Ice

'The noise resembles the roar of heavy, distant surf. Standing on the stirring ice one can imagine it is disturbed by the breathing and tossing of a mighty giant below,'

Ernest Shackleton

Sansa opens her eyes in the cold, utterly beautiful and familiar place she thought forever lost. Not the physical place, exactly, but rather the people that made it home. She does not realize it at first, as all she can understand is that she is breathing. She loses herself in that, gasping, hacking and wheezing as she jolts awake, swinging upward with tears blurring her vision and sobs threatening to tear her apart. Her hands clutched at her chest, and she wonders, for a second, confused and without understanding why she is in the smaller rooms of the family wing of Winterfell. Fire. The fire is... Where? Where? She settles her breath, before, cautiously, she starts to slip out of the enormous bed. And stumbles at the sight of her much too small feet. Sansa breathes a shuddering breath, straightens her spine, and looks at her hands.

Too small… The hands… The hands of a child.

Unease settles in her stomach, as she looks past her hands and sees her body. Lithe, thin and gangly form of a child, small in a thin shift. She blinks before she deliberately goes to the mirror on the wall, a luxury she faintly remembers begging and pleading for months until her amused parents had granted. My... My old room? The girl staring at her in the glass is not her anymore, not the woman she had become. No. The girl in the mirror is a babe, perhaps eight name days or as far as ten- Sansa has forgotten how she had looked at that age.

She has rounded cheeks, full of youth and prettily plump, and her eyes are large. Gone is the sharply shaped cheekbones of a woman, the shapely lips and the elegant tilt of her Tully blue eyes. She is so small, not the tall proud woman, full of fierceness, not the Red-Wolf of Winterfell, not the Queen of the North. No, what is looking back at her is the dove, the little bird she had been. She blinks, wondering, for a moment, if she has gone mad with the coming of the Others and the Fire… And then she moves away from the glass, and quietly slips out of her childhood room at Winterfell, and moves towards the room she had been occupying for nearly two years at this point.

She throws the doors open, carelessly, slamming the doors against the wall. Two shapes callout in surprise from the bed, tangled in furs and silks. They move, adults, people in her bed, she thinks with slight rage, how dare they. One, large, hulking, grabs at a sword, enormous, and makes something in her blink as it was much larger than her current… body. It swings in her direction and freezes meer inches from her head. She stares at the man, furrowed brow, relaxing and understanding the fact that he had taken her bed. But who is with him?

"Sansa?" he says, bewildered and scolding.

She looks at him, his grey eyes, his frown. She blinks.

"Jon… Jon something has happened to me," she tells him, frowning deeper, "I don't-"

"Sansa, sweetling?" and that voice- that voice she had never heard again. Oh, she had seen a poor imitation of it, a rasp and rattle of the Lady Stoneheart*, but not…. Not this.

The woman that comes around the man, Jon, is fair and rosy, with red hair nearly to her knees in an elegant wave of fire. Kissed by fire, the Freefolk had called to Sansa, fondly, the Fire-Kissed, Red Wolf. Her body is shapely, and for a brief moment, Sansa wonders if this is her mirror, distorted and softer version of her, before reason wins out. Because the woman in front of her is older than her twenty name days, and there is a softness in her that Sansa had never had. She has a more rounded face then her, freckles across her skin, rose in her cheeks to Sansa's devastating Stark pale, and her hair has a slight curl then Sansa had never had.

Mother.

She blinks and is horrified at the fact that tears have started to fall from her eyes. She has yet to cry since Arya had come to the Northern Camp against the Others, grey eyes cool, blade in hand.

"Sansa?"

"Mother," she says. Startled, before she looks at Jon, "Jon, Mother is back- she isn't Lady Stoneheart anymore… She's-"

"Sansa, stop addressing your father as such!"

Sansa stops and looks at the man again. A head, a head on a pike and she's crying and she feels such rage. She moves forward, just a step, to push him to kill him, when a looming figure of the Hound warns her, protects her in that one, small movement. She stares at him, disbelief crawling in her throat. His brows are thicker, she notes, faintly, his eyes are a darker shade of grey, his hair not as curly, not a mop but straighter, browner, and he is shorter. But he has to be Jon.

"You are Jon."

The man blinks, brows furrowed.

"Sansa, I am Eddard Stark, your father," he said softly, a deep grumble of a voice. Not the soothing deepness of Jon.

More tears, they slip past her eyes, down her cheeks and she hates them.

"But-But- He took your head. He made me watch as he thrust it through a spike. Made me look at what had happened to you and then he laughed," she whispered.

Her mother, let out a gasp of horror, while her father blanched.

"Sweetling, you had a nightmare."

This is the most beautiful nightmare I've ever had.

