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Chapter Text

“Theon!”

He turned. A bright eyed Robb came to his side, almost jigging with excitement, and Theon gave a merry laugh. 

“What, Robb? Finally found a pair of tits you like?”

As always with his crude jokes, Robb gave him an indulgent smile. The sounds of Winterfell’s busy courtyard faded whenever Robb smiled. 

“No,” Robb drawled, glancing at him playfully. “Father is going to give me new armour.” 

“I’m surprised Lord Stark agreed, considering his austerity. Your father is cheaper than a whore on feast days.”

Robb clapped him on the back, a sharp thud that almost sent him careening into the snow. 

“What is it going to look like, then?” Theon asked. 

“A wolf emblazoned across the front, growling and leaping in the snow,” he replied, leading Theon’s eye with one waving hand across the white surrounding them. “He wants to show off his eldest son in the finest armour the North can make.” 

Theon knew what he was not saying. Robb was too soft for it. He never said the words trueborn unless in front of his parents, for the bastard or himself he did not know, but he found it tiresome either way. There was no reason to protect Theon’s feelings on it. He had none. 

“How grand,” Theon said. “You’ll be handsome indeed. I guarantee Alys Karstark in particular will be blushing up a storm behind her cup…”

Robb groaned, a strangled laugh. His voice almost sounded like a man’s now, a deep rumble behind the sound. “You’re relentless. I’m saving myself for a wife. Love, Theon? I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

“Heard of it, certainly. In the tales and stories. From servants and commonfolk. I’ve heard it from your sister so many times I get an urge to bash my head against a wall when she speaks.” 

“Come, now,” Robb laughed, and this time the sound was as deep as his father’s. “Sansa is only a girl. She knows not of the ways of older men like us.” 

“Of glory and honour,” Theon agreed. “She couldn’t know what real warriors are.” 

Robb gave a final smile, flashing white and red, dragging Theon along with him. “Exactly.” 

He heard Robb crying on his way to bed. Theon stood there for a moment in the cold wind, the rows and rows of tents surrounding him flapping at the resistance. 

For a brief, momentous second, he imagined walking in and holding Robb to him, stroking his curls and telling him that they would avenge their father. 

But the urge was gone as quick as it had come. A hole was left behind as he listened to Robb’s quiet cries, muffled by what Theon could only imagine was the thinnest pillow in existence. It did nothing. 

Coward, he berated himself. If Robb heard his own weeping he was sure to intervene, and yet he could not do the same. 

Across the encampment Lady Catelyn scowled at spotting him outside her son’s tent and hurried her way over. Theon held in a groan. 

“Where do you think you’re g—“

Robb’s cries pierced the air again. Catelyn whipped to the sound like she’d been struck from the other side. 

Theon swallowed the bile that rose up and took a deep breath. “I was worried.”

Her blue eyes pierced him, straight through like she saw him all and hated what was there. But she glanced again at the tent and they softened. They always did, when it came to her children. 

“Fine. Thank you, Theon.” The words were grounded out between her teeth. “You may go. I will take care of this.” 

He listened. 

One of his men gave a rough shout, alerting the camp to an approaching figure. 

The closer they came into view the more Theon understood. A peddler, his cart of goods rattling across the stone, jars and trinkets and things that clinked. Curious, Theon rose from his rock, and sidled up to his cart as he neared their camp. 

“Evening,” he greeted. The rattling stopped. The rider on top turned to face him, but Theon could see no face but the shadow of his hood. 

“Evening.” Their voice was croaky, parched. 

“Stop for a drink?” he asked, patting the flask at his hip. 

The hooded figure turned front, silent, before stepping down. “Thank you, yes.” 

He passed the flask over. “I have to warn you, it’s not water.”

The figure stilled the flask halfway. “I did not expect it to be.” 

Theon frowned, trying to work out if he’d just insulted him or not, but soon enough the figure was pressing the flask back.

“We have food,” Theon said, though he had no idea what compelled his mouth to move this way. “If you’d care to rest before you continue.”

The figure was stock still. “Yes.”

Wary, Theon led them both back to the rock he’d been lounging on, waving his hand at one of his men and instructing him to bring some stew. 

The figure sat opposite, a rock perfect parallel, and Theon watched him, unusually sober. There were things even he did not mock. Unlike Ned Stark, he valued keeping his head. 

“What brings you this way?” He was heading North, like them, and then something seemed to seize him. They would pillage his cart soon enough, if he was going to any town on the way to Winterfell. 

“Nothing in particular. I like to wander.”

Theon hummed. “You don’t have a destination in mind?”

The traveller clinked his spoon against the side of his bowl in sudden irritation — the only human thing Theon had seen him do since he came off the cart.

“You Westerosi always want to rush. Go here, do that. You should slow down, for once. Recognise the journey. Remember where you have been and where you are going.” 

Theon laughed in his face. “What?”

The traveller gave no reply, staring at him. There was a moment of awkward silence. Sensing he was going to get no answer, he stifled an eye roll and changed his tune. “You have a name?”

“Do you?”

He gave a chuckle. “Obviously. Theon.” 

The traveller’s eyes ran him up and down, assessing. Theon had to resist squirming. “Names are fickle things. Make sure you remember yours.” 

“You’re mad,” he laughed again. “Of course I can remember my own name.”

The traveller did not reply, sipping a long spoonful of the steaming brew. 

Winterfell was burning. 

He’d fucked it all up, and now his hostages were gone and his men hated him and he’d lost the one thing he’d fought for and earned, and now…

Now it was nothing. He was nothing. Disowned, hated, called weak and a coward and a mainlander. Worse, he knew it was all true, on his surface and down to his core, he knew it was true. That was who he was.  It made him choke to admit that he had not dreamed of the sea in years, not since a head of brown curls replaced the crashing waves. 

In his dreams among Ned Stark’s furs, Robb loved him. Sometimes it was in the way Theon wanted, breathy moans and hot skin, but other times it was childlike love, innocent and unassuming. It was worse, that way, to wake up and know that he surely hated him. Traitor. Turncloak.

Robb probably called him far more awful things than that. He never cursed when they were boys, not in front of his father and certainly not his sisters, but even when they were alone he hesitated. Too good. Too soft. 

Theon did not doubt that he called him every curse under the sun, lip curled and those blue eyes hard. The image of it hurt more than he thought it would; and it was then and every time he took a breath after he realised over and over what a horrible mistake he’d made. 

He wished he could remember his name. It was one thing to please mas— Ramsay aloud and another to believe it, but slowly, slowly… he’d forgotten. 

All he remembered now was pain. 

He remembered her . Faintly, blurred, but he did. She pouted and shrieked and stomped her little feet, through the hallways and in the snow, at breakfast and dinner and when Winterfell entertained guests. 

He remembered Robb laughing with him, leaning on walls and jeering, all until she was upset enough for Robb to move and tickle her until she laughed. He remembered her laugh. It was nice — a high tinkle, joyful and happy, childlike. 

She did not look like a child now. It shamed him, how pretty he found her, even as he was less than human, even when he polluted the air by being around her. It was not like he had a choice. Master would be angry if he figured out Reek was avoiding her. 

He would not tell a single soul that he could not bear to look into her eyes. Robb’s eyes. Both hated him, and her brother shone out those Tully sapphires and called him everything he’d already called himself. 

When master made him apologise he saw Sansa and Robb both in her eyes, separated but the same, and still they hated him. She cried as he cried, and that night under the hay in the kennels he dreamt of never ending blue, a sea that swallowed him up. 

Robb was clearer in his dreams than he had ever been in life. He leaned over him as he lay, curls framing his square face. 

He was scowling, staring down into his eyes like Reek was at the bottom of a long, long well, Robb at the top and he at the end. 

“No one was ever going to love you,” he said, gruff, the sound echoing off the stone walls. “Not your father, not me or Ned or your sister. Not Sansa. I was the only person who could stand you, and you betrayed me.” 

When Reek awoke his cheeks were wet and the hounds whimpered as they slumbered, like they’d shared his dream and knew. 

She’d decided to give him rest today. There was no whimpers of Theon, Theon, the name that haunted his dreams and bled from her eyes. 

She only sat silent and still upon the bed. His bed, their bed, it made him sick. But he beelined for the empty tray at her table anyway. Coward.

Reek felt her follow him across the room, gaze cold on his form. Just when he thought he was going to get away today unscathed, tray in his hands, she spoke. 

“You had the boys burned?”

“I…” He swallowed, a tremor rooting his feet to the floor. “Yes, my lady.” 

“Why did you do that?”

Reek closed his eyes. He felt almost angry that she never stopped, even when she wasn’t begging. She never stopped trying, even in the smallest of ways. It was brave. He hated it. 

“So they could not be r— recognised.”

He hated more the way her face changed, twisted in disbelief and disgust both. Reek was not sure why, but her hatred hurt more than anything else now. It had come to matter to him, more than it ever had in that other man’s life before.  

“And the farmers? The parents of the boys?”

Reek glanced at the door. There were no footsteps closing in on them. “Don’t k—know. Run off or killed in the carnage.” 

She watched him for a moment, brow drawn tight. “I always thought you silly and stupid, as all children do of their brother’s friends… but I never thought you were cruel.” 

Better to be cruel than weak. Shame burned through him. Reek said nothing, eyes on the floor, and he wished she would stop looking at him like that. Like she saw through him and hated what was there. It made him want to curl up tighter than master’s beatings did.

“He’s gone for the moment, overseeing forging himself a new sword,” she said eventually, when it was obvious Reek would not speak up. “Get some sleep while you can.”

He looked up at her from under his eyelashes. Her face was no different from the mask before, but her voice was a trace changed. Softer.

He shuffled out and took her tray with him. 

Being this cold was the best thing that had happened to him in years. The cold made him feel alive. 

Better still was Sansa beside him, clutched to him like Rickon had been to Robb’s leg. Reek — Theon — Reek — he could not remember the last time he’d been hugged. No one should trust him, and yet she did, shivering and glancing at him with those too blue eyes. They stuck out in the sea of white, and he found he could not look away. 

There was a bark from afar, then closer, a choir of barking and men’s voices. Yes, he thought. I can be brave. Like Robb and Ned and his sister. Like Sansa. His hands shook.

He rose from the ground, peeling Sansa’s desperate hands off his middle. Stay, stay, she was saying. He could not. 

Theon had never been a hero; he’d been a coward and a failure and an awful son and worse friend and brother, but this, here, now, the barking almost upon them… he could do this. 

He took a shivering breath. The cold air made his teeth ache. With one last look to those too blue eyes he turned and ran — straight into the open maw of Ramsay’s hounds. 

The sea was less blue than he remembered. Perhaps it was Sansa’s eyes that had dulled the shade. After knowing how it felt to have her look at him like he was worth something, valued and wanted and even brave, the sea was no blue in comparison. 

It washed him away as good as it used to, however. 

Gone was any trace of him . The smell of rain on the dock’s wood was strong in his nose, a flood arresting the taint of everything around him and even beneath his skin. Clean. 

He could start again. 

I am Theon, he thought tentatively. Whatever that means, I am Theon. 

It did not feel right being hot. Meereen was a far cry from Winterfell, and even though he’d been kept prisoner there he missed it. Truly, he knew what he really missed, but it was awful and forbidden to think of. 

Tyrion asked him, once, what happened to their shared Stark girl. He stuttered and cursed himself a thousand times but he got it out, painting utter abhorrence across the Lannister’s face. 

“And you did nothing?” Tyrion shrugged, slopping the wine out of his goblet, but his eyes were strikes of fire. “You stood by while he brutalised her?”

“Not forever,” Theon replied faintly, even though he agreed with him. And he brutalised me too. 

He could no more save her before she saved him than he could conjure fire from his fingertips. 

Tyrion’s face scrunched like he was going to scream, before he let out a sharp sigh and pinched his nose so hard his fingers turned white. 

“Where is she now?”

Theon was wondering that himself. He always wondered, always thought about her, even when he knew he shouldn’t. She had started to consume his thoughts when he was not forced to pay attention to Yara and the dragon queen. In his deepest, darkest of hearts, he could not give a shit about the war for the throne. He knew what he wanted.  

But he had some kind of answer for that, at least, as he had none for the reason he had let her suffer like him for so long. 

“At the wall, with Jon.” 

Tyrion regarded him with a frown. “Why aren’t you with them?”

“My sister is here.”

He kissed his teeth and took a sip of his wine. “I suppose it’s best. Jon would have your head for what you’ve done.”

Theon did not want to say that Sansa would intervene for him. That was his own to keep inside his chest. 

“On second thought, perhaps you should’ve gone with her after all.” With a distasted raised eyebrow the Lannister rose from his seat and dropped down, waddling away with a dismissal that made Theon’s cheeks burn. 

The sight of Jon made the breath catch in his throat. It never struck him before how much he looked like Ned, but it did now, and Theon had to dig his feet into the sand to stop himself from falling. 

Perhaps if he knelt to the North’s new king the ghosts of his father and Robb would not rise up and follow him home. Perhaps they would not raise their twin shimmering swords and gut him night after night, whenever he closed his eyes or sat alone. He knew the idea was silly. They would always follow him. 

In front of him, Jon was staring with a fire that rivalled Daenerys’ dragons. There was a name on the tip of Theon’s tongue. It had been there for moons and, he suspected, it would be there for the rest of his life. 

“Sansa. Is she alright?”

He could be brave, sometimes. 

He was brave when Sansa looked at him with tears in her eyes and he did not fall to his knees. He was brave when she engulfed him, and he was brave for biting back the words that threatened to flood him. 

Later, she sat him on a crate opposite her and shoved stew into his hand. He had not asked but she brought it anyway, a curious sort of look in her eye. 

“Eat,” she said, gently. Not an order. “We have a long night ahead of us.” 

The hero of the godswood, they called him. He did not feel like a hero. Except, perhaps, once. When he held a soft hand and jumped into snow. 

It had not been easy to run away. But then, there were not many things Theon would call easy. Life had been awful and hard for him, seemingly since he could first think, the memories even in his youth stained with pain.

But there was one thing. It was easy being with her. There was no one who knew him better, inside and out, back to front; she touched him and knew him, she looked at him and knew him. He looked back, eager as he had never been before, and knew her too. 

The night it changed was one he would remember forever. The dead were defeated, the larger war almost won; but he was in Winterfell with Sansa, the only place he wanted to be. 

They did not need to speak to communicate. They never had. So they sat in complete silence, comfortable and peaceful, until he was so desperate for her he might’ve begun to scream. 

Raising his hand, he only noticed then that it was shaking, warm against her skin. The fire popped and the ale he’d set aside was stale, but he had eyes only for the wonder in front of him. 

"You're shaking," she whispered, and he nodded, once, quick.

"I know." There was no point in trying to stop them. "They do that when I think of you."

She closed her eyes against his touch and her mouth parted, the softest sigh he’d ever heard whistling high against the deep crackles of the fire. 

Lover, he thought. This one was easy to remember. Theon. Lover.

Names were fickle things. The traveller had been right, all those years ago. They were, on the surface, only a word; a bastard still a bastard, even with a fancy name, like Arya’s Lord Gendry. And yet they held so much power. 

They held power indeed whether they were whispered in his ear or screamed at the top of somebody’s voice.

The stories always said that the one you love held the most power of all. Theon found that to be true. Robb was the one who had hurt him most, in his dreams and in waking, and now Sansa possessed the power to do the same if she wished. 

