bites against a smile and makes a note to herself. Len rolls his eyes.

“It’s a common sentiment, Jen. It’s not like you can copyright it.”

Jenny sips her tea—served in an antique teacup and saucer today for the occasion—and waits for Xavier to finish up his filler interview with Lady Nobody from Nowhere. There’s only half an hour until the ceremony is slated to begin, which means that anyone worth speaking doesn’t have time to shoot the breeze with reporters on the streets. But E-Pop! Has to fill that half-hour with *something*, and if it’s straggling guests who have to keep viewers away from W7 until the next commercial break, straggling guests it is. 

If Jenny were a betting woman, she’d wager that Lady Rechelle’s seat is in the final rows of sept.

“You know, I think Lady Rechelle is right,” Jenny announces when the shot cuts back to them. She enjoys the choked noise Len lets out. “Not only is the weather today a blessing for the happy couple, but also for us, trying to bring the ceremony to you all—in your homes, your bars, your offices. The last televised royal wedding was of the late King Robert, gods rest his soul, and Cersei Lannister. I don’t think I have to remind you, Len, of the video quality.”

“The term ‘grainy’ comes to mind,” Len chimes in. “And let’s not forget about the rain.”

“That was one of my first major live royal assignments as a reporter, much like our dear Xavier today. It took nearly a full day to confirm that Cersei had been allowed to wear Good Queen Alysanne’s tiara. And today, between our fantastic high-quality cameras and the good weather, we’ll be able to see all of those little details and embellishments throughout the ceremony that reveals the history and sentimentality put on display today,” Jenny rambled, letting just a touch of an expert’s blasé something ] creep into her voice. Viewers love experts, love feeling like there’s something bigger and grander at play than just a series of live-action coincidences and compromises. “Not just a dream wedding for a beautiful couple, but a joining of two families with long, storied histories. You’ll see it in the groom’s cufflinks, his cummerbunds, and of course in the jewelry chosen by the Crown Princess to wear as she marries the man she has chosen for her consort.”

“Speaking of the blushing bride, where is she?” Len asks. “Still in Maegor’s? Or on the move?”

She’s still in Maegor’s.

The zipper of her gown is stuck several inches below her armpit, and no one seems to know what to do.

She’s stuck in place in the middle of her mother’s solar. Her wedding gown hasn’t been fully secured around her ribs, and its weight hangs on her shoulders. Some one tugs, and Shireen winces at the chafe against her sore skin. Bodies press in on all sides, familiar and strange, agonizing over the problematic zipper.

The problem, you see, is that after laboring for weeks over the construction of Shireen’s wedding gown, her atelier had suffered a heart attack during his morning oatmeal.

“No safety pins?” Her mother is already dressed, shoed, and crowned with a Baratheon tiara. She whirls away from Shireen in a swirl of red damask. “Anywhere?” 

“Ah, yes, because nothing says regal stability like a row of aluminum staples,” Margaery remarks from a couch across the room. She pulls on her vape pen as she aimlessly scrolls through her phone, pointedly ignoring the queen’s disgusted wrinkled nose when she blows out the smoke. 

The maid at the door ducks a curtsey. “We’ve sent to the Butler’s office, but the staff are currently attending to the groom’s party, Your Grace. I sent Jeyne to the commissary, but…I believe you gave leave for it to be closed today. For the…festivities.”

Selyse groans and flicks her wrist, sending the woman form her sight.

Shireen returns her gaze to the sky outside. They couldn’t have prayed for better weather. A midday without rain was all Shireen had asked from her knees. And here she is, blessed on her wedding day with a bright sky buffered with a slow drift of showstopping cumulus clouds.

She’d chosen Bertrand Ofglen to design the gown. He was an esteemed but reclusive designer based in Grassy Vale. Not only did Shireen love the soft touches Ofglen gave to traditional Westerosi fashion, but he’d also designed Selyse’s wedding gown thirty years ago.

Vaguely, in the corner of Shireen’s vision, there’s a flash of copper. A murmur in the soft Northern brogue about “tight teeth” in a soft Northern Brogue that Shireen hears do little of down here in the South. She only knows the other woman in passing, yet here she is on her wedding day, serving as a bridesmaid. They barely know each other. The same with the Manderly daughter, Wynafred, here at her father’s command. She looks like a faerie among mortals, the way her platinum waves shimmer against the black gowns the bridesmaids have been put in.

The gown is one of the most beautiful, intricate creations that Shireen has seen in a long time. She wanted cloth of gold, both for House Baratheon and the dignity of the crown, and embroidery done in the traditional style. 

Tully trout swim from her wrists to her elbows, spawning eggs of pearls that spray across her shoulders and the deep V of her boned bodice, where they become the dew drops on the petals of Tyrell roses twining down to her waist and petering out across the front of her wide pleated skirts.

The rose vines twist and turn in flashes of platinum thread into the tentacles of Greyjoy’s krakens, swimming backwards around her hips and thighs to dance in the loose folds of her train. A pair of Arryn Falcons swoop upwards at the sides of her skirt, their tail feathers and talons diplomatically exaggerated to eat up fabric space. And a pack of Stark dire wolves have been caught just above the hemline of her gown, running forward with Shireen.

And on Shireen’s back, between her shoulder blades, is the pièce de résistance: a black Baratheon buck with an impressive rack of antlers against a red-gold Martell Sunburst. The antlers fan up to her shoulders, meeting a light spray of Tully eggs that kiss the very tips of the Baratheon antlers.

She’d practiced walking in it the week before. Ofglen had cleared a walking path of about fifty feet in his studio, clear down the main line of his atelier. More than a dozen artisans had been working on the gown ‘round the clock for nearly six months now, and they clustered to the side to watch. Their eyes danced over the drape and pull of the fabric as Shireen paced the length of the room slowly, getting a feel for the weight of the confection and how it rode over her ribs and waist. The golden threads in the embroidery danced in the light, making the sigils move beautifully, as though they were really alive, racing and swimming and swooping all across her body.

Another muttering in that strange accent. A question. A question with out a reply, hanging awkwardly in the air long long enough that Shireen blinks, breaking her focus on the eve of geese flying across the blinding blue of the sky outside.

“Hm?” Shireen asks. “I’m sorry?”

Sansa Stark shakes her head, sending her hair swaying around her shoulders. Like Shireen, like all the other women in the bridal party, her hair has been keep long and curled around the barrel of an iron. “It’s nothing, my lady. I just—“ her eyes, Tully blue, dance over Shireen’s face. The bride wills her forehead to relax. “I think I know I to fix this.”

Relief flushes her system. “Oh, good.” She gives Sansa a tight smile. “And here I was dreading having to walk down the aisle on television with my corset out.”

“Right.” Sansa looks back at Shireen’s zipper, then glances over at where Margaery has looked up from her phone, suddenly interested in the goings-on in in the Queen’s bedchambers. “Right. What I need-we need—We need to get this dress off of you. I think it’s best if we get the whole thing off, so I can do what needs to be done.”

Shireen closes her eyes. “I have to take it off.”

“Yes. I do. And—It’s best if it’s just us in here, I think. So I can work fast.” She nods over her shoulder, where the bridesmaids and Florent women stand clustered, whispering nervously Amon themselves. “Margaery, would you be a dear?”

