Chapter Text
Sansa is no fool.
She can hope—with all of her heart, as she always has—that Joffrey Baratheon, King of The Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Realm, will choke on any aspect of his wedding feast. Any chunk of meat would do, but she cannot help but savour the idea of what a sight it would be to watch him choke on his wedding cake: to watch him turn pink, purple, red, all the shades a stag nor lion ought not to be.
His wife, her sister, she remembers, would clutch at his body and feign grief for a man she knows a monster. The Queen Mother would know him a monster and feign nothing at all.
Yes—Sansa was no fool, but to be a dreamer? It was a curse all the same. She lives in no reality but her own: she watches her king become a husband. She thinks not of how she had ached, a long, long time ago, for that to be her: how she had defended Joffrey in her youth, thought him charming, thought him the sort of man she could raise children with, as was expected of her. She had dreamed, once, that she would one day achieve the peaceful look she had so often seen on her mothers face, and that she would achieve it with him. How humorous—in all her desperation to wed a Lannister, she had never considered she would marry another, and save whatever was left of her dignity in doing so.
Instead it is Margaery who replaces her shameful dreams—sweet, beautiful, generous Margaery, of whose kindness has been unwavering in all the time she had known her. She had feared for her, once, prayed for her safety, but had been left, by the end (when the Seven had truly left her, if, of course, they had ever been her companions at all) with the unfailing belief that some could shape their own destiny. Whether it was through talent or the sheer desperation of having no other option, anything could be achieved by the very few. The now-Queen was one of those few, and, for all Sansa had lost, she allowed herself to imagine that Kings Landing might just have been a place for her yet.
Perhaps she would not marry Loras Tyrell. Perhaps she would bear the Lannister name forevermore: she had wed a Lannister, would bed a Lannister, bear Lannister Children, and, perhaps, she would die a Lannister. Perhaps Sansa would never go home.
She knew these things, and knew them, in all their unfairness, to be likely. But she knew, too, that fair was no divine tool to be handed out to those both deserving and undeserving— fair would never be given to those who had not deigned to fight for it. She had spent far too long in complacency: she had considered herself a lady for the majority of her life, and a victim the remainder. She was beginning to tire of it.
She takes what she is given. She takes the cruelty of the evening: the entertainment. One day, she believes, she may just get to watch a play of her own — not of the fall of the Direwolf, but of the slow, torturous death of the Lion. It will come: she believes, and so she knows . Her sister and Queen has taught her so.
There is more to her fond-and-more than fondness of Margaery than education—late nights have left her lonely, and the dark events of the past years have left her considerably darkened herself. If she allows herself to dream beyond what she is allowed to dream, beyond what she has been taught, she finds herself thinking of craven things, the sort those of the realm can only whisper of, and never say aloud. She dreams her troubled dreams, and then thinks the word sister, the word queen, the word woman, and allows herself to move away.
Yes—Sansa is troubled, she knows of this. It is this of which makes her husband flinch away from her, as if he were the woman, the wife, the property. She terrifies him, and she does not know whether it is because he yearns to free her or yearns for her and cannot bear the depravity. She is no longer a child, not in any terms that matter, at least, but he is guilted all the same…or maybe she is simply ruined. She is terrified and she is terrifying and it does not matter which is true so long as she wields them both in equal measure.
When the dignitaries of the realm paid obeisance to the King and Queen of the Seven Kingdoms at the end of then night, she joined them — it was nightfall, and she hoped, in its stead, nobody would see how she looked only at the latter, her head bowed with all of the respect she had failed to provide, and none of the frailty she had embodied for so long.
Little Bird, the hound had called her. As she paid respect to Margaery Tyrell, the only royal in Kings Landing she would ever choose to serve, would ever accept , she did so as nothing less than the Heir to Winterfell.
She did so as nothing less than a Stark.