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orangeflavoryawp · 4 years

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Jonsa - “A Violence Done Most Kindly”, Part 4

I’m just putting it out there that I have NOT tagged this story for Major Character Death, for those of you who read the ending to the last chapter. I’m just saying. And that’s all I’m saying. So let’s get this show on the road.

A Violence Done Most Kindly

Chapter Four: Nooses

“Sansa has learned to read faces like Arya has learned the wearing of them.” - Jon and Sansa. Stark is a house of many winters.

Read it on Ao3 here.

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 fin

* * *

Sometimes he sees the nooses swaying in the wind. There are always bodies at the ends of them, but they are not always discernible. They swing like dark, hooded shadows, catching flecks of snow so soft even that seems a betrayal in the midst of such brutality, such ardent death.

Jon takes a long, slow breath, easing it out through unsteady lungs. His hands spread over the balcony edge before him, looking out across the Riverlands, the long train of lords and their bannermen arriving from throughout the seven kingdoms for the summit – like a flood of ants.

Beside him, Davos stands watching pensively.

Jon remembers the smell of shit when those traitors died. That much he recalls. The rope had snapped taut and their voices had choked out and their bodies had jerked their final release, an end without glory, without even the dignity of a clean corpse to burn. Their filth had stained the wooden planks beneath their swinging feet for moons after.

“Now I rest”, Thorne had said. Jon wants to scoff at the words. Men like them never rest but for the grave, and even that could not hold him.

(He wants to die, he wants to live – sometimes the difference is hard to discern.)

An anger suffuses him – sharp and ripe and fervent. A familiar anger.

Olly had looked upon him with hatred, even in the end, even with a rope at his throat. And maybe the man Jon used to be would have staggered beneath such a stare, would have grieved this loss. But Jon is not the man he used to be, and he startles at the realization that neither does he want to be that man again.

“You’ll be fighting their battles forever.”

Jon swallows tightly, eyes still over the plains.

Jon knows who his people are, and he will not forget again. Alliser Thorne had that much right, at least. You choose your enemy, and you stick with it, no matter the squalls. You do not let the others into your home. You do not lead them to your hearth. You do not look outside.

Fighting for others has only ever gotten him killed.

So now, he will fight for his.

Yes, Olly had looked upon him with hatred in the end. And Jon had welcomed it. He made sure, after cutting the rope himself, to turn and watch them struggle their last, watch them twitch out the final dregs of their pathetic, traitorous lives.

Because it wasn’t hatred on Olly’s face anymore. It was a pungent, grotesque fear. A terror so engulfing his blue-tinted skin burgeoned with it, his bulging eyes swam with it.

And it was right.

“Do you ever wonder how things might have happened if I took up Stannis’ offer?”

Jon’s question is unexpected in the silence, and Davos snaps his gaze to his king, a furrow lining his brow. “Your Grace?”

Jon sighs, gloved fingers curling over the cold rail. “If I’d accepted the Stark name he promised to grant me?”

A long silence blankets the space between them, and Jon sees the nooses swinging once more. Shadows on the wind.

Davos clears his throat. “Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but I don’t think you take very well to things ‘granted’ to you.”

Jon answers with a single raised brow, a glance out of the corner of his eye.

Davos leans his weight to one leg, chest puffing out slightly. “I only mean that you… you’ve rather a talent for ‘taking’, Your Grace.”

The anger alighting Jon’s tongue diffuses into a mild tartness, his throat flexing beneath his thick swallow.

Davos inclines his head toward Jon, hands held at his back. “I don’t think you’d ever be happy with a name you hadn’t taken for yourself,” he explains, a faint smirk lighting his features. “Your Grace,” he tacks on at the end – almost purposely.

Jon had taken his justice when he let those bastards swing. He’d taken his home when he shattered Ramsay’s jaw beneath his fists. He’d taken his throne when the lords hailed him a hero. He’d taken his sister when he wanted her.

Perhaps there was wildling in him yet.

Jon offers a barely-there smirk to his Hand before he’s turning swiftly back toward the hall behind him, his cloak billowing in his wake.

The North is his. Sansa is his. And those are the only battles he wants to fight anymore.

He knows who his enemies are. He knows where the nooses lay –

And Jon is not done taking.

He stalks from the balcony, lips pressed into a thin, hard line.

Perhaps he never came back wrong. Perhaps what was wrong was a world that demanded he come back right.

Given the chance, he’d swing the sword again – he’d let hang those bastards every time.

He’d take what was his.

(The nooses never stop swinging.)

* * *

When Tyrion Lannister exits the carriage in the middle of Riverrun’s main courtyard, Sansa is all of thirteen years old again. She’s floundering, alone in the enemy’s den, her innocence like crushed dragonfly wings dragging at the ends of her skirts through deadened grass. She is a girl again.

And not in the way women sometimes wish to be girls again.

Arya steps up beside her suddenly, but she is wearing Baelish’s face, and what should be comfort at her sister’s quiet presence instead hammers at her heart like slow-brimming terror. It shudders beneath her skin like memory.