The barest of pauses, just long enough for a glance to pass between the Baratheon widow and the first daughter of House Stark. “But of course,” Margaery finally says. She pushes off the edge of the furniture and makes her way over to the gaggle of observers. The wide sweep of her black skirts serves as a convenient boom, herding them towards the door. “Your Grace, Ladies, let’s step into the solar and let Lady Sansa perform her needlework. Time is of the essence…”

Selyse protests, insistent on staying behind, but Margaery insists in her confident purr that it’s for the best, really, to let the experts work under their own rules.

Finally, the door snicks closed. Sansa fiddles with a phone, and the romantic jazz playlist turns to something more elemental. Thunder. Gulls calling. Waves crashing. Quiet settles over Shireen’s shoulders and into the folds of her gown.

“You’re a smoker, aren’t you?”

The dry Northern accent cuts through Shireen’s reverie. Sansa is at the balcony doors and is shoving the curtains wide. She turns their handles and swings them inwards. Fresh air washes into the Queen’s chambers, just the barest hint of salt on the breeze. 

Worries about photographers and security rises on Shireen’s tongue, but what comes out is,  “What makes you think that?”

“Because Margaery left her most prized possession behind. Which makes me think that you are.” Sansa nods at the coffee table. Sure enough, a slim mother of pearl case had been left sitting out, obvious and clandestine at once, right where Margaery had been mere moments before. Sansa flips it open and tugs a slim cigarette free. “So—do you want one? I can light it over here.”

Shireen gives a tight nod, stuck in her spot on the short dais. Her aunt-in-law, barely five years her senior, had been the one chosen to pin a pair of pearl studs once worn by Ellyn Baratheon into Shireen’s ears. Shireen had cast her eyes downward and smiled wider for the click of the photographer’s shutter. She was grateful the pictures wouldn’t catch how she held her breath, tense, while Margaery moved in close to her face.

Secluded on Dragonstone or not, Shireen had seen the video of course. “It’s not that I just want to be there for my beloved husband,” the newly-married Margaery Baratheon told the W7 reporter in the intimate interview. She’d squeezed Renly’s hand and smiled widely at him. “I want to be his partner. His other half. I don’t want to be queen. I want to be the queen*”

Shireen didn’t grow up dreaming of this day. She’d never been a hopeless romantic idealizing a massive affair like what she was about to endure. But she’d been a sentimental girl, looking forward to an early spring ceremony in her childhood sept. She’d figured she’d choose something soft and lacy and would carry a handful of tender snowdrops down the aisle. Her staid, spendthrift parents had indulged her delusions of simplicity, helped along by their reclusive life on Dragonstone. Robert, Cersei, and the three tow-headed children did all the work to carry on their glamorous and luxurious lifestyle in the capital. Shireen didn’t even have to worry about the press until her teen years. Something about the fading of her dragon scale scars and her entrance into puberty—and therefore, marketability—had snagged the attention of the paparazzi. Luckily—tragically—the war broke out, and then Shireen’s wedding dreams turned to nightmares. 

At the balcony, Sansa wrinkles her nose at the cigarette’s taste. She grabs a lid from one of Selyse’s porcelain sit abouts and passes it to Shireen as a DIY ashtray.

Shireen reaches out to take it, then hesitates. “Shouldn’t I get out of this first?” Shireen asks.

Sansa blinks confused, then chuckles. “Oh, no. All that zipper needs is a little slip. I can get it from the bathroom next door. I only made a fuss to get the rest of them out of the room and get you some air.” She offers the cigarette and the faux-ashtray again, and this time Shireen takes them.

“I’ll be just a minute,” Sansa promises as she steps away towards the vast bathroom at the other side of the room. She sounds surer now, Shireen realizes, than she had when trying to explain why everyone had to leave.

Shireen takes a few pulls from the cigarette. She hasn’t had one since last night, when she and Quentyn had slipped away through the dark corridors of Maegors to make love, fast and furious, in the butler’s pantry. After, they slipped out onto the keep’s ramparts used for tours. Normally teeming with tourists and guides during the day, the historic walkway was barely manned in the quiet early morning hours. Shireen and her fiancé’d shared a smoke there, sitting against the blocks of old stonework. From that angle, a princess could pretend she was living a different life. A past life, one filled with torches and swords and ravens, rather than electricity and bullets and cell phones.

When Sansa reappears, she’s got a worn-down bar of soap clutched in her hand. “It’s an old trick,” she tells Shireen as she starts to rub the soap over the teeth of zipper. “It creates some slip. It should help it slide closed more easily.”

Shireen nods. The waves continue to crash on the shore somewhere deep inside Sansa’s playlist. Another breeze floats through the room. The bridal party laughs at something out in Selyse’s solar, admirably muffled by the door dividing the chambers. She exhales a stream of smoke and closes her eyes. “Thank you. For…the air.”

“Of course. It’s overwhelming, all of this.” Another beat, then: “Can I ask you a question? Why Quentyn?”

“Why? Why Quentyn?”

“I mean, a Martell alliance, I get it. But—Trystane is objectively more attractive. Even you have to admit that.”

Shireen laughs, a tiny embarrassed sound. “Yes, Trystane is…very handsome. My parents certainly favored him.” The Drone excursion had been billed publicly as a relaxing vacation for Shireen after two years of tireless advocacy work for war survivors and the local arts community after the carnage of the Battle of the Blackwater. But it had, in fact, been arranged so that Shireen could socialize intimately with the Martell family, Trystane in particular. But, not long after arriving in Sunspear, the Crown Princess found herself drawn to the House’s quieter, more studious son.

“So…you picked Quentyn to rebel against them?”

Shireen shakes her head. “I picked Quentyn because I liked him better.”

“But he’s so…”

“Awkward?”

“Yes!” The other woman is clearly relieved she didn’t have to be the one to offer up the adjective.

“Oh, I know. The first time we talked, after all the usual ‘welcome to our kingdom’ pleasantries, we were waiting on an order of drinks at a reception inside Sunspear, and the bartender was going very slowly. And he was so at a loss to talk to me about that he ended up rambling about this foal he was waiting on. He launched into this long litany about the stallion’s speed and the mare’s endurance, and how he felt like this foal could have all the qualities needed to win the race to Starfall.” Shireen laughs, then sobers. “I love that about him.”

Sansa tugs on the zipper. “That he loves horses?”

“That he has passions.”

Shireen keeps going. Tells Sansa that Quentyn had pulled her from bed to watch the mare foal, late that night. “It’s violent, you know. I didn’t know birth could be so. Violent. Terrifying. Stella’s eyes were rolling, she’d kicked these wide crescent moons into the wood shavings. It was her first birth, and Quentyn said it won’t be so scary for her next time. She’ll remember what happens at the end of all of that. We had this hospital event the next morning, but he gave up a full night of sleep just so he could sit with her. Stroke her neck, trickle water from a bottle over her tongue when she started to lather and foam from the labor. And that’s when I knew. It wasn’t Trystane I wanted. It was Quentyn.”

The zip pulls free. It sings up the full line of teeth and lands snugly in the corner of her armpit. One moment Shireen feels open, off balance with the weight of her gown pulling her to the right, and in the next: everything shifts to center. Everything centers and settles, and her right knee prickles happily as her left leg takes on its equal share of the burden.

The two women sigh in unison. 

Sansa takes a step from Shireen, staring at the left seam of the princess’s bodice like she’s terrified it’s going to pop open again at any moment.  “I…I was really hoping that would work.”

“It’s closed. That’s what matters.” Shireen reassures her. She turns and pins Sansa with a quizzical eye. “What did your family say? When you told them about Jon.”

“About—our wedding?”

