ASOIAF/GOT Fic: With the wild wolves around you
Title: With the wild wolves around you
Pairing: Pre-relationship Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Rating: PG-13
Length: 3,737 words
Status: Complete
Warnings: Violence, briefly mentioned dubcon, some dark themes. Cousin incest. Spoilers through A Dance with Dragons.
Notes: Written for got_exchange Round Four. Title and cut text from Bon Iver's "The Wolves (Act I and II)"
With the wild wolves around you
The Dragon Queen, the whispers call her. Dragon Queen, and Mother of Dragons, and Daughter of Death, and half a hundred other things that make something like dread shiver up her spine.
Petyr sees her shiver and wraps an arm around her in a mockery of comfort. She shudders again, but does not shy away. She can’t, not yet. Not until she’s Sansa. He’s promised Winterfell, promised her true name, but those promises seem more false every day, and she’s afraid she’ll never escape Alayne Stone.
She waits, and the waiting grows more terrible each day.
“Don’t worry my dear Alayne,” he says. “Daenerys is a child playing at being queen - she does not know how to play the game of thrones. She will never take the Seven Kingdoms.”
His casual arrogance makes her want to scream. Once, she thought he was clever, clever enough to save her from the Lannisters, clever enough to win her back her home. He still is, she thinks. He is clever, clever enough to get everything he wants, clever enough to win it all. But his successes have made him arrogant, and he thinks himself infallible.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa desperately, viciously wants someone to prove him wrong.
Perhaps it will be the Dragon Queen. Daenerys Stormborn is a miracle and a law unto herself - she survived exile and assassins and a maegi’s dark spell to hatch her dragons from stone. Now they fly before her, burning her enemies and leaving nothing but fire and blood in her wake. She is Aegon the Conqueror come again, terrible and deadly and red as the words of her house.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa knows the songs and the stories; the Seven Kingdoms bowed to dragons once before, the South subdued and Harrenhal burned. Even the proud North bent the knee at the threat of dragonfire. Who is Petyr Baelish, Littlefinger, Mockingbird, liar, to say what the Mother of Dragons is not capable of?
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa screams these things at Petyr. She rages at him, at his empty promises and her lost family and everything that has been taken from her. She rages and rages and longs for the cold of the North, wishes it could sink her into her bones and soothe away this hot, impotent fury.
Sansa wishes in vain.
She is not Sansa Stark, daughter of the North and the last heir to Winterfell. The North is far away - trapped in the Vale she is only Alayne Stone, the bastard girl who nods and says nothing when her lord father assures her that the Dragon Queen will never be a true threat.
Petyr smiles at her silent gesture of agreement and tells her once more how much she looks like her mother.
Her smile is forced and brittle, but he takes it as his due.
He kisses her again that night, leaves her standing before her chambers flushed with shame and sick with loathing. She slips beneath her covers and refuses to cry. Instead, she thinks of the songs she once believed in, lovely tales of fair maidens and gallant knights.
There are no gallant knights, she knows. No one is coming to rescue her.
Life is not a song. In life, the monsters win.
Dragons are monsters, she thinks. Perhaps their victory will be enough to set her free. The thought startles her - she had believed herself too worn for hope. It seems instead there is a small part of her that refuses to give up, to accept this terrible charade as her lot in life. It is the same part that clings so fiercely to the memory of Lady’s kind eyes, that longs so desperately for the snows of the North.
Ruthlessly, she shuts away that awful, fragile hope.
Hope has given me nothing, she tells herself as she slips into sleep; better not to have it at all.
Still, her dreams are awash with red.
Leagues and leagues away, a direwolf with eyes red as blood raises his voice in song.
His master straps Valyrian steel to his back and looks to the south, chasing rumors of a fire strong enough to beat back the coming winter. Jon Targaryen they call him now, the former Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch reborn in the flames of a funeral pyre, forged anew in fire and blood.
The words of his true house perhaps, and what he seeks in the South, but not the song his direwolf sings.
Ghost howls and howls, and winter is coming.
Daenerys Targaryen crosses the Narrow Sea with her dragons and her armies, and one by one the Seven Kingdoms bow before her.
The Vale, so long neutral, quakes beneath the shadow of dragons. They fly high above even the tallest heights of the Eyrie, but they do not land. Lysa’s paranoia and Petyr’s cunning, it seems, have saved the Vale from the Dragon Queen’s immediate wrath.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa laughs and laughs until she is sick from laughing. She hoped for dragons, and now here they are. Petyr’s ravens bring tales of their conquest from every corner of the realm.
