Chapter Text
When the dragons come, as they must, Sansa is ready for them.
She has lived what feels like a thousand lifetimes as Alayne Stone, and she is ready to shed her skin as easily as a snake (the sigil of her new house, because there is no honor in some of the things she has done). She does not, however, rush to King’s Landing to claim her birthright from the new Targaryen queen. Nor does she leave the Vale and head north. She stays where she is, because the bastard daughter of a disgraced court advisor is slightly safer than the trueborn daughter of a dead Northern lord.
…
Sansa relies on the kindness of the people of the Vale, the Lords Declarant who never recognize her even when she’s not quick enough to dye her hair as black as night, and on Sweetrobin; as his caretaker, she is able to go with him to places of refuge, and he clings to her so desperately they are not able to be parted.
With the Eyrie abandoned for the winter, they make their way to Gulltown. It’s there that she hears news of the dragons, and their beautiful Queen, and when Daenerys Targaryen sends word that they should bend the knee, it’s easy. After all, House Arryn never declared a side (Sansa made sure of that, whispers in Sweetrobin’s ear to keep them all safe by keeping them here, secluded in the Vale even when he wanted to play the gallant knight riding into battle). As a result, the Queen seems eager to treat with the Lords who seem just as eager to treat with her.
Anyone is better than a Baratheon king.
It doesn’t hurt that the Vale is well-supplied, not having to feed a standing army. Their surplus food supply is an attractive prospect to a land stricken by winter.
She is in Lord Grafton’s great hall in Gulltown when her identity is revealed – not by the Queen, or someone who knew her father. It is her husband, returned from the dead.
Tyrion Lannister walks into the hall with an air of importance, missing a nose and an eye and painting a grisly figure, the walking embodiment of the war they have just survived. He wears scarlet and black – the colors of the Targaryens – and a dragon on his doublet where once there was a lion, above a hand sigil that makes Sansa shiver.
“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he tells the crowd, and then his gaze meets hers. She is standing back from the crowd, behind dear Robert, and her eyes meet his rather than look away. Though he is more grotesque than before, he is also the most familiar and comforting face that she has seen in years.
“Dear Lord Arryn,” he says, after making his courtesies to the lords and ladies, “You have grown into a strapping young boy.” This is courtly flattery, for Robert is still as sickly and pale as he ever was, just taller.
“I remember you,” her cousin says, the corners of his mouth turning downwards. “I wanted you to fly.”
“And such a charming companion,” Tyrion points out, ignoring Robert’s remark and raising his eyes to Sansa’s once more.
“This is the Alayne Stone, the bastard daughter of Petyr Baelish,” someone nearby points out.
“So that’s where you’ve been hiding,” Tyrion says quietly. Turning towards the assembled lords and ladies of the Vale, he proclaims loudly, “That’s no bastard – that’s my wife.”
The reaction is far more impressive than she expected. The resurrection of Ned Stark’s daughter – hidden in the Vale all along – is a thing of wonder, of open postulation and naked glances.
“It’s good to see you, husband,” Sansa says, stepping out from behind her dear cousin. Tyrion reaches for her hand, pressing a kiss against her knuckles.
“You really have no idea how good it is to see you again, Lady Sansa,” he says. “So many have looked for you and here you have been, hidden in plain sight.” He pauses. “The color of your hair doesn’t suit you at all. We must take care of that.”
Room accommodations are made for the Hand of the Queen, and even though Sweetrobin kicks and screams as is unbecoming of a boy of ten-and-two, Sansa’s things are moved into a room that adjoins Tyrion.
For the first time in nearly three years, she will spend the night without Sweetrobin nearby.
The thought scares her and exhilarates her in a single breath.
She sits with Tyrion that night in his solar, her hair still wet from the vigorous scrubbing that a newly-acquired lady’s maid has given her. She feels lighter, and watches as her hair dries red and gold in the firelight.
“You are welcome to return with me to King’s Landing, so that I might annul this travesty of a marriage,” he tells her. “You have been imprisoned too long, Sansa, and you should be free. And don’t give me platitudes of how it should be what I wish. What I wish is for you to speak your mind for once.”
He looks sincere, and even the scar tissue that covers his face doesn’t obscure the meaning in his features. For the first time in years, someone’s words are spoken to her without any hint of ulterior motive, and she takes them and clings to them, a promise that keeps her steady on this shifting ground.
Tyrion has always been kind to her, and she does not expect that to change now.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” she speaks plainly. “I can either remain your wife or find someone who wants a tainted one.”
“Yes, the Lannister name –“
“Not that allegiance,” she says. “Even if the marriage is annulled by the High Septon, I have dishonored you.”