Shireen nods. Sansa blinks and glances down at her hands. She doesn’t wear a ring, Shireen notices. Nothing. Not even a band. Others have noticed too. Speculated about it. Set rumor mills to churning over it.

It’s why Shireen isn’t surprised when Sansa’s eventual reply is, “Well, it was a shock.”

“They’ve settled down, though, right?”

Sansa shrugs. Her eyes dance from Shireen’s face to the queen’s bed, to the paintings hanging on the walls. “I’m not sure. I haven’t really talked to them about it. I’ve been…using the wedding as an excuse not to, I suppose.”

“He’s worth it, though, right?”

A small, contemplative smile spreads across Sansa face. Her pretty blue eyes go a little distant as a memory flits across her mind, secretive and precious. She’s swathed in wide yards of black fabric and crowned with a tiara of onyx and bronze, just a player in this masquerade as much as Shireen is. But for the space of a few heartbeats, she’s just like Shireen — a girl in love with a boy. “Yeah. He is.”

Chapter Text

After the ceremony, the guests take buses to the Red Keep’s throne room. They bunch their satin and taffeta into commercial coach seats for the ride up Aegon’s hill, silently praying the wrinkles won’t set.

The sedans carrying the wedding party take a different route. They peel off from the guests inside the gate and instead wend under arches and through gate houses to Maegor’s Holdfast. It’s early evening now, and the sun has spent all day heating the air to a muggy fervor. The groomsmen and bridesmaids are grateful to be rushed into corridors of cool stone. They’ve arrived before the royal family, but the staff go on and direct them up the staircase and down the hall, to King Stannis’s chambers.

Inside the wide, open double doors of the king’s solar, Melisandre is waiting.

She watches the sons and daughters of Westeros’s Great Houses as they cluster in the hallway. The solar’s artificial lights are turned off. The room is lit instead by dozens of fat, red candles. The priestess herself is dressed in a ceremonial robe with wide, sweeping sleeves. Tongues of embroidered flames lick along her bodice. 

“Good afternoon,” she greets her audience.

There’s a beat of uncoordinated silence, before Arianne steps forward and speaks for the group. “Good afternoon, priestess.”

A slow, bemused smile stretches across the Red Woman’s face.  “I trust they’re married, then? In your eyes, at least?”

“It was beautiful, My Lady,” Erren Florent offers up, eager for the chance to bask the Red Woman’s.

“Shouldn’t you invite us in, then?” Margaery asks with an arched brow. “To witness your blessing of their union?”

“Such sacred ceremonies are closed to those who haven’t accepted His light into their life,” Melisandre replies easily, folding her hands at her waist. “You were named as Shireen and Quentyn’s attendants for their wedding day. And so you are here. But no. You will not be invited in, Lady Baratheon. The Lord of Light only appears for those who believe in His truth.”

A clattering sounds from the stairwell, and then the king and queen round the corner. Selyse looks beside herself, despair pulling at the corners of her mouth and eyes. “Lady Melisandre, we are so sorry to have kept you waiting with the wedding party! You are a woman of faith, not a hostess!”

But Melisandre smiles and bows her head with a placating smile. “It’s of no trouble, Your Grace, to hear the good news from those who had seen it themselves.” 

Shireen and Quentyn appear at the end of the hall suddenly, laughing and giddy and clinging to each other. Somewhere along the way, the bride has lost her magnificent lace veil, leaving only her circlet of starbursts behind. Her lipstick is smeared. Quentyn’s tie is off center. Melisandre claps her hands together as they approach. “And here is our dear princess now, with her chosen prince.”

The smile on the priestess’s face looks nearly real, very nearly, Sansa thinks. But only if you don’t notice how her smile never reaches her eyes, or how she always seems to be running equations, possibilities, opportunities, in her mind. As though her very existence were a living, breathing algorithm. 

The king and queen, prince and princess, step into the the candlelit solar. Melisandre looks over her shoulder and beckons with one slim, elegant hand. “Come, Lord Erren.”

The Florent boy jumps at the invitation. He shoves his way through the gathered attendants to join the King’s family in his private solar. 

The doors shut behind him. A lock snicks into place.

Uncomfortable silence reigns for a long moment, until Garlan shrugs and cracks his neck. “Did anyone else notice the High Septon’s sash was uneven?” he asks. “Six inches, at least, I’d say.”

The men break into relieved conversation, grateful to not have to discuss what just happened. Sansa swallows and grips her bouquet between her hands. Dornish succulents, heirloom dahlias, sweet peas, with feathers as accents, all wrapped in wide bands of red silk.

Like the other women, she stays quiet. Even Wylla’s phone stays dark in her hand while she listens, ear cocked, for any hint of what was going on beyond the locked doors. 

They can hear the hum of the priestess’s voice, rising and falling like a song. They can hear the king’s baritone now and then, and the queen’s warbly soprano. Then it’s just Melisandre’s warm crescendo, ululating to a fever pitch before cutting off into silence.

Tristane and Arianne exchange a look. Arianne is a master at keeping her frustration from her expression, but the younger Martell struggles to match her.

Politics drives chasms between families, Sansa knows. When her own mother moved North to marry her father, she’d insisted on a stipend to restore the castle’s old Sept. A stipend not from her father, Hoster Tully, but from House Stark itself. 

The Lord of Light is the stipend House Martell is paying to House Baratheon, just like House Tully paid to House Stark. But knowing that doesn’t make Sansa’s stomach sit any easier as they’re ushered down to join the rest of the reception in the Throne Room.

***

Jon and Sansa sway together to the easy ballad the band plays. Far to their left, Shireen is dancing with her father. They exchange easy smiles and good-humored banter, and could be mistaken for any other father-daughter pair if not for the gold crowns on their heads. 

Selky Hillrock purrs lyrics about easy love and slow evenings into the speakers around the room. Sansa sighs and slides her hand around the back of his neck. He welcomes her into his space, pulling her more closely along the line of his body. He looks dashing in his tuxedo, a true black that matches the true black of her gown. He’d been slipped into the Sept’s fifth row at the last minute, pressed hip to hip with Theon Greyjoy and Wynafred Manderly. Sansa caught his eye as she walked ahead of Shireen in the ceremonial procession, but they didn’t get a chance to link arms until a little while ago. She’d sidled alongside him at the bar, added another drink to his order, and they’d been attached at the hip ever since.

She tucks a finger into his embroidered cumberbund. It’s new, nothing she’s seen in his closet over the past week. His abdomen flutters at her touch. “Where did you get this?”

“Your mother. It came by private courier this morning.” The room is dim, and they’ve had a drink or two, but she swears his cheeks pinken. His curls are pushed back tonight behind his ears. One tendril tucks up and around his earlobe, like naughty child. Sansa wants to touch it. Curl it around her finger. “There was a nice note, too.”

“Oh?” Sansa blinks in surprise. “Really? Nothing backhanded or catty?”

He shakes his head. “Just thanking me for escorting you, and that she … should have commissioned one of these for me years ago.” He leans in and confides, “It’s Goldcoast.”

His conspiratorial whisper pulls a giggle from her chest. “I do feel bad for whatever team of poor embroiderers were hit with this rush order, but…” She leans back in the curve of his arm and takes another look at the piece. It’s a dark, thundery gray satin, with sprays of hand-crafted white and silver snowflakes twisting on the wind. “It’s beautiful. And it matches your eyes.”

His answering smile is soft. He squeezes her in tighter. 

Sansa fiddles with the curls at his collar, listening to the music. His arm feels strong and right around her waist, and there’s no one else she’d rather be dancing with right now. Her mind drifts back to earlier in the day. That’s when I knew, Shireen had said.

