fic: SPIRITS
SPIRITS
asoiaf; sansa stark (sansa/petyr, sansa/margaery, others too probably); pg-13.
jazz age au.
note:set sort of maybe around the beginning of ASOS? or roughly two or three episodes ago if you’re only watching the series.
“New York’s a big city for a little bird like you.”
These are his first words to her. She’s sitting in a speakeasy somewhere unfamiliar downtown - 1924, with Margaery Tyrell tapping her toes across the bar. Sansa is wearing one of her dresses tonight, like she does most nights, since all of her own grow dowdy and old. Marg comes from the South, any fool knows that, but she hides it well with New York vowels and New York manners and New York clothes, all the while funded by Southern money. Sansa is no fool, and so she understands. The lay of the land is this: Joffrey was once hers, until he turned out not to be. Sansa is a quick learner, she has learnt.
“I am a long way from my hometown,” she says, measured for all the martinis. “But this is my home now.”
His eyes flicker. “Say that enough and you’ll begin to believe it, too.”
She ducks her head the way she’s learned that men like him like ladies to. “I know you.” She says.
“Forgive me, I forget our introduction.”
She laughs husky as she can muster, the way Margaery taught her - “I mean, Sir, that I know of you.”
It is his turn to chuckle, gesture to the barman, “A world of difference in one syllable, there.”
She raises the new glass to her lips. Her lipstick leaves a stain, “There’s a world of difference in many syllables.”
“All it needs is one.”
Her eyes snap to his when she retorts, “Only to those too proud to ask for clarification.”
True to his reputation his eyes crease into a grin, “That’d be the entire human race then?”
Sansa came to New York with her father and her sister. Her father is dead now, for this reason or for that, whoever is responsible for what is done hardly matters to her. It is her sister who echoes in her dreams - she’s gone west or south or north or even east across the ocean. She cares. She does not care. She just wants to know. It took her a year to meet Margaery and her brother, Loras, and before that she lived off the Lannisters scraps and residual obligations. She’s a pretty girl, of course, and she could make her own way if there wasn’t so goddamn much to lose - call it cowardice if you like but let her call it survival. All the same, for now Margaery’s grandmother sends money every month and every month Margaery slips her some. For the rest, Sansa is the guest of Cersei Lannister, whose son Sansa was supposed to marry back when the name Stark meant something this side of the great lakes.
So she buys soap and shoes and cigarettes with Marg’s money, lets Petyr gift her nylons and lipstick and pearls. She keeps Cersei’s keep in a gilded box beneath her bed, for rent and very special occasions.
She receives an invitation to the Baelish residence on a Monday morning, ignores it until five pm on the Tuesday.
“Humour him,” Marg says when she finally brings it up, wringing her hands in front of the wardrobe in their room in a boarding house somewhere off Broadway. “He has money. And he wants to spend it on you.”
“What does he expect in return?”
Margaery’s older than her by perhaps a year, maybe two, but she laughs like an eldest sister - “What does any man expect, Sansa?”
Sansa lets her lips tug upwards, reaches into the wardrobe to pull out on of Marg’s dresses, yellow and feathered around the hem. Someone once told her that Petyr loved her mother, but she never believed them. “They call him the mockingbird. Why?”
“No idea,” she shrugs. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Petyr Baelish lives in an imposing brownstone about five blocks from her residence. His house is decorated in the new money style, effortless only in the way she sees on the centre pages of snatched copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Everything is ostentatiously fashionable, black and white and cream all over. He offers a choice, whiskey or wine? She plumps for whiskey.
“Hard day?” He inquires gently.
Her legs curl to the side, ankle under ankle and hands nestled into her lap. The seat is overstuffed, so even her toes barely brush the ground. “As hard as any other,” her tone is light regardless, “are we expecting company?”
“I rather fancied we’d get to know one another more-intimately.” He says. He’s chosen his words carefully, but not carefully enough. Sansa tenses. “Forgive me,” he says immediately, “I only meant as friends. Hard to come by, you’ll agree.”
