[fic: a song of ice and fire]
you will find no safe harbor here
asoiaf. sansa stark x robb stark. au. yes, sweet, you have won but what exactly is your prize? ~2550 | r
for the starkcest ficathon
She has stood on these steps before, Sansa thinks. It was not as cool as this, and her hair was done up and her gown carefully pressed. Now she stands, haggard and tired, and her mother grips her so tightly she thinks her bones might shatter. She does not begrudge Catelyn Stark the grip.
Joffrey goes screaming, cursing, demanding the false king return his crown. There is madness in his eyes, and Sansa wonders if it has always been there, lurking at the edges, brought into stark relief with a golden crown on a golden head.
Cersei Lannister only kneels and inclines her neck. Sansa’s nails bite into her mother’s arm and she gasps. No, Sansa thinks, no. Scream. Beg for mercy. Beg them to stay the blade, beg them to spare your life, your son’s life. Beg for mercy so that it can be denied to you, as what was done to me.
But there are no words from the Queen Regent as she stoops in the pool of her eldest son’s blood. She looks as radiant as the sun, as fierce as a lioness, and her lips remained closed. Not even words of prayer pass through them. The Queen Regent has never subscribed to a power higher than her own.
She turns her head and Sansa holds the queen’s eyes. A smile ghosts at the corner of her lips-her father and brothers heads all decorate the high wall, and soon hers and her son’s will join them, and yet she smiles.
It’s as if she is saying, yes, sweet, you have won but exactly is your prize?
Robb Stark, King in the North, swings Ice down.
Sansa looks at her brother, her king, as they sit in his private chambers. He says nothing, only observes her, one wine goblet clasped in his hand. Has it grown bigger, since she has last seen it? Has he? Grey Wind prowls just at the door, and Sansa feels a worn, familiar pang. Oh, Lady, how tall might you have grown?
“You’re so quiet,” Robb says, sounding unhappy.
I have been singing for months and my voice has grown hoarse, Sansa does not say. “I have no idea what a king might wish to speak to me of.”
He scowls. “I’m your brother.”
“And my king.”
He is quiet.
Sansa turns her head, and observes the still hearth. Robb heats so easily, in King’s Landing, but she has grown used to the warmth of the south. The humidity has grown and festered inside her like disease.
“They say that Cersei offered to trade me and Arya, for her brother.”
The fingers tighten over the wine goblet. “Yes,” he says.
Her eyes close, briefly. She had wished he would decry it, even if it would have been a lie. Her life has been built upon lies after all-men are good and knights are noble and you will marry a fine prince and be his queen-what would one more be, if it would bring her comfort?
“You didn’t, though.” She opens her eyes. “We were not worth the Kingslayer.”
“You are worth ten Kingslayers and Tywin Lannister besides,” Robb snaps darkly.
“But not enough to trade,” she repeats. How much might have been spared, saved, if she and Arya had measured equal to Jaime Lannister? Joffrey’s beatings, the Queen’s sly cruelty, Arya’s life, Sansa’s sanity?
“You don’t understand. My bannermen would have strung me up if I had agreed to that trade.”
She laughs, bitter and hollow. “You are a king, Robb. You can do as you please.” Hadn’t Joffrey taught her that much, at least?
“Tell me what you want,” Robb says, and he sounds like that boy she had hugged goodbye to at Winterfell, snow catching and melting in their hair.
Winterfell.
“I want to go home,” she says. “Please, Robb, send me home.”
“I can’t.”
It’s just one more bitter disappointment, yet it catches between her ribs and twists. He will not give her even that? “Why?” she demands, anguished.
“Because Theon Greyjoy has taken Winterfell,” Robb says quietly.
I will not weep, Sansa tells herself, but finds that she did not need to. She is like a dried up well, with nothing but dust rattling around between her bones. She feels pinched, pushed together, until she is a speck upon the wall, of nothing significant.
She flees the room. She had thought the fighting done, but she’d always been a foolish child.
They will lead Tyrion Lannister out in chains, to take him to the Wall.
“Not sure what use they’ll have for a dwarf,” he says with flash brevity, “but if that last missive is anything to go by, the brothers will take what they can.”