When did Sansa know? About Jon? That it wasn’t pretending for her, not anymore? That she wanted him, not just in her bed, not just here in King’s Landing, but him?

Images flicker to mind. His candlelit face at dinner at High Table. The easy way he’d suggested a walk along the river. His warm skin under her hands in that glorious morning they’d spent rolled in sheets without interruption. The breathy way he sighed her name in the gardens the night before, when his salty musk was still on her tongue.

The music changes. Jon doesn’t make a move to change partners or to leave the floor. He just shifts his gait to match the new pace and rearranges his hold on her hand.

Sansa speaks before she can think about it anymore. “I know that we’ll be back in Winterfell soon. And you’ll be in Winter City. And we can...explain to everyone. But I like this. You and me. I want you to know that if you don’t want to keep on like this...I’ll be okay. And I wouldn’t dream of making anything tough with Papa or Robb. I know that none of … this is what you thought you were getting into. And you’ve been so wonderful, Jon, just a--a better person than I could have dreamed of going through this with--” The words catch in her throat. 

The whole time, Jon doesn’t break his sway, leading while she uncharacteristically fumbles over her words.

“I like this, too, Sansa.” Jon finally answers, breaking the suspense. He passes the hand he’d been holding up to his shoulder. Settles both hand on her lower back. “I’d like to keep going on like this, too. No matter what we tell your family about what happened here.”

She can’t help the tremulously wide smile that spreads across her face. An urge hits her to lean up and kiss him, really kiss him, but she stops herself. They’re not just in public, they’re in public. She can’t do that, not in front of Queen Selyse and Lady Olenna.

She swallows. “I know a place. In Winter City. They’re farm to table. I’ve worked with them before…I’d like to take you there. When we’re back. If you wanted.”

Jon hums, low and thoughtful. “That all sounds wonderful, but how about somewhere...warmer?”

She cocks her head. “Warmer?”

“I had the same idea, you see.” One of his eyes squints, a bad imitation of a wink. She ducks her head, understanding the teasing. “And you know that we’ve got that hospital visit in Sunspear on Wednesday, but there’s nothing on the books afterwards. So I went poking around on my phone while waiting in Baelor’s.”

“Heretic,” Sansa teases lightly.

“Well, I wouldn’t have had the spare time if the bride hadn’t been taking her sweet time,” he retorts. She gives the smallest of eyeballs, having already recounted the whole zipper-soap affair during an earlier dance. “Anyway, I found a nice restaurant with a good wine list and…” his thumb rubs over the curve of her waist. “I thought it would be a lovely place to take my wife to dinner.”

Now she rises up on her toes, unable to resist pressing a kiss to his smiling mouth.

“I’d like that.”

The apartment warm, the wine is sweet, and Jenny Whitecloak’s pajamas are comfortable.

The dress they’d put her in to day been a size small. It’d pinched her through the ceremony, and squeezed her through the post-wedding punditry. The first thing she’d done when she’d done when she got home was to turn around and beg Shonna to unzip her.

Her wife had a fresh bottle of Dornish Red and a filling dinner of zucchini pasta and cold summer soup waiting for her. The women had curled up and watched an episode of Batard’s Creek to unwind before Jenny had to return to wedding coverage for work.

Her phone buzzes on the side table. “Hey, George,” she greets her executive producer.

“Nice job today, Jen,” he says. She thinks that’s all he called her for, to congratulate her on her work for the only royal wedding the Kingdoms will see this generation. But she barely enjoys a moment of preening under his praise before he gets right to the point. “So what do you think about the Stark girl and that secret husband of hers? They seem like the picture of domestic bliss, don’t they?”

“Something tells me that you know something to the contrary.”

He chuckles. “Check your email.”

Jenny puts him on speaker phone and opens her work email. There it is, a messaged forwarded just a few minutes before. “’Trouble in paradise’?” She reads aloud, scrolling through the attached pictures. Square images from social media, heavily filtered, as was the aesthetic several years back. Jon Snow and a redhead—not Sansa Stark, Jenny realizes when she pinches her fingers to expand the picture. This girl is gap-toothed and freckled, with a stocky body better suited for the front lines than a red carpet.

“Her name is Ygritte Firstson,” George explains. “She emailed the station a little while ago. She says she dated Jon Snow for a little over a year when he was stationed with the Night’s Watch at Castle Black. After he married Sansa. And according to Ygritte, Jon told her he was single.”

“Huh.” Jenny’s gotten down to the woman’s original email to the press box. She can hear the anger in the woman’s explanation of how the Sansa Stark’s handsome new husband made Ygritte believe he was in love with her, ready to marry her, despite being bound to another woman the whole time. “So, what’s the plan? Do you want to run the story tomorrow morning? Maybe in the 10 o’clock hour, after the morning-after recap?”

On the other end of the line, George smothers a laugh. “No. No, Jen. We want you to do a sit-down interview with her for the evening news.” 

The wedding party was pushed onto a pair of private planes after the reception, and they’d touched down in a small airport surrounded by pink-lit sand dunes at dawn. The previous day had worn them all out, and they didn’t linger to gossip before peeling off for their rooms and crashing into bed. 

When Jon awakes hours later, the sun is bright, the air already heavy with mid afternoon. There’s a tray of fruit on the table and a glass carafe of coffee. Some is already gone, decanted into a mug and carried away.

He’s exhausted, and unsure what’s pulled him from sleep when Sansa’s obvious moves around the room hadn’t done the trick. 

Then, right as he’s about to drift back into sleep, hi phone starts ringing again.

Robb Stark

Jon stares at the screen for a minute, then swipes the button to answer.

When he hangs up the phone, all he can do is stare blankly at the screen for a long few minutes. Robb’s cigarette-roughened voice echoes in his ears like thunder. Their conversation is both a jumbled mess and yet…crystal clear. 

His battery icon flickering from red to green drags him from his thoughts into the real world. He needs to find his charger, which is easier said than done.

Jon swings his legs over the edge of the mattress and breathes a sigh of relief when his feet touch cold tile. It’s bigger, sprawling, even, compared to the closed-off chambers they’d stayed in at the Maidenvault.

He finds his charger in the mess of his luggage, and leaves his phone to charge on a marble-topped side table.

Like the Red Keep, the Water Gardens are a premiere example of the classical architecture of the region. But where the Red Keep was a claustrophobic maze of rough-hewn stone, the Water Gardens boast vaulted ceilings, open palisades, and nearly obscene stretches of polished stone floors. The archway leading from the bedchamber to the solar is so wide that when Jon stretches his arms side to side, he cannot touch either side. There’s a splash from outside, from their private courtyard, and Jon follows the sound. Dorne’s climate is so hot that privacy is less important than the risk of stagnant air, leaving only perforated screens and breezy curtains to separate the indoors from the outdoors.

She glides under the surface, her pale body distorted by the water’s ripples. Her long curtain of red hair is near-black when wet, only giving a hint of its auburn tones when she surfaces for a breath of air and sunbeams catch in the sheen.

Jon watches as she makes her way back and forth along the length of the pool. She’s not swimming laps. Her strokes are too slow, too dreamy, for that descriptor. 

She notices him, finally, and turns to tread water and regard him. “Are you going to join me, or just watch?”

This is a conversation for equals, he thinks, and it’s easier for him to strip off his shirt and pants than it is to ask Sansa to leave the pool and come sit with him. His prick lays soft between his thighs, but he makes not move to palm himself, to hide himself from her curious eyes. She deserves this vulnerability from him now, with what he’s about to tell her.

