A/N: Happy birthday, Jess! And thanks to Mira for reading this over for me! Future fic, obviously, set very post-ADWD.
His shadow casts long and dark over her the day Rickon is brought, at last, to the ruins of Winterfell. Sansa is not his mother, but she will have to raise him all the same, among the rubble and the gnarled blackened stone.
Jon is dead. Bran, vanished. The Dragon Queen gone, fallen with the Wall. Aegon rules in King's Landing, but not as a king. Stannis, also dead, his promises to help restore House Stark to the Northern seat gone to rest with his bones in the crypt below Storm's End, where his daughter now sits.
Arya is gone again, back across the sea out of White Harbor with a contingent of Manderly men to secure the loans necessary to secure the gold necessary to rebuild. She will be back, shortly, as soon as the currents favor a trip back from Braavos.
It is Sandor who looms over her when she kneels to receive her brother, accompanied by Ser Davos and Shaggydog, who is monstrous and black, green eyes shining out from behind a wide set skull and a flop of wild fur.
Rickon is eight, and does not remember her.
Bran's age, when I saw him last.
"Welcome home, brother."
Stiltedly, he bows to her. "Sister."
Smiling as kindly as she is able, Sansa wraps her arm around his shoulder and leads him over the snow packed into the ground, into the ashes, and into the Great Hall.
His shadow casts long and dark over her when she prays in the godswood later that night. When she finishes, and she doesn't make to move from in front of the heart tree, he sits next to her, and sets their shadows side by side.
"I cared for Sweetrobin, for as long as I could," Sansa says at last. Before Petyr murdered him, too, she doesn't say. Just as he murdered my aunt, my husband, and my daughter. "But Rickon is so unlike him. He is wild, and that is not to say that Robin was well-behaved, but Sweetrobin was so sickly—"
He barks a laugh at that. "Your brother is a little lord, and has the benefit of two sisters who are much older than him." She wraps her fingers around the finely-sanded wood of his cane, trailing her fingers down the grain, sweeping off dirt and detriment. He watches her, and she knows it, letting a curtain of auburn hair fall to obscure the expression on her face. His, in response, softens. "You have time. And Bran has only been missing a month."
Sansa considers standing, but does not, looking up out and over the godswood. The earth has been scorched, and through the snow the knotted roots of the weirwood pucker up in a fruitless search for sustenance. Although many of her Northern lords have offered her a sapling, she has asked Samwell to read what he can on how to save her family's hearth.
"I just want them to come home," she says, sighing tremendously. She does not remove her hand from his walking staff, knowing that if she smoothed her hands through the folds of her dark wool skirt he would think it a threat to stand. "I think he is alive. I dream of him. But that sounds… silly. Foolish. I didn't feel it when my father died, or when my mother truly left us. I believed them all for dead, for years."
Until she didn't, until riders from the Wall came to her encampment at the Twins, after she sacked House Frey at the behest of her advisers, and Petyr. Where Nymeria first found her, and Sandor, and they still called her the Queen in the North.
Petyr had been asleep, and she had taken the letter to read, and in the candlelight of her tent cracked open the seal of Stannis Baratheon and learned that Bran and Rickon had returned from Beyond the Wall, and he would restore them to Winterfell if she ceased to call herself Queen and directed the North to bend the knee to him.
Yes. Of course, had been her first thought.
Yes, and then, Petyr must not know. Their existence puts our plans at a disadvantage. The babe in my belly has quickened, and is heir to three kingdoms. But Bran and Rickon are my brothers.
She burnt the letter and said nothing to no one, and smiled kindly at Petyr when he came to her at breakfast, plying her with foods to nourish her babe. Oh, how he had promised Harry when he sent him the West to treat with the ruined remnants of the Lannister and Tyrell host. He had promised he would look after us both. Us, three. Sweetrobin, the babe, and I.
And now two out the three, are dead.
"Don't waste your time what may or may not bloody be, Sansa. The boy in front of you is where you need to be. And when your brat of a sister comes home—"
"Do not—"
She will not allow Arya to be referred to as such, not when they are still fragile, least of all by him, no matter what he did or did not do for Arya. Sansa is thankful to him, but she will not repeat the sins of her childhood with Sandor Clegane.
Laughing, he tugs at the cane, trying to topple her off her balance until she cedes, and gifts him a breathy giggle. "When the Lady Arya comes home, dwell on her, as well. If anyone else dead decides to dance through the bloody gates, then you can dwell on them, too."
A darkness settles over them; Sansa has a lichyard full of bones and very little else. Gold, from Arya's last letter, will come. And she has men with blood in their veins and loyalty in their hearts, men from three kingdoms who are building their homes around the bones of hers.