It was only the names she whispered that he cared about. She’d look at him with those sorrowful eyes, and he’d wrap himself around her like a bear in hibernation and squeeze until she turned a different shade. Then she would call him many things; dear, darling, my love. Best of all, in that breathy way of hers, the way that cleansed every bad memory he could ever associate it with…. best of all, she called him Theon. 

Though he called himself worse in the night, when she was asleep against him and he stared into the endless black. He thought of what the people named him, sometimes, in his darkest nights, even if he knew he shouldn’t. 

Turncloak. Traitor. Even the queen’s wife, once, to which Sansa dressed the heckler down until he was practically crying. Theon had almost felt sorry for the poor man. The queen’s wrath was a mighty one. 

No one called him that again. Either way, it didn’t bother him; he knew who he was. Theon. Coward. Brave. Brother. Lover. A thousand other things. 

“He’s run off again,” Sansa told him, hair askew, and Theon gave a tiny laugh at the sight.

“Did you try chasing him?”

Sansa stared at him flatly. “You get one guess.”

“Alright, alright, I’m going.” He wiggled out of his seat. 

A smile slowly came upon her as she watched, and she reached out to grab him as he tried to scoot by. 

“You’ve been working hard. Rest for a while, after you’ve caught him.” She gave him another small smile, the one that made his heart flip every time. No one else saw this one. “I love you.” 

“I love you,” he returned eagerly, leaning in for one of her kisses that made his toes curl. 

The air in Winterfell’s courtyard was tepid. It had been that way ever since the war ended; Theon liked to think it was because Sansa was queen and the world was right because of it. The winters did not kill. Their conductor was kind. 

A giggle sounded as he strode to the middle of the yard. Hiding a secret smile, he followed the sound until he was turning the corner of the kennels. His feet stilled. 

He’d been here after, many times, in his worst moments and when he forgot. But it was rare now. He stepped through. 

“Father! You found me!” a cry came, and there was a flash before the boy showed himself, grinning. 

Father. Yes, he liked that name. 

“Robb.” Theon found himself smiling back. He could not help it. “You’ll drive your mother mad one day.” 

Robb did not look entirely repentant, but he dragged his feet a little as he walked. “Cat did it too. She ran the other way.”

Theon sighed. “Just because your sister does something it doesn’t mean you have to.”

“I guess,” he frowned. With one hand, he pushed his hair behind his ear before he met Theon’s eyes. “Can you play with us, too, father?”

Theon had duties. He wrote letters, organised visits and advisors, countless other boring shit that needed to be done. He did them because Sansa would drown in it all on her own. That did not mean he liked being shut away from his family for long hours. 

“I fear I’ll anger the lord of Last Hearth if I neglect a reply to his letter for the fourth time this moon.” He looked at Robb, at his grey eyes, the longing in them, for a father, for love. “But he can wait.”

His son grinned and reached for Theon’s hand, yanking. Robb dragged him along, smiling, out of the kennels and into the light.

Chapter Text

The little girl sits in her lap. “Tell me a story, Mamma.”

Sansa pulls back her daughter’s hair with her fingers, twirling a curl around the thumb. The castle is almost asleep. Only the lanterns and candles burn, and her servants have retired at her request, leaving the wind outside their only companion for Cat’s goodnight tale.

“What kind of story, my dear?” Sansa asked. 

“A love story.”

She thought for a moment, but she did not have to think. “Alright… long ago, well before you were born, a princess was kidnapped by a brigand and held for ransom. See, her brother was a wealthy king, and princesses are valuable indeed.” 

“Like me?”

“Like you,” Sansa agreed. “But this princess was much older. One of his men captured her in the woods next to her home, and rode incessantly until he could deliver her to his leader. At first, the princess thought they were a brand of poor commonfolk. But when she was freed to eat or… use the privy, she recognised the sigil on their armour. The princess was highborn and had been diligent in her lessons. She knew every other highborn in the realm, and these were no commonfolk.” 

“Who were they?” 

“I suppose you could call them… krakens. The truest kraken of them all was their leader, who bared the true sigil of his tribe on his armour— a rusted thing, gold under a layer of grime. An apt description for the wearer, though I am getting ahead of myself.” She cleared her throat. “He was highborn, but he did not act like it when the princess was brought to him. They tied her up in an empty tent and left her to rot in the mud.”

Her daughter gasped. “Villain!"

“At first, yes,” Sansa admits. “He… did not act the gentleman in front of her. However, he fed her, and forced her to eat when she would not. It was better than what some hostages suffered, as she was soon to learn. The leader came to intimidate her that first night, eyes hard and armour harder, and the princess tried to conceal the tremours in her body. He squatted down so they were eye to eye. The princess noticed he had a missing finger, and scars upon his face that looked deliberate, even and careful dips in his pale skin. They could not be from the heat of battle. She was oddly transfixed by them and, in her daze, reached out to trace one with her finger.

“The leader froze under her touch. As she was nearing the end of the scar, his shoulders slumped, like he was releasing a great burden. Shocked at herself, she drew back her hand with haste, and a distinct shing ran through the cold air . He stared for a good while with those cold blue eyes of his, straight into what seemed like her soul, to the very core of her.

“I could’ve thought you were going to attack me, he told her gruffly. The blade in his hands glimmered under the moonlight. He came close to her ear, close enough that she could feel his hot breath on her face, and the princess suddenly feared him as she had not before. But then the dagger in her sights flipped, his hand gripping it to face inwards. Away from her. He sheathed it, and offered his hand instead, free of any blade. Bewildered, she took it, and rose to pass the night with him on a much preferable log, broth and bathing in the river. They did not talk, but they found they did not have to. It was rather tense at first. There were secret glances, one checking on the other — to ensure, perhaps, that neither had pulled a blade or run away. Perhaps.”

Sansa bit back a smile. “Of course, the princess was not one to be charmed by a soft hand and the barest of meals. The next night, she found the ropes that bound her hands rather loose, and managed to escape for a few hours before the kraken’s entourage found her. The leader was not best pleased.”

Her daughter gasped again. “Did he hurt her?”

“No, indeed! He pulled the ropes until they were tight enough, however. Bound the bird back to its cage. The next weeks were spent travelling, and he visited her each night under the guise of ensuring his cargo was in tact.”

“Under the guise?” Her daughter scrunched up her nose.

“Pretending,” Sansa explained. “It became obvious the longer they travelled that he had begun to enjoy her company and the princess his. Not anyone in his culture would regard his scars with such sympathy. The same was true of his honesty to a woman who had been so sheltered.” 

“Oh. They were friends?”

“Well enough, for a kidnapper and his hostage. He had explained his reasons for doing so, and although she did not forgive him, it became apparent that the world was more complicated than she might’ve imagined. His lands were poor, see, a place where the small people starved, and it had always been sparse and near barren — he intended to be the king to change that.

“Eventually, they boarded a ship and reached their destination. The princess lived on his home for a while. The people were too rough and cruel for her, but he… was not. He ruled with something approaching mercy. That was rare for his upbringing. He sat perched upon his throne — which was not a throne at all, really, more a decorated chair — and his eyes drifted to her during his audiences. Ever so briefly, but enough, and more often and for longer that his men were starting to ask what was more fascinating about the left stone wall than the right.”

Her daughter tapped her knee impatiently. “And?”

“Patience, Cat. And… that was it, for a time. It was clear the kraken king was sending secret letters when her back was turned — negotiating the terms of release with her homeland, she assumed. The thing was… the princess started to like it on the island. In the day, he sneered and jeered at her for the sake of his people. At night, he was different. They played games, drank together, talked, anything and everything. He liked to show her his homeland, the sights and jewels, the things he was too embarrassed to tell anyone else that he enjoyed. It  — it went both ways, eventually, even though they were supposed to be enemies. She began to value his company greatly. More than before. Much more. So much so that he — he begun to shine golden like the kraken on his armour, the gold that draped the halls and seeped into her dreams. No one in her homeland treated the princess as such — as their equal, man or woman.” 

“And she fell in love?”

“You’ve heard too many stories,” Sansa laughed. “But yes. She was already in love. It had taken her this long to realise it.”

“Did they kiss?”

“Not for a while. Not for a long while. She caught him writing his regular letter to her homeland one night, and even though she knew and understood he had intended to ransom her all along — he’d been upfront about it, bragging and holding it over her head  — he had grown quiet about the great funds he would have for her pretty red hair. They never liked to talk of her return. It meant, in the deepest part of their hearts, they’d have to admit neither of them wanted her to go. The kraken king never mentioned her departure after the first few times — not the riches and not the exchange. Not until that night. Not until she ripped the letter from under his feather and waved it at him. What are you asking for me this time, she demanded, a burn in her chest she had only just begun to understand. Nothing, he replied, raising his voice to match hers. I ask for nothing at all.” 

“Nothing? ” her daughter cried. 

“Nothing,” Sansa echoed. “And then the princess watched in disbelief as his lip trembled and face scrunched, and he rushed to cover it with shaking hands. He was weeping — these great, heaving sobs, and she hadn’t a clue what to do. She brought him into her arms and held him, glancing around like someone might help her. But she knew if his people found out he was crying like this he would be mocked and chased off, back into the sea he was crowned from. So she held him and called for no one. It was the two of them, the fire, the sound of waves in the distance against the stone they stood between. He wept until he was sniffling, clinging to her still, and suddenly he backed away, further and against her calls of his name. He shot out into the hall faster than she could follow.

“Stunned, she looked around and spotted the letter discarded on the floor. He had not thought to dispose of it. Outlined in firelight, she sat and read, and felt her heart flip at the words. Wolf king, he wrote. I will send the princess back tomorrow morning. I want nothing in return except your agreement to leave my islands be. It was a foolish plan from the first. I see that now. I am not so prideful as to boast my mistakes. Most of all, it has come to my attention that your sister is the best, most wonderful woman I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. She does not deserve to be locked away for years in exchange for a sack or two of gold. Please take the knowledge of my twisted affection for her and use it to reassure yourself that my words are true, for I will lie and cheat, but not about this — not about her.” 

Her daughter gave a bewildered giggle. “He lies and cheats?”

“He’s not quite the same as the heroes from other stories, is he?” Sansa remarked with an answering laugh. “Still, the princess lowered the paper and wiped her eyes. She spent half the night trying to find the kraken, wandering the castle she only knew half-well, and found him sat cross legged on the shore, watching the waves in the dark. 

“She joined him silently, digging her boots into the rocks and sand. The moonlight bathed him in blue, matching his eyes and making the red under them disappear. He looked the king he was, like that, even when she had been holding him while he cried only a while ago. But when he turned his head and gazed at her he looked a man again, the blue and white and sand a beautiful concoction. And she —“ Sansa swallowed. “She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, soft and yielding.”

“She kissed him?”

“He was shy, underneath all the bravado he liked to put upon himself. As he said in his letter, he would lie — but not about her. Not to her. She had seen right through him from the beginning, ever since he softened under her examination of his scars. They kissed for what seemed like hours, turning what was once hatred and hostility to a love that could conquer worlds, if they so chose. I read the letter, the princess whispered against his lips. I could not leave you. We will both go. ”

“The next morning they did as she vowed, saddled with some of his men in tow. They rode to the place the kraken had detailed in his previous letters, sectioned away from the might of the princess’ homeland. Neutral land, as it were, to ensure a fair parlay could be made. It did not take long for the wolf king to arrive. He was armed to the teeth, seemingly an entire battalion behind him.”

“Wait!” her daughter demanded. “The kraken said he would not harm her!”

“But remember the wolf king received all of his letters but the last one. To the best of his knowledge, his sister was going to be thrown off the cliffs if he did not concede to the kraken’s terms.

“The kraken surrendered himself to whatever punishment the wolf king offered, ensuring there would be no vengeance sought by his people in his place. The princess asked for safe passage for her love to return to his home in exchange for her, but the wolf king was not satisfied.

“You see, Cat, her brother was a stalwart man. One of pride and honour. There was, to him, no pride nor honour to be found in kidnapping the princess. Worse, he judged their shared affection a lie, a ploy by the kraken to trick him. 

“He ordered the kraken’s death, a clean beheading at next daybreak. The princess begged and pleaded but the king would not hear it. You have been with them too long, sister, he said. He has poisoned your mind.” Sansa swallowed roughly. “The wolf king meant well.”

“Death?” Cat cried. “He can’t!”

Sansa rubbed her hands up and down her daughter’s smooth arms. “That night, the princess snuck into the tent they were holding the kraken in. She untied his hands and begged him to run, to save himself and go back home, but he refused. I have not been brave, princess. My life has not been a worthy one. Let me be brave. She spent the night cradled against him, in and out of awful dreams, visions of his head on a pike and his eyes staring without seeing—“

Sansa caught the horrified look on Cat’s face and stopped. “Too much detail. I’m sorry. Instead, she… dreamed of kissing him, and woke up to do just that.” 

Cat nodded. “Much better.”

“They dragged him to the block, the wolf king polishing his greatsword — a mighty thing, the carved hilt a wolf of his tribe. It reflected the early morning light, the same way that the sea did, and the wolf king clomped to the stage, solemn as he looked down at the kraken on his knees. The princess was struck silent. Her shouts from yesterday seemed childlike in comparison to the true terror racing through her now. 

“In her desperation, the princess rushed to the stage, dodging her brother’s guards, and flung herself onto the block, covering the kraken’s body with her own. The wolf king stood frozen, sword raised and eyes wide with horror. By the gods , he thundered. Get up from there. I will not, she cried in reply, shielding the kraken’s head with her hand. One eye peeked out from between her fingers. I would sooner die with him than move.”

Her daughter gripped Sansa’s hand.

“You must move, S— princess, the kraken pleaded. For me. I am resigned to my fate but I could not resign myself to yours.”

The small hand clutched harder. 

“Witnessing this display and their words of devotion, the wolf king lowered his sword. It was not easy, nor agreeable to him. But he was no villain. A truce was brokered between the kraken and the crowned wolf — the king agreed to let him go unscathed. The kraken rescinded his threat of war and vowed to abide no more hostility between his islands and their homeland.”

“The princess and the kraken spent one last night together in each other’s arms. I have no more heart, he told her, pressing her hand to the left of his chest. You take it with you. He was so beautiful in candlelight. They were young, and foolish, and very much in love. They did not care for consequences — even welcomed them.” 

“To their great despair, the morning came, as it always did. Gathered on the dock, the crowned wolf and the kraken parted civilly with an honourable handshake. But the princess… well, she had trouble saying goodbye.”

Sansa fought to keep her voice even.

“I love you, he said, his eyes sparkling,” she whispered. “I will love you until I pass into the drowned god’s halls, and, I think, even then.” 

“The wind billowed around them, and the tears they shed sunk into the sea beside them. A few drops in a never-ending ocean of misery. Despite the men gathered around them on the dock, the kraken’s hands shook at his side, desperate to reach out for her. I love you, I love you, his eyes said, even when his mouth had stopped.”

“The princess—” Cat tried, but Sansa was too far away.

“The princess told him she loved him back, relentlessly and wretchedly. I will never forget you. Don’t forget me, Theon.”

“Theon? Who’s Theon?”

Sansa remembered the touch of his hand, how the tips of his fingers had pressed into her wrist as he helped her into the boat. That was the last taste of him she would have.