She swims to meet him in the shallows of the pool. Her hair drapes over her breasts when she rises out of the water and comes to drape her arms around her shoulders and kiss him. He loops his arms around her waist and lets her, just for a moment. She’s slippery and cool against him, all soft curves and unbroken skin.

He tilts his chin away and sighs her name. “I need to tell you something.”

Her brow furrows. “What is it?”

“I just got off the phone with Robb.”

“Is it Papa?”

“No.”

“He’s okay?”

“I—“ Jon shakes his head. “I didn’t ask about your father, I’m sorry. But—Sansa. Something’s happened. My ex—Ygritte—she’s agreed to do an interview with W7.”

Sansa blinks. “Oh.”

“She and I dated when you and I were…supposedly married.”

Her hands float down his arms. “Oh.” She turns away from him, stepping towards the deep end of the pool. She kicks off the bottom and disappears under the surface of the water to take a few strokes in watery silence.

He doesn’t mind. It lets him think about what to say next. He wasn’t sure what her reaction was going to be — to rage, to slice at him with accusations, or to break down in betrayal. This is…neutral, so far.

“It makes sense,” she says from the other side of the pool. She’s perched herself on a bench and pulled her knees to her chest, but she keeps her eyes on him, not her kneecaps. “They can only ride the high of the ceremony for so long. And scandal always ropes in viewers. Tales of excess. And I’m sure she’ll be paid well for what she gives them.”

“One million gold dragons,” Jon says. 

Sansa shakes her head and makes a wave with her hand. “Not bad.”

“I’m going to counter their offer.”

Her head snaps up. “What?”

“Her people called Winterfell. She’ll take one-point-five to cancel the interview and stay quiet. As long as she gets a chance to talk to me.”

“Does W7 know about that?”

“I don’t think so.”

She doesn’t reply right away, her gaze going distant as she thinks. Before she goes too far, Jon tells her, “Robb said House Stark won’t pay it. The kill fee. But I’m going to.”

Her mouth opens and closes. “Jon—you don’t—One and a half million? You don’t have to do that. Not to clean up my mess.”

It’s his turn to swim to her. He doesn’t like talking about this so far apart, with meters and meters of water separating them. He can’t see her properly. He hooks an elbow over the lip of the pool next to her and takes her in.  Up close, he can make out the mask she’s pulled into place. A carefully neutral mouth and cautious eyebrows.

The quickest way to knock the real Sansa loose, he’s learned, is to be blunt. So he says, plainly, “It’s not your mess.”

“I think that if you rewind events, you’ll find that this all started with me,” she says, like she’s correcting him. “I did this.”

“No, Ygritte and W7 did this. What you did was to protect yourself. And I agreed to it, you know. I could have called your bluff, if I didn’t actually care about you. But I do, Sansa.” Her chin has come to rest on her knees, but she turns to look at him. He sees the worried catch between her eyebrows. Her guilt and regret. Jon moves himself over and settles a knee onto the little bench. He’s close enough now to touch her, which he does, cupping one her her cheeks with his wet palm. “I wanted you safe then, and I want you safe now.” He shakes his head. “I should have seen this coming. Ygritte. You certainly would’ve, if you knew her like I do.”

She leans into his touch. “I remember her. You spoke well of her. I’d just…thought it’d be long enough that she’d let bygones be bygones.”

“Like I said, I know her,” Jon sighs. “I should’ve seen this coming and acted first. And it’s not like I want my past with her smeared all over the screen, either. If we’re going to make a go at this, you and me, I don’t want us to be … figuring it out with something like this hanging over our head.”

A short quiet settles over them, curled up together in the pool. The midday sky overhead is a bright blue, cut here and there with wispy white clouds. There are birds nesting in the greenery planted around the pool, and they call to each other to make conversation.

Finally, Sansa shakes her head. “Jon, it’s too much.”

“No, it’s not,” he replies. “I told you before that your father has been smart with my money. It’ll make a dent, but it’s not catastrophic. And at the end of the day, it’s my money, and I get to choose how to spend it.”

“And you choose to spend it on this?” She gestures vaguely, shoulders hitched high with incredulity. “You don’t know—what if my parents don’t understand? What if you and I end up hating each other? And you’ll have spent this…ungodly amount of money on me.”

“We won’t end up hating each other,” he promises, amusement quirking the corner of his mouth.

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. I know you, Sansa. I knew you when you were an insufferable teenager, and tattled on me and Robb every chance you got.” She blushes and tucks her chin. He wraps an arm around her shoulder, not pulling her in, just resting it there, so that she knows his next words are affectionate and loving. “I hated you then, if you could call that hate. I don’t think it was. Exasperation. Annoyance. You’re still exasperating and annoying. Like now, trying to tell me what I can and can’t do, even though the choice is obvious. But hating you? It’s not possible.” He kisses her shoulder. “I love you too much.”

When she turns her head and breathes his name, they’re nearly nose to nose. She’s shocked, but that’s not a surprise, given her tenuous relationship with honesty and vulnerability. Her mouth works, and she tries to formulate a response. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean for it to come to this, you know.”

Another man with another woman might take offense at her lack of reciprocation. But Jon knows Sansa now. He understands the deflection as the survival mechanism it is. A way to hold responsibility for others, even when others are fully-conscious participants in events. So he just chuckles and replies, “Sweetling, it’s not your fault that I happen to find a strong survival instinct and diplomatic genius to be very attractive qualities in a woman.”

That breaks up the furrow in her brow. The smile she sends him is small but genuine. “It’s not your fault, then, either. Your patience and your good heart.”

“No, those are your father’s fault,” Jon replies, deadpan, but she’s still smiling when she kisses him.

“I love you, too,” she whispers against his lips, like it’s a secret. “Too much.”

“No such thing as too much,” he whispers back.

They kiss for a little while longer, before the water chills them, and they climb out into the dry heat of the late Dornish summer and onto a wide chaise. Jon steals kisses from her mouth while her fingers drift along his shoulders and explore his chest, his belly, his cock. The sun is hot and bright, drying their skin and hair quickly. Heady with confession, they touch and tease each other, drawing circles around nipples until they’re puckered high and tight, plucking at sensitive skin until their breath goes ragged with wanting.

He slides down her body to part her thighs and curls and sigh happily against the wet slick of her. Her clit is already peeking out from its hood, asking for attention from his mouth and tongue. It wrenches a moan from her, another, then another, until she’s writing under him and begging for him to fill her. He gives her a few of his fingers, not wanting to leave her cunt just yet, and relishes the way she rides them with eager hips.

Only after she falls apart on his fingers does he climb over her and hike her knees to his sides. She’s so pretty, flushed in the afterglow of her orgasm. She leans up to kiss him again, soft and pliant around his cock as he sinks in.

“I want this,” he tells her, like she needs reminding. Her fingers push through his hair, holding his mouth to hers while he makes love to her poolside in Dorne’s water gardens.

She welcomes him in, welcomes the weight and press of his body over hers. Her heels push against his ass, pulling him in deeper. He’s struck again by the incredulity of it, the twist of fate and chance, that has him fucking his best friend’s little sister, his charge, his friend, his employer’s daughter.

But in the end it’s Sansa, just Sansa, who twines her fingers at the nape of his neck while he works himself to a climax inside his body, whispering over and over, like a mantra, “I want this, too, Jon.”

