Chapter Summary:

The charity fashion drive gives Catelyn the opportunity to spend time alone with Sansa.

Notes: Stark boys' room inspiration pic can be found on my tumblr blog (justadram).

There is no explicit description of what went on between Sansa and Petyr in this chapter, and nothing that went on between them was non-con or dub-con. Nevertheless, Petyr took advantage of his position and Sansa's vulnerability, as he does in canon. So while I don't think there is triggering content, mileage may vary. Maybe a good shower after reading isn't such a bad idea.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Catelyn

On the nights Catelyn is taken from home by charity dinners and public appearances, Osha makes sure the boys are bathed and put to bed on time and Sansa or Jon can be counted on during the weekends to fill in, but when she is home, she prefers to do it herself. The time where they'll allow you to suds their hair into mohawks, tuck them into bed, and kiss their foreheads goes by much too quickly to always be handing off the job to someone else. They're babies one minute, noses sunk in comic books and hands smeared with sidewalk chalk, and then they're running around at night with their rowdy friends, making your hair go grey as you wait for the echo of their voices in the hallway in the early morning hours the next.

Which is why she tucks Rickon's sheet in from his shoulders down to his ankles, tightly entrapping his squirmy little boy body, pronounces him as snug as a bug in a rug, and turns off the overhead red lantern in the boys' patriotic themed room, while Sansa works on the last minute donations to the charity fashion auction in her and Ned's room. There is a chorus of quiet 'night mama's already laden with sleep, as she closes the door enough so that the dim light from the hallway won't disturb them but she can still hear Bran's call if he needs her during the night.

Sometimes she still feels as if she is composed of nothing but dust and bitterness over the loss of her baby boy, but the ones that are left to her, their little voices and smiles, even their trials and tantrums remind her that there is still life to live. Her husband reminds her of it too. Ned will be home in a couple of days with Congress adjourning, and he'll want his chance to put the boys to bed too. It's a fair trade for the time she'll gain with her husband after they're asleep. She is accustomed to running their home without him, but his place in their bed always feels expansively empty in his absence, leaving her to feel more achingly empty than when he is close by.

Cat makes her way the few steps to the bedroom across the hallway, passed the closets and the boys' bathroom, which once served as part of Ned's office suite, and passed the now quiet elevator. As she brushes open the door, her daughter looks up, the electronic glow of her laptop illuminating her young, bright complexion in a way that makes Cat smile. She sits cross-legged on the bed in her pink stripped pajamas with her laptop balanced on her knees and her hair piled on her head in a messy, looped ponytail. Sansa might not be as put together as she is when she heads off to her internship in the mornings, but she doesn't need to be perfectly polished for Cat to think her the loveliest of young women.

"The boys are in bed," Cat says in her lowered, after bedtime voice.

"Rickon looked so tired tonight."

That's a generous understatement, since he whined and fussed throughout the whole of dinner, flushed from the heat and his face knit with frustration at everything that didn't go precisely his way. Nine months ago Cat would have bent the rules and done anything to ease the way with him, but she's coming back to herself and standing firm again, when firmness is what is needed.

"He got too hot at day camp, poor little man," Cat says, coming over to sit beside her daughter on the bed, where Sansa peers down at a digital camera resting on the comforter, flipping through full length pictures taken earlier today by Cat's assistant of the donations from different angles and details of their labels.

"I shouldn't have too much more work to do here, so you can have the evening to yourself."

"Don't worry about that. It's you that could use a rest. You've been burning the candle at both ends. What can I do to help you, honey?"

Sansa has been incredibly helpful, working on this project in the evenings after she gets home from work and they've all finished with dinner and the nightly routine. It's not surprising to Cat that her daughter has proven to be indispensable in preparing for the auction: she always had a flare for fashion. Whereas getting Arya into anything that didn't resemble a soccer uniform as a little girl was an epic struggle rarely worth the effort, Sansa was the child whose enthusiasm for putting together an ensemble meant Cat didn't need to expend any energy on what her eldest daughter should be wearing on any given day. As Sansa grew up, her enthusiasm for dress-up became something more focused. There were stacks of fashion magazines and trips to Fashion Week, Paris and a modeling career, print work and catwalks while she balanced her studies and social life at college, and now Sansa's internship that has turned things around for her in a way Catelyn scarcely dared hope for this time last summer.

As far as Cat can tell, it happens to have bred a little healthy distance between her and Jon too. Cat was hoping all Sansa needed was something to sink herself into, so she wouldn't feel compelled to spend so much time alone with him, lurking in the basement. That much seems to have worked out flawlessly.

"It's okay. I don't mind. This has been a lot of fun actually. All this beautiful fashion to gawk at and research. Not a bad gig really."