The South is in chaos. King’s Landing burns still - wildfire and dragonfire and Lannister desperation have reduced the city to ash and ruin. Dorne has flown Targaryen banners since Daenerys landed in Westeros, and the Reach bent the knee not long after, eager to assume old allegiances.
The Riverlands, ravaged by years of war, offer only token resistance before swearing fealty. The great fleets of the Iron Islands have all burned; their Drowned God, it seems, has no answer for dragonfire. The Westerlands remain under siege, Dothraki screamers and the might of the Unsullied bearing down upon them. They will submit, the ravens say. Even if they could hope to win, the threat of dragons loom. Finally, the Stormlands are in disarray - Stannis has not been seen since he left to answer the call of the Night’s Watch.
With the whole of the warring South on its knees, Daenerys’ next target can only be the Vale.
The dragons have come, and they have won.
The dragons have come, and nothing has changed. She is still trapped in Petyr’s masquerade, still hiding the red of her hair and answering to a name not her own. Her fate is still in his hands.
Her fate is in his hands, and Petyr will use her as a bargaining chip to weasel his way into the good graces of the Dragon Queen he so badly underestimated. She knows with aching certainty that she will never see Winterfell again, never breathe the air of the North or pray before the sorrowful face of a heart tree.
She will die for the crime of her blood, and that will be that. Her only consolation is that she will die as the daughter of Eddard Stark and Catelyn Tully, with her red hair shining in the Southron sun.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa wants to weep.
Instead, she buries Sansa, smothers the sobs building up in her chest, and does not let herself mourn. She’s Alayne Stone, bastard girl of the Vale.
She has nothing to weep for.
Far away in the distant North, the Wall comes down. The Others pour across a boundary that no longer has the strength to repel them, cold and fierce and endlessly hungry.
They seek the warmth of living bodies, and find instead the searing destruction of dragonfire.
Jon Targaryen wields Valyrian steel, and a burning sword that is not a sword at all. His aunt’s dragons light up the dark skies of the Long Night with their fire. He slips into their skins as easily as he does Ghost’s, and unleashes their rage on the advancing army. Slowly, slowly, the Others fall.
He is the prophecy fulfilled, his the song of ice and fire; winter has come, and he has met it with fire and blood.
Ghost howls and the dragons roar, and when the Long Night finally gives way to dawn he waits only until the dead are burned before turning south once more, ignoring the longing for a Northern home he no longer has that lays heavy in his bones.
Soon enough, he thinks. I’ll be back soon enough.
When the next raven arrives, she thinks nothing of it. More news of the cowed South, more news of the Dragon Queen and her inevitable journey to the Vale - she cannot bring herself to care.
She does not expect Petyr to summon her, a strange madness in his eyes as he reads the message aloud.
Jon Snow, former Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, has been legitimized by Queen Daenerys Targaryen, the first of her name, as Jon Targaryen, son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.
There is more, something about the destruction of the Wall and an incursion from the North held off by the men of the Night’s Watch, but the words barely register.
Jon, she thinks, and feels a pang in her chest at the name. She has tried so hard to bury Sansa, to lock away the fierce hope and dreams of home that never quite leave her, no matter how foolish hopes and dreams are.
She has tried, and a single raven has undone all her work.
For years, she has been alone. A wolf without a pack, trapped in a cage where she couldn’t even be a wolf.
I’m not alone, she thinks, and the words whirl about her mind like snow in a blizzard, pry something loose from the depths of her heart.
I’m not alone.
That thought is all it takes, and she is a wolf again, Sansa Stark again.
Only Petyr’s presence keeps her from letting the thinning layers of Alayne fall from her shoulders like an ill-fitting cloak - she has to be Alayne, just for a little bit longer. Just long enough to send a raven, just long enough to let the world know that Sansa Stark is in the Vale.
She has told herself time and again that it is foolish to hope, more foolish still to take hope as certainty, but she does so anyway.
Jon will come for her. She knows it.
He is in King’s Landing when the letter arrives.
His aunt - how strange it is, he thinks, to have someone to call family once more - is telling him of her strategy for dealing with the North when Jorah Mormont strides into the room, bearing the letter.
Daenerys reads it, and he watches as a murderous scowl blooms on her lips.
“This Petyr Baelish,” she says. “He’s been writing to me of his abilities as Master of Coin. He is a traitor, and he will die.”
Jorah nods. “Shall I prepare to move against the Vale, my Queen?”
