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Sansa had far too much glitter in her hair for this conversation right now.
“Hey, Willas,” she said, glaring at Elinor over her hot neighbor’s shoulder. “How was your day?”
“Shitty,” he said, tiredly. He was leaning more heavily on his cane than was his usual style, and the shitty fluorescent lighting made him look gaunt and sallow. “You know you are shedding enough glitter to make Lily happy?”
“She can meet my make-up artist one day,” Sansa had offered. “I think Randa decided that fairy punk was her favorite thing ever, and I was the perfect canvas for it. Lily can be a fairy princess.”
“As long as Randa doesn’t mind the wooden sword her Uncle Jon got Lily, I don’t see why not,” Willas said, scratching at his scruff. “Her mother can’t mind that, at least. And I know some of her friends refuse to believe she’s friends with a real life pop star.”
“Firstly, two songs on the radio does not make me a star. Secondly, let’s make it a show. Thirdly, Custody issues again?” Sansa said, watching Elinor sneak off. She’d say something later. “I thought you and Rhaenys had something worked out?”
“Rhaenys got a good job offer,” he said, sighing. “For Wayne Industries.”
“Ah,” Sansa said. “You want to come in and talk about it?”
~
“It’s not that Rhae doesn’t love Lily, I know she does, but she keeps denying herself custody and visits and I hate seeing Lily get miserable about it,” Willas said, gesticulating with his beer bottle. “And Grandmere is smug as hell about it, too, which makes it worse.”
Sansa nodded, suppressing the urge to pat Willas’ sad hair. “You know your ex’s half-brother is my cousin, so I have some idea of the family dynamics, right?”
Willas cocked his head. “Huh?”
“Rhaegar Targaryen is… Howard Stark and Odin and every shitty fictional parent at once,” Sansa said waving her hands and sending a minor swirl of glitter down to emphasize her point. She was exhausted and not on her first bottle either. “I’m actually pretty sure the most stable parental figure in her life was Ellaria Sand. She’s probably terrified of screwing up her daughter. I have actually heard the sibs refer to themselves as poison.”
Willas blinked his pretty hazel eyes. “That… makes sense. I know her dad threw some strict conditions on her when we found out about Lily.”
“Go, talk to her, get the poor woman some family therapy,” Sansa said.
“I will,” Willas beamed. “My daughter deserves to have her mother in her life.”
With that he walked out the door with exaggerated care, and it took Sansa ten minutes for her heart to start sinking.
~
“El-in-nor, my life is some romantic movie, only I’m not the starring role,” Sansa pouted over the phone. She’d collapsed on her bed, looking at her ceiling and cursing her mouth.
“Is that a song already, or are you brainstorming for your next album?” the other woman asked dryly. Dammit, Jeyne was doing some charity event in a different enough time zone she couldn’t call, and Arya would mock her.
“I think I got my fantasy boyfriend back with his ex,” Sansa added. “Or tried to.”
The line went dead for a long moment. “Oh, sweetie, trust me, that isn’t happening. Just… trust me.”
“Did it end that badly?” she asked.
“The accident happened,” Elinor said, “which in turn made Uncle Mace and his mother into raging balls of fury, plus her dad is…”
“I know, I know…” Sansa said. “Am I a horrible person for being a little bit relieved?”
“Hell, no, we need something to break the tension before a murder occurs,” Elinor laughed.
~
Lily bounced around the room, sword strapped to her hip. “I want to be a fierce fairy princess!” the seven year old said.
Randa grinned. “Hmm, what colors should we go with for your glitter, then? Red for the blood of your enemies?”
“Yeah!” Lily said. Sansa watched, doing her own hair tonight- it was pretty simple, the same slender braids from her temples meeting at the back of her head. The riot of curls and glitter did the rest.
“Let me,” Willas said, taking the brush and gently undoing the tangles.
“You’re good at this,” she said, wishing she sounded less surprised.
“Da does my hair,” Lily said, her own fall of dark brown curls to her scraped elbows. “And he did Auntie Margie’s when she was young.”
“I wouldn’t use young when talking in front of Auntie Margie,” Willas said, a slight grin on his face visible on the mirror. Sansa smiled back.
Lily had gone for a Halloween like palette, with orange eyeshadow, black lipstick, and red fine glitter dusting her cheeks and hair. Randa had added a little spiderweb in eyeliner at the corner of one eye.
Willas snapped a picture.
Sansa’s make-up was practically robotic, normally, Randa knowing exactly what she wanted to do and using Sansa’s quiet nature off stage to do it. Now she had Lily asking her a million questions, laughing and explaining why she was using this color and not another.
“It looks different than in the videos,” Lily said, tilting her head.