“One of her brothers men —” Sansa cut off, and pressed a shaking hand to her mouth as if she could control the stuttered breath there. “One of them pushed the boat out of the dock, and off they sailed, into the dark fog.”

Feeling a mighty anchor weighing her down, she had turned around to see him staring as she floated further and further. His eyes followed her until she could see him no longer, the fog and horizon so soundly disguising the entire dock.

“The wolf king was determined to act like none of it ever happened. The people of her homeland fussed and offered their sympathies to the princess, telling her how sorry they were that she was taken and how awful and brutish the kraken must’ve been. They did not know how her heart ached for him. They could not.”

Sansa looked into the fire ahead, feeling the same ache she had then. “Suitors visited her home, one after the other, but the princess could think of no one else. Eventually, the king intervened, ordering that she married one for the stability of their reign. And… she obeyed.”

Cat whipped around. “She did not marry the kraken?”

“No,” Sansa agreed, feeling her heart break all over again. 

“But… she loved him.”

“She did.” Tears burned at her eyes. “But see, my darling… the princess did her duty. She wed one of the lords from her own kingdom. Her brother’s people, and later her own, would never accept an enemy and outsider as king.” 

“I didn’t ask for a sad love story, mama,” Cat complained, though her voice sounded quieter than when she’d begun her tale.

Despite her tears, Sansa managed to laugh. “I’m sorry, my dear. I shall tell you another one — happier, this time — if you like?”

“Yes, please.” She settled back into her mother’s arms. “But first — is the princess still alive?”

“She is.”

“And the kraken?”

“As far as I am aware, yes, he is.”

“They must still long for each other, then,” her daughter sighed.

The burning wood at the fireplace crackled, and Sansa wondered if her eyes would burn this much if she put her face up to it and felt the smoke cloud around her. 

“They do. They promised each other they would, remember?”

The halls were silent as Sansa followed her skipping daughter to her chambers. If she closed her eyes as she walked, she could almost imagine she was there again — locked within the sea-stained halls, their king a false god she would gladly worship.

And, as assured, Sansa told her daughter a different story as she tucked her into bed. There, Sansa returned to the fireplace, and stared at its dancing flame. She remembered the tales King Robert spun, though she had never met him. His beloved Lyanna was a thing of myth. But he could no longer remember her face. 

Sansa wondered if she could remember Theon’s. She thought so, but she was petrified she was picturing it wrong — the eyes especially, if anything. There was little that could compare in her fictions to the reality of his gaze. 

He would look different now. Older. But no more wiser, she thought with a laugh. 

There had been no invasion of Northern shores in years, nor any contact at all, as her brother had brokered before his abdication. Sansa hoped that her kraken had found love, at least in the same love she had found in their daughter. Being queen was hard work and oftentimes brought her to the brink, and yet the knowledge that he was still alive — somewhere in the world — kept her going.

Don’t forget me, Theon. She had not forgotten him. She hoped he remembered her. 

For nigh 60 years, the Greyjoys did not invade the North, and when Queen Sansa passed away, her daughter made a fine monarch in her place, blue eyes and sandy hair a thing of tales and stories.

Chapter Text

His heart was breaking. 

It was true that he was no good match for anyone, not before and not now, and yet he could not help but wish himself in Harry’s place. 

It started after the dead had been defeated. Theon didn’t keep track of everyone who had shown up to fight, though it feels like he should’ve in hindsight. The white cloaks completely passed him by that night, too distracted by the rancid dead lunging for his neck. 

After the battle he was introduced to the leader of these strangers in a peculiar manner. He’d seen him, once, only a flash, when he strutted by at the end of the battle. Shrouded in glory, in honour and praise and good looks, smiling like the world hadn’t been about to end less than a minute ago. Theon had looked at him and known him, as well as he’d known the boy of his youth. He knew what Harry liked. Wine, women and song. 

“We have to rebuild the left wall first,” Jon said, making Theon startle. He pointed emphatically at the map spread upon the table. 

Theon tried to look like he was listening. In all honesty, he was so tired he could fall over. It was the morning after the battle  — he was weak, tired. They all were. But he was grateful that Jon included him in the family meeting, and he was determined to look focused. 

“Where is Sansa?” Jon asked. He looked to Theon with suspicious eyes. 

“Why would I know?” 

Jon’s lips turned down — a familiar gesture, and not one that would intimidate Theon after seeing it so many times as a boy. “You two seem close.”

Years ago, Theon would demand to know what he was trying to say. But he was as silent as Jon now, the air thickening. All of a sudden, he felt like he was on the shore at Dragonstone, Jon’s fist twisted in his tunic — under interrogation, as it were  — but he hadn’t a clue why. 

“She’s busy,” Arya said from the window. She was leaning against the wall, looking down into the courtyard, an awful purple bruise splayed across her eye. “Come look.” 

He was not bid, but Theon did too, gingerly peeking over the sill and past the glass. The sight made his heart stop. There, Sansa and Harry among the snow and burnt debris, kissing in broad daylight like they were the only ones in the world. Her auburn melded with his blonde as they pressed closer; it was obvious, considering the wall behind Sansa’s back, that they thought no one could see. 

“What in seven hells does he think he’s doing—“ Jon barked, whipping around to stride off, but Arya placed a slim hand on his shoulder and pulled him until he stumbled. He turned to stare at her, shocked at her strength.

“She’s finally found happiness, Jon,” she said, voice gentle. “We have all been through enough. Let her keep it.” 

Theon said nothing. He didn’t think he’d be able to speak even if he tried, eyes locked onto the pair. Never one to be in tune with his feelings, suddenly it was all too clear what that squirming in his gut these past moons was. He’d thought about her, after Ramsay, on the boat to the islands. He’d thought about her every day after, too, in Meereen and in King’s Landing and, he knew, he’d think about her wherever he went. 

Some part of him agreed with Arya. She should be happy. But a louder part… 

It shouldn’t bother him. It shouldn’t, he knew that — but it did more than that; it killed him, to know she had dined with him and looked at him like — like she wanted to eat him and yet — yet she was there, kissing another man. 

Was it selfish of him? Yes, and he knew it. But he’d always been selfish. 

It was why when Sansa had captured him later that he could not bring himself to smile, even when she was glowing. 

She caught onto his mood, as she always did, seeing through him like he was paper held up to a candlelight. “I know it’s dangerous,” she said, eyes flickering back from the wall to his face. “To trust someone who is not one of us. But I do.”

His forehead creased. “Us?”

“Our family,” she explained. Then, she reached into the pocket of her cloak, procuring a flash of silver that made his heart skip. 

“What is this?” He knew damn well, but his mouth could say nothing else.

“A reminder, if ever you’re in need of it.” There was something incredibly soft about her voice. “A reminder that you are one of us. You are a Stark.”

Theon bit his tongue. I love you, he wanted to say, so desperately he felt himself shake from the force of it. The words rattled in his empty skull and made his legs weaken, like a mummer’s puppet with its strings pulled too tight. He would snap. He would snap. 

“Thank you,” he said instead, and meant it, even if other words wanted to accompany them. 

Then Sansa’s gaze softened even more — he did not know how that was possible, how someone could be so wonderful and tortured and still show their deepest heart — and she reached out to hug him, slowly, giving enough time for him to refuse the contact.

If it was anyone else, he would. But being held by Sansa was being held by goodness itself, and he would not deny her the twin comfort. He launched into her arms like an excited child and she gave a lovely laugh. Now he felt ashamed at what he’d thought looking out of that window this morning.

He could not be upset that she had found love. It was what she deserved, and better, too, that it was not him; he would only drag her down. 

She released him and met his eyes before reaching out to pin the wolf to him, a soft touch that even his tunic could not disguise. Of course, the fingers curled over his heart were warm; how could they not be?

He wanted to beg her to send Harry back to the hole he’d come from. He wanted to demand what she saw in him — in a man who seemed too close to the Theon of the past, who postured and smiled without reservation and kissed like a master. Harry would hurt her, like he’d hurt a hundred women before Ramsay. 

He got out, “Sansa—” before his throat closed up, and she squeezed him tighter.

“It’s alright,” she shushed him. “I know you haven’t felt like one of us. When we were little and… after. But you are. You are.” 

Overwhelmed, he fought the sob rising up and up and up, but it was no use. He let go in her arms, and she stood tall through it all, scrunching a gentle hand in his hair.

 He lied. He still couldn’t stand seeing them together.

It hurt, but not just in the usual way. Harry the heir was beloved; a golden boy, sparkles in his eyes and a strong sword at his hip. As best Theon knew, his father loved him, his siblings loved him, Sansa loved him. Everyone loved him. 

Robb had been Theon’s brother for all his years in Winterfell. But he had never ceased to envy him, to covet what he had most easily — a father, a family, trueborn glory and armies, a fair head for war and women that lined the castle to wed him. 

Harry was — he was the same. Theon didn’t know if he actually wanted the things the heir had, not anymore, not after knowing a wiser way of living. But it did not stop the finger of envy digging itself into his gut, twirling and twisting until he thought he might dry heave in the middle of every council meeting. 

He looked at the two of them, standing tall and beautiful side by side, and Theon wanted. He wanted. 

Time seemed to blur, the dark of his room a constant, until suddenly he was standing under the godswood in the snow. 

Shuffling his feet in the slush spread under the tree, he turned to Jon beside him, who was staring a hole into Harry’s golden head. The heir was bouncing on his heels impatiently, hands folded in front of him. 

“I think we’ve made him wait long enough.” 

“Have we?” Jon whispered back, a satisfied smirk teasing at his lips. “I suppose I’ll go get the bride, then.” 

In another life, Theon would have reveled in rising in Jon’s opinion like this, becoming someone the bastard might share jokes with. As it was, he was glad, but it only ever made him miss Robb more. He imagined it always would. 

Crunching the snow beneath his boots, Jon departed, and returned with a Sansa that made Theon’s heart fall into his gut. She was beautiful, but she always was; she’d chosen an elegant grey gown. Not quite the startling white she’d worn for the other wedding he remembered. 

The ceremony began, but Theon quite honestly couldn’t hear a word. 

Theon could shout, if he wanted to. He could dive in front of her and beg her to be with him. He could unsheathe his sword and cut Harry down before he could rise from his knees. 

He could kneel in front of her and tell her that he loved her, that he’d loved her all along and he was too stupid to realise it, and that, even though it wasn’t true, it felt like he’d loved her since they were children. 

Instead, he stood there and did nothing. The blue falcon on her cloak stared back at him. 

Jon did not object when Theon joined his sulking in the corner of the feast. 

Like he, Jon had seen too much to ever trust himself in the middle of a crowded room — a quick dagger, a poisoned cup, even the swords the northern amen and knights wore on their hips. Even Longclaw at Jon’s. Theon saw threats everywhere; shadows in every corner, laughing and flicking the blade between their bony fingers, grin wider than those horrid dolls Sansa played with as a girl. 

“You two must be happy,” came a voice, and both of them startled. A clean shaven knight sidled up in front of them, sipping cheerily on his ale. One of the lords from the Vale, Theon vaguely remembered. 

“Why’s that?” Jon asked, blinking in that accusing way he did. 

The lord slid his eyes from Jon to Theon and back again. “Your sister is married.”

Jon kissed his teeth. “Aye. Of course.”

Giving him a curious glance, Theon almost laughed. He knew that voice. That was the voice Jon used when he would rather be eating glass. A little thrill ran through him — did he dislike Harry as much as Theon did? 

Though not for the same reason, surely. 

“I’m family,” Theon spoke up, as if that deflected everything. “I’m happy if she’s happy.”

He was sure Jaime might’ve said the same of Cersei, if pressed. It was not the same. Neither their father nor mother were shared, and yet, Sansa treated him as if they were. He loved it. He hated it. He wanted to be a Stark so badly as a boy, and now that he was he wished he wasn’t. Only him. Only his shit life. 

“Indeed.” The man lowered the tankard from his face, and now Theon saw the apprehension in his eyes. “Then why do you two look like you’re on the rack?”

“It’s been a long few years,” Jon said with an accompanying painful, flickering smile. A cat with brown fur taped to its head would pass as a lion sooner than Jon’s words would be convincing. 

“So we should be celebrating!” the man cried, clapping both of them on the shoulder; his ale spilt onto Theon’s shoulder and he grimaced. 

Looking at that expecting grin, Theon placed him. He was Harry’s right hand man; he’d been first to his side at the wedding and on horseback beside him before that, during the battle and in every meeting. Invested, perhaps, in gaining from this alliance. 

Theon shared a glance with Jon. He knew, too. 

“For the sake of my sister, I’m going to keep quiet,” Jon said, low and gruff. “But I’d suggest you leave and find merriment and whatever information you were sent to seek elsewhere.” 

With no more than a raised eyebrow the man listened, sliding out of centre view with ease. 

“Sansa is not going to like that you pissed him off,” Theon murmured, watching him mingle with other white-cloaked men. “That was tactless.”

“I’ll take the stripping down without complaint.” He ran his tongue along his cheek and sighed. “We’re her family. We have to protect our own. If he’s up to something involving Sansa, I hate him, and I want him to know it. I did the same with Littlefinger.”

Family , he thought. There it was again. Could he never get away?

Making a half-hearted hum of agreement, Theon imagined wrapping his hands around Harry’s neck the way Jon had told him he did to the weasel. Would it feel good?

Sansa would be angry at him. If I could do what he did to you… she would. He could hear her say it. That hatred directed towards him made him curl further inward than anything else in the world could. No, it would not bring him any satisfaction. 

He sighed and pressed his back into the cold wall. At his side, Jon copied him, face solemn, the two of them stiff as statues. 

Theon had too much to drink. He was sure he had; Harry was far too close in his vision to be real. The merriment had died, most of the men retired. Jon had departed long ago, leaving Theon alone to brood between Winterfell’s walls, before he’d tried to find his chamber too. The golden heir had captured him in the attempt. 

“Greyjoy,” he said, husky. Raising his cup to his lips, Harry took one long sip, as loud as he could possibly make it. 

What kind of show of strength was this? “Where’s Sansa?” Theon tried.

“Somewhere,” he answered with a shrug. Harry tipped forward, from the drink or of his own volition he couldn’t tell, but he landed square on his lips. 

Theon jolted back, stumbling against the wall. There was no one else here, suddenly, and he wondered when that had happened. 

“What? What is it?” Harry asked. His eyes were wide and trained on him, almost frightened. 

It wasn’t that Theon was not tempted. He had done things with men before. With — with Robb, in the candlelight, when his parents were asleep. 

“Nothing,” he slurred, utterly bewildered, his tongue smacking against the roof of his mouth. He tried to keep it in, but — “It’s only… I’m rather in love with your wife.” 

There were a few beats of complete, utter silence. Harry was struck silent. 

Then, he rolled his eyes, a great sweeping gesture. “You Starks are all mad!” he cried. “Either mad or weird or stubborn as foul horses.”

“Leave, if it bothers you so much,” Theon offered, as sour undertone as he could get. “I’d gladly escort you out.” 

Harry’s eyes were no longer frightened. They were strikes of lightning. If Theon wasn’t half drunk, he’d start to suspect he’d taken the rejection badly. 

“Are you joking? And give up what I’ve gained?” With that, the golden heir swept his stupid long cloak back with one brisk hand and turned the hall, leaving Theon to groan and stumble his way to bed. 

