[ fic ] between the shadow and the soul ; petyr/sansa, a song of ice and fire
Written for embossedsilver as a part of the A Song of Ice and Fire Fanfic and Fanart Exchange. Many, many thanks to the lovely ladyrostova for being an amazing beta - and being amazing at dealing with my crazy, as per use ;) You are one in a million, love. <3 I, uh, don't actually have much else to say about this. One of the things I'm most overall pleased with in a while, I guess? Exchanges drive me crazy with nerves and fretting, lol, but the end results are fun, so I think I shall continue participating in these types of things. Originally posted here.
between the shadow and the soul » a song of ice and fire. petyr/sansa. r. 2,980 words.
Three crimes of Sansa Stark, and how they came to pass. warnings: substantial age difference, powerplay, minor character death, and spoilers for AFFC; it takes off from the end of that. I do not own the characters or their world, I am making no profit, it's all for fun, etc etc.
01.
Sweetrobin is her first crime.
+
She is not involved, plays no role as she had with Joffrey and purple amethysts in her hair. But she knows, where she did not know with Joffrey, and when both haunt her at night it is for that reason she decides Robert was the true crime.
“He is a sickly child,” Lord Baelish had whispered to her, a hand curved around her waist and his mouth almost almost brushing her skin. He is a sickly child - but Alayne knew his shakes well, knew his sickness, and when he arches off the ground one last time there is something wrong about it.
And her eyes meet Petyr’s, and his are already fixed on her, and that settles the suspicion in her belly more than anything else. She thinks she will be properly sick, forces herself to inhale through her nose and swallow, words like heir and promise and Winterfell swarming her mind. Petyr’s voice.
Robert’s voice too. She remembers how he’d tug her hand, pull at her skirts, Alayne, Alayne, and beg a story before night.
Now he is unmoving on the floor, foam on his lips and a string of spittle smeared across his chin.
He looks so small, Alayne Stone thinks, and even though Robert has always been small, it is this thought that prompts her to turn away, gasping for a moment before she is sick all over the floor - because she knew, she knew.
When she lifts her head, she can barely meet Petyr’s eyes for the humiliation in her stomach. They are narrowed with disgust or disappointment - she cannot tell which. Both leave her only bitter shame, and she straightens herself - straight like her spine is made of iron - and tries to clasp her quivering hands together.
She thinks of Winterfell.
+
Everything falls into place exactly as he told her it would.
Harry the Heir is made Lord of the Vale. Their marriage is planned. Petyr gives her salts to help wash the dye from her hair, and on the morning of her wedding, Alayne Stone rises from her bath to stand naked and shivering in front of her mirror, and she does not recognize the girl who stares back - it has been too long since she has seen Sansa Stark in the glass.
She emerges into the hall decked in white and silver finery, her cloak soft on her shoulders, the direwolf sigil bold and sharp on her back. It feels stitched into her skin; she is wolf again.
There are gasps, there are whispers, there are shouts, when the pieces of Petyr’s puzzle come together.
“You are a vision,” Petyr had told her that morning - not pretty, not lovely, not beautiful, a vision, because that is her purpose in this instant, a vision of the North, a vision of something that could be, something real, something men will fight for.
Sansa Stark is a vision in grey and white, the last Stark standing, alive after all, and men fall to their knees before her.
Petyr falls last. She watches him slowly descend, cannot look anywhere else, and when his knees touch the floor is when she feels triumph.
+
She is Sansa again, not Alayne; she tests out her old name in a new, older voice at night while her new husband sleeps in their bed. She is Sansa but she is no longer a girl, no longer a maiden.
It was shockingly numbing, startlingly nothing, only a slow soreness deep inside that spreads throughout her until she can hardly feel it either. She finally slips out of the bed, too awake to sleep, full of new and old life.
She does not know where she is going when she leaves the room on quiet feet, but her path takes her down a familiar hallway and when she sees him through the open doorway she wonders if perhaps she did have a destination all along.
“Sansa,” he greets her, and his voice sounds different too when he is addressing her by that name. He looks at her different too, and when he approaches her he reaches out, almost as if he can’t help it, to touch her hair.
Bright auburn. His fingertip skims a curl.
“Why are you not with your husband?” His voice sounds filtered through a distant buzz, too far away.
“I have been already with my husband, my- my lord.” Her voice falters, ‘my lord’ feels stiff on her tongue but he is no longer Father to her.
He senses the trip in her tone, and his lips spread. “My lady,” he echoes back, and his mouth twists the words perversely. She feels, feather-light, his fingers settle against her waist. Her husband is lying in their bed and she has been married and Petyr Baelish is no longer her father and she is no longer the bastard girl Alayne Stone and no longer a maiden and everything has changed so quickly, so crucially.