Chapter Text

“Sweetling, you cannot be serious,” Catelyn Stark says.  

 Sansa exhales heavily through her nose and catches Jon’s eyes on the far side of the table. He’s been quiet so far while Sansa walked her family through what they’ve decided to do. Logically, cleanly, precisely. It sounds reasonable, coming out of her mouth. A nice, tidy plan presented without fuss or tears. But Lady Stark’s derisive, cutting comment has stopped his fork mid-air, loaded down with eggs on the way to his mouth.

“I keep thinking it over—Jon up at the wall, dating Ygritte,” Catelyn continues. She sounds scandalized, horrified, distraught. “I had no reason to worry about it, back then. He never acted like he had to hide it, and gods I—I encouraged it. Thought a girlfriend would be good for him. And now, to know that he’d left you behind to watch him stepping out on you? I can’t even fathom it. I keep turning it over in my head, trying to understand where in the world he came to believe that would be … acceptable behavior. You could break with him, you know. Let this girl speak her piece, and let Jon go, and start over, my dear one. No one would blame you, after what you’ve been through.”

Her mother’s words slice cleanly to Sansa’s bones. She can hear the hurt in Catelyn’s voice, the despair of watching her oldest daughter stare down yet another public humiliation. Here lies the true cost of Sansa’s half-cocked conniving to save her own skin. And from what, exactly? A boring and comfortable few decades in a well-appointed manse on a rocky eastern beach? An objectively handsome if milquetoast husband? 

When you skip a rock into the water, the ripples stretch far and wide.

Across the coffee table, Jon has set his fork down, abandoned the rest of his omelet and fruit. He’s steepled his fingers and set them against his forehead, letting Catelyn’s words wash over his skin. It’s Sansa’s family, and so he’s let her speak, let her lead. As far as the other Starks know, he’s not even in the same room. 

“Sansa.” Arya’s voice shakes her from her shame and despair. Arya speaks carefully, delicately—more delicately than Sansa has known she’s ever been capable of. “Jon and I talked recently. There’s…something else to this. He said as much. What aren’t you telling us?”

This time, when Sansa locks gazes with Jon eyes, there’s a hint of betrayal in her bright blue eyes. 

He sighs, shrugs apologetically. Out loud, he admits: “I told her this was something you and Lady Stark were best suited to deal with.”

“Jon?” Robb barks in surprise.

“Has he been there this whole time?” Catelyn demands, scandalized.

“‘Deal with,’ probably isn’t right” Jon continues without answering his best friend or the woman who had raised him. “But I said that all of this was…yours and your mother’s area of expertise.” He waves his hand and then rakes it through his hair. “Kings and weddings and power.”

“Politics,” Arya mutters, annoyed by the concept alone.

“Sansa?” Catelyn asks after a long minute of quiet. She sounds less upset now, at least. “What exactly is going on? What haven’t you told us?”

Sansa mimics Jon, pushing her fingers through her loose waves and heaving a sigh. Outside, marshbird sing to each other. A morning breeze ruffles the palm leaves. 

Jon sets his chin on his fist. His eyes dance from Sansa’s face to her phone, where the digital timer ticks off the minutes of the call with Winterfell. “It’s a secure line,” he tells her. “No bugs in the room. Shireen’s married. We’re out of the Red Keep. It’s up to you, love.”

Love.

She nods. 

And starts from the beginning.

The call with Ygritte later that evening doesn’t go nearly as smoothly.

Jon and Sansa’s roles are reversed, with Sansa standing by the window, listening to his ex-girlfriend tear into him without speaking a word. She doesn’t have to be here, and he’s told her as much.

Ygritte’s angry. Angrier than he’s ever heard her. So angry her voice breaks when she accuses him of fucking the low-rent version of his pretty High Lady wife. 

He can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen her cry. And that’s why he lets her rail against him, scream and shout and call him everything but a child of God.

She’s always lashed out when she’s felt hurt. Fought like a feral cat against any gentling or comfort he’d tried to provide her when she’d gotten an injury in the field, or burnt her hands cooking, insisting that she didn’t need his help. So this? This must hurt. 

Kissed by fire, that’s what Tormund had called her. And like a fire, she burns hot and bright, until all of her kindling is burnt to ash and all that’s left coming through the line is her shaky breathing and the soft whooshes of tissues being pulled from their box.

Only then does Jon try to reason with her. “The only reason this offer from W7 is on the table is because I’m tied to Sansa. To the Starks. Don’t you see that, Ygritte? No matter what you say to them, they’ll cut and edit it to make it about her. And she doesn’t deserve that. Your fight is with me, not her. So…let’s work this out between us.”

“Oh, just listen to you,” Ygritte flares. “What a hero you are, Jon Snow, saving your fancy lady from the monster beyond the wall.”

He ignores the jab. It’s meant to hurt him, to make him feel just a little bit of the pain that she’s going through. Instead he says, “Sansa doesn’t need anyone to save her. You’d like her, actually, I think. If things were different.”

Ygritte scoffs a dry brittle laugh. "“It’s true, then, isn’t it? You were married the whole time." Silence stretches out between them, and then: "You lied to me, Jon Snow?”

Sansa’s stood still as a statue the whole time, watching the seabirds swoop across the dimming sky. She doesn’t look back at him, not with pleading eyes, not with apologetic eyes. What he says will be his choice, and he knows she won’t hold either answer against him.

Jon looks back at the phone, towards the voice of his first love, the woman who thrilled him and terrified him in equal measure, whose irreverence and laughter helped shape him into the man he is today. He takes a breath and replies: “Yes.”

“Keep your money,” she spits. “Only kneelers take coin without earning it.”

Ygritte deactivates her social media.

Winterfell declines to comment.

W7 never airs a feature.

Instead, Leonette Fossoway and Garlan Tyrell announce they’re expecting. Tabloid attention shifts overnight from Dorne to Highgarden.

“No that it was planned that way, but we roses never turn down a moment in the spotlight,” Margaery tells Sansa, swishing her hands in the water to turn her float around at the far end of the pool. Sansa’s brought a bottle of Arbor Gold and a pitcher of orange juice over to Margaery’s chambers to celebrate the good news, and they’ve made quick work of it in the Dornish heat.

Sansa sets her glass on the side of the pool and uses her foot to push herself back into the middle of the pool. They’re both on a pair of those ridiculous unicorn floats socialites have plastered all over social media. Sansa feels ridiculous and pretentious; Margaery looks effortless in her black one-piece and slick top knot.

“‘Not planned that way’?” She asks. “What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t planned to distract the buzzards from Jon’s ex, I mean,” Margaery drawls, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “But divine timing is divine timing, I suppose.”

She knew. She knew, because of course she knew. Margaery always knows, and all Sansa can do is lean her head back onto her unicorn’s inflated rainbow mane and laugh.

“So, what did she want out of him?” The other woman asks. “It must have been something juicy, for a public servant like her to pass up a cool million and five minutes of fame.”

“She wanted to know if it’d all been a lie. Their time in Winter City. Their relationship. All of it.”

“And he said…yes?” 

“Well,” Sansa shrugs. “Yes.” 

Margaery stares at her for a long moment, her expression indiscernible under her wide-brimmed hat. Then she pushes her cat-eyed sunglasses up her nose and swishes her hands in the water to push herself back into the sun. “Huh.”

“‘Huh,’ what?” Sansa asks, feeling like a broken record.

“I just didn’t think Jon was capable of lying,” Margaery says.

“I—lying?”