Sansa goes and sits with him, sometimes. Odd, that he is the only face she feels familiar with now. He was kind to her when she was captive, he is kind to her now that those roles are reversed.
“Will you miss them? Your brother and your sister?”
Tyrion’s face darkens, but only fleetingly. He has learned to sing as well. “Of course, my lady, I will mourn them every day of my life. And my father too. And Joffrey, though he was a coward and cruel. They’re family. You love them despite yourself.”
“If I were your sister,” she murmurs, “would you have traded Robb for me?”
“I don’t know,” Tyrion answers. “I’ve never been a king so I can’t claim to have ever known a king’s mind.”
When Robb at last calls for his Frey bride to come to King’s Landing, Sansa doesn’t think much of the pale, trembling woman. She’s too thin by half, and holds her husband and king’s hand like it might jump up and snap at her.
“He might come to love her,” Catelyn says neutrally, brushing out Sansa’s hair. She never remarks on how thin it has grown. “In time.”
Sansa sees herself in the mirror, taller than the day she came to this awful hot place, with tension and grief etched into her face.
“I don’t claim to know a king’s mind,” is all she says.
She and her mother and her king and brother sit in his private parlor. Robb has had the hearth lit, and warms his hands by it. Catelyn sits quietly. Her lady mother always sits quietly, since she came. Does she think of Bran and little Rickon, in Theon Greyjoy’s clutches? Sansa tries very hard not to think of them, like she had when a different king sat on the Iron Throne, and instead she thinks of Theon Greyjoy. So handsome and always smiling. He and Robb had been as thick as thieves, but he took Winterfell from them, stole it from them.
Life is not a song, Sansa thinks, elsewise she’d be on her way to Winterfell.
The little porcelain horse is in her hands before she can think. It crashes and shatters against the wall beside Robb Stark’s head. He only stares at her.
“You left me,” she snarls, like a wolf.
“Sansa!” Catelyn bursts to her feet and Sansa understands. This is not like a fight with Robb when he was just my brother. I have threatened my king. He could kill me, if he wished. Good.
“Leave us,” Robb says.
“Robb,” Catelyn whispers, her eyes lock on his. Sansa knows her mother thinks she’s changed, though she will not mention it, but she wonders now does Catelyn Stark think her son changed? Does she worry what he will do, to his sister? Is she afraid of him?
“My Lady of Winterfell,” Robb repeats. “Leave. Us.”
And she does, and takes air and warmth with her. Perhaps that it the point. Robb is showing her that she cannot hold them together, no matter how much she might wish to. Robb Stark is a king, and Sansa Stark is no longer a little girl. They made her a woman, scooped out her insides and put something else in its place. Her joy was sapped from her breast, and her cheeks grew hollow. She feasted on the food that tasted like the blood of her father, and saw her sister’s ghost in the shadows.
“You left me,” she screams. “You left me to rot! You left Arya to die! You abandoned us! You abandoned me! You measured me against your crown and said I was worth less! You did not come. You did not come.”
His arms come around her, and that is worse than being struck. “But I did, Sansa,” he says quietly against her ear. A hand moves down her back, tangling in the edges of her hair. “I did come for you.”
“You came too late,” she whispers. “You came too late.”
She jerks away, and winter blooms like a tumor on her lips and Robb Stark, her brother and her king, kisses her, mouth flat and open against hers. She feels his chest grind into her and she stands up on her toes to kiss him back, to bite into his lips, to drag him against her. The Hound almost kissed her once, and she almost let him, but this is not the same as that. The Hound had cried like a broken toy callously disregard. Robb groans into her mouths, digs his hand into her back and draws her flush against him.
Heat burns like acid, like alchemist’s fire on Blackwater, in her stomach and she’s pulling at doublet and breeches and laces and her back hits the soft down of his bed. They took something out of me, she thinks, the whole world. They ripped it from me and mounted it on a spike on wall. Put it back in me. Sew me back together, Robb.
He wretches away from her and lays on his side. “No,” he says. “No. We’re not the Lannisters.”
“No,” she agrees, “we’re not.” Jaime Lannister would have traded you for Cersei in a thrice. We are not the Lannisters.