Everything hurt. Worse, everything was a blur. 

He knew he should remember something. It was very important, whatever it was. He remembered wanting to remember. But not what it was. 

He tried telling Sansa at breakfast, but his tongue was tied and Harry kept glaring at him. Theon had no clue why. 

“You had a little too much to drink last night, did you, Theon?” Sansa asked after his fifth failed attempt, reaching out and covering his hand with her own. 

“Found a woman who made you so happy you can’t speak?” Harry jested with a painfully forced laugh, some of his men joining in with their own grunts and chuckles. The long table they all sat at had been brought out special, a morning celebration for their Lady’s marriage. 

Sansa frowned at that, squeezing his hand. “Was it a woman?” Her voice was quiet, intimate, only for him. 

“No,” he answered resolutely, though he wasn’t sure why it was so important to have her know that. 

Theon imagined flipping his hand and lifting until her soft skin reached his lips. He imagined leaning over the table and smacking the bowls aside, concentrated only on making Sansa moan with the skill of his kiss, using every trick he’d ever learned and then some, everything he had to impress the woman who was so many leagues ahead she was at the top of the well he’d been stuck in for years.

One day, perhaps he would meet her at the top. 

“Too much ale,” he answered, and dug into his porridge. 

It took three days for he and Jon to agree in thwarting whatever plan the Vale’s lords had for Sansa. It took five days for Harry to show his true colours.

Those colours were not red, of blood and bruises and flaying, but a decidedly more hurtful nature. It always hurt more when you loved them. 

Jon paid the whore and moved her out of the castle while Theon went in search of the unhappy couple. Unlike he’d assumed, there was no shouting or screaming that he could easily follow. He supposed he should’ve known Sansa would never shout or raise her voice, not when she’d been taught to flinch at the sound like he had. 

Luckily, Harry was less inclined to follow his wife’s lead.

“I love you!” came an insistent voice, somewhere behind a wall to his left. 

Theon stopped still in the hallway, waiting. His breaths were coming in short, jagged puffs; he was angrier than he’d realised, walking behind Sansa’s wake and seeing the same sight she had — the blonde heir on top of a dark beauty. Now that there was no one to see his face, he let himself go, nostrils flaring and clenching his fists. Talk, fucker, he seethed. Talk and I will find you.

He wasn't sure which brother Harry should be more frightened by.

“Sansa, would you see reason?” This time the shout came closer. His feet pounded along the floor, rapid and strong. He’d never felt stronger.

“It was one whore—!”

Theon swung open the door. The two of them turned in tandem, Sansa’s face kinder than his, and yet her red eyes and wet face sent another thousand tendrils of anger down Theon’s spine. 

“You better be damn glad I found you first,” he stormed, directing his glare at Harry. “Jon will kill you as soon as he gets his hands on you.”

“He can try,” Harry tried to refute, but Theon only heard Joffrey’s petulant tone.

“I can try, too.” Theon stepped forward, into the room. “Would you like to see?”

“Don’t,” Sansa pleaded, holding out a hand. “It will solve nothing.”

“What’s there to solve?” Theon asked, his anger fading at the sight of the pain in her face. Her pain was his, as it always was. “He dishonoured you. Lied. Deceived. Treated you like mud on his boots.” He was back to anger again. “Let me hurt him. Please.” Like he hurt you. I could not hurt the last.

“No, thank you, Theon,” she said, clearing her throat. She stepped over to him and led his arm backward, out of the room. He followed her lead. 

“Are you sure? If you need help—”

“I’ll come to you. I promise.” Now that Harry could no longer see her face as she had her back turned to him, her eyes were clearer, sharper. That was the Sansa he knew. “I can handle this.” 

Her eyes held his own until she closed the door, locking him out and leaving him cold in the hallway. 

 A week later she came to him anyway.

He was not with her this time, but she knocked on his door and entered in a hurried daze, hair askew and cloak draping off one shoulder. 

“Sansa.” He bolted out of his seat, ready to run with her at a moment’s notice. “What happened?”

“Harry—“ she began, rushed, and the anger clenched his chest again. “He — He — I found him sleeping with a man.” 

Fuck. Her eyes were wide, utterly bewildered, and Theon watched her for a moment. That was it. The thing he could not remember. Harry had tried to kiss him at the wedding celebration. 

Ashamed, he looked up at her from underneath his lashes, but she didn’t seem disgusted at the revelation she’d laid out, like the rest of Westeros told him he should be.

“Oh.” Theon didn’t quite know how to proceed. “Do you want me to go in there and draw my sword?”

Sansa’s eyes got wider, if they could’ve. A startled laugh ripped from his throat; he never expected Robb’s little sister to fabricate an innuendo. 

“I don’t know,” she said after a moment’s pause. “He’ll be killed if anyone else found out.”

“He’s still cheating, Sansa. On you. What kind of dense fool would tr—”

“But he doesn’t deserve to die for it, does he?”

Theon stopped. He was not naturally predetermined to kindness, to mercy. Like many other things, it had been beaten into him. He knew well enough she was right, even if the vengeful half of him, the one that dusted the cobwebs around the Theon of old cried out for retribution. “No,” he agreed. If that was true, he and Robb would’ve been dead before their fourteenth nameday. “But you… you deserve better. A man who loves you. Only you.” 

Sansa’s lips parted a little as she studied him, and Theon’s heart started to thunder in his ears. What is—

“You’re right,” she blurted, and turned to leave. She stilled, and he knew what she was thinking. She was deciding whether to trust him with Harry’s newfound hobby — his word of silence confirmed.

I am your family, he wanted to say. You can trust me with anything. But he would not blame her if she couldn’t; he’d made mistakes enough. 

“Thank you for — for being here. Goodnight,” she said, and nothing more. 

 “You have a week to organise your men and leave,” Sansa informed her husband. “Or the rest of Westeros will learn the lord of the Riverland’s secret.”

Tactfully, she did not specify; Jon and the guards in the room were ignorant of what had transpired the night before. 

Harry’s stormy eyes slipped over to him. “And you stand at her side, Greyjoy, all tall and proud. As if you’ve done a thing.”

If Theon wanted to, he could easily divulge his secret to the realm independent from Sansa. Rumours required no proof, and they’d be enough to ruin him for life. But he’d betrayed for the sake of his own anger enough. 

“I’ve gained and kept her trust, which is more than you can say,” he replied. 

After he agreed, Harry was escorted out, glare locked onto Theon. 

Jon was gone with the dragon queen and the northern army. Harry was gone, too, and took his white cloaks with him. 

Yara had written. But Theon couldn’t leave, not when Sansa was in Winterfell without an army, without her bannermen. Worse, he could not leave her hurting. 

He found her drinking alone in the library. Trying to walk as quietly as he could, he’d snuck in here to find a book to put him to sleep — he liked reading to spite Ramsay, who never let him read a word — and saw a candle lit in the corner of the room. Theon’s chest clenched with fear, and he spun to dart away. 

“It’s just me,” a high voice spoke, like she could read his mind. It felt like she could. “Sorry for scaring you. I wanted some quiet.”

“I’ll go, then—“

“No.” There was a slush of liquid. “Come — come sit down with me, if you would?” 

He didn’t know if it was appropriate. Jon had sat alone with her well enough, her brother, but the rest of the castle never saw him as such, even when Sansa did. That drink in her hands worried him, though. He’d been there. Sat in that chair, staring into the fire, wishing his very bones would dry up and evaporate. 

Theon sat.

“Thrice married.” She took a large swig of ale, a sight that made his eyes bug a little. “I wonder if I can get to a dozen.” 

He made no reply, instead watching as she laughed to herself. 

“I’ve been very stupid.”

“You haven’t,” he argued. “Wanting to find love is no flaw. You wanted to be happy.”

“I was already happy,” she protested. “When you came back. I was happier than I’d been in years.”

His heartbeat quickened. For fear of falling out of the chair he gripped its arms. Sansa did not continue speaking, only looking at him, and he found himself fidgeting so much he got back up again, like a child’s jack-in-the-box. 

“I’m… glad.” He did not understand. 

“I thought marrying Harry might make my feelings go away,” she explained, eyes imploring. “They did not. They could not.” 

He nodded, finally understanding. “You were avoiding another man?”

“Yes.” She sat there, staring. 

“Who?”

Now she laughed again. “Is it not obvious, Theon?”

He could not speak. Not when she was looking at him like that. 

She fiddled with her hands. “I thought you would think me revolting, like the Lannister twins.”

“I would never.” He exhaled a sharp breath. “We’re family.”

“But family doesn’t have to mean siblings, does it?” she asked, almost desperately, eyes imploring. “Man and wife are family.”

Theon’s heart beat so fast he worried it would do a handstand and flip out of his chest. “You’re right. Of course you are.”

There was a moment of silence where they watched each other.

“What—”

“I—”

They stopped at the same time and another moment of silence enveloped them. Eventually, they let out twin huffs of laughter. 

“You first,” he said.

She nodded, but hesitated, a fine red growing on her cheeks. Theon’s heart really had flipped out of his chest, and now it was resting beneath the skin of the woman he loved.

“I never saw you like that,” she began with another smaller, embarrassed laugh. “When we were young, and when… but after, I… when we were sharing soup. I knew then.”

He was smiling so much his cheeks started to ache. “What… what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I want to marry a man I love, for once. To make you my family twice over.” 

A thousand protestations came to his tongue. He could not give her children, or protect her as well as a husband should, or be brave or as kind as she deserved and…

But of more importance was the one voice out of the thousand. The one that wanted to be happy, damn what people thought and what he couldn’t be. He could never be Harry again; golden, handsome, unbroken. 

Sansa was staring at him with those lovely eyes. She did not want a Harry any more than he wanted to be the man he was. 

The voice rose in pitch, shouting over the rest, until it was all he could hear and it thundered in his ears. The voice told him to look at her, Theon. You have wanted and wanted when you thought you never could again. 

The same voice that said — “Yes.”

Chapter Text

It all felt like a bad dream. 

The rocky shore beneath him dug into his feet, jagged blades no match for the one pressed into his heart. The men around him wore grey, a grey he knew all too well, thick cloaks that flapped in the violent winds of the islands. 

“Father,” the boy opposite said. Only he was not a boy any longer; red curls down to his shoulders, blue eyes too familiar. But the anger on his face did not surprise him. 

It had been coming for Theon for a long time. 

“I’ve conquered your sea city. What do you say?”

Had he sounded so hurt, when he took Winterfell from Bran?

“I say… that it is yours, son.”

“Don’t call me that,” the man snapped. “Put up a fight. Be a man.”

“Why?” Theon breathed. Even over the waves his voice carried. “What would fighting do? It would only put you in danger.”

“Shut up!” The man’s face twisted as he unsheathed his blade, pointing it ever so gently at Theon’s chest. “Raise your sword and aim it at me!”

“I won’t,” he vowed, feeling the burn in his eyes as he fiercely shook his head. “I would never.”

“Coward!”

Theon bit back a sob and swallowed it. He was right. He’d always been a coward, even when he was crowing about glory and the spoils of war. 

The man was disarmed at Theon’s complete calm, and licked his lips before jutting the sword forward as he ordered him about. “You’re going to come with me, and you’re going to tell your people that they’re my people now.”

“Am I?” Theon raised his eyebrows. But he meant no true defiance. “They won’t listen to me. They never have.” He’d been no true king, not when he was young and foolish and not now. 

His son narrowed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”

Theon watched him, feeling the pain of a thousand daggers as he saw Sansa staring back at him. “I miss your mother,” he said into the waves that crashed along the shore, and the boy stepped forward. 

“Don’t talk about her. Don’t even mention her.”

“It wasn't her fault, what happened. Nor was it mine.”

“But you didn’t have to leave , did you?” The anger in his son’s facade cracked to something worse behind. 

“I couldn’t stay there,” he choked. “You have to understand. Not when she was everywhere I looked.” 

“So you abandoned me!” he cried, sword jittering in his hand. “Ran away, back to this shitty island, where you could hide and pretend none of it ever happened.” 

It was odd, and awful, how much of his own Theon saw in his son. Balon had never tried to free him from Winterfell. Content to sit on his rear and drink himself into a stupor, ranting and raving about mainlanders turning his son into a girl; and yet he did nothing, even when it was the ironborn way to conquer.

“I’m sorry,” Theon said. Warmth ran down his face. “I mean it. I’m so sorry.” 

“Too late, father,” his son said, shaky, quiet, oddly soft, even when his men were watching. “Too late.” He raised the blade in his palm. 

With a sickening sob his son lunged, and Theon stood still as stone as it came toward him. The sword twisted in his gut, but all he could see was the boy’s contorting face, full of hate and rage.

His knees ached as he fell on them, jutting against the rocks. Pain, awful, needling and burning, everywhere and in his chest and in his heart, on his side as he careened to the floor. There came a distant choking sound, and Theon watched his son’s eyes — Sansa’s eyes — fade and dim in his vision. 

He awoke with a shout, cold sweat sticking to his skin, his arms trembling where he held himself up. The sheets were wet.

A groan came beside him. “Theon? You had another one?”

He let out a sob, like Robb had before he plunged his wolf blade into his chest. Not when she was everywhere I looked. She was still here. 

A let out another as he buried into her, crushing her to him as the memory of her loss still pounded in his heart. It ached.

“It was so real,” he wept. “You’d been killed, years ago, and Robb… he hated me. I could not speak my own son’s name. It stung too much.”

She shushed him, but he continued. He had to tell her. 

“He grew up, and he’d become this awful conqueror, efficient and merciless. He took Pyke and the islands, and made me hand it over to him, as I did to Bran.” He breathed in her sweet hair. “Oh, gods, gods. He killed me. Stuck a sword in my belly.”

“Nonsense,” she told him. “All of it. That is your own guilt coming to you. Not real. Not real. Robb would never hurt you.”

“He might,” Theon said, voice thick and awful. “Gods be good, he really might. I’m not a good father. He will hate me, Sansa, and when you are gone everything will go to shit.”

“Stop it.” She fisted his hair in her hand. “I’m not going anywhere. Your son loves you so much, Theon. You are good to him.” She shook him a little. “It was a dream. Nothing but a horrible dream.”

He breathed slowly, in and out, catching the scent of her on the way in. He laid there until it evened out, calm, his tears dried and sticky. 

“I would go mad if anything happened to you. I could not live again.”

With a weary sigh, she craned her neck down to his hair and pressed a kiss into it. “You’d need to look after Robb.”

Theon thought for a moment. In his dream, he had fled once she’d died, leaving his son to fend for himself. He had lived on Pyke knowing that choice would haunt him for the rest of his life, and most especially when he’d heard word ships with wolves stitched into their sails were heading his way. He felt more tears burn at his eyes, though these ones did not shed. It was too awful to think of. 

“Where’s Robb?”

“In bed,” she replied, running a soothing hand down his back. “As he always was.”

He went to speak into the night air again but she beat him. “I’ll take you to him. Show you that he is safe and happy. Will that help you to sleep again?”

He nodded against her. 

“Come, then, my love. Take my hand.”

Feet stumbling as he rose, she led him to their son’s chamber, only a room away from their own. She cracked open the door, careful to not wake him from the sliver of light that set his auburn aflame.

“There,” she gestured gently at his small form, curled up in his furs, snoring away. “He is here, full of love for a father who would give the world for him.”