“No,” she says, and hands Jon the letter. “My nephew will go.”
Any protest he might have made dies on his lips when sees the name at the bottom of the page, signed with a delicate flourish he remembers from long afternoons spent learning to write with Maester Luwin.
Sansa Stark.
He leaves for the Vale two days later, his aunt’s army at his back as he rides to meet his cousin.
One of Petyr’s bootlickers tells him about her raven, but it is too late.
Littlefinger has nowhere to run, no clever tales to spin; the Lords Declarant will not support him, and the Dragon Queen will show him no mercy.
Daenerys Targaryen sees only a traitorous man harboring a potential political rival, waiting for the right moment to reveal her as the last of the Starks, waiting to rally the Stark bannermen and declare her the Queen in the North. Sansa Stark, who never wanted to be queen. Sansa Stark, who will bow to the Dragon Queen if only she is allowed to return to the home she has so long missed.
This is the tale her letter spins, crafted with the cunning she learned to wield from Petyr Baelish and stitched together with the sweet lies she learned to tell from Cersei Lannister. It is the tale she knows the new queen will believe.
I have learned your game of thrones, she thinks, and I have bested you both.
It is the truth.
Jon comes for her less than a month after her letter wings its way towards King’s Landing. He arrives at the Vale with the might of Dragon Queen at his back, twenty thousand Southron men marching North at his command.
The irony is enough to make her sick, but it is overwhelmed by something far more powerful. She has scrubbed her hair free of the brown dye that marked her as Alayne Stone, and she greets Jon with the red of her Tully hair shining brilliantly in the Southron sun.
For the first time in years, Sansa Stark is free.
There are no dragon banners flying on the day they leave the Vale.
The sigil of the Dragon Queen’s restored house - of his house - is conspicuously absent. His men think it is so they will be better received in the North, but they are wrong. The direwolf banners he orders flown are for Sansa, and Sansa alone.
He watches her search the for the dragons, watches the small, fierce smile dawn on her face when her eyes find only the Stark direwolf. The expression is a match for that of the fierce gray beast, mouth open in a snarl as it lunges across a field of white. Triumphant, free at last.
His heart lurches painfully in his chest at the sight of that smile. He’d thought her long dead, a victim of Joffrey’s cruelty or the Hound’s anger, swallowed by the chaos of the War of the Five Kings. He’d thought her as lost as all the rest of his childhood family, and his relief at seeing her whole is so powerful that it nearly cripples him.
It is soured only by the knowledge that she has been alone as long as he has, denied her true name and the home that is hers by right. Longclaw spilled Petyr’s blood just as easily as it did Janos Slynt’s, but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough.
Petyr is dead. She’s free now, and he will take her to Winterfell. It’s far too little far too late, but it’s what he can give her.
He wishes he could give her more, but her smile makes him think that for a moment, maybe it's enough.
There are no dragon banners flying on the day Jon and Sansa leave the Vale.
There is only a direwolf, red eyes fixed on her just as his master’s are, watching as she urges her mount forward, bound for the North.
Winterfell is in ruins. She knew it would be, after the Greyjoys’ sack and Ramsay Bolton’s long stay, but it still hurts to see the castle in such a state.
She walks the halls she walked as a child, trailing her fingers along dusty, crumbling stone, and feels tears prickling her eyes.
She’s no longer Alayne, but she still doesn’t let herself weep. She hasn’t cried in so long, it’s as though she has forgotten how. So instead of weeping, she begins to rebuild the shattered castle that was once her home.
She organizes the smallfolk that survived Ramsay’s tender care, sets them to repairing broken masonry, cutting fresh wood to rebuild the houses and farms that once lived in the castle’s shadow. She pours over the records her mother kept, and tries to prepare for the coming winter.
Through it all, Jon stays. She thought he would leave as soon as she was safely back at Winterfell, back to King’s Landing and his new aunt, or perhaps to the Wall once more, but instead he stays.
It makes her heart beat strangely within her chest, that he stays. She was terrible to him as a child, so eager to cut him down with the circumstances of his birth, so eager to parrot a mother she knows now was blinded by hurt and jealousy when it came to her husband’s bastard son. She knew he would come for her - Jon has always been honorable, has always done the right thing - but she never thought he would stay.
She is quietly happy that he does. They were never close, before, but now she finds herself seeking out his company, his dry jests and warm smiles brightening her days. She thinks perhaps her company cheers him as well. The thought bolsters her when she feels like giving up, when the task of restoring Winterfell seems too daunting to ever complete.
