fic: learn fast, little bird (Sansa; Game of Thrones)
Title: learn fast, little bird
Characters: Sansa Stark
Rating: G
Author's Notes: ~500 words. Spoilers for all aired episodes and the book; though really only up to where the show is. I own neither the show nor the novel series. Written for the prompt 'you're standing on the landing with the war/you shouldered all the night before' over at the multi-fandom comment!fic meme. Feedback is always and greatly appreciated.
There are shouts and raised voices, the clang of steel against steel. She hears screams as they move her out of the Tower and into a different part of the castle. She is confused: where is her father, where is her sister, what is going on.
No one answers her questions. They fall on blank faces; but the eyes, the eyes, they all gaze at her with something she doesn’t recognize. She is young, but not so young to be completely naive.
Sansa does not sleep that night.
-
Morning comes, the sun rises, and it is now quiet. The balcony of their old rooms, the ones of the King’s Hand, is gone. She can only see so much from the window of the room she’s been placed in.
The guards outside the door won’t let her leave and still have no answers for her questions. Her pleas for the Queen, for her Prince, for her father fall on ears turned away. It’s a futile effort.
Sansa retreats to the bed, sits on the coverlet, the fabric no longer soft but scratchy and unfamiliar to her. She wants her mother like she hasn’t wanted her since they came South. This is not how the stories go. The songs don’t sing of future princesses, future queens, locked away.
But maybe something has happened, something bad. Like someone trying to kill the royal family, someone laying siege to the keep, and the Queen has put her away for safety.
She’s scared.
Her father is missing, Arya as well.
She thinks of what her mother would tell her.
-
They send for her.
She thinks the guards have finally passed on her message to the Queen. The Queen will fix this, her lovely face smiling, ever so kind since she's arrived.
She dresses carefully.
-
Once when she had been younger, a year or two ago, Sansa had watched her father preside in the main hall of Winterfell. A rabble had broken out in a village, not an uprising, but not far from one.
She had stood in the back of the hall and watched her father carry out his justice. The men had sworn fealty, dropped to bended knees.
She remembers.
-
The Queen looks beautiful by the throne, beckons her closer with a smile that once Sansa would have named friendly. Now, she is not so sure. Guards stand round the throne room, knights mixed in. Not a one of their faces reassure her. None of her family or her father’s guard are here.
Her steps are slow and measured. Around her neck, Joffrey’s necklace weighs her down, feels too heavy on her slim neck. She is a Stark of Winterfell. She is a direwolf with ice that flows through her veins. Lady would not be afraid and neither will she.
She doesn’t understand.
For now.
-
Sansa curtsies low.