Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Message in hand, Sansa hurried along the corridor; at its bifurcation, she peered around the corner to the open passageway leading to the gardens.

At a distance, pillars framed just one of Highgarden’s many courtyards, green and gray and dripping in the rain. Silhouetted there under the swooping archways was a tall slight figure, androgynously dressed in the brown riding clothes of a boy, with dark hair in a long braid down her back. She paced to and fro with the fierce and impatient grace of a swordsmaster.

Sansa drew back, heart thundering in her chest, as she tried to collect herself. Could it really be—

She stepped out into the darkened passage. The figure whirled about. Her face was that of a ghost that Sansa remembered only in half-focus.

“Arya?” she said, her voice quavering.

This woman was taller, thinner than the Arya that Sansa remembered; her face was longer and more angular, a woman’s face. Her eyes burned like two coals. She watched, still as a statue, as Sansa walked closer, every step making her head feel more and more underwater, as if every step led her farther away from the reality of her past five years.

The woman who was Arya looked her up and down in wonder, and Sansa’s eyes burned with tears. She put her hand out tentatively, hardly daring to touch, and placed it on Arya’s arm just below the shoulder. Feeling the brown worsted fabric, she knew. She pulled the stranger, her sister, into her arms, gripping tighter than she’d held anything since she could remember.

Sansa couldn’t form words. She held her sister close, her chest shaking with sobs she did not voice. In her arms, her sister, taller yes, nearly as tall now as Sansa, smelled of leather and sweat and musk. Arya-smell. Her sister made no sound, she was almost eerily silent, but she wrapped both arms around Sansa and held so tight she nearly squeezed Sansa’s breath away.

They finally drew apart. Sansa’s face was slick as she wiped at her face with her sleeve; she was still trembling, trying hard not to lose what remained of her composure. She did not want her sister to think she’d gone soft. On the contrary, she felt as if all soft things inside her had been scooped out long ago, and what remained had been forged into something hard and permanent.

Arya stared at her with a guarded expression. Sansa smoothed her hands onto her skirts and realized for a moment how she must seem—a southron woman through and through, silk gown and curled hair and rose jewelry.

“It really is you.” Arya said, her voice a perfectly flat line. “I suppose you’ve gotten married. They told me…”

Sansa pressed her lips together and nodded just slightly.

“Yes, I’ve married,” she answered. “To Willas Tyrell, the heir to Highgarden.”

“So one day this all,” an expansive gesture, “will belong to you.” Arya was expressionless, but the tight curl of her mouth said something different, as if the fulfillment of Sansa’s childhood dreams meant something any more. Sansa had forgotten them until now.

“Yes,” she answered. But with her sister in front of her, all memories of marital duty flew clean out of Sansa’s head. “But I want to leave. Take me home. Let’s go home, Arya.”

Arya’s eyes widened, her entire expression changed, her face grew alive with something like mirth. She laughed, a sound of disbelief. But it was genuine. 

Now it would be the two of them, a duo that had perhaps never truly existed before. But now it did.

The only question was, how?

“I’ll kill him,” Arya said flatly.

“Arya—no.” Sansa put her head in her hands. “It doesn’t work like that, they would know right away—and besides, he isn’t like that. He is kind.”

“Kind,” Arya snorted. “You know you can’t trust any of them.”

She started to cry tiredly, almost without realizing that she was doing it. That was the way she did all things these days. She expected Arya to look at her with disgust, but a look of pain jumped across Arya’s face, and her sister reached out to take Sansa’s arm almost timidly. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Arya cleared her throat. “Please don’t cry. What do you think we should do?”

She went to her husband after dinner.

“My lord,” she said gently, coming to sit before him as he liked for her to do.

He looked at her and smiled, and her heart twisted. Willas was truly sweet and gentle. Yet Sansa couldn’t help but wonder how much of that had to do with the fact that he’d never left the South, never ventured into the lion’s pit that was King’s Landing, or anywhere outside of his region where he was known and almost universally adored.

“My sister has come,” she began.

“Ah, so she was the woman who came to see you today.”

“Yes,” Sansa answered. Her voice dropped into a hot whisper. “I thought she was dead. For four years, I thought she was dead,” she repeated, and then the tears would not stop.

Willas lifted her up so that she sat on the chaise beside him. He gave her his handkerchief and watched sympathetically as she cried. This was not the first time they had done this.

When she calmed slightly, he remarked, “Despite your tears, I can tell you are already happier because she has come.”

A lump rose in Sansa’s throat. “I am happy here, my lord.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, Sansa,” Willas said gently.

When she looked at him, she never saw him. She saw shadows of the siblings she had known—and loved—before. She saw handsome Loras. She saw beautiful, scheming Margaery. To her, Willas would never be more than a placeholder. She wished that she could love him. 

“It’s not you,” Sansa said. “You have been a good husband to me. A better husband than I ever could have hoped for.”

Willas looked at her coolly.

