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“Once upon a time, there was a girl. She was the prettiest girl in the whole of England, until puberty gave her legs up to her ears and forgot to give her boobs-”
“Thanks for that, Arya,” Sansa sighed, settling more comfortably into the deeply cushioned seat of the booth Arya’s friends had claimed for the night - Sansa had never come to this club before, probably because it was a lot lower-key than her old crowd had liked, but she had to admit that she liked it, even if she felt horribly self conscious and out of place, just for being with Arya’s friends.
It had been nice of Arya to invite her along, of course. Sansa would be the first to point out just how wonderful Arya had been since the accident, especially since they hadn’t been on speaking terms in the weeks leading up to it. Arya had stepped right up, better even than Mum or Dad had. She could understand that, sort of - Mum and Dad had been through it all with Bran, and besides, Sansa had been… Independent of them for a while, before the accident.
She said accident. She meant “high speed single-car collision which crushed the car in which she had been a passenger so thoroughly that it cost her her right arm and Joffrey his life.”
None of that meant that she didn’t feel like an intruder. This was a place made for people like Arya and her friends, who dressed like Alexa Chung and listened to those cool, weird bands whose names Sansa didn’t know. Sansa had always been a prom-dress-and-pumps kind of girl, and she didn’t even know what kind of music she liked anymore, since she’d spent the last four years listening to whatever Joff picked out.
That was why she’d agreed to this, after all. New scene, new haircut (soft curls pinned back on one side and loose on the other), new look, new her, all to go with her new arm.
The arm wasn’t so bad, really - they’d given her a glove thingy that meant the hand at least looked fairly real, and the long sleeves of the ditsy floral print blouse Arya had convinced her to buy hid the bits that didn’t look even remotely real, so it was fine. Really. It was fine.
And so what if Sansa wasn’t used to it yet? She’d only had the damn thing six months, and the doctors had assured her that difficulty with fine motor control was normal. That’s why she was very carefully not fussing that she couldn’t grip a glass with her new hand.
Arya had slipped away while Sansa was brooding, and was dancing with Alla and Ned, Arya with her hair slicked up, Alla’s curls threaded with silk flowers, Ned’s dusted with lavender chalk. They looked so cool, and so utterly natural in their coolness, and Sansa felt even more out of place just looking at them.
“Hey,” Trys said quietly, leaning in a little closer. “You’re fine with us, you know that, don’t you? If you want to go home, just say the word.”
Trys was probably the most beautiful man Sansa knew, with his huge dark eyes and his soft, pretty mouth, and he was also always designated driver, for reasons she didn’t fully understand. She’d learned long ago not to question the set rules in Arya’s relationship. It was easier that way.
“I’m okay for now,” she promised him. “But thank you all the same.”
Trystane patted her hand - the new one - and turned back to his conversation with Shireen, laughing at one of her characteristic sly, subtle jokes. Sansa liked Shireen just as much as she liked Ned and Alla and Trystane, even if she didn’t know her nearly as well. It was easy to like Arya’s friends, because they were so welcoming, so accepting, simply because she was Arya’s sister. It made her regret all the times she’d said nothing when her friends had been terrible to Arya, all through the years.
Sansa had looked as natural as that on a dancefloor, once. She’d always been first out of her seat, teetering on the high, high heels Joff had liked, taller than everyone else and dressed twice as expensively, even when they were out in Chelsea with Joff’s chums from Eton.
Things had changed. Now, she felt clumsy all of the time, because she was always aware of the falseness of the new arm, the strange weight of it against her side, the way it didn’t quite move the way her old arm had. She didn’t like to dance anymore, not in a club and certainly not in a studio. Oh, Frauline Mordane had urged her to come back, and her doctors had agreed that ballet would be good for her, would help her regain her strength and flexibility, but she hadn’t been able to face it.
She hadn’t gone diving in a long time, either. She’d never been as good as Arya or Rickon, but she’d enjoyed it. She’d loved it, maybe more than she had dancing, because it had always just been for fun. She hated the idea of being in a swimsuit now, though, with the stupid new arm on full display, and all her scars showing.
Fucking Joffrey! She didn’t like to speak ill of the dead, even in the security of her own head-
“Hey, San, quit with the teeth-grinding,” Arya said, suddenly sitting opposite Sansa again, sweaty and glowing. Sansa missed feeling like that, feeling happy and alive and whole.