“Lady Sansa,” Tyrion greets, something of fondness lining his voice, and Sansa feels sick suddenly. He looks at her kindly, as he always has, and perhaps that’s where things begin to splinter.

The most favorable of her husbands, to be sure, but on his chest rests the pin that announces him as Hand of the Queen, a conqueror intent on chaining the North as fervently as Cersei once had, as all the Southron kings and queens once had. This is not a former husband she greets. This is an adversary – wearing their shared past like false comfort.

“My lord,” she answers with an inclination of her head, a practiced smile at her lips.

“Please, Sansa,” he urges. “I believe I asked you to call me Tyrion the last time you addressed me so.”

“And I believe the last time I addressed you so, you were still my husband,” she points out with a raised brow.

Tyrion clears his throat, nodding as though to himself, and then offering a perfunctory greeting to the false Baelish, a strained smile at his lips. His eyes take in the courtyard around them.

“I apologize for my brother’s absence,” Sansa says, grabbing his attention once more. “His Grace is in talks with my uncle, the Lord Edmure, and Lord Robin Arryn of the Vale. He extends his welcome, however, as well as his thanks for you and your queen’s attendance at our peace summit.”

“Yes, well, peace sounds absolutely refreshing at this point, my lady. There’s been enough death these last few years.”

“Speaking of which,” Sansa begins, “where is your queen?”

Tyrion’s lip quirks slightly at the unvoiced insult, taking note of Baelish’s own amused smile following the words. “Daenerys will be here shortly.”

“Arriving on dragon-back, I take it. A good show of power.”

“You’ll forgive her dramatics when you see what kind of queen she is, I’m sure. She’ll do much good for Westoros.”

Sansa can only offer an acknowledging hum, her own thoughts on the matter kept tight behind pursed lips.

Tyrion’s face shifts then, brows furrowed, a keen unrest overtaking him, and Sansa imagines he’s thinking of the last queen Westoros had known.

She shrugs her furs closer around her shoulders, licking her lips. “I can’t say I’m sorry for your loss, my lord, if I’m being honest” she says as quietly and kindly as possible.

He shakes his head, face pinching tight. “Cersei was….she was…” Words fail him suddenly, and Sansa thinks it’s the first time she’s ever witnessed such a thing. He swallows whatever he had failed to say, offering a tight smile instead, pulled at the edges like a fish gutted on the hook. He simply nods.

Sansa’s eyes flutter to the floor, a grim remembrance shadowing her thoughts.

Sisters can be terrible, wonderous things, after all.

Sansa clears her throat, eyes glancing back up. “Lord Baelish, I believe that is Lord Varys I see emerging from the last carriage.”

“I do believe you’re right, my lady.”

“I’m sure he’d like a visit from an old friend. I’ll escort Lord Tyrion to his chambers myself. You may leave me.”

Arya nods in Baelish’s skin, offering a farewell before leaving the two.

Tyrion watches her go with a wary look. “I had heard he was working for the Starks now.”

“An exaggeration, my lord. Petyr Baelish works for no one but himself. You and I both know that.”

Tyrion looks back at her with an appraising look. “And yet he seems to have your confidence.”

“He has his uses.” She lets a secret smirk cross her lips and does not bother to check it when Tyrion catches sight of it. Truth can sometimes tempt the best of them, she reminds herself. “Please, my lord, if you’ll follow me.” She directs him through an archway at the end of the courtyard and then they’re making their way through the halls of her mother’s childhood home. It does not escape her that Riverrun will soon be housing both Lannister men her mother had once held prisoner. Sansa squares her shoulders, stalking through the corridors just a touch more forcefully.

War makes strange bedfellows, in the end. And she – they – cannot afford grudges of the past bleeding into the present.

Her mother would forgive her, she knows. Because her mother would have also honored guest right if it meant protection for the North, protection for her North.

The pack survives, after all.

“Your brother and his forces are to arrive any day now,” she tells him, breaking the quiet that’s overtaken them since they left the courtyard.

Tyrion releases a short, almost anguished chuckle. “So many happy reunions. I daresay I should have brought more wine.”

“You may yet need it.”

“You know, I don’t recall you being quite this sardonic when we were married, my lady.”

“You hardly knew me when we were married.”

Tyrion is silent at her back for many long moments, and then, “I would have liked to, if you’d let me.”

Sansa stops, turning to him stiffly. He almost stumbles into her, hands curling and uncurling nervously at his sides when he looks up to her.

She keeps her gaze cool, her tone civil. “You would do well not to mistake a child’s regard for romantic attachment, my lord. I am not the girl you once thought to save.”

Tyrion swallows thickly, hands held up as though in surrender, head shaking. “I meant no offense, my lady. I only meant it in true friendship, please.”

Sansa considers him for a moment, silent and pensive, and then she’s turning back without a word. He follows instantly. They make it all the way to his temporary chambers before either of them speaks again.

It’s Sansa this time, motioning to the door with a graceful hand. “Your chambers, my lord.”