But the dead do not dance, they walk. The Others have been turned back, but their puppets linger, frostbitten facsimiles of human beings that are shot upon sight by her archers. Some, who wear the faces of men and women that she knew.
She sighs, and happiness slides through her fingers as water through a sieve. Digging through the snow with a gloveless hand, she packs snow into tight filaments between her fingers, before uncovering a root and abandoning the venture.
"Sometimes, I wonder how all of this survived…"
Her dreams of Bran are always dark and cold, pulsing red and knotted in sorrow and mystery, and Sansa knows not if they are her fever dreams, returned, or something else entirely.
Sandor takes her hand between his, and brushes ice from her fingertips before pressing his palm over her knuckles. It is an act; they touch each other as a lady and her guard should not, and make pretend that their little plays are mere fancies of chivalry. "It survived, Sansa," he rasps. "That is what matters."
"So much didn't," she whispers, and says nothing more, because he was there when Petyr poisoned Sweetrobin and by chance, her as well, and he withered and lingered and finally, died, all the while her belly contracted and blood rushed out between her thighs, dark and sticky.
Word of Harry's death at the hands of Cersei Lannister (before her own, at Jaime's) had come days later, and Sansa had known, lying in sickbed, having been forbidden even a glance at her malformed child—a girl, my lady, Sandor had told her with softness she had not known in years, mopping her brow between hallucinations and seizures—that all of Petyr's careful planning had come undone in his own haste.
And if only she had told him of Bran and Rickon's survival, he would have diverted his attention elsewhere, left Sweetrobin alone.
Lady Arryn, they call her. No longer Queen Sansa, and not Lady Stark. She is Lady Sansa to many, and Lady Arryn to more.
"And much did," he counters, firm and almost angry, and she turns to look at him. In moments, self-chastisement washes away his anger, and she can hear him reciting the Elder Brother's lessons at himself. She cannot think of something to make him stop, but cannot take his hand like this. "Rickon will… he will gentle. You managed to tame the likes of me, didn't you? He will not… you won't fail him, if that's what you worry about. He won't grow to be a brute like me."
"I won't let harm come to him," she swears.
She knows.
"I was there when you ordered Littlefinger's beheading, little bird," he reminds her, and turning her palm upwards she allows him to take her hand. Molding her expression into one of tutored blankness, she squeezes her fingers into the gaps between his, blinking back tears when the warmth of his calloused hand bleed into hers.
No one touches her.
Not even Arya, her steadfast bedmate. Rickon neither, for she is not the mother he remembered. Jeyne Poole shirks touch, and Sansa does not begrudge her that. And Jeyne Westerling is nothing but a shadow against the stone, her quiet defiance too similar to what Sansa has experienced.
And he did not, not until she stood from the table in Petyr's tent and shouted for help, before bending at the waist, vomiting blood. His shadow cast long and dark over her for days, while her body fought to cling to life.
And once she was strong enough, he helped her stand to watch Sweetrobin's body be sent back to the Eyrie, and once the cart was out of sight, he let go.
Sandor stood two steps behind her when she held her chin high and ordered that Petyr Baelish be sentenced to death, and spoke five years' worth of treasons against him, and renounced her title as Queen for Bran.
Lady Arryn.
"Sweetrobin was the price for my brothers, one of whom is lost to me again." A woman's lot in life is sorrow, she once was told. From the cradle to the crypt; her daughter's life was hardly more than that journey. "Sweetrobin, and my child. What does that make me, Sandor?"
He hesitates, the scarred side of his face crinkling as he opens his mouth over an unanswered question.
"A Stark," he finally says, and then considers. "If it pleases you."
When he first came to her, he bent the knee. Fell to the ground, leg barely working after weeks on the road. I ask for your forgiveness, he said.
Petyr had been watching her, and so fearfully she had concealed her relief. Sandor Clegane had frightened her so in King's Landing, but this was not that man. Nor the man she had dreamed of, but this man came to her alone and to no other, to no promise of home, or power, or lands.
So she had folded her hands into her skirts.
You must earn it.
And he has.
"Winter has come, indeed…" she says. Lady Sansa Stark. She wishes only to return. "Rickon will be a good lord, if it be needed of him, and summer is only a dream away."
"Only," he laughs, in a way that is not humorous at all.
In the distance, there is a shout, and then the twang of an arrow being released into the night. Snow lands into the torches anchored into the walls, and hisses.
"Only," she echoes.
And then stands.
There are rumors of her infertility, and she encourages them, for if they believe that she is as barren as Aunt Lysa was, no one will want her hand in marriage.