“And even harder to keep.”
She accepts another drink, and he stays perched on the opposite couch to hers. Perhaps he knows that she is nervous, or maybe he is nervous too. Sansa dismisses the second possibility when he shifts forward to speak. “You share a room with Margaery Tyrell, I’ve been lead to believe.”
“I do. Have you met her?”
“No,” he concedes, and stands to top her glass up a third time, “I have heard a lot of her though. Joffrey Lannister is smitten, by every account.”
Her eyebrows flash, “The boy has eyes.”
A soft laugh that doesn’t reach his, trained unflinchingly on hers. “I suppose he does.”
She takes Marg’s advice, now, and studies him. Her gaze roams across all of him except his eyes, which continue to seek hers. He’s short, for a man, perhaps, but handsomely built with dark hair and a slightly darker brow sitting heavy on his head. He’s clean shaven, as is the fashion to which his clothes also adhere in their shades of dark brown and charcoal. He’s sans jacket, revealing a waistcoat lined in crimson and a heavy pocket watch etched with a mockingbird. “The mockingbird?” She says, suddenly emboldened, “Why?”
This time the smile creases his face, and if she was Margaery she’d know why, “Who’s afraid of the big bad bird?”
She arrives back well after curfew, sneaks to the room she shares with Marg and finds Loras there too. “Well?” They say, the way only the closest of siblings can.
It seems easiest to play coy. The whiskey is making her grin, “Well what?”
They look to one another, and then to her, “Did you?”
She shakes her head in earnest, and Loras huffs before hands a dollar bill to his sister. Sansa frowns, “Was I supposed to?”
“No.” Marg says, and Loras says “Yes,” at the same time. Sansa understands. Sansa is learning.
When she wakes she’s still in the yellow feathered flapper dress. Sansa’s mind clouds, unclouds, then clouds again and all she really wants is to not have to move.
“Mornin’,” Marg says, draws the curtains open wide.
Sansa groans and slides deeper beneath her duvet.
Petyr summons her again that evening. “You can say you’re busy,” Loras says, when he sees the bags beneath her eyes.
Sansa glares at him and remembers when she loved him. Or rather, she thought she loved him and then she learnt that he can never love her and well - Sansa knows enough to know to learn to not love that. “He won’t believe me.”
“You’re a pretty girl.” He ventures, “Pretty girls are often busy.”
She sees Marg smile at him indulgently. “And so are pretty boys,” his sister teases and even Sansa laughs at this.
“I should go,” she says, finally.
Margaery nods, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.” She says, presses a deep blue gown into her arms. A little long for her, it comes up a shade too short on Sansa, and so she makes a point of wearing flats whenever she borrows it to wear. Sansa’s eyes meet the older woman’s and she understands - flat shoes are flattering for a short man.
She reads the evening paper in the taxi on her way over. The ink rubs off on her fingers, and then on her face when she reaches up to rub her temple before she notices. Shit, she breathes.
“Bless you, Ma’am.” Says the driver.
Petyr greets her as Miss Stark, and she excuses herself to the lavatory immediately, scrubbing her nose and then her fingers until they are red rather than black before meeting the remaining guests - Varys, a camp European sort who reaches up immediately to wipe the ink smudge off her face, Ros, a beautiful women whose accent she recognises but can’t quite place and, most strikingly, Tywin Lannister, the man whose grandson she was supposed to marry so many moons ago. He acts as though he has forgotten her, bowing and kissing her still-damp hand like any gentleman. “A wondrous acquaintance, to be sure.” He says, and Sansa’s halfway to believing him when she remembers his family. It’s easy enough to reinvent yourself in New York, but even here there’s mud that sticks.
Their host knows this too, and so he just pours the champagne and stands back to spectate.
Sansa notes this, and if she’s honest she expected nothing less, “Keep up, Sir.” She teases, raises a laugh from Ros.