Jon helps there as well. He still commands some of the men that rode north with them, and he puts them to work, ordering them to assist with the repairs and the new construction, to help the farmers prepare for winter.
The rest of the men he gave into the keeping of one of Daenerys’ commanders, and he tells her they ride through the whole of the North, chasing the remnants of Stannis’ army. She does not particularly care if Stannis’ forces are captured - they managed to rid Winterfell of the Bastard of Bolton, and that is the only deed of theirs that matters to her.
Whatever happens, Jon assures, the North will be left to itself in the end.
“My aunt,” he says, stumbling a bit over the unfamiliar address, “has her hands full with the South. She does not care for overmuch for the frozen North, and she thinks I will hold it for her if you decide to rebel.”
His tone makes the statement a jest, but the words turn the blood in her veins to ice.
“Jon,” she says, forcing her voice to work, “is that why you stayed?”
Surprise and something like hurt flicker across his face, and she bites back a flush of shame, thoughts of their childhood racing through her mind once more. She was so horrible to him, so horrible. Why else would he stay? He’s no longer a bastard, no longer the outsider. He has a family now. Why else would he stay, unless it was to guard against rebellion?
“Is that why you think I’m here?”
She doesn’t answer, and he stares at her for a long moment before walking out of the room, shoulders rigid and hands clenched into fists.
The soft click of the door shutting behind him is the loudest sound she’s ever heard.
He finds her in the godswood, kneeling before sorrowful face of the heart tree.
“Sansa,” he says, and cringes when she tenses at the sound of his voice. He speaks again anyway - he’s been quietly happy the past months, watching her rebuild Winterfell. It’s selfish, but he doesn’t want to lose that. He doesn’t want her to think he’s only here because of Daenerys.
“That’s not why I’m here,” he says. “That’s not why I stayed.”
She silent for a long moment, and he thinks to leave, but when she turns to face him there are tears on her cheeks.
He moves toward her without thought, pulling her up into his embrace.
“Jon,” she says, and the word is a sob. “Please don’t go.”
He doesn’t.
She cries into the furs at his neck for a long time, and when she finally pulls away, it feels as though she has cried all the tears she ever held back in King’s Landing, all the tears she ever held back at the Vale.
Afterwards, they talk. They talk until long after the sun has set, about the Wall and the Others, about King’s Landing and the Vale, about Daenerys and Petyr and all the people they’ve lost since they parted ways so long ago.
He tells her that he never planned to stay in the South. “I was always going to go back to the North,” he says, “but I didn’t know where. There’s no place for me at the Wall, and I’ve never had any right to Winterfell.”
He pauses, and she waits for him to continue.
“I’m here because you are,” he says, and the words shiver through her.
She tells him how desperately she wanted to be Sansa again. “I hoped the dragons would come,” she says. “In life the monsters win, and I couldn’t think of anything more monstrous than dragons. I thought if they won, then maybe something would change. Even if the queen wanted to execute me, at least I would die as Sansa Stark.”
“Sansa,” he says, and his voice is so terribly sad that she reaches for his hands, lacing their fingers together.
“It’s alright, Jon,” she says. “It’s alright. I dreamed of red, and thought it was the dragons. But it was you, you and Ghost. You came for me. And I’m Sansa again.”
“You are,” he says, voice reverent, and presses a kiss to her forehead.
Warmth flutters through her at the soft touch, and she sighs.
Later, after the repairs are done and winter has come, after she has turned that brief gesture over and over in her mind, she will walk to his chambers and kiss him. Later, he will groan and gasp her name and pull her to him, and they will find a home in each other.
Later, Daenerys will give up hope of Jon ever returning south. Later, Winterfell will be filled with laughter of Stark children once more, and Sansa and Jon will live the lives they dreamed of living when they were young.
For now, they sit together and thank whatever gods saw fit to bring them back together, here at Winterfell.
Ghost’s howl sings in her veins, echoes in her bones.
Winter is coming, it says, winter is coming.
She stands in the godswood, her fingers twined with Jon’s, breathing the frigid air of the North and listening to the joyous howls of a direwolf. She is a Stark again, and Winterfell stands whole behind her.
Jon may be called Targaryen now, but he is the North’s, Winterfell’s, hers.
She tightens her grip on his hands and leans back against his chest, thinks of the little wolf hidden dreaming in her belly.
Sansa feels a joy unlike any she has ever known before spreading through her, and when Jon presses a kiss to her frozen cheek, she knows he feels it too.
Home, she thinks. We’re home.