“You will have Winterfell soon enough now,” he promises.
And you? She wants to ask, but stays silent instead. She will win Winterfell, and what will Petyr win? He is pulling all the strings and she is not so foolish to presume he is not working for his own gain, but she is not so adept at his games to figure out what that gain is.
“Thank you, my lord,” is all she whispers. His fingers dig deeper at her waist, press hard enough to leave bruises through her nightgown. “You have been too kind,” she whispers.
He tilts her chin to him, his mouth hovers close, and she presses hers to it shakily. She does not know what she is doing here, if this is why she came, if this was even her idea or if it was expected of her and she knew all along. It should bother her more, how muddled her thoughts are, how uncertain she is of her own volition - but Petyr’s lips part at the touch of her own like he is coming undone, his fingers clench tight as he pulls her close to him, and again she feels triumph.
She is beginning to play her own game, and so far she is playing well.
02.
Harry is her second crime.
+
But first they wait. Harry organizes the men of the Vale, signs decrees, and reads letters from lords with opinions on his new position concealed beneath condolences for poor Robert. Harry takes on his new role with shoulders squared and tries to accustom himself to it, and Sansa watches him and does not let it show on her face that there is no point to his efforts.
She wills away any guilt when she is with him at night, bites her lip and digs her fingernails into his skin. He gasps, so alive, and the sound is sears into her; she knows she will hold it inside. When he is finished, she curls into herself and twists her hair around her finger loosely.
She thinks of Petyr’s eyes, the first time he saw her again with hair this colour.
Her husband’s hand finds her shoulder as he falls asleep, and she shifts closer to him.
Sansa dreams she is a falcon, tearing at a man’s face - at first she thinks it must be Harry, and then it appears to be Petyr, and then it is too bloodied to tell.
+
“The word has travelled North,” Petyr tells her early one morning, his voice oddly toneless. “Men will rally to you, Sansa Stark. The last Stark.”
She hates that title, more than any other name, more than Alayne Stone, more than any words people could ascribe to her. She forces a smile, brittle - but she senses in the smile that plays at Petyr’s lips that she has not fooled him.
“And Winterfell will be mine?” It is a question, though he has answered with assurances so many times before. She cannot quite say it as a statement, though, cannot bring herself to pin her hopes so decisively.
Petyr brushes a lock of auburn hair behind her ear; his fingers linger against her skin.
“Yes,” he assures again.
“And Harry?” This question she whispers. This answer she already knows too. He doesn’t say it, merely stares at her steadily. Then he steps away, goes to his wardrobe and finds a small velvet pouch. It swings from his hand as he returns, and from it he withdraws a small glass bottle half-full of a clear liquid.
He is staring at her, not the bottle, and she wonders if he is looking for cracks, signs of weakness, signs that she will be consumed with doubts. The urge to prove him wrong rears so strongly, so quickly-
She reaches for the bottle.
He steps back, shaking his head and smiling now. “Not yet. We need him currently.”
Harry is not a horrible man - she has known horrible men - but when she thinks of night and his body on top of hers and how hot and heavy he breathes, she only wants it ended. She is playing her role, but she wants to be the one to end it - wants to play a larger role.
“When the day does come...” she begins, slow, careful.
She is steel now, standing before him. Petyr appraises her for a long moment before he nods, slipping the poison back into the bag.
He leans close, and his fingers stroke at her neck while his mouth brushes her ear.
“All yours,” he whispers.
+
Sansa sits atop a white horse down in the belly of the Vale as her husband speaks to the bedraggled army before them - Harry’s bannermen, and men fled from the Riverlands, or trickled down from what remains of the North.
She never imagined herself in such a position. She looks out at the vast array of soldiers, and knows that though they are all looking back at her, none are seeing her. They see the Stark direwolf embroidered on her cloak, on the banner that flies above her. They see her auburn hair; they see the last member of an extinct family. They see a promise.
They see the North, but she is just a girl.
Sansa waves, Sansa smiles, Sansa almost hopes, but does not let herself, not yet.
When only the dust stirred into the air remains as proof an army once stood here on this ground, Harry wheels his mount around and begins up the path back to the Gates of the Moon.
Sansa watches the dust begin to settle, and clenches her hands around the reins she holds. The men who’ve ridden off are completely foreign to her, but her mouth feels dry all the same, and her stomach nervous - there will always be something within her, she thinks, that hates farewells of any kind.
The next morning, Harry begins the ascent up the mountain before her as well. Only Petyr rides beside her, and when they stop to rest, he draws her to him with a soft hand on her arm.