“Like, I thought he might actually spontaneously combust if he ever had to vocalize an untruth,” the other woman goes on, gesturing at her throat. Sansa bites back another broken reply, frustrated that once again she finds herself unable to pivot and swerve through a conversation with Margaery Tyrell. And that just makes Margaery laugh, amused and exhausted in equal measure. “Oh, come on, I know a fake marriage when I see one.”

“Fake—marriage—?” Sansa can’t hold that one back. “That’s not—Jon and I are just — upset that the news had to come out — this way.”

Margaery sighs and pulls off her sunglasses. She snaps the arms closed and fixes Sansa with a near-pitying look. “Sansa, love. Did you really think that Renly and I ever, ever fucked? Even once?”

Sansa opens her mouth, then closes it. Her float bumps into the other side of the pool, and she covers her silence by pushing herself off again. “Frankly? No.”

“So,” Margaery waves a hand. Adjusts her hat. “You see.”

Sansa doesn’t have much to say to that. She just spends a few quiet minutes confirming, rejecting, adjusting several of her own assumptions and theories about Margaery, Renly, and House Tyrell. 

“What gave it away?” Sansa finally asks, breaking the ambient quiet of the burring insects in the palm trees around the pool.

“He didn’t pack suits.” Margaery replies, without a moment’s hesitation. “He hadn’t been attached to your chambers in the Maidenvault—okay, that’s explainable. But coming down to the nation’s capital alongside his super-secret wife for two weeks without a single suit? No. Not possible. A nice upstanding young man like Lord Snow would at least have tried to sneak you off for a clandestine dinner date.”

Sansa shakes her head and lets her fingers drift across the cool surface of the water. “You should teach classes, you know.”

“Gods, no.” Margaery shoots Sansa a sharp grin. “You know as well as I do that the value of information is negatively correlated to the number of people who know about it.”

“Don’t you want to know why?” Sansa asks a moment later, when Margaery has tilted her head back and let the conversation lapse.

“Why?”

“Why we faked it?”

“Oh, I already figured that out. I’m fairly sure Stannis tried to get you to fuck off to Storm’s End with Edric and pop out a few spare Baratheons just in case Quentyn is shooting blanks.”

Sansa stares at the other woman, slim and bronzed and lazy in the midday sun. “Stannis is going to regret not making you his Spider.”

That wrenches a genuine laugh from her chest. “Oh, gods, Stannis’ head is so far up tradition’s arse that he’d never even think about hiring a woman for that job.” Then she sighs and flicks her hand. 

“No, unfortunately this particular case is more advance notice than courtier gossip. Stannis pulled the same sneak attack on me at Shireen and Quentyn’s engagement party last year. Hence the intense ‘grieving widow’ charade.” Margaery gestures at her chic black swimsuit as she floats past. Then she sighs, and her self-deprecating smirk softens. “Well, ‘charade’ is a little strong. Act. Play. Though it’s…given Loras some space of his own, me sucking up all the airwaves. I’m glad to give him that.”

The silence weighs heavily for a moment while, again, Sansa shifts the pieces on the game board in her mind. 

“It’s a strange theatre we’ve been born into,” she finally says. “‘The Game of Thrones.’ That’s what the queen…what Cersei called it.”

“That it is,” Margaery agrees. She tilts her head back and squints at the wispy clouds overhead. “Some days it feels like this life is a gift from the gods. Other days, like it’s some sort of karmic punishment. I’ve decided that all you can do, truly all you can do, is find the people you’re supposed to play it with. Speaking of…” she says, trailing off as Jon steps through the parted curtains and onto the deck. 

His eyes immediately land on Sansa, and his resting worried expression relaxes into a bemused smile when he takes in her polka-dot bikini, double braids, and massive fantastical float. “There you are,” he says, tucking his hands into his pockets. “You girls dreaming up world domination out here?”

“You know, I have been looking for an excuse to visit Myr,” Margaery quips, drawing laughs from both members of her audience. “But actually, Jon, you’re perfectly on time. I was just about to ask Sansa about visiting Highgarden, once we’re released from our service to the crown. What do you think? Surely another week away from chilly North wouldn’t be so bad. I promised your wife a tour of the rose garden years ago, and I intend to make good on it sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t know,” Jon demurs, glancing at Sansa. “A chilly Northern gale actually sounds pretty good right about now. I’m not made for this heat.”

He’s a true Northerner, she thinks. Just like her. 

“Jon’s right,” Sansa tells Margaery, though her eyes stay pinned on Jon and his soft, affectionate smile. “It’s time to go home.”

Chapter Text

One year later

When the snow falls and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.

It’s Jon who wants a proper wedding.

He brings it up one evening, when sweat is cooling on their bodies after a very active round of sex in their brand new bed, set up in their only slightly-less-new master bedroom in their still-new-enough-to-feel-exciting penthouse in Winter City.

He rolls to his side and kisses Sansa’s pink-flushed sternum. Rakes his wild curls back with a lazy hand. Smiles down at her and says: “Let’s get married.”

Sansa’s lived through enough pomp and circumstance in her (still-young) life that she chuckles and tells him, softly, sweetly, that oh, love, they already are married.

She’s not wrong. The certificate is right there on the books. It doesn’t matter how it got there. For all intents and purposes, it’s valid and binding. 

They submitted a copy of it with the purchase contract for the aforementioned penthouse and disclosures about their respective finances. They crossed their fingers and held their breath that everything would go through without a hitch. The real estate attorney is the best there is north of the Neck, with a billable rate commensurate to her confidentiality. If there’d been an issue, she’d’ve raised it—discretely. 

And yet — nothing. When the morning of closing arrives, she hands over the key fob and a pair of garage keycards with a smile and congratulations!

It was the first major test of the tale they’ve spun and re-spun and re-spun again since that fateful day in Maegor’s Holdfast, when Sansa flailed for a lifeline and Jon—

—faithful, selfless, loyal Jon—

—caught her hand and hauled her to safety.

Maybe that’s why she relents, in the end.

Not after a calm weighing of the pros and cons, like when they’d compromised over who got to pick the furniture on a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago, meandering through the wide empty rooms and onto the roof patio.

Jon got the master suite, by the way. Sansa pointed out that they’d eventually start having friends over, and she that she’d been in enough salons to arrange every thing for a good flow—

“A flow?”

“Yes, Jon, flow . Oh, don’t make that face, you know exactly what I mean.” A chuckle. A huff. A slap of the hands on perfectly pleated pink trousers. “Like if someone is making a drink over there, you want to direct them to come over here. But with the arrangement of things, of furniture.”

“You look like a football coach, using your hands like that.”

“Obviously, it’s movement, so let’s not muck with up with some big hulking … Wilding bearskin sectional.”

Bargain duly struck, she hadn’t even protested when they made their way into the bedroom and he proposed, a little smugly, ‘a big hulking Wilding bearskin headboard.’ He’d been a little surprised, but she’d tilted her head, and her eyes went a little dark, and her voice went a little husky as she admitted that she’d like to see him leant back against it.

—and he had to admit that the points she made were quite effective.

No, this concession of hers comes late one night, after a weekend back at Winterfell with the whole family. One of those rare occasions where everyone’d been in a good mood. Sansa spent the morning with Bran, convincing him to rearrange his ever-expanding library by color, and then joined Arya outside the garage to watch Rickon practice his long boarding. He’s picked up the hobby from Gendry, who shouts tips from inside the bay while the girls whoop in support.