Feedback is love!
Pairing: Pre-relationship Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Rating: PG-13
Length: 3,737 words
Status: Complete
Warnings: Violence, briefly mentioned dubcon, some dark themes. Cousin incest. Spoilers through A Dance with Dragons.
Notes: Written for got_exchange Round Four. Title and cut text from Bon Iver's "The Wolves (Act I and II)"
With the wild wolves around you
The Dragon Queen, the whispers call her. Dragon Queen, and Mother of Dragons, and Daughter of Death, and half a hundred other things that make something like dread shiver up her spine.
Petyr sees her shiver and wraps an arm around her in a mockery of comfort. She shudders again, but does not shy away. She can’t, not yet. Not until she’s Sansa. He’s promised Winterfell, promised her true name, but those promises seem more false every day, and she’s afraid she’ll never escape Alayne Stone.
She waits, and the waiting grows more terrible each day.
“Don’t worry my dear Alayne,” he says. “Daenerys is a child playing at being queen - she does not know how to play the game of thrones. She will never take the Seven Kingdoms.”
His casual arrogance makes her want to scream. Once, she thought he was clever, clever enough to save her from the Lannisters, clever enough to win her back her home. He still is, she thinks. He is clever, clever enough to get everything he wants, clever enough to win it all. But his successes have made him arrogant, and he thinks himself infallible.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa desperately, viciously wants someone to prove him wrong.
Perhaps it will be the Dragon Queen. Daenerys Stormborn is a miracle and a law unto herself - she survived exile and assassins and a maegi’s dark spell to hatch her dragons from stone. Now they fly before her, burning her enemies and leaving nothing but fire and blood in her wake. She is Aegon the Conqueror come again, terrible and deadly and red as the words of her house.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa knows the songs and the stories; the Seven Kingdoms bowed to dragons once before, the South subdued and Harrenhal burned. Even the proud North bent the knee at the threat of dragonfire. Who is Petyr Baelish, Littlefinger, Mockingbird, liar, to say what the Mother of Dragons is not capable of?
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa screams these things at Petyr. She rages at him, at his empty promises and her lost family and everything that has been taken from her. She rages and rages and longs for the cold of the North, wishes it could sink her into her bones and soothe away this hot, impotent fury.
Sansa wishes in vain.
She is not Sansa Stark, daughter of the North and the last heir to Winterfell. The North is far away - trapped in the Vale she is only Alayne Stone, the bastard girl who nods and says nothing when her lord father assures her that the Dragon Queen will never be a true threat.
Petyr smiles at her silent gesture of agreement and tells her once more how much she looks like her mother.
Her smile is forced and brittle, but he takes it as his due.
He kisses her again that night, leaves her standing before her chambers flushed with shame and sick with loathing. She slips beneath her covers and refuses to cry. Instead, she thinks of the songs she once believed in, lovely tales of fair maidens and gallant knights.
There are no gallant knights, she knows. No one is coming to rescue her.
Life is not a song. In life, the monsters win.
Dragons are monsters, she thinks. Perhaps their victory will be enough to set her free. The thought startles her - she had believed herself too worn for hope. It seems instead there is a small part of her that refuses to give up, to accept this terrible charade as her lot in life. It is the same part that clings so fiercely to the memory of Lady’s kind eyes, that longs so desperately for the snows of the North.
Ruthlessly, she shuts away that awful, fragile hope.
Hope has given me nothing, she tells herself as she slips into sleep; better not to have it at all.
Still, her dreams are awash with red.
Leagues and leagues away, a direwolf with eyes red as blood raises his voice in song.
His master straps Valyrian steel to his back and looks to the south, chasing rumors of a fire strong enough to beat back the coming winter. Jon Targaryen they call him now, the former Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch reborn in the flames of a funeral pyre, forged anew in fire and blood.
The words of his true house perhaps, and what he seeks in the South, but not the song his direwolf sings.
Ghost howls and howls, and winter is coming.
Daenerys Targaryen crosses the Narrow Sea with her dragons and her armies, and one by one the Seven Kingdoms bow before her.
The Vale, so long neutral, quakes beneath the shadow of dragons. They fly high above even the tallest heights of the Eyrie, but they do not land. Lysa’s paranoia and Petyr’s cunning, it seems, have saved the Vale from the Dragon Queen’s immediate wrath.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa laughs and laughs until she is sick from laughing. She hoped for dragons, and now here they are. Petyr’s ravens bring tales of their conquest from every corner of the realm.