“You are playing the part so well,” he murmurs, and though his eyes are on her she feels that he is looking at someone else entirely, and she cannot tell anymore what is merely her part in the game and what is real. She does not voice this, knows what Petyr would tell her - it is all a game.
Life is a game. And right now, she thinks they could win.
She kisses him, there on the mountain, and they are under open sky instead of hidden away in the darkness of an empty room at night, but they are just as alone. Kissing Petyr in fresh air feels like swooping, or tumbling, something that leaves her dizzied.
It is only when she breaks away that she realizes he did not ask, and she has never before kissed him unprompted.
He only smiles, though, and she wonders if this is part of her role as well, if he has planned this all along, if she is caught in another game of his that she has no awareness of.
Sansa silently swears that she will not lose this game either.
+
The day they receive word that Winterfell is theirs is the day that Petyr presses a small glass bottle into her hand.
“Not yet,” he whispers once more. He does not need to tell her that the timing would be entirely suspicious, and she feels a white-hot pride that he trusts her to understand. He trusts her to wait, has given her the poison, and now it is in her hands only. He is testing her - that she understands too.
Sansa hides the poison with her dresses, tucked away in folds of fabric, and waits as days slowly tick away. She wanted this. She wanted to do this. She wanted to do something, to finally be the one to make a move in Petyr’s game. And she wants it still. So she waits.
She spends less time alone in Petyr’s company, though she catches him staring at her often. She wonders if he is waiting too, wonders what he is thinking, wonders if she can really hope to play his own game as well him. She cannot tell if he expects her to succeed or fail.
She does not fail.
One month passes before she makes her move - one long month of her nerves tangled tight and never enough air in her throat to properly breathe. The poison ends up in Harry’s breakfast. He dies before he can finish the meal, and Sansa shrieks like she should, screams for help, and when she cries no one can tell that she is crying with relief.
It seems she spends the entire day crying in front of so many people, and she barely glimpses Petyr until night. When she arrives at his room, he lifts his head with a furrow to his brow that she understands as warning that is most likely not wise for her to be here. But a slow smile is spreading on his face at the sight of her, and she closes the door behind her and smiles back.
Her eyes are red and sore, her cheeks still sting salty, but she feels a sudden giddiness low inside her, and Petyr only has time to greet her with a soft “My, my,” before her hands have flown to begin unlacing her dress.
“Sansa-” he starts, almost alarmed but for a strangled lilt to his voice and the way his eyes have fixed on her.
She smirks, slowly - just like him - and crosses closer to him. She has killed a man today, she is no longer a mere pawn in Petyr’s games, and she places her palm on his chest, her fingers trembling.
“I think,” she says quietly, tilting her head and continuing to fumble with the strings of her dress with her free hand, “that I deserve a kiss?”
Her smirk melts into a grin, her throat flutters, and she feels her heart beat out of time inside her chest.
Petyr is staring at her like she is something entirely new to him - she feels entirely new, even to herself - but he raises a hand to her cheek, gentle and wondrous.
She tilts her chin. He kisses her.
She presses close, and lets her hand settle around the back of his neck. He carries her to his bed.
03.
Walder Frey was to be her third crime, but he dies of old age.
+
Freys with first names she does not know take his place instead, when they are shuffled into her hall, captured, and she orders them executed without once blinking or shuddering.
When Petyr came to her with the news that her lady mother’s and her king brother’s murderer was dead of natural cause, she had cried hot, angry tears, furious at his death stolen from her hands. She had cried for Robb, she had cried for her mother, incoherent, and Petyr had held her and stroked her hair and looked at her with that expression that meant he was seeing someone else entirely.
She does not cry again after that day, not for any of the Freys who die at her command, for a revenge that tastes bitter in her throat and never sweetens.
She sits on her father’s seat in Winterfell - leagues away, Harry’s own heir, a cousin, sits on the throne of the Arryns - and she has never felt lonelier than she does here in the hall of her family when she is the only one left.
But at night there is Petyr, whispering in her ear words of game and strategy, news from the South and news from further North, news of men who call her queen in the north, who would forge her a crown and ride to their deaths for her, as if the continent was not already drenched in blood as it were.
She is a promise, she is a hope, she is still a mere image rather than a girl.
But it an illusion that is required to win this game, Petyr whispers to her at night.
She straddles his waist in her bed, in the dark of her room, shivers at the feel of him underneath her and his fingers pressed into her hips. He breathes ragged and she inhales, pushes her hair away from her face and closes her eyes as she sinks down on him. Her breath catches in her throat, and his grip tightens on her. They exhale together.
This is when she is a girl; this is when she is real.
But she will keep up the illusions, she will keep up the promise and the hope, because it is all for the game.
And, more than ever before -
Sansa thinks they are winning.