This startles Tyrion, who doesn’t know what to say. When he does speak, he asks, “I hope it was of your consent.”
“It was.”
Harry’s hands on her hips, urging her forward, it’s what girls have to do to become better, so Littlefinger says...
Whoever Sansa Stark was when she left King’s Landing, the girl that returns will never be the same. There are things she knows now, things that she has done, that have broken her but given her power within the same breath.
Tyrion studies his wine for a moment. “Our dear friend Littlefinger – “
The thought of Littlefinger’s hands upon her body – the one time he tried beyond that kiss - makes her cringe.
“No. He never got what he wanted.”
The look of surprise on Littlefinger’s face when she dug the dagger in deep makes her smile.
Tyrion smiles. “I had wondered what Lord Baelish’s fate was.” He pauses. “This war has made us all face our demons.”
Sansa takes a sip of her own wine. Seven take her, she nods in agreement.
…
Robert refuses to see her the next day, even though she tries to explain to him through the door that she is married and always has been, and even as the platitudes and lies cross her lips, she cannot gain entrance into his chambers.
“Well played, little lady.”
Sansa turns to find Tyrion in the hall behind her, and she blushes furiously. The things she has learned as Alayne Stone are horrible, and nothing her lady mother would have been proud of – how to use her voice in such a way that a man cannot refuse her requests, how to be graceful and manipulative in a single stroke, things that she watched Margaery Tyrell do years ago, things that she never thought should be done.
And yet she has done them – whispered in the ear of Robert, used her smile and her voice to get her information, used her body to reclaim whatever power was stripped from her with her clothes in King’s Landing all those years ago.
She steps back, horrified at what she has become. This is not who she ever thought she would be.
“He is a spoiled child,” Tyrion says. “And he’s going to have to listen to someone else speak for once.”
He knocks on the door and demands to be let in, reminding Robert that he is the Hand of the Queen.
Whatever he says in the time that he’s in Robert’s chambers changes the young boy completely. When he finally lets Sansa in, he clings to her once more, begging apologies.
“At least we are kin,” he tells her, “I am so glad that you are really my family.”
Sansa runs her hands through his hair, grimy with sweat and in desperate need of a wash. Robert Arryn is part of the family she has left. The thought does little to comfort her.
...
When his business at Gulltown is done, Tyrion offers to escort her to Winterfell.
“Your brother wishes to see you,” he tells her.
She knows he speaks of Rickon, found by the redeemed Davos Seaworth.
Her only other brother is not her brother at all but the son of Lyanna Stark. He is her cousin. Always a bastard, but now with a legitimate claim to the Iron Throne through his father (or so the Queen says).
Robert stays behind in Gulltown, under the protective care of his bannerman, and the delicious freedom of not having to see to his needs causes Sansa to spur her horse forward – something she’s never done before, not even in her youth. The wind is crisp and cool on her face and she smiles for the first time in a long time.
“I am glad to see you happy,” Tyrion tells her when she slows her horse to a canter. “You have been robbed of much happiness in this life.”
Sansa says little, biting the inside of her cheek. She agrees with Tyrion, because it is true – but she has been robbed of more than happiness. She has been robbed of her family as well, and as they leave the Vale and take the Kingsroad north, that thought turns into a dull ache in the center of her chest.
What she finds there is nothing she remembers.
Burnt remains of her family home, a scattered population, blood smears on walls and death in the air. Whatever the Boltons did, they have tainted her memory forever. Even their heads on pikes above the walls does little to assuage her hurt.
At the very least, she remembers a very different wall with a very familiar head, and shivers under her furs.
Rickon is a wild thing, so different from the small brother she remembers. But he can read and write, and that is something. How they found a maester to tutor the young boy is something indeed.
Bran is lost to the wild, so the Reeds say, though they won’t stay more. They look as haunted as Rickon, and Sansa wonders what exactly happened in the North while she was away.
Too many years in the South have turned Sansa’s skin to that of a delicate flower: if the Vale was cold, then Winterfell is colder still, and the fact that her childhood home brings her such misery with the cold and without her mother and father and Robb and Bran and Arya is too much for her.
She does take time to go to the crypts, for her father’s bones are the only ones that have actually been brought home. It is there that the tears finally flow freely – tears hidden, because as Littlefinger taught her, tears are not for bastards who know their fate, nor for ladies of the court. They are for spoiled little girls and boys, and Sansa was once spoiled by love in this very place.
Rickon finds her and curls into her, head on her lap, letting her stroke his hair.