The South is in chaos. King’s Landing burns still - wildfire and dragonfire and Lannister desperation have reduced the city to ash and ruin. Dorne has flown Targaryen banners since Daenerys landed in Westeros, and the Reach bent the knee not long after, eager to assume old allegiances.
The Riverlands, ravaged by years of war, offer only token resistance before swearing fealty. The great fleets of the Iron Islands have all burned; their Drowned God, it seems, has no answer for dragonfire. The Westerlands remain under siege, Dothraki screamers and the might of the Unsullied bearing down upon them. They will submit, the ravens say. Even if they could hope to win, the threat of dragons loom. Finally, the Stormlands are in disarray - Stannis has not been seen since he left to answer the call of the Night’s Watch.
With the whole of the warring South on its knees, Daenerys’ next target can only be the Vale.
The dragons have come, and they have won.
The dragons have come, and nothing has changed. She is still trapped in Petyr’s masquerade, still hiding the red of her hair and answering to a name not her own. Her fate is still in his hands.
Her fate is in his hands, and Petyr will use her as a bargaining chip to weasel his way into the good graces of the Dragon Queen he so badly underestimated. She knows with aching certainty that she will never see Winterfell again, never breathe the air of the North or pray before the sorrowful face of a heart tree.
She will die for the crime of her blood, and that will be that. Her only consolation is that she will die as the daughter of Eddard Stark and Catelyn Tully, with her red hair shining in the Southron sun.
Beneath the layers of Alayne, Sansa wants to weep.
Instead, she buries Sansa, smothers the sobs building up in her chest, and does not let herself mourn. She’s Alayne Stone, bastard girl of the Vale.
She has nothing to weep for.
Far away in the distant North, the Wall comes down. The Others pour across a boundary that no longer has the strength to repel them, cold and fierce and endlessly hungry.
They seek the warmth of living bodies, and find instead the searing destruction of dragonfire.
Jon Targaryen wields Valyrian steel, and a burning sword that is not a sword at all. His aunt’s dragons light up the dark skies of the Long Night with their fire. He slips into their skins as easily as he does Ghost’s, and unleashes their rage on the advancing army. Slowly, slowly, the Others fall.
He is the prophecy fulfilled, his the song of ice and fire; winter has come, and he has met it with fire and blood.
Ghost howls and the dragons roar, and when the Long Night finally gives way to dawn he waits only until the dead are burned before turning south once more, ignoring the longing for a Northern home he no longer has that lays heavy in his bones.
Soon enough, he thinks. I’ll be back soon enough.
When the next raven arrives, she thinks nothing of it. More news of the cowed South, more news of the Dragon Queen and her inevitable journey to the Vale - she cannot bring herself to care.
She does not expect Petyr to summon her, a strange madness in his eyes as he reads the message aloud.
Jon Snow, former Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, has been legitimized by Queen Daenerys Targaryen, the first of her name, as Jon Targaryen, son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.
There is more, something about the destruction of the Wall and an incursion from the North held off by the men of the Night’s Watch, but the words barely register.
Jon, she thinks, and feels a pang in her chest at the name. She has tried so hard to bury Sansa, to lock away the fierce hope and dreams of home that never quite leave her, no matter how foolish hopes and dreams are.
She has tried, and a single raven has undone all her work.
For years, she has been alone. A wolf without a pack, trapped in a cage where she couldn’t even be a wolf.
I’m not alone, she thinks, and the words whirl about her mind like snow in a blizzard, pry something loose from the depths of her heart.
I’m not alone.
That thought is all it takes, and she is a wolf again, Sansa Stark again.
Only Petyr’s presence keeps her from letting the thinning layers of Alayne fall from her shoulders like an ill-fitting cloak - she has to be Alayne, just for a little bit longer. Just long enough to send a raven, just long enough to let the world know that Sansa Stark is in the Vale.
She has told herself time and again that it is foolish to hope, more foolish still to take hope as certainty, but she does so anyway.
Jon will come for her. She knows it.
He is in King’s Landing when the letter arrives.
His aunt - how strange it is, he thinks, to have someone to call family once more - is telling him of her strategy for dealing with the North when Jorah Mormont strides into the room, bearing the letter.
Daenerys reads it, and he watches as a murderous scowl blooms on her lips.
“This Petyr Baelish,” she says. “He’s been writing to me of his abilities as Master of Coin. He is a traitor, and he will die.”
Jorah nods. “Shall I prepare to move against the Vale, my Queen?”
