Standalone: When the Day Came
Title: When the Day Came
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones
Characters/Pairing: Arya, Sansa
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~1800
Summary: A 'stranger' offers Sansa three names. (Warning: This contains spoilers beyond the TV series.)
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It was after that a girl returned to Westeros. It was after Cersei Lannister’s fall from grace and after Stannis Baratheon purged the Bolton bastard from Winterfell. It was after the dragons landed on the shores of the seven kingdoms, with their Golden Company and unsullied. It wasn’t after the war, however, and that was why a girl returned. The north stood behind a Baratheon king, King’s Landing behind three dragons and their mother, and a blue haired dead man held the Stormlands with hands that trickled fingers into Dorne.
It was a dream that brought her back, made of fur and snow and fire. Her pack, full of simple wolves and bloodied teeth, ranged the winter lands behind her and slaughtered the red men with glee, littering their gold trimmed armor across the snows. Freys were rare, but the stench of them was unique. Treachery left a smell to them that bloated and curdled like old milk. Bastard knights with blue eyes smelled altogether different, deep and smooth with iron and old smoke, but even he didn’t bring a girl back across the ocean. It was the fire that brought her back, red and bright where it had been banked in ashes for far too long.
Sansa, a girl whispered to herself when she could hold it secret in the silence. A girl slept at night, slipping into fur and fierceness so she could circle the small and sturdy cabin where the fire lived. She wasn’t alone in her wooden house. There was a woman, large and strong with a sword and armor a girl could respect, but she spoke with a Lannister and a girl nearly set into him with teeth and claws until he gave the familiar girl with bright hair his share of food after she spent her morning losing her breakfast behind a log near the edge of the cleared yard.
Even without the lion and the woman speaking in hushed tones after Sansa went to sleep, a girl knew what was wrong. The fire was spreading, little embers burning in her belly to be born bright little flames of their own. Winter was coming, it was bringing House Stark with it.
When she was awake, a girl was moving. She collected gold and faces, knives and precious things. She moved a stone and stole away with a sword, though a girl refused to acknowledge what it meant. She brought it all the same.
A ship was easy, but a harbor was hard. It was difficult to know where the little cabin in the woods existed when the world wasn’t made of smells. The wind wasn’t the same when she was awake, but a girl decided to pick a ship bound for Westeros and follow her dreams.
Her dreams were the same and different altogether. The burned man came, bringing with him heavy bags of supplies. The lion and women weren’t surprised, and the fire never seemed to fret, so she circled in the miles around, sharing her kills during the evening dark and protecting them from the scavengers until the woman found them in the morning. She worried them, the lion, the woman, and the burned man, but they accepted the food with wary desperation and the little fires grew larger in their mother’s belly as a girl came nearer.
It took a girl five moons to cross the sea and find the little cabin, but when she did, she stayed away. She found herself, with yellow eyes and bright white teeth, and cried and named her dreams, whispering Nymeria with the same reverence that she sighed Sansa, but a girl wasn’t ready. A girl was a girl, empty and no one. She wasn’t ready for a name. But, she wanted, and her fire was so bright that when the lion rode away and the burned man went to hunt and the woman said she would be gone for supplies, a girl let herself step into the small cleared yard outside the small log cabin and pulled a face old and weathered over her skin and knocked, knowing that the fire, that Sansa, would be the only one there to answer.
When a girl was once a lady, Sansa had been dainty and pale and pretty, made of delicate bones and soft features. But, now, she was different. Her face was solemn and her cheekbones long and sharp like a man she had never resembled before. Her mother’s kindness was barely a hint around her eyes, where the wary sharpness was softened ever so slightly by a stubborn goodness. But, a girl noticed, Sansa’s chin was exactly the same and that was enough.
“Hello,” Sansa said with a delicate consideration that staved off the fragility of suspicion without inviting friendliness, “I’m afraid you’re a long way from the road.”
“Not so far,” a girl tipped her head, “depending on the road.”
“My husband,” she replied with a pointed turn of her head, “is to be home soon. If you need some bread, you’ll have to wait until he returns. He counts the rations.”
It was a lie, a girl knew. Sansa kept careful count of everything inside her little home. She rarely left to go outside, but when she did, she even counted the trees that could be used for kindling and the spaces for a garden if their little group stayed until spring. She counted everything.