He gets up and leaves. Sansa stays on her back in his bed, arms sprawled out. I will not weep, she thinks, and does not.
Robb gives her a seat on his council, perhaps to apologize. She could tell him that she would prefer no gift at all rather than this one. She has grown weary of politics and the Game of Thrones. She has tasted enough of it to last her a life time.
“Dorne,” Ser Rodrick says to her left. “We must secure Dorne. The Tyrells march with us, but only begrudgingly. And the Arryns will not come down from their damned loft. We must give the Tyrells no reasons to forge an alliance with Dorne.”
“The Dorne will never agree to an alliance with the Starks,” Robb points out. “Not while they’re still fuming about Myrcella Baratheon’s broken engagement.”
“They might be placated with a more inciting offer,” Varys the Spider points out. “After all, would not the sister of a king be a far better prize than a disposed princess likely the product of incest?”
“I will not,” Robb snarls, “give my sister to Myrcella Baratheon’s cast off.”
“I did not speak of Trystane Martell,” Varys says with an ominous sort of calm. “They have an elder son.”
“Quentyn Martell? He possesses no real caliber to be sure,” Ser Rodick says, “but he’s still the eldest Martell son.”
“No.” Robb slams a fist down on the table. “No. My sister has suffered enough. She’ll marry no one unless she pleases. I will not barter her off like some-”
“I agree to the marriage,” Sansa says, and the room goes quiet.
Robb’s head swivels towards her. Is he thinking of those kisses, in his fire-warmed room? Of his hands on her back and in her hair, of hers on his breeches? Is he feeling the sting of betrayal, like a maiden praying for her brother to rescue her and rising each morning to disappointed hopes until they wilt away like flowers in winter? Good, Sansa thinks.
“He’s no knight, my lady,” Ser Rodrick says gently.
“I’ve had my fill of knights,” Sansa says. And kings, she might have added but her courtesy is still her armor and she knows better. “He might serve me better.”
Robb kisses her in the shadows of the Red Keep.
“Don’t go,” he says, and his mouth sucks at the underside of her chin. “If you go, your skin will turn brown with the sun and your body hard with sand. Winter will melt out of you like thawing ice.”
Sansa moans, but keeps it locked up like a buried treasure in her chest. She turns her head away. “You’ve a wife to see to, Your Grace.” She leans in closer, and her hands rests over the spot where his heart pounds. “We are not the Lannisters.”
He lets her go.
“If you wish to stay, to cry off, you’ve only to say,” Catelyn assures her the night before. She brushes out Sansa’s hair. It’s grown fuller in the last few days, but she does not mention it. “You don’t have to go, Sansa.”
I cannot go home, but I cannot stay here. If my whole life is to be a prison, let it be one of my own choosing, Sansa thinks but does not know how to explain this to her mother, who has lost husband and children all.
“I have no wish to stay,” she explains gently. “I wish to leave. I wish to go.”
Catelyn presses her forehead to Sansa’s hair. She might be thinking, I will not weep. And the lady does not. There will be time yet for weeping. A lie, but a comforting one.
“Shall I braid your hair then?” her mother asks.
“No,” Sansa says, “I will leave it dowin. I will no longer go to foreign cities and let them pour me into their awaiting molds. I will come to them a wolf, and stay a wolf all of my days.”
And this time, Catelyn Stark does weep.
They bear her away on an awning and the sheer fabric of her canopy dapples purple shadows across her blue gown. The king and his lady mother and his queen, sitting beside him like a small waning moon, watch her from a terrace above. The people of King’s Landing throw flowers at her feet.
I could stay, Sansa Stark thinks, I could stay. We could be as Ser Jaime and Queen Cersei, with shadowy kisses and secret touches. I could marry a man, but all my children could be his. I could carve my Winterfell out in his bones, I could make his ribs my godswood, I could make his heart my weirwood tree. I could throw myself from here, say I’ve change my mind and that I don’t want to go, and he’ll put his cloak up around me and bear me to his rooms. I could offer myself up to the altar of his grace.
Yes. She could. That is why she puckers her lips and lowers her head, sways in time with the motions of the men taking her from the city. Robb Stark watches her leave, but from the distance she cannot ascertain the look upon his face.