“Anyone would’ve thought he wanted us off our rockers,” Ros stage-whispers to her conspiratorially. She does not notice Varys’ or Tywin’s gaze, or if she does she ignores them. “What secrets doesn’t he know that he wants us to tell?”
“I have no secrets.”
Ros cocks her head, looks at Sansa with something approaching kindness but is probably closer to disbelief, “Of course you don’t, little dove.”
The gentlemen have retired to the balcony for a smoke when Ros pulls her aside. There’s a lilt to her accent that Sansa places, then loses again. “Where did you say you were from?”
“Somewhere very far away,” she says, scoops her hair over her shoulder. It’s a brighter red than Sansa’s, and she fancies that it’s been hennaed to make it shine brighter in the Manhattan sun. “It doesn’t matter where you come from anymore, Sansa. We make ourselves and we break ourselves, and no one cares about the before or the after.”
“I’m not sure I believe that.”
Ros’ takes her hand. “You’re young and pretty in New York City. You don’t have to-“ her eyes flick towards the billowing curtains, the voices beyond, “-- but you will. Soon enough you will.”
The other girls words haunt her all the way home. She considers a taxi, decides to walk instead, tucking her bag into the inside pocket of her coat and pulling it tight around her. Her heels clack on the cobbles, and by the time she rounds the block to the boarding house rain’s beginning to spit. There’s an all-night café three doors down that she slips into, ordering a strong coffee and three slices of toast.
She sees Loras before he sees her. “You’re out late.” She says. It’s a school night, after all and while it’s true that there are more responsible employees in New York than Loras she ventures that he does actually care, if only occasionally and with practised nonchalence.
He only shrugs and stares into his cup. “Lost track of time.” He says, “And you’re hardly one to talk. This’ll be, what, the third night this week you’ve snuck in through the window?”
Her smile’s sheepish. “I don’t have anywhere to be in the morning.”
There’s a silence when the waitress hands her the toast and turns to fetch jam and marmalade. Sansa adds three sugars to her coffee, then a splash of milk. “Tywin Lannister was at Petyr’s party,” she says, keeps her tone conversational.
If Margaery was here Loras would act interested, but she’s not and he doesn’t. “Baelish likes powerful men and pretty girls. Same as everyone.”
“Not the same as you.” She replies, meaning for it to sound deep. Instead it sounds sharp and Loras shifts in his seat, drains his coffee.
He sits a little straighter, eyes wider for the caffeine. “I’ll walk you home.”
“It’s three doors.”
“I’ll walk you.”
Once, her heart would’ve leapt at the prospect.
Ros calls by the boarding house to invite Sansa to lunch the following day. It’s Margaery who greets her, and Sansa stands back to observe her marvel at the silk of her dress, and the tone of her hair and watches as Ros in turn praises Marg’s figure and slash of bright red lipstick. Every compliment is echoed by another, far superior, and it’s almost enough to make Sansa laugh.
They buy bagels from the Jewish place three blocks from hers, then wander up to Central Park to eat them. All the way, Ros chatters, about the weather, about the clothes of passers-by, about how charmed she was by Sansa last night. Sansa, for her part, lets it wash over her.
Eventually they settle on a bench. A companionable silence falls for a few moments. “Why did you invite me to lunch?” Sansa asks.
“I wanted to get to know you a little better.” Ros says, “Petyr’s fascinated by you, and what fascinates him fascinates me.”
“Why?”
Ros’ smile is opaque, “I told you that we make ourselves. Sometime we need a little help. Petyr helped me, and now I help him.”
It takes another invitation from Petyr for Sansa to understand what Ros meant.
He drinks to much wine with dinner and slumps beside her, now. “Sansa,” he says, slurring it, “Sansa?” He says again, and she knows he means to say, Cat?
Even in the land of the free everyone belongs to somebody.