Tyrion finds them hours later, and if he thinks anything of her red-rimmed eyes, he does not say.
“Take me to King’s Landing,” she tells him later that night. “Whether or not you keep me as your wife is a different matter. Just take me away from here.”
“Of course,” he says. He stands before her, looking uncomfortable, like he wants to touch her and make her feel better. He’s always been so kind, so she presses a kiss against his cheek before retreating to her quarters.
…
Their party is a royal one, so the lords and ladies of the land do their best to entertain them despite the waning winds of winter that choke the growth of the land. Sansa hears that it is warmer further south; Dorne has never appealed to her the way it does as she rides her horse along the Kingsroad, winter seeping into her veins.
She is less of a Stark now than she ever was.
They stay at the houses of lesser lords, names that she remembers her Septa making her recite in youth (it feels forever and a day ago). They treat Tyrion with wary concern, but her they treat with utmost respect. They make noises about the fate of her family, her parents and her sister and her brothers. They want to ask about Jon Snow, but they never do. They want to ask her everything, but with a smile and a delicate tilt of her head, she makes it known that she is always too tired from the road to answer their questions.
Alone in her bedchamber, Sansa strips and studies herself in the mirror. She has grown inches and breasts, and even though she can’t see them she knows there are still silvery scars that fall across her back, courtesy of the King and his guards. There is nothing here of the girl who left Winterfell all those years before. The girl that looks at her in the mirror is not the girl who once had soft eyes and a soft heart.
The girl that stares back looks her straight in the eye. She will wear the clothes of a lady but she is no lady. There is something in her, feral and fierce and untamed, that has been created over time, with each break of trust, each movement as a pawn in the game of thrones. She may not have much honor, but what she has done has been to save others.
She fears no one but herself.
She is more of a Stark now than she ever was.
...
“I know what happened to my family,” she tells Tyrion one night, after they stop to treat with yet another minor lord. “I need to know what happened to yours.”
Tyrion raises his eyebrows – she knows him well enough to know that his next move, taking a sip of his wine, is him stalling for him instead of telling her what she wants.
“Well, my dear, I killed my father, and the Spider killed my uncle,” he says, putting the goblet down. He counts on his fingers while staring at the ceiling. “Sweet Cersei chose to throw herself from the Red Keep instead of meet with our Queen’s justice. I don’t know where Jamie is – he was last seen leaving Pennytree not two years ago with a very tall and slightly disfigured woman who is allegedly Brienne of Tarth, but I haven’t heard anything since then. Perhaps they opened an inn somewhere.”
“Tommen? Myrcella?” The fact that the most offensive Lannisters are come doesn’t rattle Sansa in the least – they should be in the seven hells for all that they did to ruin her and everything they touched. But the littlest Lannisters – nothing bad should ever come of children.
Nothing like what happened to her own family.
“Myrcella is in Dorne, and I don’t see her being returned. With no mother or father, and no kin that is claiming her, she is better off there. I hear the Prince has taken a shine to her, though she won’t marry Trystane Martell in the end. And Tommen...Tommen is at Highgarden with Margaery Tyrell.”
Sansa is surprised at this development, and doesn’t do a good job masking it on her face.
“Apparently putting yourself between several Unsullied soldiers and a young boy endears you to our Queen,” Tyrion adds. “Margaery seems quite taken with the lad, and I hear he and his cats enjoy the gardens of Highgarden. Their marriage has been annulled, of course, but the Tyrells were kind enough to take him on as a ward.”
“That’s wonderful to hear,” Sansa says, because she did wonder what happened to Margaery as well. As much as she distrusted the Tyrells, she did like Loras and Margaery.
“The Tyrells are not to be trusted – or they weren’t, rather, when their father was still alive. Highgarden has a new lord, and I dare say this one will not turn cloaks as easily.”
“Willas?” Sansa asks. She remembers Margaery’s promise of marriage, and feels – something. Missed opportunity? She’s not sure what she feels, because she feels everything these days and it’s easier to just push it down and away. Numbness keeps her alert.
“The very same.” Tyrion presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “My dear Sansa, it would have been so much easier on the both of us if that old woman had sent you to her grandson to begin with but I will be honest – I have quite enjoyed your company these past few weeks.”
Sansa smiles – a slight smile, and Tyrion frowns.
“I hope that one day your smile returns, my lady.”
“I fear that my smile has been lost as well,” Sansa says, downing her wine in a single gulp and extending her cup, asking for more. “Perhaps the Queen will need a scowling lady-in-waiting.”
“Truthfully, my dear Sansa, you’re not the only one who’s lost her smile. You will soon see.”