She stands in her thin shift, a small coolness trickled down her spine. If this is a dream is what she thinks it is-

"Robb," she whispers, suddenly, before she turns and runs.

Startled shouts follow her, but she just runs, hiking up her sleeping shift unseemly before she crushes into Robb's old rooms. He wakes with a startled shout, and Sansa feels her chest heaving as bewildered blue eyes look at her. He is so young. Hardly three and ten name days and she feels something give at the innocent look in his eyes or his wild mop of red curls.

They had beheaded him, she thinks, just like father. Only they had made a mockery of the Young Wolf by sewing Grey Wind to the remains of his neck. Joffrey had jeered and laughed about it. Promised to serve me them both at my wedding with Tyrion before he threatened to rape me.

"Sansa, what is the matter with you?" he cries, and his voice breaks, not the man she had left in her doom trip South, but a gangly youth.

More tears. But suddenly, they are mingled with laughter, both joyous and hysterical.

"Bran."

She runs, slipping just past her father's reaching hands as she runs to the next rooms. This one she runs into grabbing, dragging at the already awake boy, lounging in his bed. She rushes the startled boy, reaching, pleading that the stern, distant and mythical thing he became was gone from her younger brother. When he stands on his feet, she gives more breathless laughter. His eyes are clear, innocent and no longer entrenched with knowledge beyond human understanding. Tears fall, blurring, freely as she moves away from the confused boy.

"Arya."

She runs, slipping beneath father's waiting arms and under his feet in an unseemly slide that has her laughing more, even as shouts follow her. Arya is already awake, spread across the floor in her sleeping shift, of all things playing, and Sansa laughs and laughs, at the fact that Arya's hair is so long, or that her features are the awkward shape that she would grow into. Guileless, not cold, but innocent eyes stare at her. Her chest is heaving, her eyes are prickling with unshed and shed tears, and laughter, both joyous and hysterical is bubbling in her throat. Her sister stares, brows furrowed, clutching at a soft cloth toy of a wolf.

"What are you doing, stupid?" she says, suspiciously, a worried frown on her face.

Sansa only laughs, before running away from her father, towards the nursery. Rickon, little Rickon is there, barely three name days, alive and she breathes another laugh for her Wild little Wolf before she is running again, past her parents, screaming for Jon. Her King, her brother.

"JON!" She bellows, laughter and tears escaping her, "JON!"

A boy, just a boy, appears at the end of the hallway, barely dressed in trousers, not her King, not the man that had taken Winterfell back for her. Not the King that had fallen down with his dragon in a blaze of glory and fire and blood. He is shirtless and so terribly thin, barely gaining muscle, wild tossed curls black and looking half awake. She breaths, a soft joyous laugh escaping her again as she ran full as fast as her short legs could take her. She slams into the boy, so young, so innocent, who grunts at her weight and is startled when her legs and arms wind around him. She only laughs at his awkward patting on her shoulder, only focusing on the warmth of him.

Please, gods, old and new, please let this not be a dream.

"SANSA!" bellows her mother.

She only laughs, tears flowing down her cheeks in a steady trickle. She kisses him, on the mouth*, on the cheeks, on his forehead, on his nose, on his neck, anywhere she can reach.

"Jon. JON! YOU IDIOT! " she screams, because she had watched him fall, but all of that is behind them. She has been granted heaven, and nothing matters anymore, "Look at us, home, again!"

The boy, oh the beautiful boy, just struggles with her weight, lifting her awkwardly by her thin thighs.

"S-s-sansa?" he asks, confused, and when she looks into his grey eyes…

She sees nothing. Not the same warmth that she had gorged herself on after years of coldness, hate, lust, and dismissal. Not the small worship he gave to her for coming back to him, to be the first of their siblings to reach him after years apart. Not the confidence of the man dead and risen again, not, her King.

She blinks.

"Snow, you put my daughter down right now!" and that is her lady mother, fierce, cold and disdainful.

Panic claws at Sansa. She locks her ankles around Jon's waist, jumping to wind her arms around his hilariously scrawny neck, tighter, panic giving her strength.

"NO!" she screams as her mother pulls on her arm, nearly sending them off balance, "You can't take him away from me! I watched him fall- I watched him die. I watched him be taken from me like everyone else. Give me this."

"Sansa, you had a nightmare-" her father, her father says, and she stares at him, looks at him truly.

She blinks again.

"No," she whispered back, tears falling down her cheeks, "No, father. You don't understand. This is the dream. My heaven. My family whole, their innocence returned. My blissful Summer days after my haunting Autumn and the dreadful Winter come to kill us all."

Her father stares at her, brows furrowed.

"Jon, son, put her down," says the man.