We are not the Lannisters, she thinks, but what are we?
asoiaf. sansa stark x robb stark. au. yes, sweet, you have won but what exactly is your prize? ~2550 | r
for the starkcest ficathon
She has stood on these steps before, Sansa thinks. It was not as cool as this, and her hair was done up and her gown carefully pressed. Now she stands, haggard and tired, and her mother grips her so tightly she thinks her bones might shatter. She does not begrudge Catelyn Stark the grip.
Joffrey goes screaming, cursing, demanding the false king return his crown. There is madness in his eyes, and Sansa wonders if it has always been there, lurking at the edges, brought into stark relief with a golden crown on a golden head.
Cersei Lannister only kneels and inclines her neck. Sansa’s nails bite into her mother’s arm and she gasps. No, Sansa thinks, no. Scream. Beg for mercy. Beg them to stay the blade, beg them to spare your life, your son’s life. Beg for mercy so that it can be denied to you, as what was done to me.
But there are no words from the Queen Regent as she stoops in the pool of her eldest son’s blood. She looks as radiant as the sun, as fierce as a lioness, and her lips remained closed. Not even words of prayer pass through them. The Queen Regent has never subscribed to a power higher than her own.
She turns her head and Sansa holds the queen’s eyes. A smile ghosts at the corner of her lips-her father and brothers heads all decorate the high wall, and soon hers and her son’s will join them, and yet she smiles.
It’s as if she is saying, yes, sweet, you have won but exactly is your prize?
Robb Stark, King in the North, swings Ice down.
Sansa looks at her brother, her king, as they sit in his private chambers. He says nothing, only observes her, one wine goblet clasped in his hand. Has it grown bigger, since she has last seen it? Has he? Grey Wind prowls just at the door, and Sansa feels a worn, familiar pang. Oh, Lady, how tall might you have grown?
“You’re so quiet,” Robb says, sounding unhappy.
I have been singing for months and my voice has grown hoarse, Sansa does not say. “I have no idea what a king might wish to speak to me of.”
He scowls. “I’m your brother.”
“And my king.”
He is quiet.
Sansa turns her head, and observes the still hearth. Robb heats so easily, in King’s Landing, but she has grown used to the warmth of the south. The humidity has grown and festered inside her like disease.
“They say that Cersei offered to trade me and Arya, for her brother.”
The fingers tighten over the wine goblet. “Yes,” he says.
Her eyes close, briefly. She had wished he would decry it, even if it would have been a lie. Her life has been built upon lies after all-men are good and knights are noble and you will marry a fine prince and be his queen-what would one more be, if it would bring her comfort?
“You didn’t, though.” She opens her eyes. “We were not worth the Kingslayer.”
“You are worth ten Kingslayers and Tywin Lannister besides,” Robb snaps darkly.
“But not enough to trade,” she repeats. How much might have been spared, saved, if she and Arya had measured equal to Jaime Lannister? Joffrey’s beatings, the Queen’s sly cruelty, Arya’s life, Sansa’s sanity?
“You don’t understand. My bannermen would have strung me up if I had agreed to that trade.”
She laughs, bitter and hollow. “You are a king, Robb. You can do as you please.” Hadn’t Joffrey taught her that much, at least?
“Tell me what you want,” Robb says, and he sounds like that boy she had hugged goodbye to at Winterfell, snow catching and melting in their hair.
Winterfell.
“I want to go home,” she says. “Please, Robb, send me home.”
“I can’t.”
It’s just one more bitter disappointment, yet it catches between her ribs and twists. He will not give her even that? “Why?” she demands, anguished.
“Because Theon Greyjoy has taken Winterfell,” Robb says quietly.
I will not weep, Sansa tells herself, but finds that she did not need to. She is like a dried up well, with nothing but dust rattling around between her bones. She feels pinched, pushed together, until she is a speck upon the wall, of nothing significant.
She flees the room. She had thought the fighting done, but she’d always been a foolish child.
They will lead Tyrion Lannister out in chains, to take him to the Wall.
“Not sure what use they’ll have for a dwarf,” he says with flash brevity, “but if that last missive is anything to go by, the brothers will take what they can.”