Of course, Sansa does not know herself if the rumors are true, and does not wish to test them.
She once dreamed of becoming a wife and mother, and the game of thrones had soured these aspirations for her. Childbed, now, is a haze of sorrow and pain, fever and sickness. Let me remain here, she thinks. Let me be the Queen of Snow. The Queen of Wolves. The Queen of Ice. Sansa never expected to remember Olenna Tyrell with such fondness. Let me make fine matches for my relations, and remain here at Winterfell for the duration of my life.
But all the lords look at her like she is an empty-headed fool.
You are seven and ten, my lady. Time will change your feelings on the matter.
Moon tea, she knows. If drunk regularly, it would ruin her. One more marriage to prove that she is barren, and then return home with an annulment.
She has Rickon to raise, she thinks, petting his hair while Maester Samwell teaches him his letters. Rickon, and even though two moons have passed, Bran. And once Arya returned, her pack will be four, and they will grow big, and strong.
Bran and Rickon will grow to be strong, just like the castle walls around then.
When he growls at Maester Samwell for correcting him, Sansa turns her nails into Rickon's shoulder. He flinches through layers of wool and leather, looking balefully up at her.
"Mind yourself," she reminds him, voice gentle where her grip is not. Her shadow casts long and dark over him, and she leans down until her auburn hair spills over his shoulder. "There is no one to fight here, not I, nor Maester Samwell. Do well in your lessons—and if you do not, I shall know—and I will find you someone with whom you can fight. Am I understood?"
Blue eyes blink up at her, and Rickon nods, chastened. "Yes, sister."
But it only makes her want to pull her hair at out the roots. Sister should not have to pluck and prune the wild from her brother's skin. Sister should not have to raise. Sister should be sister, not mother. Sister will be Arya, and she will be his regent until he comes of age, and will hand him a kingdom that he will not have to sew back together, needle and thread.
Sansa knows that none of her other siblings have much the patience for needlework, or the embroidery of the fabric of a kingdom.
She kisses the top of his head.
Sandor's cane clatters down again and again onto the floor as he follows her out.
'You were once the most fearsome warrior in the Seven Kingdoms," she says, glancing at him out of the side of vision.
(His leg, the bad one, is a festering ulcer. You could have other guards, her lords tell her.
There are other guards, she always answers. And they are all around me. I am in my homeland. No one will strike me down.)
Sandor nods. "I will find someone for him."
"He is strong. The Skagosi—"
Where did Bran go? she asked him a fortnight ago.
Rickon had blinked, and cast his gaze to the floor. The Wall came down, and we were separated. I tried to hold onto him. And then his temper flared, and Sansa did her best to soothe his anger. Anger, she knows. Anger, and grief, and sorrow. Roughly-hewed little boys.
(This is her life, now, crafting roughly-hewed kingdoms and boys and men out of winter and night, trying to salvage what terror wrought on them all. Sansa Stark knows sorrow, and terror, and anger.
She can do this.)
He had looked at her like a mother.
When it was over he was gone, with Summer and Meera and Jojen.
"I will find someone."
"Thank you."
A blizzard howls through the night, wakening the drafts in the rafters of the newly-repaired great hall, and many drag their cots out to lie with one another to save warmth.
Save Sansa, who shakes snow out of her cloak and furs after returning from meeting with Lord Umber, who has been tasked with manning the guard posts throughout the night. She is exhausted, is often so, but generally with so many others in attendance. Tonight, with Arya gone, and Sandor's cot at the foot of her bed, her ladies have removed themselves to sleep nearer to the fire in the hall, and she is alone to let her cloak drop to the floor with a wet plop.
Sandor watches her as he unwraps his leg from his cot.
In time, she lets the tension drop from her shoulders, and slowly moves towards her bed. "I was not ready to be a mother. I still am not. And I do not particularly want to be. What does that make me?"
"A girl, if it pleases you," he answers roughly. "A maid not so maiden wearing the mantle of a bloody queen, marching on to continue the bloody farce day after day."
Sansa frowns at that, before kicking off her shoes in the most unladylike fashion. He stares, until she toes on her slippers. "I am seven and ten," she counters.
"As nearly was your brother, and look what they did to him." Robb was betrayed, she must keep herself from saying. For Sandor's advice may be gruff, but it is often an opinion she does not wish to hear, and therefore must force herself to hear. Cold, skin roughened by the sting of the harsh winds, she lowers herself onto her featherbed, thumbing the thick drapes hanging from the four posters. Her head snaps back to him when he next speaks. "Be grateful you recognized Littlefinger for who he was, and used him-"
She makes a reflexive moue of distress.