Not her, though, not now - she has flown the nest.
end.
asoiaf; sansa stark (sansa/petyr, sansa/margaery, others too probably); pg-13.
jazz age au.
note:set sort of maybe around the beginning of ASOS? or roughly two or three episodes ago if you’re only watching the series.
“New York’s a big city for a little bird like you.”
These are his first words to her. She’s sitting in a speakeasy somewhere unfamiliar downtown - 1924, with Margaery Tyrell tapping her toes across the bar. Sansa is wearing one of her dresses tonight, like she does most nights, since all of her own grow dowdy and old. Marg comes from the South, any fool knows that, but she hides it well with New York vowels and New York manners and New York clothes, all the while funded by Southern money. Sansa is no fool, and so she understands. The lay of the land is this: Joffrey was once hers, until he turned out not to be. Sansa is a quick learner, she has learnt.
“I am a long way from my hometown,” she says, measured for all the martinis. “But this is my home now.”
His eyes flicker. “Say that enough and you’ll begin to believe it, too.”
She ducks her head the way she’s learned that men like him like ladies to. “I know you.” She says.
“Forgive me, I forget our introduction.”
She laughs husky as she can muster, the way Margaery taught her - “I mean, Sir, that I know of you.”
It is his turn to chuckle, gesture to the barman, “A world of difference in one syllable, there.”
She raises the new glass to her lips. Her lipstick leaves a stain, “There’s a world of difference in many syllables.”
“All it needs is one.”
Her eyes snap to his when she retorts, “Only to those too proud to ask for clarification.”
True to his reputation his eyes crease into a grin, “That’d be the entire human race then?”
Sansa came to New York with her father and her sister. Her father is dead now, for this reason or for that, whoever is responsible for what is done hardly matters to her. It is her sister who echoes in her dreams - she’s gone west or south or north or even east across the ocean. She cares. She does not care. She just wants to know. It took her a year to meet Margaery and her brother, Loras, and before that she lived off the Lannisters scraps and residual obligations. She’s a pretty girl, of course, and she could make her own way if there wasn’t so goddamn much to lose - call it cowardice if you like but let her call it survival. All the same, for now Margaery’s grandmother sends money every month and every month Margaery slips her some. For the rest, Sansa is the guest of Cersei Lannister, whose son Sansa was supposed to marry back when the name Stark meant something this side of the great lakes.
So she buys soap and shoes and cigarettes with Marg’s money, lets Petyr gift her nylons and lipstick and pearls. She keeps Cersei’s keep in a gilded box beneath her bed, for rent and very special occasions.
She receives an invitation to the Baelish residence on a Monday morning, ignores it until five pm on the Tuesday.
“Humour him,” Marg says when she finally brings it up, wringing her hands in front of the wardrobe in their room in a boarding house somewhere off Broadway. “He has money. And he wants to spend it on you.”
“What does he expect in return?”
Margaery’s older than her by perhaps a year, maybe two, but she laughs like an eldest sister - “What does any man expect, Sansa?”
Sansa lets her lips tug upwards, reaches into the wardrobe to pull out on of Marg’s dresses, yellow and feathered around the hem. Someone once told her that Petyr loved her mother, but she never believed them. “They call him the mockingbird. Why?”
“No idea,” she shrugs. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Petyr Baelish lives in an imposing brownstone about five blocks from her residence. His house is decorated in the new money style, effortless only in the way she sees on the centre pages of snatched copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Everything is ostentatiously fashionable, black and white and cream all over. He offers a choice, whiskey or wine? She plumps for whiskey.
“Hard day?” He inquires gently.
Her legs curl to the side, ankle under ankle and hands nestled into her lap. The seat is overstuffed, so even her toes barely brush the ground. “As hard as any other,” her tone is light regardless, “are we expecting company?”
“I rather fancied we’d get to know one another more-intimately.” He says. He’s chosen his words carefully, but not carefully enough. Sansa tenses. “Forgive me,” he says immediately, “I only meant as friends. Hard to come by, you’ll agree.”