Maybe that support group Bran had suggested wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
She was the only person there missing an entire limb. Apparently, that sort of thing was more common among combat veterans, who had their own support group meeting down the hall and on Tuesdays.
Here, there were a lot of people who’d lost hands to machinery accidents in the workplace, or who’d lost a foot to a car crash - those people seemed to very quietly thank God for small mercies whenever she said how she’d lost her arm, how the fireman had asked the EMTs to sedate her before they even considered cutting her out of the wreckage, because he thought she’d go mad if she had to look at the mess of her arm and Joff’s everything for much longer.
Sometimes, Sansa wondered if she had gone mad, but her therapist said that negativity like that was bad for her, so she tried never to linger on it.
The support group was helping, more than she’d ever admit to anyone except Arya and Bran, and maybe Mum. She’d made a couple of tentative friends, people who understood what she’d gone through, more or less - there was Donella, who’d been locked up in her own home and lost most of her right hand, and Gilly, who’d been unlucky as all hell in the parent stakes and was down a foot.
There were people. Friends. People who understood and didn’t sigh when she complained about her arm feeling alien to her body, who didn’t frown when she admitted that she hated the hell out of it.
There was Willas, too.
Sansa hadn’t considered dating since she’d broken up with Joff - she’d been too afraid, first, then too busy trying to rebuild her life, and then he’d arrived at her door out of his mind on vodka and cocaine and forced her into the car, and-
And the past year had been a mess. She was mature enough and far enough along in her recovery to admit that.
But meeting Willas was starting to change her mind. He’d started coming to their meetings about six weeks after she had, on crutches, because in his own words, “that fucking machine is too uncomfortable to wear here after wearing it all day at work.”
Sansa understood that - she had to wear her arm all day at work, because even though she was clumsier with it than without it, the head was afraid her being armless would frighten some of the smaller kids - and was so deeply relieved to see someone else who was in more-or-less the same boat as her, amputation-wise, that she marched right up to him and introduced herself.
It had sort of snowballed from there.
Willas had lost his leg in a motorbike accident when he was sixteen, racing his then-girlfriend’s adrenaline junkie father along the aptly-named Boneway, about ten miles north of Cardiff. He admitted outright that it had been his own stupidity that cost him his leg, and took a certain ghoulish delight in shoving down his trousers to reveal both his fabulous electric green boxers and the tiny remainder of his left leg.
Sansa outdid him when she tugged her jumper over her head, showing off all her scars and, when she took off her arm, the even tinier stump that extended just four inches from her shoulder - all that could be salvaged, after the wreck, and only salvaged at all in the hopes of making her more receptive to the prosthetic.
So yeah, Sansa had formed something of an instant bond with Willas. And yes, he was over ten years older than her, the COO of his family’s massive food production company, father to a fourteen year old daughter called Aster, who apparently refused to wear her hearing aids when she was in a mood, but none of that seemed to matter when they bundled up in scarves and coats and went for coffee after the Amputees Anonymous meetings.
They weren’t really called that, not officially, but all the members called them AA as a joke, and it was the kind of joke that rolled off the tongue so easily that it was hard to call the meetings anything else.
Sansa didn’t call her post-meeting coffees with Willas anything at all, even while discussing them with Arya. They were just an hour or so, once a week, where she didn’t have to worry about the way her arm was resting against her side, or about how awkward she looked trying to rip open a sugar sachet when she was finding it had to get a grip on it, or about scratching at the imaginary itch of her scars. Willas understood, so there was no need to worry, and it was such a relief that she didn’t dare call their coffee hours dates for fear of jinxing herself.
Arya and Alla and Trys and Ned all insisted that they were dates, every time she went out to the club with them, and pointed out that she’d started dressing nicer for the meetings because Willas would be there, too, which was blatant flirtation, and that she was fooling no one but herself.
She firmly pointed out that they were talking through their collective arses, and never mentioned Willas again.
But then, one cold but startlingly clear night, Willas paid for her coffee and asked her to join him for dinner the following Monday, she supposed that she had to call this one a date, really, and that maybe Bran and Arya were right about some things, sometimes.