Sansa goes and sits with him, sometimes. Odd, that he is the only face she feels familiar with now. He was kind to her when she was captive, he is kind to her now that those roles are reversed.
“Will you miss them? Your brother and your sister?”
Tyrion’s face darkens, but only fleetingly. He has learned to sing as well. “Of course, my lady, I will mourn them every day of my life. And my father too. And Joffrey, though he was a coward and cruel. They’re family. You love them despite yourself.”
“If I were your sister,” she murmurs, “would you have traded Robb for me?”
“I don’t know,” Tyrion answers. “I’ve never been a king so I can’t claim to have ever known a king’s mind.”
When Robb at last calls for his Frey bride to come to King’s Landing, Sansa doesn’t think much of the pale, trembling woman. She’s too thin by half, and holds her husband and king’s hand like it might jump up and snap at her.
“He might come to love her,” Catelyn says neutrally, brushing out Sansa’s hair. She never remarks on how thin it has grown. “In time.”
Sansa sees herself in the mirror, taller than the day she came to this awful hot place, with tension and grief etched into her face.
“I don’t claim to know a king’s mind,” is all she says.
She and her mother and her king and brother sit in his private parlor. Robb has had the hearth lit, and warms his hands by it. Catelyn sits quietly. Her lady mother always sits quietly, since she came. Does she think of Bran and little Rickon, in Theon Greyjoy’s clutches? Sansa tries very hard not to think of them, like she had when a different king sat on the Iron Throne, and instead she thinks of Theon Greyjoy. So handsome and always smiling. He and Robb had been as thick as thieves, but he took Winterfell from them, stole it from them.
Life is not a song, Sansa thinks, elsewise she’d be on her way to Winterfell.
The little porcelain horse is in her hands before she can think. It crashes and shatters against the wall beside Robb Stark’s head. He only stares at her.
“You left me,” she snarls, like a wolf.
“Sansa!” Catelyn bursts to her feet and Sansa understands. This is not like a fight with Robb when he was just my brother. I have threatened my king. He could kill me, if he wished. Good.
“Leave us,” Robb says.
“Robb,” Catelyn whispers, her eyes lock on his. Sansa knows her mother thinks she’s changed, though she will not mention it, but she wonders now does Catelyn Stark think her son changed? Does she worry what he will do, to his sister? Is she afraid of him?
“My Lady of Winterfell,” Robb repeats. “Leave. Us.”
And she does, and takes air and warmth with her. Perhaps that it the point. Robb is showing her that she cannot hold them together, no matter how much she might wish to. Robb Stark is a king, and Sansa Stark is no longer a little girl. They made her a woman, scooped out her insides and put something else in its place. Her joy was sapped from her breast, and her cheeks grew hollow. She feasted on the food that tasted like the blood of her father, and saw her sister’s ghost in the shadows.
“You left me,” she screams. “You left me to rot! You left Arya to die! You abandoned us! You abandoned me! You measured me against your crown and said I was worth less! You did not come. You did not come.”
His arms come around her, and that is worse than being struck. “But I did, Sansa,” he says quietly against her ear. A hand moves down her back, tangling in the edges of her hair. “I did come for you.”
“You came too late,” she whispers. “You came too late.”
She jerks away, and winter blooms like a tumor on her lips and Robb Stark, her brother and her king, kisses her, mouth flat and open against hers. She feels his chest grind into her and she stands up on her toes to kiss him back, to bite into his lips, to drag him against her. The Hound almost kissed her once, and she almost let him, but this is not the same as that. The Hound had cried like a broken toy callously disregard. Robb groans into her mouths, digs his hand into her back and draws her flush against him.
Heat burns like acid, like alchemist’s fire on Blackwater, in her stomach and she’s pulling at doublet and breeches and laces and her back hits the soft down of his bed. They took something out of me, she thinks, the whole world. They ripped it from me and mounted it on a spike on wall. Put it back in me. Sew me back together, Robb.
He wretches away from her and lays on his side. “No,” he says. “No. We’re not the Lannisters.”
“No,” she agrees, “we’re not.” Jaime Lannister would have traded you for Cersei in a thrice. We are not the Lannisters.
He gets up and leaves. Sansa stays on her back in his bed, arms sprawled out. I will not weep, she thinks, and does not.