“No,” she says, and hands Jon the letter. “My nephew will go.”
Any protest he might have made dies on his lips when sees the name at the bottom of the page, signed with a delicate flourish he remembers from long afternoons spent learning to write with Maester Luwin.
Sansa Stark.
He leaves for the Vale two days later, his aunt’s army at his back as he rides to meet his cousin.
One of Petyr’s bootlickers tells him about her raven, but it is too late.
Littlefinger has nowhere to run, no clever tales to spin; the Lords Declarant will not support him, and the Dragon Queen will show him no mercy.
Daenerys Targaryen sees only a traitorous man harboring a potential political rival, waiting for the right moment to reveal her as the last of the Starks, waiting to rally the Stark bannermen and declare her the Queen in the North. Sansa Stark, who never wanted to be queen. Sansa Stark, who will bow to the Dragon Queen if only she is allowed to return to the home she has so long missed.
This is the tale her letter spins, crafted with the cunning she learned to wield from Petyr Baelish and stitched together with the sweet lies she learned to tell from Cersei Lannister. It is the tale she knows the new queen will believe.
I have learned your game of thrones, she thinks, and I have bested you both.
It is the truth.
Jon comes for her less than a month after her letter wings its way towards King’s Landing. He arrives at the Vale with the might of Dragon Queen at his back, twenty thousand Southron men marching North at his command.
The irony is enough to make her sick, but it is overwhelmed by something far more powerful. She has scrubbed her hair free of the brown dye that marked her as Alayne Stone, and she greets Jon with the red of her Tully hair shining brilliantly in the Southron sun.
For the first time in years, Sansa Stark is free.
There are no dragon banners flying on the day they leave the Vale.
The sigil of the Dragon Queen’s restored house - of his house - is conspicuously absent. His men think it is so they will be better received in the North, but they are wrong. The direwolf banners he orders flown are for Sansa, and Sansa alone.
He watches her search the for the dragons, watches the small, fierce smile dawn on her face when her eyes find only the Stark direwolf. The expression is a match for that of the fierce gray beast, mouth open in a snarl as it lunges across a field of white. Triumphant, free at last.
His heart lurches painfully in his chest at the sight of that smile. He’d thought her long dead, a victim of Joffrey’s cruelty or the Hound’s anger, swallowed by the chaos of the War of the Five Kings. He’d thought her as lost as all the rest of his childhood family, and his relief at seeing her whole is so powerful that it nearly cripples him.
It is soured only by the knowledge that she has been alone as long as he has, denied her true name and the home that is hers by right. Longclaw spilled Petyr’s blood just as easily as it did Janos Slynt’s, but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough.
Petyr is dead. She’s free now, and he will take her to Winterfell. It’s far too little far too late, but it’s what he can give her.
He wishes he could give her more, but her smile makes him think that for a moment, maybe it's enough.
There are no dragon banners flying on the day Jon and Sansa leave the Vale.
There is only a direwolf, red eyes fixed on her just as his master’s are, watching as she urges her mount forward, bound for the North.
Winterfell is in ruins. She knew it would be, after the Greyjoys’ sack and Ramsay Bolton’s long stay, but it still hurts to see the castle in such a state.
She walks the halls she walked as a child, trailing her fingers along dusty, crumbling stone, and feels tears prickling her eyes.
She’s no longer Alayne, but she still doesn’t let herself weep. She hasn’t cried in so long, it’s as though she has forgotten how. So instead of weeping, she begins to rebuild the shattered castle that was once her home.
She organizes the smallfolk that survived Ramsay’s tender care, sets them to repairing broken masonry, cutting fresh wood to rebuild the houses and farms that once lived in the castle’s shadow. She pours over the records her mother kept, and tries to prepare for the coming winter.
Through it all, Jon stays. She thought he would leave as soon as she was safely back at Winterfell, back to King’s Landing and his new aunt, or perhaps to the Wall once more, but instead he stays.
It makes her heart beat strangely within her chest, that he stays. She was terrible to him as a child, so eager to cut him down with the circumstances of his birth, so eager to parrot a mother she knows now was blinded by hurt and jealousy when it came to her husband’s bastard son. She knew he would come for her - Jon has always been honorable, has always done the right thing - but she never thought he would stay.
She is quietly happy that he does. They were never close, before, but now she finds herself seeking out his company, his dry jests and warm smiles brightening her days. She thinks perhaps her company cheers him as well. The thought bolsters her when she feels like giving up, when the task of restoring Winterfell seems too daunting to ever complete.