That was when a girl knew, because she counted, too. She counted the first time her wolf eyes caught sight of her sister’s red hair. It was when a girl stopped becoming no one. She counted when her wolf nose caught scent of her sister’s wee belly. It was when a girl turned around. She counted now, when her girl eyes and girl nose and girl self saw her family, whole and hearty, if worn, alive, that she began being someone again. She counted three and to the girl she’d been, that meant a great deal.
“I have a gift,” She said in her crone’s voice, “for Sansa Stark. Sandor Clegane can count them when he returns, if you’d like. You’ll be here. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Who are you,” her sister demanded, hand white knuckled on the door.
A girl simply smiled, realizing with a sudden warm she was someone more than before, “I am Winter and I have come. I bring with me a debt. Three lives have been spared because of you. Three must be given to balance the debt.” At her sister’s growing alarm, a girl assured her, “Three names. Any three names, and I will kill them.” And a girl gave one sorrowful piece of advice she wished she had heard, “Think of the three names that haunt you most. The three that threaten everything.” She tipped back her hood slightly, so her eyes could stare bright into the fire and said, “Pick the three that will keep you safe.”
“I don’t need three,” Sansa’s hair caught the light that cracked through the door when she shook her head. “But, you need to leave.”
“Roose Bolton is dead.” A girl insisted, pressing her hand to the door to keep her from closing it. “Cersei Lannister lies in a shallow grave. They took your home, they took your family. Tell me who still lives and the God of Death will take them. I know who you are,” she pleaded. “I know. I am Winter and they doubted me, but they will suffer for their pride. Three names. He demands it. Let them be three names to keep you safe.”
Her sister’s stomach was hidden behind the door, but a blanket lay half-finished by the fire. Sansa followed her eyes and pursed her lips. “Why? If you are...” She shook her head. “Who you say you are. What you say you are. Why would I matter to you?”
“Because you are the north,” she pressed, “Your child is the north. No stag or dragon can ever understand. You are the north and that makes you mine.”
“I could name them all, you know,” Sansa said with a tired shrewdness. “I could name Stannis Baratheon and the Targaryens. I could send you to murder kings and queens.”
“And I would do so.” A girl responded immediately, confidently. “Name them and they will die.”
Sansa looked away, then, her eyes softer and vulnerable. They changed her from the hard woman she’d become to something gentler; something, the girl realized, that she recognized.
“You do not have to run any longer,” she spoke to the tiredness that hung from her sister’s shoulders, to the tense watchfulness that surrounded this little house in the woods. “Give me the names that will let you rest.
“Petyr Baelish,” Sansa spat with an angry swallow. She looked up again, her eyes bright and angry. “Petyr Baelish. Can you kill him?”
“Yes,” a girl nodded. “One name is given.”
Sansa’s sigh was heavy and shaking with unshed tears as her eyes darted to a different corner, but her hesitance was weighed frantically, as if she had more thoughts than she could give. “Walder Frey,” she enunciated slower, as if it was an answer that suitably matched all her checks and balances inside her own head. A moment later, she seemed surer and met the girl’s old face again. “I name Walder Frey.”
“A second name is given,” she agreed. “And the third?”
This time, a grave sadness came over her features before Sansa spoke, but unlike the second, the third came without question. “Lady Stoneheart.”
A girl nodded slowly. “A third name is given,” she said with quiet gravity.
“Yes,” her sister agreed with a heavy finality, “it is.”
“The names are given, the debt will be paid.” A girl stepped back and turned away into the woods.
“Wait,” Sansa called opening the door a fraction wider. She seemed torn as she spoke, “I - You said to give you names that would let us rest. That would keep us safe.” Her tongue ran along the smooth teeth of her mouth and she fought back tears. “I want you to know, I don’t hate them. Not all. But they make me run. They want to take away what I have and I won’t let them do that. Not anymore.”
A girl nodded. “They will be claimed. You will be safe.”
“Thank you.”
Sansa watched her go, a girl knew, as she stepped between the skeleton trees. It wasn’t until the girl was far past the nearest deer path that she changed her face from old to young, then younger once more. This face, she reminded herself, was hers. It was hers in a way that crow’s feet and grey hair weren’t.
This face had grey eyes and a long nose. This face had dark eyebrows and dark hair and a firm mouth that didn’t smile. It was a girl’s face, but not for just anyone. Not for no one, she decided. This face, she told herself firmly, had a sister.
This face, she thought to herself and she pulled needle from the small pack she had set inside a hollow tree, had a name.
That name was saved three times. It was time to pay her debt so she could have it back.