Fashion isn't something Cat is terribly enthusiastic or knowledgeable about, but many in her world are. She relied on those contacts to fill up the storage room with racks of designer clothing, some of which have their exorbitant price tags still attached. The only notable women to ignore her calls were those in Cersei Lannister's immediate circle—Taena Merryweather, Lollys Stokeworth, and Jocelyn Swyth were among those who couldn't even be bothered to pick up—and Cersei herself. Those women spend more on designer fashion than the other half of Manhattan put together, and normally they would have sent over some kind of cast off when called upon to donate if only to give the appearance of being charitable. The fact that they refused or ignored her outright only cemented Cat's conviction that Cersei has poisoned the waters against their family at least within certain homes.

Nevertheless, there have been plenty of donations to work with and Cat has done her best to forget the snubs and focus on those who are eager supporters, rallying the right kind of people to the cause instead of ambitious phonies. It would be satisfying to chase those petty women down and demand answers for the cold shoulder she and her family have received, but she doesn't care to end up as embittered as her sister, who seemed almost gleeful about being proven right, when Cat reported to her the nasty tenure of the last conversation Ned had with Robert.

Sansa gives her a smile—a real one—as she looks up from her work and adds, "And it's been fun doing something together."

As the donations trickled in, Sansa helped her catalogue them, writing up descriptions of each item using her knowledge of the designers and their collections. All this cataloguing saved Cat from the trouble of having to pay someone to research and fill in the gaps in her minimal knowledge of labels. Hopefully it will also attract people who are ready to bid once the catalogue is uploaded to the website with all the pertinent details and vivid descriptions Sansa has written to pair with the photographs. But it also provided them with hours to work alone together, side by side. It's been the kind of quality time one doesn't always get to spend with one's grown children.

"It has been, hasn't it?" Cat agrees.

She is perhaps more suspicious than she was before her son's death—although at least in regards to Cersei she feels certain that it is not suspicion that makes her wary—but family is a comfort and these evenings with her daughter have allowed her to feel some measure of joy again.

"And based on what I've seen, this class of yours isn't going to give you the least bit of trouble."

Sansa twists a curling lock of darkened hair around her finger. It is a fidgety gesture that conflicts with the lightness of her voice, when she says, "Maybe," indicating at least some residual anxiety about the prospect of returning to school, despite the great splash she has made in her internship, where everyone has been won over by her fresh talent and enthusiasm.

"I think it might help build your confidence back up about school."

It needn't be Boston and it needn't be a degree in the liberal arts, but she and Ned would like to see Sansa go back to school. She's too smart to give it up entirely. They want the world for her, every opportunity, every happiness, and the thought that the events of the past year might keep her from that is not one either of them want to entertain.

"Maybe," Sansa repeats, this time infused with a markedly flatter, less sing song quality.

"I know it can't be easy, starting something new, but your father and I are so happy you've decided to take another class."

"Whether or not I do well this semester, I'm not going back to Boston."

When Sansa confessed on her twenty-first birthday that she had failed out of school, she claimed she wasn't going back. Ever. She said much the same thing when Cat sat her down in front of her father. It was how they came to the decision together that maybe an internship would be just the thing to get her out of the house and heading down the right path. So it shouldn't be a shock to hear it, but it is, and Cat's spine stiffens at her daughter's firm assertion. She and Ned assumed—wrongly, it would seem—that Sansa would change her mind given enough time to adjust and heal. Enrolling in a class on the heels of her positive experience at the magazine only increased their optimism.

Sansa turns off the camera with a click. "Boston just isn't an option for me anymore."

"Boston," Cat repeats, because there is something about the way Sansa said that one word which trips her maternal alarms. She suspected there was something more to Sansa's story of how she came to skip both her midterms and finals, but they didn't press the issue with her. Even the children's therapist thought it best to let Sansa reveal everything in her own time. They were all so raw and Cat worried it would be poking at a wound to demand that she explain her reluctance to return to the school where she'd once been so happy. That instinct might have been a bad one. "Boston is the problem."

Sansa's finger swirls over the pad on her laptop, making the mouse move in ineffectual circles over the document she has open. "Joff is there, and I know he won't be forever, but I don't want to run into him if I can avoid it."

"Breakups can be very difficult."

Especially first loves, and while Cat never quite understood why Sansa was infatuated with Cersei's eldest, when he seemed to all the rest of them to be the worst kind of spoiled brat, she can understand why the loss of him after more than a year of dating would feel monumental to Sansa. No doubt more so since presumably the breakup coincided rather closely with the loss of her brother.

Sansa makes a high humming noise, as if what Cat has said doesn't properly match up with her feelings on the subject, but Cat has no time to pursue the topic further before Sansa says, "I don't want to run into the dean either."

"The dean?"