Robb gives her a seat on his council, perhaps to apologize. She could tell him that she would prefer no gift at all rather than this one. She has grown weary of politics and the Game of Thrones. She has tasted enough of it to last her a life time.
“Dorne,” Ser Rodrick says to her left. “We must secure Dorne. The Tyrells march with us, but only begrudgingly. And the Arryns will not come down from their damned loft. We must give the Tyrells no reasons to forge an alliance with Dorne.”
“The Dorne will never agree to an alliance with the Starks,” Robb points out. “Not while they’re still fuming about Myrcella Baratheon’s broken engagement.”
“They might be placated with a more inciting offer,” Varys the Spider points out. “After all, would not the sister of a king be a far better prize than a disposed princess likely the product of incest?”
“I will not,” Robb snarls, “give my sister to Myrcella Baratheon’s cast off.”
“I did not speak of Trystane Martell,” Varys says with an ominous sort of calm. “They have an elder son.”
“Quentyn Martell? He possesses no real caliber to be sure,” Ser Rodick says, “but he’s still the eldest Martell son.”
“No.” Robb slams a fist down on the table. “No. My sister has suffered enough. She’ll marry no one unless she pleases. I will not barter her off like some-”
“I agree to the marriage,” Sansa says, and the room goes quiet.
Robb’s head swivels towards her. Is he thinking of those kisses, in his fire-warmed room? Of his hands on her back and in her hair, of hers on his breeches? Is he feeling the sting of betrayal, like a maiden praying for her brother to rescue her and rising each morning to disappointed hopes until they wilt away like flowers in winter? Good, Sansa thinks.
“He’s no knight, my lady,” Ser Rodrick says gently.
“I’ve had my fill of knights,” Sansa says. And kings, she might have added but her courtesy is still her armor and she knows better. “He might serve me better.”
Robb kisses her in the shadows of the Red Keep.
“Don’t go,” he says, and his mouth sucks at the underside of her chin. “If you go, your skin will turn brown with the sun and your body hard with sand. Winter will melt out of you like thawing ice.”
Sansa moans, but keeps it locked up like a buried treasure in her chest. She turns her head away. “You’ve a wife to see to, Your Grace.” She leans in closer, and her hands rests over the spot where his heart pounds. “We are not the Lannisters.”
He lets her go.
“If you wish to stay, to cry off, you’ve only to say,” Catelyn assures her the night before. She brushes out Sansa’s hair. It’s grown fuller in the last few days, but she does not mention it. “You don’t have to go, Sansa.”
I cannot go home, but I cannot stay here. If my whole life is to be a prison, let it be one of my own choosing, Sansa thinks but does not know how to explain this to her mother, who has lost husband and children all.
“I have no wish to stay,” she explains gently. “I wish to leave. I wish to go.”
Catelyn presses her forehead to Sansa’s hair. She might be thinking, I will not weep. And the lady does not. There will be time yet for weeping. A lie, but a comforting one.
“Shall I braid your hair then?” her mother asks.
“No,” Sansa says, “I will leave it dowin. I will no longer go to foreign cities and let them pour me into their awaiting molds. I will come to them a wolf, and stay a wolf all of my days.”
And this time, Catelyn Stark does weep.
They bear her away on an awning and the sheer fabric of her canopy dapples purple shadows across her blue gown. The king and his lady mother and his queen, sitting beside him like a small waning moon, watch her from a terrace above. The people of King’s Landing throw flowers at her feet.
I could stay, Sansa Stark thinks, I could stay. We could be as Ser Jaime and Queen Cersei, with shadowy kisses and secret touches. I could marry a man, but all my children could be his. I could carve my Winterfell out in his bones, I could make his ribs my godswood, I could make his heart my weirwood tree. I could throw myself from here, say I’ve change my mind and that I don’t want to go, and he’ll put his cloak up around me and bear me to his rooms. I could offer myself up to the altar of his grace.
Yes. She could. That is why she puckers her lips and lowers her head, sways in time with the motions of the men taking her from the city. Robb Stark watches her leave, but from the distance she cannot ascertain the look upon his face.
We are not the Lannisters, she thinks, but what are we?