“And even harder to keep.”
She accepts another drink, and he stays perched on the opposite couch to hers. Perhaps he knows that she is nervous, or maybe he is nervous too. Sansa dismisses the second possibility when he shifts forward to speak. “You share a room with Margaery Tyrell, I’ve been lead to believe.”
“I do. Have you met her?”
“No,” he concedes, and stands to top her glass up a third time, “I have heard a lot of her though. Joffrey Lannister is smitten, by every account.”
Her eyebrows flash, “The boy has eyes.”
A soft laugh that doesn’t reach his, trained unflinchingly on hers. “I suppose he does.”
She takes Marg’s advice, now, and studies him. Her gaze roams across all of him except his eyes, which continue to seek hers. He’s short, for a man, perhaps, but handsomely built with dark hair and a slightly darker brow sitting heavy on his head. He’s clean shaven, as is the fashion to which his clothes also adhere in their shades of dark brown and charcoal. He’s sans jacket, revealing a waistcoat lined in crimson and a heavy pocket watch etched with a mockingbird. “The mockingbird?” She says, suddenly emboldened, “Why?”
This time the smile creases his face, and if she was Margaery she’d know why, “Who’s afraid of the big bad bird?”
She arrives back well after curfew, sneaks to the room she shares with Marg and finds Loras there too. “Well?” They say, the way only the closest of siblings can.
It seems easiest to play coy. The whiskey is making her grin, “Well what?”
They look to one another, and then to her, “Did you?”
She shakes her head in earnest, and Loras huffs before hands a dollar bill to his sister. Sansa frowns, “Was I supposed to?”
“No.” Marg says, and Loras says “Yes,” at the same time. Sansa understands. Sansa is learning.
When she wakes she’s still in the yellow feathered flapper dress. Sansa’s mind clouds, unclouds, then clouds again and all she really wants is to not have to move.
“Mornin’,” Marg says, draws the curtains open wide.
Sansa groans and slides deeper beneath her duvet.
Petyr summons her again that evening. “You can say you’re busy,” Loras says, when he sees the bags beneath her eyes.
Sansa glares at him and remembers when she loved him. Or rather, she thought she loved him and then she learnt that he can never love her and well - Sansa knows enough to know to learn to not love that. “He won’t believe me.”
“You’re a pretty girl.” He ventures, “Pretty girls are often busy.”
She sees Marg smile at him indulgently. “And so are pretty boys,” his sister teases and even Sansa laughs at this.
“I should go,” she says, finally.
Margaery nods, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.” She says, presses a deep blue gown into her arms. A little long for her, it comes up a shade too short on Sansa, and so she makes a point of wearing flats whenever she borrows it to wear. Sansa’s eyes meet the older woman’s and she understands - flat shoes are flattering for a short man.
She reads the evening paper in the taxi on her way over. The ink rubs off on her fingers, and then on her face when she reaches up to rub her temple before she notices. Shit, she breathes.
“Bless you, Ma’am.” Says the driver.
Petyr greets her as Miss Stark, and she excuses herself to the lavatory immediately, scrubbing her nose and then her fingers until they are red rather than black before meeting the remaining guests - Varys, a camp European sort who reaches up immediately to wipe the ink smudge off her face, Ros, a beautiful women whose accent she recognises but can’t quite place and, most strikingly, Tywin Lannister, the man whose grandson she was supposed to marry so many moons ago. He acts as though he has forgotten her, bowing and kissing her still-damp hand like any gentleman. “A wondrous acquaintance, to be sure.” He says, and Sansa’s halfway to believing him when she remembers his family. It’s easy enough to reinvent yourself in New York, but even here there’s mud that sticks.
Their host knows this too, and so he just pours the champagne and stands back to spectate.
Sansa notes this, and if she’s honest she expected nothing less, “Keep up, Sir.” She teases, raises a laugh from Ros.