Jon helps there as well. He still commands some of the men that rode north with them, and he puts them to work, ordering them to assist with the repairs and the new construction, to help the farmers prepare for winter.
The rest of the men he gave into the keeping of one of Daenerys’ commanders, and he tells her they ride through the whole of the North, chasing the remnants of Stannis’ army. She does not particularly care if Stannis’ forces are captured - they managed to rid Winterfell of the Bastard of Bolton, and that is the only deed of theirs that matters to her.
Whatever happens, Jon assures, the North will be left to itself in the end.
“My aunt,” he says, stumbling a bit over the unfamiliar address, “has her hands full with the South. She does not care for overmuch for the frozen North, and she thinks I will hold it for her if you decide to rebel.”
His tone makes the statement a jest, but the words turn the blood in her veins to ice.
“Jon,” she says, forcing her voice to work, “is that why you stayed?”
Surprise and something like hurt flicker across his face, and she bites back a flush of shame, thoughts of their childhood racing through her mind once more. She was so horrible to him, so horrible. Why else would he stay? He’s no longer a bastard, no longer the outsider. He has a family now. Why else would he stay, unless it was to guard against rebellion?
“Is that why you think I’m here?”
She doesn’t answer, and he stares at her for a long moment before walking out of the room, shoulders rigid and hands clenched into fists.
The soft click of the door shutting behind him is the loudest sound she’s ever heard.
He finds her in the godswood, kneeling before sorrowful face of the heart tree.
“Sansa,” he says, and cringes when she tenses at the sound of his voice. He speaks again anyway - he’s been quietly happy the past months, watching her rebuild Winterfell. It’s selfish, but he doesn’t want to lose that. He doesn’t want her to think he’s only here because of Daenerys.
“That’s not why I’m here,” he says. “That’s not why I stayed.”
She silent for a long moment, and he thinks to leave, but when she turns to face him there are tears on her cheeks.
He moves toward her without thought, pulling her up into his embrace.
“Jon,” she says, and the word is a sob. “Please don’t go.”
He doesn’t.
She cries into the furs at his neck for a long time, and when she finally pulls away, it feels as though she has cried all the tears she ever held back in King’s Landing, all the tears she ever held back at the Vale.
Afterwards, they talk. They talk until long after the sun has set, about the Wall and the Others, about King’s Landing and the Vale, about Daenerys and Petyr and all the people they’ve lost since they parted ways so long ago.
He tells her that he never planned to stay in the South. “I was always going to go back to the North,” he says, “but I didn’t know where. There’s no place for me at the Wall, and I’ve never had any right to Winterfell.”
He pauses, and she waits for him to continue.
“I’m here because you are,” he says, and the words shiver through her.
She tells him how desperately she wanted to be Sansa again. “I hoped the dragons would come,” she says. “In life the monsters win, and I couldn’t think of anything more monstrous than dragons. I thought if they won, then maybe something would change. Even if the queen wanted to execute me, at least I would die as Sansa Stark.”
“Sansa,” he says, and his voice is so terribly sad that she reaches for his hands, lacing their fingers together.
“It’s alright, Jon,” she says. “It’s alright. I dreamed of red, and thought it was the dragons. But it was you, you and Ghost. You came for me. And I’m Sansa again.”
“You are,” he says, voice reverent, and presses a kiss to her forehead.
Warmth flutters through her at the soft touch, and she sighs.
Later, after the repairs are done and winter has come, after she has turned that brief gesture over and over in her mind, she will walk to his chambers and kiss him. Later, he will groan and gasp her name and pull her to him, and they will find a home in each other.
Later, Daenerys will give up hope of Jon ever returning south. Later, Winterfell will be filled with laughter of Stark children once more, and Sansa and Jon will live the lives they dreamed of living when they were young.
For now, they sit together and thank whatever gods saw fit to bring them back together, here at Winterfell.
Ghost’s howl sings in her veins, echoes in her bones.
Winter is coming, it says, winter is coming.
She stands in the godswood, her fingers twined with Jon’s, breathing the frigid air of the North and listening to the joyous howls of a direwolf. She is a Stark again, and Winterfell stands whole behind her.
Jon may be called Targaryen now, but he is the North’s, Winterfell’s, hers.
She tightens her grip on his hands and leans back against his chest, thinks of the little wolf hidden dreaming in her belly.
Sansa feels a joy unlike any she has ever known before spreading through her, and when Jon presses a kiss to her frozen cheek, she knows he feels it too.
Home, she thinks. We’re home.
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