“The lights on stage are really bright, so they change how everything looks,” Sansa explained. “It’s a pretty cool science experiment, if you ever want to try it out.” She looked at Willas, avoiding biting her lip with Randa right there to give her a glare of death. “Or just look at different types of lights- really bright ones, really yellow ones, stuff like that. Lighting effects are really important- we actually have people here dedicated to it.”
“Cool,” Lily said, eyes wide.
“Now, I think it’s time for Sansa to finish getting ready, and for your poor Papa to limp to the seats,” Willas laughed, winking at Sansa.
“Oh, you have it so bad,” Randa was shaking with laughter, not even trying to hide her amusement at Sansa’s expense.
“Harry Hardyng,” Sansa snapped.
Randa stuck her tongue out.
~
Arya had been the first to properly help her describe it- Stage!Sansa was someone totally different than RealLife!Sansa. Stage!Sansa was braver, someone who could take an audience and make them follow her for the price of a song, who rocked glitter and a pair of leather booty shorts that made RealLife!Sansa avoid her mother’s calls for a week.
So it was Stage!Sansa up on stage, enjoying the crowd and the music.
And a little surprise.
“Now, I was told that a friend of mine had a little problem,” she told the crowd, between songs. “My friend Lily said that some of her friends at school don’t actually believe we know each other. Can you believe that?”
There was a roar from the crowd, and Lily bounced up and down. Willas crossed his arms, shaking his head and laughing.
“So, can Lily and her Dad come up on stage so we can prove she’s right?” she said, hands on her hips and glad for her bike shorts under the dress.
Lily dragged her father up in her eagerness, but Sansa was looking at Willas as she started the song.
“Let the bough break, let it come down crashing, let the sun fade out to a dark sky, I can't say I'd even notice it was absent, ‘cause I could live by the light in your eye,” she sang, bouncing right up to Willas. He looked good-stunned, Stage-Sansa decided, which was good, because she knew this was Lily’s favorite song.
Also, if Real-Life Sansa was going to be a blushing embarrassed wreck for the rest of her life, she was going out in a blaze of glory.
Though, she suspected Real-Life Sansa would kindly like it Stage-Sansa stopped doing things on the fly like this.
She and Lily were dancing around Willas, who had the most adorable awkward dad moves, made possibly worse due to the cane, so Sansa decided to take advantage of his mostly stationary position and wink.
He winked back, before putting on a cute and baffled look on his face.
Lily looked between them, something starting to click.
Sansa got down on one knee. “Tell the world that we finally got it all right, I choose you, I will become yours, you will become mine…”
He started rummaging through his pockets, clearly miming looking for a ring.
She mock-shrugged and he helped her up, and it turned out he could dip a girl, even a girl who was nearly six feet in her stocking feet.
There was a few whistles, and Lily looked ready to faint.
“I choose you,” Sansa finished.
And then, of course, Willas decided to kiss her.
And it was not a stage kiss. At all.
Lily was whooping in the background, and the lights were making everything so very sharp, but she could only focus on the fact that his hair was more absurd than normal.
“Dinner tomorrow?” he grinned, reckless and wild and the opposite of the defeated look from when she had offered Lily a trip. “Can’t promise it’ll top this, but…?”
She laughed, something breathy and bright. “What do you think?”
“You don’t I will!” someone catcalled.
“That would be a yes, then,” Sansa said, blushing. “Now, give it up for my friends!”
The cheers were wild, and Lily bowed like it was her due.
~
Real-Life Sansa took over… oh, about as soon as she got in her dressing room and saw her cell.
Arya, her mother, Robb, Jeyne, even Jon.
Arya had simply sent a smiley emoticon and a note to check certain tumblr tags. Mom had left a voicemail she was going to listen to later, because Dad was probably chipping in, and her parents got weird about her dating after Joffrey, Jeyne was a voicemail, Robb was… not going to dealt with, and Jon.
Christ, she hadn’t even thought about that. Jon was Lily’s Uncle. Which was weird, because Jon’s Dad was, as Arya put it, High King of the Jerkasses and He Who Jackson Thranduil had Been Modelled off of.
“Hey, Sansa,” Willas said. “Elinor is taking Lily back to my place.”
“Oh, good, good,” she said. “Um, is this going to cause problems for you? Me kind of…” She waved her hands over the paraphernalia of music-dom.
“With Rhae?” Willas asked, head tilted, settling into the comfy chair. “Nah. She… agreed to go to therapy. She’s just trying to keep her family out of Lily’s life, even if it means keeping herself out as well. I might get some ragging for this, but she won’t try and take Lily away.”
“Oh, good,” Sansa said, slumping on her settee.
“So what kind of dinner do you want?” he asked.
“You might want to wait to see how big this gets,” Sansa raised an eyebrow.
He gulped.