"He killed—and more than that, my aunt, my—"
"Yes, little bird, and then you took his head. You learned your lord father's lesson on the price of mercy," he finishes harshly, tearing the sweated-through linen wrapped around the open wound on his thigh. Six months, since Ser Robert Strong struck his lance through Sandor's poor leg, and Arya put Ser Robert to the flame.
Sansa stands, crossing down the dimly-lit bedchamber to him. "How is your leg? Does it ail you?"
"It always bloody ails me," he grouses, but leans back and allows her to palpate the edge of the wound with her fingers. "As it shall, from now until I'm rotting in the Seven Hells, where I wager it'll ail me more."
Sansa flinches, bearing her shoulders back. Please, no talk of heavens or hells. She counts too many among the dead, and dreams of Bran in dark places, and fears Rickon's wildness, the strange tongue that he speaks, his lack of direction. Time, she knows, Sweetrobin took time, and she was so much younger and weaker then, but she does not need this from Sandor. "Please do not—"
"Fine," he says sharply, before blunting the edge off his voice. "Fine."
Shaking her head, she stills her fingers. The knotted roots of sorrow are tangled down, tying her into the earth. We survived, and he knows better. "I'm sorry," she says, like the lady she is. "I just—"
"I know," he answers, as if it does not matter. So it won't.
Sansa looks up at him from her knees, staring him down. As if he does not know her silences and she does not know his. Sandor is with her because he knows what bends her smile and straightens her spine. They have traced each other's weakest spots without flinching and born the coldest nights together.
Many who have tried to love her have failed.
"Let me get the poultice," she murmurs.
She removes her gown, stripping down to her chemise before standing. And then dons her robe, heavy embroidered velvet and lined with the finest fur, a wedding gift from Harry. All of her finer things are from her time below Moat Cailin, when brocade and seed pearls and lace mattered, when she was playing the role Petyr sculpted for her in his spectacle.
Taking the herbs that Maester Samwell collected, she presses them tenderly into his leg, sternly looking up at him when he grimaces.
"It hurts."
She exhales shortly through her nose. "If you didn't move as much, it wouldn't hurt as badly."
"You're the one who has me chasing you all over this godsdamned castle!"
"Then take to your bed, I'll find someone else to dog me," she quips, startling when he laughs and stares up at him, offended.
Gently removing her hand from his leg, he begins to reach for fresh linen to dress the wound. "Don't bother with me, little bird. Go to sleep."
Her fingers sweep over his thigh before she removes herself from him. For a moment longer than he was prepared, she realizes when he stiffens, shifting almost imperceptibly on his cot. He is the only man she has touched since Petyr's head was removed in front of her. Petyr did not find it necessary to tutor her in an education on the flesh, but sharing a marriage bed with Harry did lend her some awareness as to how men function, how men think.
She looks to his breeches, and then looks away.
This, too, is knotted between them.
She knows now that the kiss planted in her memory is false. When her fever at last broke, the poison gone from her system, she was left to sift through her muddled haze of memories and fever dreams. The kiss, she knows now, is a fiction.
That does not mean she hasn't imagined what it would be like to feel Sandor between her legs, especially with him so close.
It is girlish, and perhaps foolish.
She could tell him that she does not think she will be able to sleep, and press him further, but she needs his companionship more than she can say. And so she nods, steps into her bed, and draws the curtains.
She did not intend to fall asleep, and wakes hours later from a violent dream, shuddering and sweating. Throwing open the curtains, Sansa forces herself to quiet, to chase the visions of exploding lights of purple and blue and green, of Bran's shouts and the howls of wolves of icy winds, deep reds circling down into darkness.
"Heart of winter," she repeats to herself, washing the words from her head.
She nearly screams when she throws open the drapes covering her lone glassed window, the noise choking off deep in her throat.
Green fire in the sky.
It fills the room, and when Sandor stirs, and sits up, asking what is the matter, she is brought back to another night.
"I—I do not know," she answers him truthfully. And then she dips her head, smiling ironically, rubbing her hand across her now aching forehead. "It feels as though we have been here before."
I used to think you had kissed me, the night you went away. How stupid was I? she had confessed, and his face had been inscrutable, and now she knows he was containing his horror. What had you intended to do to me, Sandor? And do not lie. You told me a hound will die for you, but never lie—
I was going to kill you. Before the Lannisters could.
She had swallowed hard. I am glad then that you left. So we could meet again, like this.
"I will keep you safe," he says, after a time. She hears his weight shifting between his good leg and his bad leg behind her.