“There you go, son,” a deep voice calls when Rickon manages to flip the board and land without falling. They all look up—surprised, excited—to see Ned watching from an open window, a steaming cup of coffee in hand. Robb and Jon flank him on either side, the both of them grinning. The three of them there are so picture perfect Sansa could’ve screamed. 

“Y’saw it, Pa?” Rickon shouts, sixteen- and six-years-old in one moment.

“I did,” Lord Stark replies. “We’ll have to see about building you a ramp.”

“Is that an order, m’lord?” Gendry calls back, joking. It earns him a tap of Arya’s boot to the back of his knee. 

Rickon's delighted with his father’s idea. Sansa’s delighted by Ned’s presence of mind, of his family, of himself. Her youngest brother’s next attempt is steadier, bolstered by practice and confidence and joy.

Jon drives them back to Winter City after dinner. Reaches across the console to cup her knee. Leans in at a stoplight so she can kiss his cheek.

He parks the car in the underground garage and cuts the engine and the purr of late night radio.

“Okay,” she says, without prompting. He shoots her a quizzical look, unsure of what she’s decided to agree to this time. She reaches out and tucks a curl behind his ear, lets her fingertips drift along the beard he’s let grow long over the winter. “Let’s get married.”

They bill it as a vow renewal.

“The news will leak,” she tells him, when he sulks about the dismissive air she puts on while talking about it with vendors. She slides into his lap instead and kisses him long and slow, the way he likes. “But I want for this to be about us. And the less of a fuss we make about it, the less attention it’ll get.” 

The catering, tuxedo, and florist contracts go off without a hitch. 

Hysterically, its the linen order that outs the event. Well, the linen order, and what Sansa is sure is a tip from Highgarden that Margaery Baratheon had boarded a private jet bound for Winter City to spend a weekend celebrating Jon and Sansa, with whom she’d reconnected at Princess Shireen’s wedding.

Once the hounds set their nose to the ground and sniff out twenty ivory tablecloths for a private event at Winterfell, W7 screams onto the internet with an exclusive about Sansa Stark and Jon Snow’s plans for an intimate vow renewal ceremony under a full moon.

“Huh,” Arya drawls, thumb swiping at the face of her phone. ”I didn’t know it was the full moon.”

“Neither did I,” Jon replies, holding still while Rhaegar slips pins along his inseam. The tailor’s flown in from King’s Landing for the final fitting of his custom suit. 

“Really? I thought that’d been the point. ” Rhaegar remarks, manicured brow arched high. “Fertility, and all.”

“Oh, no—” Jon sputters, while Arya cackles.

Rhaegar tuts, disappointed. “Her coloring, with your curls? Honestly, it’s a shame if you aren’t considering it.”

Jon coughs, shifts in his heels. Pins prick his thighs. “I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.”

Arya and Catelyn help Sansa get dressed in her childhood bedroom. Early autumn in the North is more like a crisp Southern winter, so Sansa tops her ivory sheath with a mantle of white foxfur to keep the chill off her skin. 

Catelyn twines her daughters’ long auburn curls into a braided crown and pins it into place with heirloom combs from House Whent. “Gorgeous, my love,” Sansa’s mother murmurs into the mirror, tugging a few tendrils loose to frame her blue eyes and high cheekbones.

Ned waits for her at the door, tucks her hand into the crook of his arm and leads her to the godswood. Catelyn and Arya take a different route, leaving the father and daughter alone on their short journey down through the main hall and through its oaken double doors.

“I promised you a bridegroom who would be brave, and gentle, and strong. Before all of this,” Ned murmurs, once they leave the quiet of Winterfell’s walls and enter the godswood, purring with evening insects. Sansa leans her head onto her father’s shoulder and closes her eyes, trusting him to lead her deeper into the dark. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have helped you more.”

“Papa, you did more than you could have dreamed,” she reassures him. The leaves crunch underfoot, rustle under the light drift of her skirt. Here and there the wierwoods are draped with stringed lights, giving just enough grace to find one’s way while maintaining the mystery of the enchanted grove. Jon waits, alone, under the heart tree ahead of them. Hands folded, patiently awaiting the moment Ned will press his daughter’s hands into his. “You led me to him.”

When she was young, she’d dreamed of a wedding fit for the songs. Three hundred guests, a seven-tiered cake, a bevy of bridesmaids and a string quartet to accompany her through Baelor’s Sept. The whole ceremony broadcast for the great and small folk of the Seven Kingdoms, so all may share in her—their—joy.

But tonight, only Winterfell’s heart tree hears the vows she and Jon make to each other. The evening breeze through the trees is the only music that accompany them to the glass gardens. And inside, only about forty guests await them with raised glasses. Tormund shouts the loudest, pounding his chest and screaming about being kissed by fire. Gendry’s right behind him though, thundering his fists on the table despite his own fiancée’s annoyed grimace.

Even Robb joins in on the thunderous applause, setting down his own glass to clap his palms together. Time and space has worked out his angst over first feeling betrayed, then feeling left out, and finally the sheer awkwardness of his best friend oopsie-daisy falling head over heels for the same gangly-limbed girl they once tormented with ghost stories.

Margaery has landed in the seat beside him, by some sheer stroke of luck. She’s always prided herself on being an expert conversationalist, so it’s no surprise that she’s able to engage the acting Warden of the North in chit chat about the weather, about Sansa, about Jon. About the dogs loping around the table, about the horses back at Highgarden. About the renovations made to the First Keep, about the blight that nearly killed half of the briarwood labyrinth a few years back. About him. About her.

Jon catches Sansa watching them from the head of the table. His fingers brush her wrist. “What’re you thinking? That we should rescue him before she pounces?”

Sansa shakes her head. Robb’s resting his cheek on his fist, watching Margaery laugh at something Alys Karstark says. He doesn’t look like a man who would thank them for helping him avoid said pouncing.

“No,” she says instead. “I’m thinking about how different things might’ve been, if the Reach had decided to hitch its wagon to the North instead of to the Stormlands.”

He chuckles and takes her hand in his. “My love, please tell your brain to take a night off.”

“I’ll pass the message along, my love,” she parrots back. Her eyes twinkle in the candlelight and she brushes a kiss across his knuckles.

“Good, because I’d like to dance with my wife,” he says, pulling her to her feet as the band starts up. “And it’d be nice if it were just a dance, and not some metaphor about war and peace.”

That makes her laugh, a real laugh, and one Jon hopes to wring from her night after night for years and years to come.

When the revelers have gone to bed, and the staff has turned off the lights, Bran stays awake.

He can’t help it, not after talking with Tormund Giantsbane and hearing his own stories about the shifts in the aurora borealis at the Fist’s glacier. 

Bran boots up his computer and falls into a hole of magnetic fields, glacial creep, and temperature ideation for the visual spectrum. He has three screens, yet it’s not enough for the data mining and the note taking and the academic paywalls.

The pink light of dawn is creeping through the windows when he decides to finally turn in. Summer huffs, relieved, when he powers down his computers and wheels himself into the lift.

He and Robb must reach out to Daenerys Targaryen as soon as possible, he decides, as the lift rumbles him down to his bedroom. Since booting her brothers from the board, her company has accelerated R&D on three carbon capture models that have the science sphere abuzz. 

Drogon—the largest, the most expensive, the most ambitious, and apparently the Targaryen princess's personal favorite of the three—shows the most promise, the scientists say.

Now is not the time for half-measures, Bran thinks, finally pulling himself free from his formal attire. His House's words aren't just words. They're a warning. A promise. A call to arms.

Winter is Coming.