Sansa pulls down the drop menu, saving her work. "Dean Baelish. I'd be embarrassed to see him again."

The laptop snaps shut as Sansa says 'him,' but the sound doesn't obscure the rancor that infuses that one word.

That name spoken on the heels of Joffrey Baratheon's, an ex-boyfriend, doesn't follow. Petyr is a family friend. A long time family friend. One whom Cat's known since she was just a girl, when he used to tag along after her and Lysa, a head shorter than either of them and pockets stuffed with rolls of Wint-O-Green Life Savers—the kind that spark in the dark. By the time they were teenagers, it was no secret he had a crush on her, but Sansa doesn't know that.

"I didn't think you really knew Petyr."

"Not properly. Only the little bit from when we all went to lunch during orientation, but I went to him when I was getting in over my head at school."

Which is exactly what Cat would have wanted her daughter to do. It's the reason she introduced the two of them at freshman orientation.

"He wasn't helpful?"

If Petyr knew that Sansa was floundering, Cat imagined he would have stepped in to help her, not only as a dean of the school, but also as a family friend, as someone who once held Cat in some affection. A call to her mother would not have been entirely amiss either.

Cat always thought the attention Petyr paid her was nothing more than the symptoms of a harmless crush. Perhaps at some point it developed into something more than that, because what he did at Cat's wedding with Lysa seemed too purposefully timed and too pointed for Cat to fully ignore it. Still, it wasn't the first time something inappropriate took place in a wedding party and no one got too hurt. Lysa moped for a few weeks, but that was the end of it. What happened between all of them was a lifetime ago. Far enough in the past that when Sansa chose Boston, it was a comfort to think of Petyr being right there in case she ever needed anything.

Petyr was someone Cat thought she could rely on. She assumed he was someone she could trust. It would be incredibly disappointing to find out that Petyr had refused to help Sansa, because Cat had chosen Ned over him. As if there had ever been a choice: she'd never viewed him as anything other than a little brother.

"He was at first," Sansa says placing the closed laptop down on the comforter beside her and pulling her legs up to her chest. "I mean, he kind of helped me escape. Except, looking back on it, I know it was wrong of me to go."

"Go where?"

"The Hamptons." Sansa traces the length of one white stripe on her knee with her index finger. "Over break he invited me to stay at his place there."

"Easter break?"

"Yes."

"You told us you were with your friends."

"Joff and I had already broken up and I couldn't stand the thought of being around my friends. I went to the Hamptons."

Cat bites her lip. She doesn't like Sansa's tone—detached and not as apologetic as Cat would expect her to be, when confessing that she lied to them about her whereabouts. She doesn't like how her daughter won't meet her eye either and she really doesn't like the idea that a grown man invited her daughter to stay at his place. Any man. Even as old a friend as Petyr.

"It was a weird offer. I knew it right away, because what adult offers their place in the Hamptons to some college girl? It was like he was saying nice things, but I didn't quite believe his face when he said them."

What comes to mind now with sickening recall is how people who knew Cat when she was younger are always saying that Sansa reminds them of her as a girl. The resemblance is striking: similar bone structure, roughly the same height, same blue eyes and smile, and red hair a shade lighter than hers. Except Sansa's hair isn't red anymore, and Cat isn't sure when it was that Sansa dyed it.

"I had the whole place to myself. Until he came towards the end of the week."

Being lied to about her whereabouts over the whole of a break put Sansa in danger. It was irresponsible and thoughtless. But it isn't anger Cat feels at this revelation. Her hands begin to shake in her lap, where she balls them to stop their visible quiver.

"What are you trying to tell me, sweetheart?"

"Things got out of hand. I don't know. I was lonely and he was really nice. He gave me what sounded like really good advice about stuff," she says on a sharp laugh. "He said he'd help make things easier for me. That's about all it took. I stayed on there in his house after the end of break. I slept with him."

Cat brings one fisted hand up to her mouth, holding back the scream that threatens to perforate her throat with its latent force.

Sansa's voice is so small, when she says, "I should have known better," that Cat almost can't hear her over the roar that seems to have filled her head.

"He should have known better. He's the adult," Cat spits, her hand flexing before her face and closing tightly again just as quickly.

If he was here, if Petyr was here within her reaching grasp, she'd find plenty for her hands to do. She would claw his perfectly groomed face. Claw the smirk right off his face. Throttle him until he turned purple. Watch his head snap back and forth like a rag doll.

Sansa looks up, her eyes brimming with tears. "He called me your name. During."

Cat is on her feet and moving towards the phone, her eyes cutting to the clock on the bedside table, when she feels Sansa's hand close around her elbow. It doesn't matter that it's after nine or that Sansa jerks at her arm to stop her forward movement: she's calling the school.

"Mama, don't."

