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Searing, excruciating pain. That’s all she feels as she wails until she is breathless.
Even Ramsay and Joffrey couldn’t beat this. Gods know they’d try.
“You’re doing so great, my love. So great.”
Sansa glares at Jon, crouched between her spread knees. She wants to push him away from what she knows is probably an absolute nightmare, but knows that she needs his help. His grin and kind, sweet encouraging words seem to indicate that he doesn’t mind.
In a different world, she would be birthing a babe in the same bed her mother gave birth to her; she would be warm and safe in her mother’s old chambers, with a Maester or a midwife.
But this is their reality. It is just her and Jon, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from home, in the middle of a storm, on a dirty merchant ship to Essos.
Arya and Bran are in their own cabin, hopefully asleep. Sansa had begged Jon not to fetch for them, not wanting them to see her like this. Surely, they'd been traumatized enough; the four of them had spent several months on the run, first down to Riverrun, and then back up to Greywater Watch under the protection of Lord Howland Reed, until they had received word that Lannister armies were moving swiftly through the Neck. They’d left to catch a ship to Essos the very next day, Sansa already with child and what she thought at the time to be massive (oh, how foolish she had been). Jon had not wanted to risk staying behind for a battle they could have very well lost.
The boat lurches over a wave, and so does the pain that seizes her belly and lower back. The motion sends Jon stumbling to and fro.
“This- ah!” Sansa grips the edge of the bed so tightly that her knuckles turn white. Tears prick at her eyes, from the pain, but also fear. “This is going to kill me, Jon. I’m going to die.”
The lump in his throat bobs as he rights himself, and he shakes his head. Maybe he isn’t so sure himself. He moves to her head, kissing her sweaty brow tenderly and then dabbing it with a cool, wet cloth. “No. You are not going to die. You’re so strong and brave, darling. I love you so much.”
“I’m so scared,” she says, tears leaking freely now. Jon kisses them away tenderly before sweeping her hair from her forehead. “What will happen to the babe if I die? There is no wetnurse-”
“I meant what I said when I told you that you’re not going to die.”
But what if I do? What will happen to him, what will happen to you? Could you will yourself to cut him from my womb if I’m unable to push him out?
The pain- she’s pretty sure the books she’s read have called it a contraction- is coming quicker now, each episode perhaps only a few minutes apart.
She’d asked about childbirth, just once, when she was just a girl of eight. Her lady mother had spoken of great pain, but had smiled and told her that it was well worth it, that you forget the pain the moment the babe is in your arms. She’d done it five times, after all, and probably could have done more if she hadn’t… if she hadn’t…
Ned and Catelyn Stark will never meet their grandchild, and Robb and Rickon will never meet their niece or nephew. As a Stark, the child in her belly is entitled to a home: Winterfell. That is a home that none of them will likely ever see again. She wonders what will become of the castle. Will someone take care of it, or will it turn to ruins? The unfairness of it all is coupled with another contraction that leaves her reeling.
She sets those thoughts aside for the strange pressure that she feels in her pelvis. “I think I need… I need to push,” she says, exhaling a gust of breath. Jon hurries back to the space between her spread legs, seemingly ready to catch the babe, as if it will shoot out of her like an arrow. She might laugh at the sight of him if she weren’t being split in half.
“Then push,” Jon says, grabbing her hand and kissing her knuckles.
The boat sways as she takes in Jon’s face. By candlelight, he looks very much so like the nervous young man she’d wed in the godswood seven months prior- just days after she’d told him she was carrying his child. She holds on to that memory, and the sight of his face; it might just save her yet.
--
“I can’t do this,” Sansa says through the tears. She feels like she’s been pushing for ages, and she’s past the point of exhaustion. “I’m so sorry, Jon.”
He takes a look under her skirt. “You’re almost there, I promise. I think I see-” He ducks under her skirts to peek again, and she’s past the point of caring. “-the head.” How blind they are, going into this alone. They had both read some dusty old tomes on childbirth, whatever was available to them in the library of Greywater Watch, but had failed to bring them on board in their haste. “When you’re ready, can you try pushing for me one more time?”
She gives this push all of the strength in her body, letting out a yell that has likely woken the whole ship. The sweat that has beaded along her hairline is not rolling down her forehead, making the light hair at her temples stick to her skin.
“Fantastic! Another.”
She bears down, screwing her eyes shut and squeezing his hand so hard that Jon winces.
“Almost there…”
Sansa screams, curses, clenches her teeth so tightly she swears they might shatter. This is it, this has to be it, she can’t do this anymore, it hurts so much…
She feels the babe slip from her body and almost faints from the feeling. When she opens her eyes, Jon is holding their babe in his hands. His eyes are wide, face filled with worry, until…
The babe lets out a wail, healthy and strong, timed perfectly with a boom of thunder, and relief brightens his features.
“It’s a boy,” Jon says as stands and brings him to her, eyes welling with tears on the verge of spilling. He places him on her chest and she pulls the neckline of her shift down in the front, letting the babe rest on her bare breast. He does not feed, not yet, but he quiets and blinks up at her with big, blue eyes. The thunder and pitching of the boat lessens, and for several long moments all that can be heard is the calming rain on the roof of their cabin. Jon cuts the tether connecting him to her womb with his knife.
“I love him already. Our little Robb,” she says, choking back a sob. They had never discussed names; Sansa thinks that perhaps they always just knew he would be Robb, from the very moment they knew he existed. She wants to give him everything: Winterfell, the North, all of Westeros if he’d wanted it, but all she can give him is this love, a love so great it’s almost painful. Perhaps that will be enough. She presses a kiss to the sparse black curls on his head and rubs his cheek with her left nipple, just as the book had said. By instinct, Robb’s head turns into her breast and he begins to feed.
“Robb,” her husband says, voice full of wonder as he crawls into the bed next to her. She feels them all then, mother and father and Robb and Rickon, maybe Aunt Lyanna too, the same way she’d felt them when they’d wed in the godswood, what feels like so long ago. “Robb Stark.”