She bowed her head, pressing a kiss to his hands. “I’m sorry, my lord. I should love you, but… I want to go home with my sister. Please.” She shook her head wearily, wearily. “Please release me. Please let me go home.”

“Oh, child,” Willas said, his face colored with pain. He brought a hand under her chin and raised it.

“Sansa,” he said gently, “I don't think I can.”

And her heart sank. She would say that it had broken, but there was no longer anything left to break.

But then. Something changed. Willas yielded. He lied for her, going before his entire family to say that he could not fulfill his marital duties (this was untrue, they had been trying, and had been almost successful). He lied, saying that he could not keep it in his conscience to bind his young wife to him.

The saddest thing was that in doing so, he made Sansa love him with all that she had left to love with. By releasing her, he was the truest husband he could have ever been.

(Besides, letting her go would cement an alliance between North and South. Perhaps that was why the Queen of Thorns had agreed. But at this moment, Sansa couldn't care less.)

As she rode away from Highgarden, her charger trotting alongside Arya’s dark brown horse, her heart lifted for the first time that she could remember.

I’m going home.

Chapter Text

“Turn around.”

Arya turned slowly, as carefully as if she were pirouetting with Needle in her hand. She was awkwardly conscious of the ivory satin around her, feeling as though she had to take the smallest of steps.

Sansa’s eyes were luminous, taking in the sight. She clasped her hands. “You look—beautiful. Beautiful,” she said in a small voice, teeth worrying at her lip in a way that showed she was fighting tears.

Heart pounding, Arya turned to the mirror, glass clouded in its ancient wooden frame, and froze. Yes, that was her—but was it, really? This tall, slim figure with her chestnut hair swept away from her face, snowy white gown glimmering and lined with white fox fur? She felt like a shadow of a story she must have heard before somewhere, stories of her long-gone aunt Lyanna, or her half-brother Jon’s ice-white direwolf. All the sad, sad stories of Starks who had gone before.

“You look like Father,” Sansa said. She came closer, slowly, and stepped before Arya. She didn’t look in her sister’s eyes, instead smoothing down the shoulders of the gown slowly with soft movements, before her gaze fixated on the bodice. “Oh, one’s come loose,” she said anxiously, voice sharp and thin. She plucked at a seed pearl, nestled among the hundreds lining the collar of the gown.

“Sansa,” Arya said, trying to gently push her away. “It’s beautiful. You’ve done more than enough.”

It had taken Sansa months to finish just the embellishment, mornings and nights spent alone in her solar with the snow swirling past the windows, picking away with her needle and fine linen thread. She had always been so good at needlework—but, as with everything Sansa used to do, her sewing always seemed to find decorative rather than practical use.

This, like so much else, had changed since the Stark sisters had returned to Winterfell. As soon as she’d gotten word of Arya’s betrothal, Sansa had insisted on sewing the wedding gown herself, accepting help only once in a great while. She preferred to be alone.

If it had not been for Sansa’s insistence, Arya wouldn’t be wearing such a gown. If Sansa hadn’t immersed herself in restoring Winterfell, in praying and following the old traditions, maybe Arya wouldn’t have decided to get married. But she was leaving again for a time, and she had gained some respect for the ties that bound people together. And so, Arya had decided, she might as well be married to the man who would be accompanying her everywhere, not just for this venture, but for the rest of her life. It made things simpler, and the idea of it made her sister exceptionally happy.

Sansa squinted unselfconsciously at the seed pearls, which had come all the way from Oldtown. She was still as fair as ever, but every feature that was once dewy was now more heavily shadowed, like the faint bluish blooms beneath her eyes that never quite seemed to fade away. Arya, who had once so resented Sansa’s beauty, now assessed it calmly and objectively. The older she grew, the more Sansa resembled their lady mother, so much that it sometimes made Arya ache.

Arya stepped carefully away from the mirror, adjusting to the feeling of the gown around her, its heavy train at her feet. Acclimating at last, she moved with grace, learned from so many years of moving dexterously in the shadows. “It’s the prettiest dress I’ve ever worn,” she said honestly, extending her arms to show off the belled sleeves lined with white vair.

“Well, I suppose that’s not saying very much,” her older sister teased, thankfully breaking the look of painful worry on her face. Arya smiled back, fondly annoyed. It was true that she favored plain, utilitarian dresses when she wore them, slashed up the sides with breeches underneath to facilitate movement, riding, and all of that, but it would be too strange to adopt the full costume of a highbred lady when she had grown up as anything but.

Sansa went to the bowl of winter roses, blooming a bloodless white that was almost blue. These, too, were Sansa’s handiwork. She tended them day and night in the glass gardens, walled in as if she too were one of those delicate, fragile blooms. But Arya knew better. Her sister was made of steel, and she was still only a closed bud.

Sansa took a rose and put it in Arya’s dark hair, plaited and woven with silver ribbons as their lady mother had always done for them on feast days. It had been so long since Arya had worn her hair this way that she almost felt like it was a stranger’s face before her, so many years older than the skinny young girl she used to be. Her hair finally reached past her shoulders again, after all this time.