Theon stared. She pulled his arms around her and he eagerly sunk into the embrace, eyes still on his son above her shoulder. Robb’s red curls shone in the dim candlelight.

“We are both here,” she soothed.

He breathed a shaky sigh. It sunk in. The two people he loved best in the world were still alive, and neither hated him. They would not hate him; he’d make sure of it. 

Theon would not let it end the way of his dream. Balon could play the hateful father in his memories, but that was what they would remain; decrepit, half-blurred images and sounds, resigned to the back of his skull. 

Robb would not feel the sting of his father’s betrayal, nor the anger or hurt in finding him again. He would not know how to grieve his mother so young. Theon was made of stronger steel than that, to give in to a painful vision — a dream, only that, and nothing more.

Chapter Text

He had to go back to his sister.

That much was obvious, and he did not have to tell Sansa this. She knew. Even so, he’d spent days circling around the subject; he was all healed, now, and could walk without her assistance. The spear in his gut felt far away.

Yara’s letter was insistent. Yet he’d found the courage — somewhere, somehow — to read it thrice over and put it into the fire in his chambers. She would kill him if she knew, but Theon found he didn’t care. His uncle was dealt with; the dragon queen made quick work of him. Yara was queen and good on her. There was nothing for him on Pyke, and yet… he knew he had to return. The drowned god would not wait long. 

Sansa sat beside him by the fire. “You look gloomier than usual,” she commented, watching him with her solemn eyes. “Which sets me on edge.”

“I’m alright,” he assured. “Everything’s alright.” He ran a finger over his lips. No one was dying, but his troubles had narrowed down to a single issue within the last few moons. 

Sansa let out a little sigh; it was sweet, and it made him touch his raised lip with the same finger. Sometimes he touched the smiles she gave him to remember he could do so at all. 

“Would you blame me If I didn’t believe you?” 

He restrained a wider smile. “I would not.”

“You don’t often reveal the inner workings of your mind, Theon, but I can tell when something is eating at you.”

“I don’t reveal them to you because you see them anyway. Like you have now.” 

She swallowed. He watched the motion, her pale skin bobbing. “Tell me. If — if you want.”

Drowned god, did he want to. He’d spill it all if he could. But he wasn’t sure how she’d take it, if she would be disgusted or frightened or hateful at the revelation that he would do anything for her. At least he could tell her of the letter.

“Yara has written to me, commanding my return to the islands.” 

The fire crackled, sharp pops in succession before it quietened.

“Oh.” Out of the corner of his eye, she peered into the bottom of her goblet like it might transport her somewhere else. “You are going, then?”

“I have not started to plan or saddle horses, but… yes, within the next few days, if possible.” He felt awful at leaving it at that. Sansa deserved more. “It’s the honourable thing to do.”

Sansa huffed a gentle laugh. “You sound just like father.”

He looked away, embarrassed — for he’d heard it too, the holier-than-thou tone that had so annoyed him as a boy. “But no less true.”

“No,” she agreed. “And it’s good of you to do so. It shows the man you’ve become.”

He could almost scream, if he thought about it too hard. That the little girl who had sang Florian and Jonquil in the dining hall was here, now, older and as haggard as him, telling him that he was a good man. Like one of her silly stories. 

“And you, Lady Sansa, will be queen.” There was no point in mentioning why this was so. It would only hurt her. “We have found our way out of the forest. You could be… I could be... dare one say it — happy.” 

“And what a happy ending this is for me,” she breathed, voice small. The steel cracked in the awful silence between her words, until she was all porcelain again. “A lonely northern queen.” 

He was staring at her, suddenly, before he was in her arms, gripping at anything he could reach, the two of them intertwining into the fur on the floor. He’d sunk to his knees holding her, somehow, and he found he didn’t mind at all. 

“I don’t want to be lonely,” she half wept, clutching at his neck. “Oh, gods, I don’t want to be alone.”

“I know, I know,” he said gently, choked. He really did know. “I…”

Like she knew what he was going to say, she began to cry, leaning her head onto his chin with a soft smack. 

“I would not beg you to stay,” she struggled out past her tears. “It would not be fair.”

“Ser Brienne—“

“Is in the south, with Bran, where she plans to stay. Arya has left. Jon has disappeared. There is no Stark left in Winterfell but me.” 

Once, that prospect would have delighted him. The castle would be easy to conquer, then, with only a girl in charge. Now it killed him.

He squeezed his eyes shut, so hard he might pop his eyeballs out. “I wish it were different.”

“Me too,” she said against him, burying as far as she could get, and he surrendered to it easily. 

Then, because as stupid as he was, it’d never occurred to him before, a realisation came to him; it was silly, to think he could ever be anywhere else. She was so warm.

“I could not leave you. For all the glory and honour in the world, I could not.”

“Don’t joke with me.”

He shook her, pulling up her arms so she could look him in the face. Those wide, wet eyes stared back. 

“I would share my life with you, if you wanted it. It’s battered, bruised and flayed beyond recognition, but it is mine. And I know where I wish to spend it.” 

“But — you just said  — your sister —”

“Will survive fine without me. I was never in love with honour. But I am in love with you.”

With a smile that could light a thousand candles she reached forward and kissed him.

There was steel underneath her, he knew, and yet it was not so with him. With him, she only felt soft, more sensitive and vulnerable than cold metal could ever be. Had anyone else known her like this? 

“I can see a hundred things swirling in your head,” she said from his side. “Stop that and go to sleep.” 

He buried closer into her. “They are good things. I am thinking of you.” 

She was still a romantic, after everything done to her; a most surprised smile graced her face. Even if it took years, he vowed he would make it so his affections no longer surprised her. 

“Still. You need the rest,” she argued. 

“The night king is long dead. I am all healed, Sansa.”

“Are you?” She ran a tentative hand across his chest. “I won’t… I won’t wake and find you gone back to the iron islands?”

“Never. Not without you.” He paused. “Would you come with me, If I went back?”

“I would like to see your home,” she started, gently, before her voice turned sad. “But I can’t leave permanently. Winterfell —” 

“I know.” He rubbed a hand up and down her back. “I would never ask you to.” She’d worked too hard, endured too much for this pile of stone to give it all up for a man. Him, especially, of all men. Besides, he had no intention of going anywhere. 

In the following days that turned to weeks, he had never been happier. The giddiness of his thoughts made him laugh, and he’d begun to pity everyone else as he barely restrained himself from skipping down the halls.

Sansa was a kind ruler, ruthless to enemies and threats. She cared very much about the North. But it was clear in the weeks following her coronation that he was the luckiest man in existence; she was different with him, open in a way she was not with any of her subjects.

He wondered what he’d done to earn the deepest part of her heart, but he took it gladly, stuffing it away next to his own, two clumps of fragile flesh that beat in tandem beneath his chest.

It was at supper one night when he was reminded of this fact. They housed some lords from across the North, a minor celebration in the face of successful rebuilding of several structures in the kingdom. 

They were dancing — more swaying, perhaps, since his cheeks burned at the thought of trying to do the more complicated moves, and Sansa was nothing but understanding of newfound shyness — when his ears pricked up at some loud-mouthed gossips at the head table. Two lords, though Theon could not give himself away and look over to confirm their identities. 

“It’s vulgar, almost,” one said, tutting like a disapproving father. 

Theon had missed the start of the conversation, evidently. Sansa was pressed against his chest, eyes closed and drifting without a care in the world. He loved the soft smile on her lips, the way she buried herself closer like she wanted to step inside him. 

“A lady should be composed, dignified, pure —” the other man growled. Theon couldn’t resist; he glanced upwards, and watched one of the two lords scowl and gulp down his ale. “And here she is, Ned Stark’s daughter, whoring around with a southern traitor.” 

“What was that?” Sansa demanded, rising so suddenly from Theon’s chest he almost stumbled. He should be wisened to her tricks — she’d been listening, even when she looked far away.

Both lords whipped their heads up in tandem, looking for all their life like they’d been caught throwing rocks at passing stray dogs. “Your grace,” they harmonised. 

“You heard me, my lords. And I heard you. Would you like to repeat that sentiment to the rest of the hall?” 

At her raised voice, the rest of said hall stilled, even the poor flute player in the corner fading his whistle down and down until it was no more. The lords began to give their usual well-bred excuses, but they stopped upon seeing the pure vitriol on her face, and Theon desperately tried to hold himself together. He had not had to fight the instinct to laugh inappropriately in years. 

“Your grace,” the lord who’d spoken last piped up again, but he only stuttered a little before forcing it out. “Forgive me. Us.” 

Sansa shared a glance with Theon, and he saw the steel shutter down across her eyes, the same way he saw it disappear when she laid in his arms.

“I would like to think I am a queen who listens to her people, my lord. I’d be very pleased if you expressed your complaint directly to me instead of whispering behind my back like fishermen’s wives.”

“V—very well,” the other lord surrendered. “We shall keep that in mind, your grace.”

But Sansa was not done. “So, I would like to hear your complaints now.”

“They are not… complaints, your grace, so much as —”

“Cruel, untrue slander? Yes, I thought so.” She turned to look at the flute player, who was watching with wide eyes, one hand still positioned on his instrument. “Play, Godwin. You’re so very good and it would be a shame to not use your talents.” 

Doing as he was bid, he immediately picked his lively tune back up with a nervous, faulty breath, but he gained the rhythm again after a few moments. Eventually, the lords aimed their eyes at the floor and remained silent, either thoroughly ashamed or embarrassed or both, and this time Theon could not hold in his laughter. It was short, quick, but more than he had laughed in so long, and it felt so good he could fly. 

Turning back to him with surprised eyes, Sansa locked her arms around his neck, resuming her swaying. “I’ve missed your laugh.” 

“It’s been a long time,” he agreed. 

“I don’t think I’ve heard it since we were children.” She bumped her nose with his, the sweetest gesture that Theon had ever been recipient of, and if he wasn’t in a room full of people he would lean forward and let her know how grateful he was. 

“What was so amusing?”

“Nothing,” he tried, but he smiled and ruined his paper-thin ruse. “It’s only… no one else sees this side of you. Jon, Arya, and Bran, maybe, but the rest of the North think you an ice queen.” 

She frowned for a moment, and he was deathly afraid he’d hurt her. But then the frown was gone. 

“It goes both ways, Theon,” she answered. “You talk to me as to no one else. You touch me and no one else. I have reached past your own armour.”

He didn’t know he had any. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

She only hummed, and they swayed in silence, for what felt like hours and seconds, a long while and not long enough in the same breath. 

He supposed it was true; he’d never put thought to his own guard that he had placed over himself, before and since Ramsay, even when it seemed he was all too sensitive at the time. After all, she clapped her hands at his neck and called him Theon Greyjoy, and that was it, the steel crumbling away between her fingers, drifting to the stone floor like ash.

“I love you,” he said, into the dim air and almost silent hall, the lords all mostly retired. But still they were swaying. 

There it went again. The slick sheet between the world and Sansa dissipated between one blink and the next, and there she was, not the queen but the woman who had suffered the same as him. 

“I love you,” she returned, voice soft, and buried her face into his neck.

Chapter Text

Her heart was in her mouth. A thousand things fought to get out, scraping and clawing, but only one word made it to the surface. “Why?” 

It was a question indeed. He stood in front of her, solemn, yet his eyes were sorrowful strikes of lightning. 

“Queen Daenerys demanded it,” he answered, but even he knew that was thin as muslin, voice shaky.

“And you just listened? Without one question, one word in our defence?”

He knew, he knew how she felt about her and yet he —

“My sister is her ally. I follow what she asks.”

“You and I know very well that obeying evil orders — when you have the power to break free — is wrong.”

He seemed to curl inward. “I’m a coward,” he said gravely. “I've always been. I know it, and so do you.” 

“That’s an excuse. And an untrue one at that.”

His eyes fluttered closed. “I thought I might save you. Save the North. She is going to burn it all, Sansa, and I…”

Too much like father , she thought. Too much like Robb and Jon. 

He took a shaky breath and tried another route. “Jon is captured. She wants you to bend the knee.”

Sansa watched him for a moment, the way his breath caught in his throat as it fought to escape, the way his face betrayed how much of all this was hurting him, even when he thought he was being aloof. 

“I’ll go to Kings Landing,” she conceded. “Only to save him.” It hurt. It hurt. “And then you and I will never speak again.” 

As it turned out, she had to speak with whoever she was travelling with. She’d talked with Littlefinger — more than she ever wanted to — on her way to the Eyrie and later Winterfell, but Theon was a far better companion, even when they spent most of the time in silence. Mostly because they spent most of the time in silence. 

There was no argument when she rounded up northern men to accompany her, which surprised, but perhaps it shouldn’t have; he looked just as sick as she felt at the thought of going south without protection.  

It was three days into their ride that she broke her self-imposed rule in only exchanging the necessities. 

“Your men requested a break,” he said, leading his horse beside hers. 

“Alright. Ride back and inform them we’ll stop by the running lake just ahead.”

He watched her for a moment longer than necessary, mouth opening as if to say something, before nodding and turning his horse. 

A strange realisation came to her. She knew that expression; she’d seen it many times, when Jon beat him in training or she talked too long about a new romance she’d heard. 

It was the first time she had seen him annoyed since… well, since. A part of her was almost happy at the fact he’d regained the ability to feel irritation, let alone show it — and another part of her wondered why he’d chosen to express it to her than anyone else. After all, she had more of an excuse to be upset with him than the reverse.

Throughout the rest of that day he never said a word, except a meagre thank you when she passed him his supper around the fire. Their fingers brushed as she did so, and she both loved and loathed the way just that touch alone made her want to leap on top of him.

There was a sudden spike of her own irritation as she studied him eating his stew. They’d never done anything that night before the dead arrived, but their feelings seemed like an unspoken understanding. Evidently, considering what he’d done at Daenerys’ command, he did not think the same of it. And it was that which bothered her. 

It was pure stubbornness that held her from asking what had annoyed him so. She resisted the beating impulse until he was halfway through his soup; he began to glance over at her, looking so sad he might begin to cry. 

No matter how angry she was, she hated it when her family cried. 

“I know you feel torn,” she said, and he snapped his startled eyes to her. “I don’t want you to feel that way.”

“I’m not,” he mumbled, straight into his bowl. Then, thinking better of it, looked up to meet her eye. “I came back to fight for Winterfell.”

“And then left, coming back with demands to come South or have Jon’s kingdom razed to the ground.”

She knew it crossed his mind the same it did hers, but if Daenerys got her way, Jon wouldn’t be living enough to be the king of anything. Theon was wise enough to only take another spoonful of stew. 

He pushed the small chunks of meat around with his spoon for a while before he spoke again. “I’m still on your side.”

Are you? She wanted to say. But he said the words so resolutely that she had little choice but to believe him. 

Words clogged in her throat. She felt like a little girl again, vying for Joffrey’s singular attention and crushed when he gave nothing but a distasted scoff. 

It was this, then, that had hurt her. “Did that night mean anything at all?”

If she hadn’t seen his hand shoot out it would’ve frightened her. He took it quickly but gently, curling his fingers underneath her palm. “It did,” he said. “It meant everything. That’s why I need you to understand. I did what I thought would help. What I thought was right.” His thumb ran up and down her knuckles; a tick. “But I chose wrong. Again.”

She let out a long sigh. “She would’ve killed you if you’d disobeyed her orders.”