She hisses, locking her ankles tighter. Jon, Jon gives a slight wince of discomfort, but she clings. Please, please let this be real and mine again.

"Has she gone mad?" and that's Arya, small, blinking at her with that curiosity that always had Sansa frowning and irritated, and she cannot see anything of Invisible Wolf in her sister, and Sansa is so glad, "Did Sansa hit her head?"

"Father, what is going on?" and that's Robb, the Young Wolf, she remembers, staring, "Should I fetch the Maester?"

She stares back, thighs clenched around Jon, and she realizes her breath has gotten fast again, and she wonders what this really is… I don't care. I don't care what this is, this is all I ever wanted in so long.

"Sansa, sweetling," and that is her mother, hands reaching out, face wild with fear, not with the eerie stillness of death and rotting flesh, an apparition that had come to them seeking justice and revenge, Sansa had burned her herself in order to lay her Lady Mother to rest, "Let him go-"

"What the bleeding seven hells is all this racket?" and Sansa feels her mouth drop at the sight of Theon Greyjoy, whole, handsome but young as he comes stumbling into the hallway.

He pauses, no doubt at the odd sight of most of the Stark family disheveled and in their sleeping shifts, in the position of her, with Jon. The boy in front of her is not the broken wreck of a creature with no semblance of self or dignity. Not the half-broken man coming back to himself in small bursts, not the brave thing that had flung himself off the walls of Winterfell with determination and self-loathing and regret with her in order to save her.

She stares. And stares.

"Begging your pardon, Lady Stark, Lord Stark," he says, realizing that they are present, blanching slightly.

"Sansa has gone mad!" and that's Arya again.

Unbidden, delighted laughter leaves her, for the Invisible Wolf had been quiet and calculating. Not outspoken and blurting.

"Sansa, if you… If you are unwilling to part from Jon?" starts her father, at her sharp nod, he continues, "Than will you both come to my solar? Sansa… You can further explain-"

"Only Mother and you and Jon?" she whispers, and its because if she speaks louder she fears she will only laugh or cry and cry or laugh.

Her heart, she realizes, is beating, rapidly as her mother usher's everyone to bed or to go dress, and quietly, follows them as they make their way to her solar. In the room, Sansa realizes she cannot cling to Jon forever, much as she wants to. The boy had struggled with her weight, and his face was red and so utterly confused. What a fool I'd been to him. How did I ever look away from him? She slips down him, realizing with a jolt that he is still so much taller than her, more than a foot, and she frowns as she misses the fact that her head had reached his chin, within distance to always reach down and press a kiss to her temple. Eyes, grey, innocent and worried, so utterly bewildered, stare at her.

Summer boy.

She blinks, slowly, before she frowns.

"Jon," she says, and her heart clenches at the fact that he flinches, "I love you dearly, brother."

Wild, confused eyes stare at her with hunger and hope. She reaches, hand tangling with his, calloused and rough and already dwarfing her hand.

"I- I love you as well Sansa," his voice is hesitant but warm.

And despite the indifference she had always shown him, that is true. He loves her back. Sansa smiles, wide, and reaches on her tiptoes to kiss both cheeks, before she turns to her father, sitting in her chair. Her mother, frowning, eyes narrowed at the display, no doubt, stares at her. They both are. Paragons and immortal figures of her Summer days. Dead and mutilated in her horror-filled Autumn. Grief for them rises in her, and she wonders, with dawning realization if this is no dream.

They do not remember. In my heaven, they would remember so they could forgive a Summer Child's foolish mistakes.

"Sansa," says her father, the Quiet Wolf, she thinks, remembering his moniker distinctly, his voice steady, deep and his face still, "Will you please tell us what has caused you behave… To behave so strangely?"

"Father, Mother… What year is it?" she asks instead of answering.

Her parents exchanged glances, brows furrowed. Her father turns to her, and he frowns.

"The year is 295," he answers, slowly, eyes wide.

Sansa blinks. Than she wobbles to a nearby chair, dragging Jon with her, and he stands awkwardly next to her. She stares at their intertwined hands. At calloused and pale, useless hands that only know how to sew.

I… This is not a dream.

She breathes, deeply, feeling the air in her lungs, in her chest, her rapid heart. She closes her eyes. Relishes the feel of Jon's hand in her's. Life. Not green wildfire.

I am alive. Everyone… Is alive. Three years before everything was lost.

"Father… Mother… Jon. I closed my eyes in the year 305 in a fire of my own making," she grins, savagely, not a sweet girl of ten name days, not a child of Summer, but rather the Queen in the North, The Red Wolf, as she opens her eyes. She who had been broken down by cruel Winds of Autumn and reforged in the Ice of Winter, "The North Remembers."