"Something is happening," Sansa murmurs, combing her auburn hair behind her ears. "I dreamed of Bran, and the green light, of things beyond the edges of the realm. I know that something is happening. The 'heart of winter,' he told me, before a heart tree. I do not know what it is-is it like how Arya can warg? And Rickon? Is that how I know? Lady is dead, but I live—"
"Rickon does not have the dreams?" he asks gruffly, and she knows he knows the answer.
"No," she says. He does not. If Rickon did, he would tell her. That much she can trust. And Arya does not, because they sleep beside each other. "He does not. Nor Arya. It is me."
"Then perhaps Bran is telling you."
His hand lands on her shoulder, pulling her away from the window. For the first time, she notices that she had pushed the panes opens, and her front is covered in melted snow, her white chemise lacquered to her skin. But she does not shiver; the cold does not bother her. Never after the dreams.
"But telling me what?" she asks, turning so his hand does not leave her. Her mind lingers in the past, remembering as he pressed her down to the bed. There is no knife, this time. He is as harmlessly clad as she, in breeches and a tunic for sleeping. And she knows him, now, and trusts him.
There is a green light in the sky; he cannot be disaffected. He must… he used to speak of her inappropriately, in ways not befitting a lady. He has not, since the Quiet Isle. But his thoughts, she thinks, must stray like hers do.
Sandor sighs at her, stroking his thumb over her collarbone. "What do you worry about, little bird?"
"If he is coming home," she says without thinking. The heart of winter, Sansa, he had said. Cut through the root of sorrow, I am at the heart. "He is coming home?"
He snorts. "I'm not the one with the bloody dreams."
"There is nothing to do. But wait."
She's waited so long.
Thunder, or something else entirely, she thinks, roils through the night—a boom, like the one they heard the night the Wall fell, even all the way south in Winterfell. Sandor stutters towards her, a kind of shuffling, startled lope, and hisses when he steps too hard on his injured leg.
"Oh!"
Struggling to take on his weight, she wraps his arm around her waist and leads him to her bed, fussing over him and blushes, then, noticing how his eyes have strayed to the gaped opening of her chemise.
He looks down, ashamed almost, when she catches him looking. "My apologies—"
"Why?"
What has come over me? It is as if the light has filled her veins, has made her bolder knowing that her pack is almost complete, will soon run together.
He is my pack now, too. Dogs have been known to run with wolves. He is one of her roots, too. Arya and Rickon and Bran and Sandor. They are not all grown from sorrow.
"Sans—little bird."
Gathering the hem of white linen in her hands, Sansa climbs atop him, one knee on either side of his lap. Watches his face, looking for any sign that would negate that he, too, wants this. Has wanted this. Puts the hand not bracing him against the featherbed against her breast, sucking her lower lip between her teeth when his fingers circle her nipple.
"Do you remember? How I dreamed up a kiss?"
"Yes."
Instinct, something light-filled and red, makes her lift her hand to cup his cheek. This is a different night, cold and snowy. They do not smell of fear of blood or vomit. They are different people, died and reborn.
What did it feel like, when you were dying? she asked him, once. And he had looked at her strangely. Clarity. She had nodded. And it was terrible? she whispered. Sandor looked to her, apprehensive. And then nodded. And it was terrible.
"I know I've sung many times since we've met again," Sansa says, shivering when his hand strays lower. He is hesitant, and she wonders if he's had any lovers he has not paid. Any lovers to look him in the face. "I want you to make me sing again."
She sings for him, louder than the storm outside.
By morning it has passed, and she goes to Maester Samwell for tea. She is not foolish, nor ashamed. He ducks his head, and makes it for her.
"You may feel queasy," he warns her. "And there may be some bleeding, even if a child has not been created. It is the nature of the herbs."
Sansa does not know if she and Sandor will bed again. Regardless, she has no regrets, she thinks, sipping the bitter drink. He comes to her, hours later, but in the usual manner.
Until she sees the look upon his face.
"The guards have spotted something in the distance," Sandor tells her, and she stands, sweeping her cloak over her shoulders, pausing at the confusion on his face until his words resolve her question. "And Rickon is screaming at them not to ring the alarm."
They rush to the battlements, and Sansa holds her hand out to Rickon as she approaches, allows him to tow her to the ledge.
"What is it?" she asks him breathlessly, squinting at the glare of the sunrise stretching up over the horizon.
"A creature, my lady—" one of the guards begins to say.
And then she sees him. Smoky grey, large and proud.
Rickon tugs on her hand, pulling her closer. "
"Summer!"
Only a dream away.
Thanks for reading!