“Seems almost worth it, though, doesn’t it? To die honourably in defiance. A martyr.” There was a faint curiosity in eyes, and idolisation she thought had been dashed against the wall as fast as hers had in King’s Landing. 

“No, it doesn’t,” she quickly disagreed. She flipped her hand so their palms were touching. “I’d much rather you alive.”

He kept her gaze. This was it, the line, the boundary of the unspoken.

As if it were natural, uncontested and unbeatable, he slowly leaned in as she did the same until they were buried in each other’s necks. They could do no more than this — her men were watching, after all — but there was no need to do more. She breathed him in and felt his own warm puffs on her jaw.

“Promise me you will live,” he whispered. 

Her heart dropped into her stomach. She knew what he was really asking. To live would mean to give over the North, to find satisfaction in handing over the kingdom so many had died for. 

She reached up a hand and combed it through his hair; he let out a tiny sigh. She had no intention of doing any such thing. “I promise.”

King’s Landing was a ruin. Ash, bodies, debris, everywhere and anywhere she looked; she almost opted to close her eyes to it, but the insistent poking at her back kept her moving. 

Her men had been spotted before they’d entered the city, and instructed to stay behind as she and Theon were escorted by what seemed like a legion of unsullied. 

After a few minutes of treading through the crunch of ash, Sansa spotted a dark form flitting between the shadows of snapped wood and crumbled stone. Her chest squeezed, but she kept silent; at least if this form was hostile, it might do away with the unsullied before it came for her.

The figure stopped just ahead, only it’s face visible between two piles of rubble.

The figure put its fingers to its chin and, in a sight that had Sansa almost screaming, pulled back their skin to their forehead. A familiar pair of grey eyes were staring at her. 

“A—“

Her sister snapped a finger to her mouth, waving it while imploring with her slanted eyebrows. Be quiet! 

There was a desperation in her serious face, body taut and straight, as small and comforting as it was to see. Sansa jogged her head backward, praying desperately that Arya would understand. I’ve brought men with me. They’re at the gate. 

With a sharp poke Sansa was moved along quicker, and soon Arya was out of sight. 

“Stop that,” Theon said, glaring at the unsullied trailing behind her. “She’s come here of her own will. There’s no need to treat her like a prisoner.”

Sansa couldn’t see the unsullied’s reaction, but she imagined she didn’t need to; they were all expressionless even in the face of the undead. 

“Queen’s or—ders,” he monotoned, butchering the words with his accent. 

For the rest of the walk, the longer the unsullied pointed his spear at her back the more agitated Theon became, and so by the time they reached the Red Keep he looked very much like he wanted to wrestle the entire army. 

 It was with a familiar kind of dread that Sansa stepped into the throne room. It had been years, and yet not long enough; an entire lifetime would not be enough time away from this snake lair. There was an awfully gaping hole in the middle of it, though, which brightened Sansa considerably. 

The queen herself was lounging like a pleased cat upon her throne, stroking the arms with her pale hands, and she looked even more pleased to spot Sansa trudging towards her.

“Thank you for coming, Lady Sansa.”

“Of course.” She bowed, sharing a glance with Theon who did the same.

“I must admit I’m surprised you succeeded, my lord,” Daenerys began, sliding her bright eyes to him. 

“How so?” 

Daenerys tapped a finger on the arm of the throne. “I’m not familiar with Westeros politics. I had to be reminded that you were Ned Stark’s ward.”

Theon struggled keeping her eye. “I was.” 

She stifled an eye roll. “It stands to reason, therefore, that you’d be more willing to stand beside the Starks then your own alliance. I was prepared to hear news that you’d run away with Lady Sansa, as you told me you did once before.” 

“I did what you asked,” he protested, but he did not try to refuse his loyalties. 

“Of course you did.” Her lips twitched up, but it wasn’t a full smile. “I thank you for it. Now I’m going to do what I planned.” Daenerys looked to her. “Jon is no longer Warden of the North. He is awaiting trial in the keep’s dungeons.” 

Sansa sucked in a breath. “Why?”

“I think you know very well,” Daenerys said, staring straight through her. “Regardless, that makes you the next in line, and current keeper of the North. I’ve brought you here so that I can make sure of your loyalty to my reign. Bend the knee.”

Sansa’s spine locked. She thought of Robb, of father and mother and Rickon, of the thousands who died in the War of the Five Kings and afterwards. 

There is a long, tense silence, and she can feel Theon’s eyes burning into the side of her face. 

Sansa opened her mouth to deny the new queen, even when it would cost her life, but Theon starts to resist the guard’s grip on him. 

“Sansa!” Theon’s breaths were ragged, heaving his chest. It was pride and fear both, staring out of his wide eyes. 

The longer she is silent the more he struggled. She knew what he was thinking — he’d seen this before, in Robb. The crusade that ended with his brother falling to his knees. Theon’s face twisted. 

“Do it!” His voice was rough. Broken. “Just kneel. Live.”

“I’d listen to my ally, my lady,” Daenerys interjects. It is with faintly raised eyebrows that she observes Theon’s growing desperation. Sansa had never talked to anyone about the growing shift between them — not a soul. It evidently came as a surprise for Daenerys. 

Sansa thinks of the Starks who had died in this hall. Perhaps it was foolish to give up your life for a principle, but lately she had felt more like a Stark than Jon and Arya combined. 

“No.”

A strangled cry ripped from Theon. “Wait! Wait!”

“Very well,” Daenerys nodded. Still, she did not look shocked. Beside her, the dragon puffed and huffed. Sansa barely stopped her knees knocking together. 

Theon’s calls began to turn to sobs, loud and wild. “Don’t! Please don’t!” He scrambled for purchase, ripping inches off the guard’s grip on his limbs as he flailed, but they pile on and combat his furious pushing and he was still shouting. 

Her heart beat in her ears. 

Arya would not get here before she could save her. She thought the kiss of fire might feel gentle like a lover’s touch, but she knew it wouldn’t.

“No! No! Sansa!” 

She thinks to say the names of her family, those dead and alive, but he is the only one there to hear them. 

“I love you,” she told him. It is true. Truer than anything she’s said in this awful room. 

“Dracarys.”

Theon screamed, wretched and agonised, and it tears a hole in her. She braces herself. True terror pounds through her body and she squeezes her eyes shut. 

There is another, gruffer scream in the distance and the dragon stills, the growing growling cutting off halfway. Feeling like she might fall to her knees regardless of her words, she opens one eye to watch the dragon look left. It opens its mouth and promptly aims its fire at the iron throne. 

Sansa hardly processes the chaos that breaks out. Daenerys is ghostly white, utterly floored, and she seemed to realise she was vulnerable without her dragon. Before Sansa knew it the throne room was flooded with northern men, and at the head of them all, her sister and — and —

Jon was the other scream. He was a Targaryen, bonded to the dragons in a way she would never understand. It understood his distress, even shared it, with the way it did not hesitate in turning away. Of course, Sansa had read of such things as a child, but they were tales and silly stories, fantastical hypotheticals in a world harsh and real. 

Not so harsh after all. She rushed to Theon, engulfing herself in the arms he’d opened for her. He was still sobbing a little, in relief and desperation, the sounds reaching her ears louder at the intimate embrace. He ran his hands all over her, clenching his fists in her clothes. Then, her face, the best touch of all. 

She clung to him. Nothing mattered now — it would later; she was alive, and it did matter, but not when she was still shaking from staring that dragon in the face. 

From what felt like far away, the sounds of battle raged on, her sister and brother among those fighting to free her. 

“Stay behind me,” he told her, eyes imploring, and then he stepped back to unsheathe his sword. She circled around to his back and gripped his jerkin. 

With the last Targaryen queen gone, Jon was the first candidate for discussion in the dragon’s pit. 

“I don’t want it,” Jon said, thoroughly exhausted, and Sansa shared an eye roll with Arya beside her. 

“Sansa should be queen,” Arya offered, after Edmure Tully made his terrible case. Though she was utterly touched by the gesture — nothing had sowed as much discord between the two of them as children like their difference in dreams — she abhorred the idea. 

“I’m not a girl anymore,” Sansa said, trying to inject it with a gentleness despite the formality of the situation. “I have no interest in being a queen of the South.” 

“The North, then?” Jon pitched in. “You were always far better at ruling than me.”

Yara gave a snort. Next to her, Theon fought a flickering smile. 

“Yes, but that hardly solves the rest of the realm’s problems,” Sansa pointed out. 

The Prince of Dorne cleared his throat. “We could each form our own kingdoms. Independance for all of us, at last.”

After further discussion, the matter was decided, and Sansa left the dragon’s pit a crown heavier.

She had only to survive one more night in this place until dawn. Still, she resisted pacing across the floor like a caged lion but everything in her hated to let her guard down in this keep. To sleep meant to be vulnerable, and to be vulnerable meant to be dead by morning. 

The castle was ghostly quiet as she snuck through it, her padding feet the only sounds. Faintly, there was a call of some night-time bird, and she remembered hearing it during her first stay here and being comforted by a bird who suffered as she did. There was another bird who could not sleep through the night. 

She turned a corner and spotted a figure across the hallway, arms folded on the edge of the stone wall and staring out into the ruined city. For a moment she thought it was Arya, and that she might turn back and peel back the dead skin again, but Sansa would be able to tell it was him if she were blind.

Letting out a little sigh — to let him know he was no longer alone — she stifled a smile and walked to his side, leaning her elbows on the stone beside him. Now that she was closer, she could see how awful he looked. Theon was run through, face pale and eyes red. He managed to keep it together earlier, but now that it was all over he let himself sag deep into the stone, shoulders hunched. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked, shifting one of her feet a bit. No matter what, she always felt a little awkward imposing on his silence, even when he seemed to welcome her company. 

“No,” he agreed, voice low, unwilling to break the peaceful quiet that blanketed the keep. “I can’t stop picturing that dragon lording over you.” 

“He’s gone, now.” She turned to face him, and realised how close their faces really were. He was so close he engulfed her vision — she could be in Winterfell. “I keep thinking of it too.”

He stared into the black nothingness, the night lanterns she remembered completely gone, along with the people who lit them. “You closed your eyes,” he reminded her. “But mine were open. I would’ve watched, had you burnt. I would’ve watched.”

Sansa did not think she would ever forget the way he had screamed for her. In the corner of her eye she saw his hand move as it had that night, as it had that day before they jumped into snow. With an awful sinking feeling, she knew she could not let it reach its destination; his touch would sear her like it always did, and then she would be gone and everything she’d fought for would be for nothing. 

She rose from the stone and stepped away. Trying to make it look natural completely failed, and he froze with his hand mid-air, eyes following her. 

“You didn’t let me touch you, once,” he said. “Is it to be the same punishment?” 

Sudden anger flared through her. “You make me sound like —” She swallowed. “It is not a punishment. I will give in if you do. And I must — I must leave.”

He stared straight into her eyes, and she knew he must’ve seen the resolve in them, for he took a shaky breath. 

Slowly, then all at once he slid to his knees, hands clutching at her legs, and she was desperately pulling him back up. 

“Please, please." He was begging, broken. 

“Stop, stop, Theon, get up, get up.” She pulled harder. It was not his fault that this pleading sickened her, too alike stepping back than forward, and she was not — she was not. 

He sobbed into her calf. Yanking was getting her nowhere; he only held tighter. She kept speaking but he did not hear her. Releasing a sob of her own, she disentangled her hands from his grasp and tried to step away, to move herself if she couldn’t move him. 

After her third pull, as hard as she dared he released her. She stumbled backward before balancing again. 

“Don’t demean yourself like that,” she choked. “You are better now.”

It was reminder enough. He rose from his knees, level with her again. With a shaking hand he wiped his face, rough swipes, no care for himself. She ached to reach out and do it for him. 

“You are leaving, then?” His voice was swollen, awful. 

“I must,” she whispered. “For myself. For my kingdom. And you must go back to your sister.” 

He couldn’t look her in the eye suddenly, and it made the part of her that still lived, that still loved despite all of her pain shriek. Look, look, it was saying, look what you are doing to him. You’re almost as cruel as… 

She stopped herself. She wasn’t. She wasn’t. It was not her fault how he acted. He saved her, once, but she could not save him from his own mind; no more than she could save Jon from himself nor any other man. 

But she loved this one. With a swift step forward she was touching him again, cupping his face and bestowing a kiss there. One more, and that’s the last. 

Before he could speak she turned and ran.

It had been a year since that night. 

Every eligible suitor in the realm had knocked at Winterfell’s walls. She’d made a particular attachment to Last Hearth’s heir, Hal; blonde and brown-eyed, kind and intelligent, he had become a friend throughout his prolonged visit.

Which meant, of course, that he had to complicate matters.

He had requested to enter her chambers, but Sansa had been resolved years ago to have no man enter her private rooms. All but one, who’d already been there the night before the dead arrived, and he was the only man she wanted there. She violently pushed away that thought. 

“Lady Sansa,” Hal greeted, closing the door to her library. “Thank you for entertaining me.”

“What is it, my lord?” Sansa found she was in no mood for courtesies tonight. 

With an awkward sort of nod, he seemed to pick up on her irritation. “I am going away, to Dorne, and I wish you to travel there with me as my wife.”

He reached out a hand and laid it on her arm. She felt nothing; not like the warmth that sped through her chest when Theon touched her. She was only cold.

“Henry, I don’t love you.”

“Love?” He cocked his head. “When we are married love will surely follow.”

Perhaps Sansa had not changed at all. Perhaps she was still the silly romantic who had seen and hoped for a better world than the one they lived in. She could see and feel and smell nothing but him, and she wished most desperately that he was with her again, like a child praying at their bedside. 

Try as she might she could not rid herself of him. It made her seethe, but the truth of it — the real truth — was that she had forgiven everything he could ever do long before he could ever do it. He’d brought her to Daenerys because he thought she would be given mercy, and it was not his fault he was wrong. 

A moment passed in which Hal’s face twisted as he frowned. “I know why you reject me,” he said, sinister, hollow. “The Greyjoy’s visit is no secret among the northern people, whether they be highborn or commonfolk. He was the one that brought you to the last Targaryen.”

“And what does that have to do with my rejection?”

“You still entertain affection for him. The traitor.”

Sansa felt like she’d been hit. “He isn’t a traitor. Not when —” She remembered the searing heat of the melted throne, his shouts and screams. “Not when it counted.” Even if he was, she was starting to believe it didn’t matter; her love endured even at the knowledge of his flaws and thorns. 

“He’s not even Northern ,” Hal snapped. “You’re the Queen of the North. I thought you were wiser than this.” 

She was . And yet, Theon whispered her name in her ear everytime she went to sleep and every morning she awoke. 

“You don’t know him,” she defended. “Nor do you know me. I’d thank you to leave.”

He ran a rough hand through his golden hair, and it sparked a sudden barrage of southern memories in her. “So all this — these weeks we’ve spent together?”

“You were a good companion!” She let out an agitated huff. “Is it so awful, to be friends with me? I would keep your friendship, Henry, before I’d ruin it with a loveless marriage.”

“No one marries for love, Sansa. Not in this world.”

“I know that.” But in her deepest heart, she knew the only man she could ever marry is — was — no, is — Theon. 

“An agreeable offer of marriage may not be offered to you again, your grace, not with your… history.”