"I'm calling the school," Cat manages to say around the tightening in her throat.

"Don't. Don't do that. Please."

Her daughter's eyes are wide and pleading, but all Cat can think of is Petyr's hands on Sansa. He sits at a desk in his office in his ivory tower, having taken advantage of her daughter with nary a consequence. He stole something from Sansa. Cat will see to it that something is taken from him too.

"The school needs to know who it is they have in that kind of position. They'll fire him for this. It's an abuse of his power to have…"

Cat can't say the words. If she says them, she'll start to scream and the last time she gave breath to screams like that, she thought she would never stop.

…

She never makes that call. It's not a decision she's completely comfortable with: her body burns with the need to lash out at him and the self control necessary to keep her from reaching for the phone is almost beyond her in her current state of unbalanced rage and exhaustion. But Sansa begged and her daughter's tears stilled her hand. Sansa is no child. Someone needs to respect her wishes, and that's what Cat intends on doing until she can figure how to ruin Petyr without endangering Sansa's fragile mental health.

After talking for hours into the night with her daughter, after comforting and assuring and listening to the best of her ability, the only person she intends on discussing this twisted situation with before Ned comes home is Lysa—that's the deal she made with Sansa. Lysa needs to know. On the off chance her sister is still in contact with Petyr, she needs to know exactly who he is and what he's capable of. Cat can't call the school and keep faith with Sansa, but she can do that much. She can and will protect the rest of her family from his machinations.

"What are you going to do about it?" her sister asks after the silence that follows Cat's revelation of Petyr's betrayal, of her impotent fury as a mother, and her need for her sister's support.

"I wanted to call the school, Lysa." I want to kill him for putting his hands on her, she thinks, as her teeth grind together.

"You can't do that."

Cat lets her head fall into the palm of her hand, pressing the phone to her ear that much harder, so as to be sure she's heard right and that fatigue hasn't stolen her hearing as well as blessed her with an eye twitch that pulls relentlessly at her right brow. "Repeat that?"

"You can't call the damn university. You can't tell them Petyr fucked your daughter in some weekend long affair in the Hamptons."

Fucked. That stings. But what pretty word would better suit what Petyr did? There's nothing appropriate that floats to the surface of her weary mind. She wouldn't want Sansa to hear Lysa talk that way, but there's little point in arguing with her sister over terminology.

Cat drags her fingers through her tangled hair, only half processing the content of Lysa's manic prattle, as she continues to babble instructions. The pitch is high, the words too clearly enunciated for how quickly they come across the line. She sounds hysterical. Lysa has never been the most attentive aunt—she's too wrapped up in her son to devote any attention to her nieces and nephews—so Cat doubts her reaction has much to do with Sansa. This is Petyr they're talking about and that is the primary issue. Lysa is selfish enough that her outrage might be nothing more than proof that she's taking the whole thing personally. Nothing more than Petyr Baelish choosing Cat or Cat's daughter over her.

"For the love of God. If you would let me finish," Cat says, cutting her off. "I'm not going to call. Sansa doesn't want me to."

"Of course she doesn't," Lysa snaps. "That would expose her, wouldn't it?"

It would. Sansa is afraid that if the school is informed, what happened between her and Petyr will end up splashed across the papers and the television. She fears being torn apart by talking heads, moralists, and gossips. It would be lovely if Cat could promise her no such thing would happen and they only need worry about doing what's right. But she can't. Sansa isn't wrong to be worried. They are too high profile of a family and her father's job is too prominent for something like this to go unnoticed. The media is relentless. They will dog her, making her relive everything that occurred. It could very become the next racy scandal to fill i[ the twenty-four hour news cycle. Sansa doesn't want people to judge her in the court of public opinion. Cat doesn't want that for her either. Petyr deserves those things. Sansa might have been a consenting adult, but he still took advantage of her in some kind of sick game. He deserves to be raked across the coals, he deserves to lose everything, but Sansa doesn't. How can Cat risk putting her through anything else?

"We need to all keep away from him. That's why I called you. So you'd know."

"I'm not surprised. I wasn't just dug up yesterday. This is just the kind of thing I'd have expected."

Petyr might have slept with Lysa at Cat and Ned's wedding and then never returned her calls after, but this is something else altogether. How could her sister have seen this kind of warped behavior on the horizon?

Cat scrunches her eyes closed, determined to finish the call despite the thundercloud that sends tendrils of lightening across her brain. "I have to ask you not to tell anyone."

Lysa doesn't give her an answer. The answer is the silence of a dead line.

Notes: Jon's upcoming chapter will conclude the Stark mini arc. The next arc features the Lannisters-Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion-and a smut fix. ;) I've got a month left to go before Baby Dram's estimated arrival. Let's see if I can knock at least that much out before he does make his appearance!