“Anyone would’ve thought he wanted us off our rockers,” Ros stage-whispers to her conspiratorially. She does not notice Varys’ or Tywin’s gaze, or if she does she ignores them. “What secrets doesn’t he know that he wants us to tell?”
“I have no secrets.”
Ros cocks her head, looks at Sansa with something approaching kindness but is probably closer to disbelief, “Of course you don’t, little dove.”
The gentlemen have retired to the balcony for a smoke when Ros pulls her aside. There’s a lilt to her accent that Sansa places, then loses again. “Where did you say you were from?”
“Somewhere very far away,” she says, scoops her hair over her shoulder. It’s a brighter red than Sansa’s, and she fancies that it’s been hennaed to make it shine brighter in the Manhattan sun. “It doesn’t matter where you come from anymore, Sansa. We make ourselves and we break ourselves, and no one cares about the before or the after.”
“I’m not sure I believe that.”
Ros’ takes her hand. “You’re young and pretty in New York City. You don’t have to-“ her eyes flick towards the billowing curtains, the voices beyond, “-- but you will. Soon enough you will.”
The other girls words haunt her all the way home. She considers a taxi, decides to walk instead, tucking her bag into the inside pocket of her coat and pulling it tight around her. Her heels clack on the cobbles, and by the time she rounds the block to the boarding house rain’s beginning to spit. There’s an all-night café three doors down that she slips into, ordering a strong coffee and three slices of toast.
She sees Loras before he sees her. “You’re out late.” She says. It’s a school night, after all and while it’s true that there are more responsible employees in New York than Loras she ventures that he does actually care, if only occasionally and with practised nonchalence.
He only shrugs and stares into his cup. “Lost track of time.” He says, “And you’re hardly one to talk. This’ll be, what, the third night this week you’ve snuck in through the window?”
Her smile’s sheepish. “I don’t have anywhere to be in the morning.”
There’s a silence when the waitress hands her the toast and turns to fetch jam and marmalade. Sansa adds three sugars to her coffee, then a splash of milk. “Tywin Lannister was at Petyr’s party,” she says, keeps her tone conversational.
If Margaery was here Loras would act interested, but she’s not and he doesn’t. “Baelish likes powerful men and pretty girls. Same as everyone.”
“Not the same as you.” She replies, meaning for it to sound deep. Instead it sounds sharp and Loras shifts in his seat, drains his coffee.
He sits a little straighter, eyes wider for the caffeine. “I’ll walk you home.”
“It’s three doors.”
“I’ll walk you.”
Once, her heart would’ve leapt at the prospect.
Ros calls by the boarding house to invite Sansa to lunch the following day. It’s Margaery who greets her, and Sansa stands back to observe her marvel at the silk of her dress, and the tone of her hair and watches as Ros in turn praises Marg’s figure and slash of bright red lipstick. Every compliment is echoed by another, far superior, and it’s almost enough to make Sansa laugh.
They buy bagels from the Jewish place three blocks from hers, then wander up to Central Park to eat them. All the way, Ros chatters, about the weather, about the clothes of passers-by, about how charmed she was by Sansa last night. Sansa, for her part, lets it wash over her.
Eventually they settle on a bench. A companionable silence falls for a few moments. “Why did you invite me to lunch?” Sansa asks.
“I wanted to get to know you a little better.” Ros says, “Petyr’s fascinated by you, and what fascinates him fascinates me.”
“Why?”
Ros’ smile is opaque, “I told you that we make ourselves. Sometime we need a little help. Petyr helped me, and now I help him.”
It takes another invitation from Petyr for Sansa to understand what Ros meant.
He drinks to much wine with dinner and slumps beside her, now. “Sansa,” he says, slurring it, “Sansa?” He says again, and she knows he means to say, Cat?
Even in the land of the free everyone belongs to somebody.
Not her, though, not now - she has flown the nest.
end.