Sansa opened her mouth to say something, probably insult him until his ears turned red and he cried, but there came a distinct smack at the door. Ser Brienne swung open the flimsy wood with no effort at all, and glared a hole straight into Hal’s soul. 

“My lady told you to leave,” she barked, and stood ramrod straight, emphasising her height. The display made Sansa smile a little, and she enjoyed Hal’s frightened scamper of an exit more than she probably should have.

The feather shook in her hand. Was it stupid? Yes. Was it the worst decision as queen in the north she could possibly make? Oh, yes. But her heart cried for it. 

First she received no reply, and every week that passed with silence made her pace the creaky wooden floorboards of her home faster. It took courage to sit there and lead when all she wanted to do was curl up like a girl, like the true age she was. 

Hal was no longer speaking to her except in polite nods and bows. She would say good riddance, but it was a shame to her that he could not get over her affections for a man who was not him. Eventually, he asked her to marry him once again, even — blessed be — bestowing his begrudging acceptance for the title of consort if she would agree. How could a disillusioned, bereft maiden refuse?

He was gone within days.

Then Yara sent a reply and turned Sansa’s world on its head. She’d accepted the proposition. She was lucky the queen of the iron islands had agreed, she knew — she’d not been happy at her brother’s broken heart, and vowed to estrange the North for the rest of her reign. That was a year ago. Now Sansa knew what she wanted.

A diplomatic mission to everyone else apart from herself and Brienne, they departed Winterfell a week later. Arya and Bran had strict instructions to make sure the North did not crumble while she was gone, and Arya had crossed her arms at the insinuation of her preference for anarchy but did not deny the charge. 

The night before they docked Sansa dreamt of his touch, what his hand in hers felt like. When they reached the shores Theon had spoken so much of, Yara stood there, spine straight as a steel rod, eyes cold. Sansa scanned the shoreline. He wasn’t there. Her heart clenched. 

The queen offered no greetings but a stiff handshake, until Sansa’s first words were, “Theon?” at which Yara’s lips tightened. 

“This way,” she croaked. Her greasy hair flapped in the wind, turning to led her along. “He’s been ill. On and off. Ever since he got fucked over.” She glanced back as she walked, piercing Sansa with a distasted stare. Sansa ignored it. It didn’t even occur to her to take in the sights of a land she’d never stepped on before, but her mind was up in that castle, wherever he was.

When she thought they’d walked the entirety of Pyke, Yara stopped, giving a brisk wave to the door beside her, as much the same as any other door in the plain hallway. 

Even though she’d fought to be here, Sansa’s feet stilled. 

“Are you going in or not?” Yara snapped. Her voice was harsh, but when Sansa checked, her eyes were softer than before. During the evening before the dead came, Theon had told her of his sister, of what it meant to him that she had more heart than she let on, and that she had let him see all of it. 

“I’m going.” She was careful to creak open the door gently, allowing herself more time to prepare. If he looked anything like… her mind shied away from it, but she shouldn’t be so cowardly. If he looked anything like Reek, she did not know if she could stomach it without breaking down. 

There was a form curled under furs in the corner of the room, back to her. 

The room was sparse, but she could tell it was his; he’d haphazardly thrown his boots near the fire to warm them like he’d done as a child. Her mother hated when he did that, especially in front of Bran and Rickon. They’re going to start copying him, and one day they’ll throw their boots and make their gentile wives faint. Sansa took those words to heart as a child, but it occurred to her now that her mother had been teasing her.

“What’s happened now?” he mumbled.

Sana felt her heart skip. It felt like a decade since she’d heard his voice. 

“Yara?”

“It’s not Yara,” she said, voice small. The form shifted. 

“Drowned god,” he moaned. “Now I’m truly going mad.”

“You’re not.”

Swiftly, he turned in his bed, until those eyes of her dreams were gaping at her. He sucked in a breath. “You’re not real. But you’re the realest I’ve dreamt yet.”

“I am real.” She knelt at his bedside, barely able to hold back the tears burning at the corner of her eyes. “Touch me.” 

He did, reaching out a trembling hand, cupping her face with a gentleness she wished she had not forgotten. She never wanted to forget again. Then, she returned it, brushing a hand past his ear and into his hair. 

“You’ve come back. Forgive me, forgive me,” he wept, and she gathered him up. 

“I do. I have. I am finished with keeping myself away from you.” 

He smiled and choked on it, but it persisted, the smile only widening as tears leaked sideways into his hair. “Yara said — she told me of you when I begged — she said you’d received suitors at Winterfell.”

“A farce,” she soothed. “Though I did like one.”

He watched her. He was close again, like that night in King’s Landing. “Who?”

“Henry,” she answered. “Heir to Last Hearth. He was clever. Handsome.”

Theon’s face darkened, turning to gaze out of the window. “Better than me.”

She bit back a playful smile. “He asked me to marry him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I don’t love him,” she said simply, patting his hair. “He doesn’t love me.”

“Impossible,” he scoffed.

“He’s passionless,” she insisted. “Severe. Cold as an iceberg. He wouldn’t scream at a queen with dragons for my life.” 

Something broke in him, then. “I can succeed where he doesn’t in that. But there are so many things I can’t give you that he can.”

“Name one.”

“Children.”

“I don’t want them if they’re not yours,” she insisted, and Theon let out a little sob. “We’ll house orphans from Wintertown.”

He seemed to accept that, turning into her, careful as he always was, touch soft enough to drive her mad if she let it. She remembered this. She’d thought about it incessantly in this year apart and before that, about his touch before the dead and the feel of his hand before. His touch was an anchor; it had always been. 

“You’ll stay with me, Sansa? Gods, you’ll stay?”

“Forever, if you’ll have me,” she answered, and pressed her lips to his.

Chapter Text

His return to Winterfell did not play out the way he thought it would. Theon believed he’d be shunned the moment he entered, but Sansa embraced him and Jon… had not murdered him. Which was, by his standards, as close to acceptance as he was going to get. 

Before that, he’d spent the time when Sansa was occupied wandering around Winterfell. There were many things he could’ve chosen to do with perhaps his last night, but the heightened kind of rowdiness his men were throwing their tankards around with did not appeal. 

Theon liked the quiet now, as he never had before, and found the dark corners of the castle peaceful. There was a time he had been closely acquainted with Winterfell’s shadows. A time when he was one of them.

He let his feet lead him where they may, and their destination was no surprise. When he heard Bran had fallen, he was utterly speechless. His life, up to that point, had certainly been no bed of roses, but the Stark children were untouchable. Faced with the very real possibility that one of them might die, Theon was unusually somber that day, though he sprang back quickly enough. 

He’d joined Robb and Ned in their inspection of this tower at the time, shifting through the debris and long rotted wood, searching for a simple answer that would never be there. 

It was still rotted, ice clinging to its decrepit walls. He craned his neck up to look to the top, and imagined catching Bran as he fell. 

“Are you looking for Sansa?” came a gruff voice, and Theon turned at the sound. Jon was standing slightly off-kilter, with more weight on one foot than the other. Familiar, but less so was the worn face. He looked more lost than Theon had ever seen him.

“She’s occupied,” Theon answered faintly. “What are you doing with your last night?” 

Briefly, Jon’s eyes fell to the floor before they met his own again. “I don’t know. I hoped my night’s watch brothers would be here by now, but they’re late.” 

“Oh. I’m… sure they’ll be along soon.”

Jon grunted. A slightly awkward silence elapsed, and Theon went back to gazing up at the abandoned tower. The one that started it all. He had found Sansa here many times when Ramsay sent him to find her; it was always him, never another servant. Ramsay sought him out special where Sansa was concerned.

He could feel Jon’s eyes on the side of his face, assessing, and tried to push down the sudden desire to run away it conjured in him. 

“It’s odd, being back here again,” Theon remarked, when the silence was starting to choke him. “To look at this tower and know we could have stopped all of this if we’d watched Bran that day.”

“It’s not your fault,” Jon replied, and sounded surprised at his own response. “Nor is it mine.” 

Then, as if Jon had looked into his dreams and saw what he most wanted, Jon trudged closer, coming to stand at this side. The last time they had been this close his fist was in his tunic, and before that Robert Baratheon was riding into Winterfell. 

“You should eat something,” Jon offered, scratching a hand at the hair under his nose. “They’re about to start serving supper in a few moments in the courtyard.”

Absentmindedly, Theon felt himself nod. “I’ll wait for Sansa to finish.” 

He felt more than saw Jon glare at him. “It won’t be for a while. She makes sure Winterfell doesn’t descend into chaos.”

“Still,” Theon mumbled. “I’ll wait.” 

She would sit with him and she would know and he would feel safe. He could not stay still if it meant he would blend into the walls again — he was no ghost, not anymore. He’d scraped and clawed and screamed for this much, and he was not giving it up. 

There was a crunch of twigs and snow under Jon’s boot as he shifted. He made a noise so close to a huff it erased the years between them. “I’m trying to get you to come eat with me.”

Theon’s eyebrows went to his hairline. “I… Oh. Oh .”

“Are you coming?” Jon was half turned.

“Yes,” he answered, and joined Jon in trudging against the snow blanketing the ground. Silently, Jon glanced back at him with an almost playful twist to his lips.

 The line for food was long, stretching what seemed like halfway around the castle, but Theon had more patience than sense at this point in his life. It was awkward, though, to stand in line with Jon and wait like sullen boys. It was a different kind of return to familiarity than just riding back into Winterfell’s walls. 

A man further down the line called out. “Lord Snow! Your grace!”

Theon watched Jon turn to the sound, and he also watched the way he tried to hide his frown. “Just Jon,” he called back. “Aye?”

“How many dead are there, sir? You’ve seen ‘em, Lo— Jon, and we was all dreading to think of facing ‘em.” 

Theon had never been a good leader. He was a miserable failure at capturing and keeping Winterfell, at giving speeches and handling audiences, at being a Prince and Lord and Master. He was no master, and his own was relegated to the recesses of his memory.

If it was him, he would tell them it was no threat it all. The dead will be gone by dawn, perished on our swords and spears. 

Jon sucked in a breath, grey eyes pensive. “Thousands,” he answered gravely. “Thousands upon thousands. Our only hope is sticking together. It’ll be hard, but we’ll get it done, aye, boys?”

The entire line seemed to join in on the cheer.

Theon sat down with his stew, but he took a moment to study Jon. “I would’ve lied,” he said.

Jon pushed his spoon through the steaming liquid, watching the way it parted to make way for the force. “At Dragonstone, when you told me I always make the right choice — you remember that?” Theon nodded, and he continued. “I lied, back there. There are perhaps a million dead coming for us, and we’ve only the barest hope of survival. See, Theon? Not such a perfect man after all.” 

It should’ve worried him that his first thought was for Jon, and not for the million dead, but Theon had made his peace with death a very long time ago. “You always seemed that way. Especially when we were children.” 

Jon scoffed. “The bastard of Winterfell seemed perfect? To you, of all people?”

“It’s silly to think of it now,” Theon mumbled, aiming the words at his bowl. “But it’s true. I envied you and Robb. Ned loved you.”

“Ned loved you .”

“No, he didn’t,” Theon argued, finding the courage to meet Jon’s all too familiar grey eyes. “Not like he loved you.” 

He expected Jon to launch back at him, and Theon would take the lashing even though he knew he shouldn’t. But Jon kept silent, squinting in that way he always did when he was thinking. 

The breath curled in the cold air as he sighed, running an eye up and down Theon as he swallowed a warm mouthful of stew. “Why did you come back?” 

A dozen answers came to his mind, but Theon could only think of one. He gave a brief shrug. “It was the right thing to do.” 

“That’s it?” 

Theon didn’t understand. “... what do you want me to say?"

“I’m not sure,” Jon answered quickly, looking down into his bowl. “Nothing. Aye, forget I spoke.”

Theon tried to think of what he wanted to hear. Honour, perhaps? That was always Jon’s favourite word, as it was his father’s. For Ned, Robb, Catelyn and Rickon? He’d already said that. It was the right thing to do, to come back to defend their home one last time. So what did Jon want? 

“B— Bran,” Theon started, forcing past his stutter. “I’m here to defend Bran. It was him I wronged the most.” 

The pinched expression on Jon’s face did not change. “Aye.”

That was not it, Theon could tell. Before he could try stuttering some more, to both his and Jon’s embarrassment, a doe-eyed woman came by with ale pitchers in hand. She spotted Jon and offered him the full thing, placing it with a thunk beside him on the crate. Jon took it and topped up Theon’s tankard til it was brimming, and he felt a warmth in his chest that had been scarce throughout his life. He’d felt it when Sansa embraced him earlier, and he felt it now, with Jon filling his cup like they were friends. 

All was not the same, however. Jon was studying him again, flicking his eyes up to his face and back as he sat the pitcher down. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, much like he hadn’t a clue what Jon wanted to hear. But Theon thought Jon was searching for the same youth that Theon searched for in his own scarred face. 

A youth that could only be achieved by going back in time, revisiting memories and imprinting them onto his vision until the truth of it all seemed entirely faint, a mirage you could wave away like fog.

Theon knew he looked nothing like he had before; it must be an uphill battle for Jon to try and see anything of his youth in him.

Jon seemed to struggle with words. “I’m glad you’re here. Truly, I am. It’s… good of you.” He paused, giving Theon a pointed stare. “Sansa has been asking after you—”

“Robb!” A high voice called, making Theon jump. He scanned his surroundings for the source. Had he actually travelled back in time? Did he wish it into existence? Where was — Jon was still here, older and haggard and —

“Evening, my lord,” Jon said pleasantly, reaching out behind him. “Come to visit me, have you?” He procured a scrawny little thing from behind his back, barely more than an infant, warbling on two shaky legs and bright eyes locked on Theon. 

“Apologies, my lord,” the puffing maid that had followed him struggled out. “He ran before I could stop him.”

Jon gave an indulgent smile; Theon remembered that smile. Arya received it most. “That’s perfectly fine. You can leave him with me.”

With a polite bow she did, retiring the child to Jon’s engulfing arm, strewn across his small shoulders. Theon hadn’t looked away, couldn’t… his heart was in his throat. Robb. Bran. Rickon. Cradled in Lady Stark’s arms and his own, once or twice.

The boy was the spitting image of the Stark children he remembered. Theon knew those curls. He knew those eyes.

“What—?” He might weep.

Jon’s eyes widened, like he’d forgotten Theon was there. He neatly lifted the boy into his lap. “Oh. This — this is Robb.”

“You have a son?”

“No,” Jon said. But he didn’t say anything more, jittering his occupied leg. Robb’s curls bounced. Jon’s mouth opened and shut a few times, struggling. 

“Arya, then?” Theon asked. He wasn’t sure if Bran could have children — if not, they were quite a pair. 

“No.”

Theon tried to huff, suddenly irritated, but it came out half a sob. “Well — how old is he?” 

Jon pressed his lips together until it looked painful. On his lap, the boy turned to stare up at him, reaching a pudgy hand into Jon’s beard and pulling. “A year and a half,” he gritted out.

“Why does he look like—“ Theon froze. His hair was red. His hair was red. 

Jon winced, gauging his reaction. “We love him,” he insisted, fingers tightening their grip on the boy. “He is nothing like him.”

Sansa. He looks like Sansa. 

Theon’s voice shook. “Him?” he echoed, but he knew well enough. A year and a half. 