“Does it scratch you?”

“No.”

Sansa’s touch was gentle, almost as light as the day that she had seen Arya again for the first time after everything had happened. She had reached for Arya as though reaching for a ghost, as though Arya might blow away into a thousand pieces. Her hands had trembled, Arya remembered. And the terrified, ecstatic look on her face was still burned into Arya’s mind.

She, Arya, had been frozen. Could this tall, pale, elegant, sad woman really be her sister? It had been her first introduction to the Sansa who retained some of the same old characteristics, but who almost never talked about what had happened to her in the years of their separation. Nor did Arya. Their histories were coming out piecemeal, as they spoke to each other over dinners by the fire, alone or with their remaining brothers.

“This morning when we prayed in the crypts, I asked Father and Mother to bless you,” Sansa said quietly, placing the roses in her sister’s hair. “They would be so proud of you. And I asked Robb to make you brave.” Sansa had become very pious since her return to Winterfell; she spent an hour each morning in the godswood or in the crypts.

A pause. Sansa stood back, regarding Arya.

Then Sansa’s hands went to her mouth, and she let out a strange, nervous sound. “What?” Arya asked, astonished.

“It’s just that—I always thought I’d be the one married before you.” Sansa paused, and then said in disbelief, “And I suppose I was, to Willas! I wore the Stark colors on my wedding day. I'd almost forgotten.”

Arya could feel the anger pounding behind her eyes, the anger that never went away, but only laid dormant when she could quell it. “It doesn’t count,” she said fiercely. “It isn’t the same.”

Sansa moved her head noncommittally, and ducked her gaze down to the seed pearls once again. It was strange, so strange that Sansa of all people would no longer be interested in marriage. Once, it had been practically her sole occupation, her everything, the one thing on her mind. Now, she rarely spoke of it, and Arya always felt too awkward to push—and who was she to talk, she who had found the rarest thing of all, a love match?

“Don’t do it,” she said abruptly, reaching for her sister’s shoulder. “Don’t marry again, Sansa.”

Sansa glanced up indulgently, but said nothing.

“If you ever marry another man, and he’s cruel to you,” Arya added, “I’ll cut off his cock and feed it to him.”

Sansa’s mouth dropped open slightly. Arya choked back a laugh at the look on her face, wincing all the same. But then Sansa’s eyes brightened and she started to laugh.

“Now there’s a skill I’d like to have,” she said, mirthfully.

Arya grinned. “Well, I can teach you.”

Sansa’s mouth trembled. “But you—”

“Well, you know, I love him,” said Arya, defeated and rueful. Her loyal, headstrong, brilliant, annoying, wonderful man. As of tomorrow, her husband. “He’s stupid, but I love him.”

“I’m happy for you.” Sansa put her hands on her hips. “You’re marrying for love. That’s the most important thing you could do. You’re going to be so happy in your big house with your handsome husband.”

“It’s not such a very big house,” Arya said. “He’s only a hedge knight, after all.” She laughed. “But you think he’s handsome? That’s good, I suppose.”

How odd it was that after all that she had done, how far she had traveled and everything she’d learned, that Arya had returned to marry and live (ostensibly) in the place where she was born. That had always been Sansa’s dream, not her own. But this wasn’t a dream, it was her life. And, Arya realized abruptly, she had no idea what her sister’s dream had become now.

“Love.” Sansa turned the word over in her mouth like she tasted something bitter and strange. “I don’t… I don’t think I know what that means. I love you, Arya. I love Rickon, and Bran, and Jon. There isn’t room for anything else.”

Arya clasped her sister’s hand, saying nothing.

“And I’ll be lonely without you,” Sansa said suddenly. The tears that had been threatening to fall ever since Arya donned her wedding dress started escaping, slipping down from the corners of her blue eyes. She pressed at them with the sleeve of her simple linen gown. “Winterfell will be much emptier when you’re gone.”

“Don’t be sad,” Arya said brightly. “You know I’m coming back within the year. Weddings are supposed to be happy.” She paused at the look on Sansa’s face. “They’re supposed to be happy,” she insisted. “And this one will be.”

She blew gently on Sansa’s face, making the loose strands of her sister’s hair dance and move about. “You used to hate it when I did that,” she reminded Sansa, who crinkled her nose with a reluctant laugh.

“I did? I don’t remember.”

“Then again, you hated just about everything I did.”

Sansa smiled. "Don't remind me, please."

"Oh, I always will."

It was time to go, but Arya stood in silence next to her sister for a moment, both of them staring into space. She thought fiercely all of the things that she had never said to Sansa, all the things that she was so glad that she still had the chance, would have many chances, to say.

Now there was Bran, and Rickon, to see. And Jon had ridden in yesterday morning with Ghost loping at his side, his gleaming fur collar turned up to his chin. He’d had to come so far, but he’d written to say that he wouldn’t miss this for anything in the world. It would be Jon who would be giving her away to her husband. 

Arya turned to her sister.

“Let's go, Sansa. Everyone is waiting.”