All of it came back at once, every cut and every lash, every beating and rape and broken bone and his lost fingers and Sansa’s cries, the ones that tormented him as well as his own— 

He was choking, he was dying, gasping and flailing. There was water here. He fell into it, sinking into the depths and swallowing the bitter taste in gulps. 

“Theon,” a voice called. “Theon!”

Grey eyes. He knew those eyes. A strong hand at his shoulder, squeezing and pulling. 

“I— have —“ he could get no more out. He twisted until the hand let go and he stumbled onto shaky legs. 

“It’s alright.” Jon’s voice sounded like it was a thousand miles away, like it was coming from the bottom of the ocean, warbling, unsure of his own words. “Sansa will—“

“Stop!” Theon couldn’t. He couldn’t. He ran before Jon could stop him. 

He was in the kennels when Sansa found him. It was not so bad to return to them, to feel the familiar scratchy hay on his skin; the storm in his head was worse to endure. 

It did not feel like long before she came. Jon must have pulled her from her work to find him, and guilt’s sticky fingers poked into his gut. She stood still, blocking what little light could enter. She darkened the kennels all until she moved closer and the light came back, haloed around her hair. 

Unlike the first time she’d found him in here, he did not shy away. He laid there in the straw waiting, watching; he could watch her for an eternity, the way she moved and the grace in her face and hands and eyes, every part of her. 

“I’m sorry I didn't tell you,” she said, face twisted as she sat beside him. “I thought it would only hurt.”

It did. But it — he needed to think. “When—?”

“Before the battle of the bastards,” she cut him off, and offered no more.

He felt sick. As if she had not suffered enough. “I’m so sorry.”

Sansa looked at her hands. “Out of everything he did, I am the least sorry for this one. I love my son. He is mine only.”

Theon nodded, slowly and painfully. He took pains to breath in and out, in and out, focusing on the sensation. The cold air burned but he was used to that. “He looks like you.”

“And I thank the gods everyday for it,” she agreed. “My mother’s eyes, Robb’s curls with my colour.” She hesitated. “And he is good, Theon. So sweet and kind and not a trace of evil.”

The pressure that had built in his chest loosened a fraction. He pictured the boy on Jon’s lap; he’d stared at him, eyes wide, as all children did, but there was no remnants of the man who’d flayed him into submission under his pudgy skin. 

He had meant his words. The boy really did look like Sansa. That was not so awful — perhaps he could try to face his fear, this sweet boy who had no control over who his father was. 

“Can I — where is he, now?”

“Running around the encampment, being chased by Jon or Arya, I imagine.”

The encampment. “The dead.” He shot up, grasping her with a desperate hand. “Oh, drowned god, Sansa — he has to be safe from them.”

“He will be.” She patted his hand with her free one. 

“And you have to be safe.” A brave finger stroked her wrist. 

“I will be,” she reiterated. “Robb is coming to the crypts with me.”

He didn’t know why panic had gripped him so. “Promise me you’ll both be safe.”

“We will. Theon—“ She leaned forward like she wanted to hug him again. “We’ll be alright. We will endure. We will survive this.”

There was conviction in her eyes. The shine of a worthy leader, a bravery he did not possess, like the one he’d glimpsed in Jon’s eyes as he lied to his men. 

“Will we?” he asked, and he felt like a stupid little coward. He’d thought about the dead, the absurdity of it and then the growling monster Jon had brought to the dragon pit. He returned to Winterfell to fight them, of course, but it was only ever a secondary explanation. 

His true meaning in coming back — he knew it, he knew it — was the Starks, Bran and Jon and Arya and Sansa, sweet gods it was Sansa he was here for. 

“You have a son that I didn’t even — know about and now he’s in danger — he looks like you and Robb and Lady Catelyn, now we — it’s up to me to defend you.” He breathed sharply through his nose, desperate to control his racing heart. 

It seemed easy, when Yara gave him leave. Fight the dead. How hard could it be? 

But he had something to live for. Things to lose, as he never had before. Theon was being tested. By who, he did not know  — the drowned god or the old gods or the new, he believed in none any more. But they tested him nevertheless. 

Sansa pulled at his arm, bringing him back. “Stop. You’re driving yourself mad.”

The words I can’t do it rumbled in his chest, running up him until they were sharp pokes at his tongue. He wanted to say them, to say them in shouts and whimpers and into her hair; she would understand, she knew, she knew. He wanted to say I’m not enough and it’s my fault and I’m not strong, not brave or steel like you and Jon and my sister. 

But he knew who that voice was. It was his, surely, in his own mind; but it was someone else’s, too, a person that only egged his terror on. Someone who only ever wanted to watch him fail. 

Enough. Enough. 

Silently, Theon rose, up and up until he was standing, and brought Sansa with him. He led her out of the kennels and brushed the straw that had stuck to his hair with one rough swipe. Then, with Sansa close enough that she engulfed his whole vision, he only looked at her. Drinking her in.

“Theon?”

“I love you,” he said, instead of all those other things. “I love you and you have to live.”

Her grip on his arm froze as he gathered the courage to keep looking into her eyes. Her son had those eyes, and he felt better about his existence knowing that. 

It didn’t matter how she took it. He only needed to have her know it. There was a gentle, warm hand on his face, and he leaned into like it was land to his ship-wrecked soul. 

The faint lines in her face softened, the ones he’d seen put there, deepened and softened with each new day. He’d missed her so. 

“I love you,” she answered. That was all. The hand was still there, and Theon thought about leaning forward and kissing her. I could do it and no one but us would care. No one in the world would care, and that is the greatest freedom I have been offered since I escaped. 

There was no need. He was too slow, and she stole his attempt at chivalric romance right out from under him, capturing his lips in a soft press before he got the chance to.

Even though he was very aware he could die, that most of these men around him and Jon and Sansa and even, awfully, little Robb could die, he was content. To Sansa’s continuous exasperation, Theon was quite content to watch Robb run around and shove things into his mouth for the rest of the night.

She’d been right. There was nothing of him in the boy. 

Robb took a special interest in him, this newcomer who never smiled; he spent what seemed hours trying to poke Theon’s lips upwards. Eventually he lost their game, giving in when Robb got particularly frustrated and frowned just like Jon did. 

It was only when he looked up, still smiling, that he noticed Sansa watching them from her crate opposite. His heart gave a little pitter-patter; it did that when he saw her, and every time he’d thought about her when he was across the narrow sea. 

“I understand if when…” Sansa began, struggling. “If we win, you don’t want to stay here afterwards. Looking at him and seeing — I couldn’t imagine. I’ve never — never seen him, not when he was born and not now. But I… I would never make you.”

Theon observed her for a moment. It was obvious, what she was really asking — in the fluttering of her eyelashes, the way she looked away and then back, over and over. Will you stay with me, she said, and he thought it a joke that she would need to ask. In his arms, Robb babbled faintly and settled into his chest, yawning.

“It won’t be easy,” Theon said. “But nothing in this life ever is.” Sansa gave a choked noise, intending to interrupt him, but he was determined and continued. “I’ve learnt to pick the things I want to suffer for.” 

“That’s unfair,” she argued, shaking her head. “I can’t ask you to suffer just to be here.”

He shrugged as much as he could with Robb buried in his chest. “I’d suffer either way. If I go south or — when this is all over — back to the islands, what do you think I’m going to do?”

She kept his gaze, brow pinched. “Whatever you want to.”

“Drink, probably. Shut myself away. I don’t — I don’t enjoy the things I used to enjoy. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I’ll go home and be miserable and think about him, Sansa. I’ll think about you and the boy I left behind for the memory of a man who doesn’t exist anymore.”

Now he felt he had to look away, and gave in, but he turned straight into Jon’s hard gaze, standing beside the two of them. Theon felt a terrible heat flame his cheeks.

There was a long, crackling silence, one that felt as wide as the realm, even when men chattered all around them.

“The night’s watch still aren’t here?” Sansa asked, when it became clear neither he nor Jon were going to speak first.

“No,” Jon answered, still looking at him. Then, he took a seat beside Theon, prompting the two of them to shift on the crate. Robb made a short whine of complaint before he settled again. Theon was warm where he lay, and he gave in to the instinct to run his thumb against his tiny back.

Tyrion Lannister strode across the courtyard a fair distance away, heading inside the castle with his one-handed brother at his side, but he stopped once he met Theon’s eyes. The Imp took in the sight of the three of them huddled awkwardly on crates and gave a delighted guffaw. Theon hated it; the sound was smug and too amused for his liking, but Tyrion carried on before he could think more about it. 

He supposed they did look silly, he and Jon crammed closer than either wanted to be. 

Jon looked like he’d eaten a lemon, like he hated the very words that he was about to say. “You’re staying, then? After the battle?” 

“Jon,” Sansa rebuked with pleading eyes, but Theon was strong enough to withstand the ire of an honourable man. Jon would never hurt him where he couldn’t see it coming. 

“I am. Is that what you wanted to hear earlier?”

Jon’s eyes slid from him to Robb asleep on his chest and then down into his drink. “Aye, it was.”

Theon realised something, then, and gave a startled sort of laugh. “And that was why you told me Sansa was asking after me.” 

Giving his answer in a curt nod, Jon still looked like he wanted to heave. Across from him, Sansa gave an almost blinding smile, and Theon found he could easily return it. 

After making sure Bran was safe, the first thing he did was run. He’d run quite a lot — hunting, sport, dueling, and then for his very life — but never like this. He was on the edge of hysteria, practically, and he had been ever since he let Sansa and Robb out of his sight. 

Sweat coated his hair and shook from it as he sprinted across Winterfell, sliding on the ice and not caring one bit, faster and faster. His legs felt like they were about to fall off. He had no more arrows, the sword he’d hastily sheathed was blunt, and his armour cracked through, but still, defenceless and stronger than a storm he ran. 

The remnants of Winterfell scattered across the ground, gaping holes in the towering walls and bodies, limbs and heads and guts, he jumped over them all. He’d think on it later, when the panic was not pounding in his skull. 

Once he reached the courtyard he spotted a familiar shock of black hair. “Jon!” he called, and his old brother let out a relieved gust of breath as Theon closed the gap.

“I’m glad you made it,” Jon said, breathless, patting him with a sharp slap to the back. He looked awful, dusty and sick, pale and red-eyed and exhausted, but he was alive. 

“You as well,” Theon rushed. He had no time for excess pleasantries. “Sansa?”

“Crypts, I assume. No one has come out as yet. The battle has only just en— Theon!”

But he was gone. 

Though he’d never extensively visited Winterfell’s crypts as a boy, Theon knew the way well enough, and he was there before anyone had ventured down. 

Without thinking about it, Theon rattled the barred door so hard he felt the rumbling on the stones beneath him. “For the — let me in!” 

A heavily bearded northerner, collapsed on the floor a distance away, turned to stare at him. A few more men turned too, till he felt like a crown fool on display. 

“Help me, cowards!” Theon demanded of them, in perhaps his first display of anger in what felt like years. He kicked the door in frustration. He promised. He promised. “Just —” He pulled so hard his hands ached. “ Open this door —”

There was a distinct thump and the sound of a rattling chain, before the door gave way and creaked outward. A woman he didn’t recognise stepped aside as he darted in. She was unable to look him in the eye.

Those men he’d yelled at followed him in, and he was glad for it. It was carnage. Bodies, everywhere, as much a slaughter as outside, and Theon barely held back the stew he’d struggled through hours ago. 

He wanted to speak, to say something to the survivors, with their wide-eyes and blank faces. He knew it well. But he — not now. If they were — he’d rather be Reek again. He searched through those faces, hoping and hoping and praying and hoping — but he searched and searched, down and down until he reached the Kings of Winter. 

“No,” he whispered to himself, so quiet no one could hear. “N—” He broke, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth to stop the sob.

Perhaps he’d missed them. His search had been hurried, desperate. He forced his feet to move again, back the way he came, down and down the shadowy crypts. 

If they live, I will be a better man, I promise. His word was true now. I promise. Please, let me find them. 

Then he saw Ned Stark. The face wasn’t right, but Theon could tell it was him by the way he stood, the cloak and the sternness and Ice gripped between two hands. He’d held that sword enough. 

Ned seemed to call to him, grey imprinted upon the bland stone of his eyes, and Theon went. He was his ward, after all. Come, Theon, he was saying, voice gruff. Come. The way Theon remembered it. He supposed Ned was as much a ghost as Reek once was. Come. 

There, huddled behind the man he’d sooner call father than any other, was Sansa, shielding Robb with her cloak. 

“It’s safe,” he breathed out, falling to his knees beside them. “They’re gone. They’re gone.” 

Letting out a relieved sob, Sansa launched into him and he met her halfway. He pressed desperate kisses into her hair, down her neck and onto her shoulder. She returned them with an equal fervour. Between them, Robb clung to them with strength in his small fists. Theon crushed the boy to his chest and breathed both of them in.

He never thought in a thousand centuries that he would be hugging Ramsay’s son. Perhaps it helped that he wasn’t — not in the way it mattered. Robb looked like Sansa and acted like Sansa, like all of the Starks he’d known as a child, and that was better grounds for Theon’s growing affection than a thimble full of seed could ever be a deterrent. 

Theon did not realise he was crying until he felt the burn. Sobs climbed their way up his chest and out his throat. He’d lost so much. His youth and his mother and ironborn brothers, Robb and Ned, Yara and Sansa before he’d found them again — the act of laughter and lovemaking, so many opportunities for joy dashed against the wall. He’d gained as well as lost, scars that ran across his back and around, stinging and gaping and the way he jumped at shadows. He’d gained, too, and lost enough. He clutched at Robb and Sansa harder.

“You’re alive, we’re alive,” Sansa mumbled into his shoulder, trying to reassure him, but he would not let go. Not yet. Letting go meant facing the mass devastation to their people and the castle, and here was better. Here was relief and warmth and love, for as long as he was allowed it, and he’d sooner grow wings than let go of the two of them. 

She was crying, too; he could feel it, and knew she would not let go either, the three of them huddled beside Ned Stark’s grave.

 Overall, it had been a strange homecoming indeed. The dead were gone and the night king with them, something that came from myths and legends and still didn’t seem entirely real. Stranger than that, Sansa loved him and her son too. They never left his side as he rested, and Robb found many ways to lay himself horizontally across his chest without causing Theon pain.

It was with a heavy heart that he saddled his bags and instructed his remaining men to do the same. He’d stay forever, if he could. Winterfell had never quite been his home as a child. It was home now. 

“Be safe,” Sansa said to him, running desperate hands up and down his chest, across his shoulders and down his arms, like she was conjuring her own armour with the movements. 

“I will,” he whispered back. She was close enough to kiss, and so he did. Robb was passed from the maid into Sansa’s arms and again into Theon’s, and he left a strong kiss on the boy’s forehead. 

“I have to — I have to go with my sister.” He swallowed the tide in his throat and handed Robb back. He missed the warmth instantly. “I made a promise, an alliance. I can’t betray it now.”

Sansa kissed his cheek, a lovely caress that made him swoon like a maiden. He jogged one of his feet to remind himself he was still standing upright.

“You returned, once,” she said, clinging to him with her free hand. “Make sure you do it again. Come back to me, to us, once this is all over.”

“I will,” he assured, and meant it. He took a moment to drink in the sight of Sansa with Robb, their matching red hair astonishing in the daylight. “I will always return to you.”