He nods, stepping toward it, hand on the knob, and then he stops, takes a deep breath, turns back to her.

She watches him expectantly.

“I worried for you, Sansa, when you’d disappeared after Joffrey’s wedding. Truly, I had.”

“I believe that,” she says honestly.

His hand slips from the door handle as he turns fully to her. “I would have protected you, if you’d stayed.” There’s something fervent in his voice then, almost angry if she looks too closely at it.

She wonders if she will ever escape the anger of entitled men, or if perhaps that has always been the end of any lady.

“You could hardly protect yourself.” She tries for indulgent, but it comes out more like disdain.

Tyrion’s jaw works beneath his words. “And yet here I am.”

Sansa pulls a steadying breath through her lungs, her fingers itching for the hook and pin chain anchored around her throat. “Yes, I suppose murder has its merits,” she says calmly, almost admirably, if it weren’t for the twitch of her lip signaling her scorn.

Tyrion’s eyes widen, and he takes a step closer. “What did you say?”

It comes to her like a gentle hand brushing the hair from her neck, a tug at the laces binding her dress, a tender admonishment when she takes one too many lemon cakes. “We all do what we must to survive,” she says lowly, a streak of accusation lining the declaration.

Taking a deep breath, Tyrion tries for words. “Sansa, what I’ve done – ”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

Tyrion blinks at her, brows furrowed.

(It comes to her with dark hair and dark eyes and dark humor. It comes to her like the ache of scars.)

“I was talking about Shae.” She steadies the quake in her voice, chin lifting. “I couldn’t care less for your despot of a father, but Shae was good to me. Shae was kind. Shae deserved better than what you gave her.”

Tyrion blanches at the words, eyes widening. “How do you – ”

“Bran knows what you did. He tried to tell it to me. I told him I didn’t want to know – not entirely.”

Tyrion just stares at her, hardly breathing, his jaw clenching beneath his brewing words.

As a girl, she hadn’t understood their relationship. As a woman, she still doesn’t. And perhaps that is the point.

Tyrion wipes a hand down his face, drawing a ragged breath through his lungs. “Why?”

He doesn’t have to specify further. She understands all the same.

Sansa looks off to the far wall, hands gripping themselves tightly before her. She will not shake. She does not shake. “I don’t want to know the details. I think I might lose all civility toward you, otherwise, and I can’t afford that just now. I just… I can’t. Jon needs peace. And I need – ” She stops, breath catching, hands flexing in their hold. “I need peace, as well.”

Tyrion closes his eyes, face pained, hands bunched into fists at his side. “Forgive me, my lady, but I – ”

“I don’t,” she interrupts curtly, the words already lighting her tongue before she even realizes she’s given them air. “I don’t forgive you, my lord, not for her. In fact, I don’t know how you forgive yourself most days.”

His eyes snap open to hers, a heated breath flaring his nostrils. “You said your brother… ‘knows’. What do you mean?”

There’s a bit of the man she knew in him still, she finds.

“In time, my lord,” she says. “Should your queen agree to accompany us back to Winterfell, perhaps you can ask him yourself.”

She does not wait for his response. She does not entertain the conversation further. She simply turns from him, stalking back along the hall, low heels clacking in the silence. She simply leaves him.

(It comes to her like a lonely remorse – like the missing of someone you can never get back.)

She cannot ask Bran further – she cannot.

“We all do what we must to survive.”

It’s the hardest lesson Shae ever taught her.

* * *

“Did you kill Cersei?”

Sansa’s eyes narrow at the question.

Jaime is haggard. A remnant of a man. His once brilliant blonde hair is dusted with grey and unattractively coarse, the lines on his face telling of years not worth recollection. There’s a stiltedness to his stance, a ring of practiced disinterest to his words that betrays his hollowing grief.

But Sansa has learned to read faces like Arya has learned the wearing of them.

The words draw from her lips before she can collar them. “No, I did not.”

Jaime clenches his jaw, his one good hand settled along the sword at his waist – a sword that draws her attention like a gale across still plains.

Widow’s Wail.

Sansa frowns. Such a foul name. It has no place in the North – in her father’s court. Not even when it hails from Ice.

(Such a sword would never stand across from Ned Stark’s daughter, or the North knows no justice.)

Jaime nods – slowly, patronizingly, lips smacking with something of disdain. “My sister always warned me not to treat with wolves.”

“Yes, well, your sister’s dead now, isn’t she? So it matters little, I suppose.” Sansa offers him little more than a blue-frost gaze, hands held at her back, head tilted slightly as she gauges the Kingslayer.

Jaime’s mouth dips into a harsh frown and he takes a step toward her.

Brienne pulls Oathkeeper half out its sheath in a motion of warning, an urge of temperance at her lady’s side.

Jaime flicks unsteady eyes at Brienne, and Sansa does not need to look back at her sworn shield to know the hurt that pulls at her features. There is another conversation happening in this room – one she may never be privy to.

There is another war being fought.

Sansa closes her eyes, breathing deep.

She hasn’t the heart for this. She hasn’t the heart for any of this.

“I didn’t kill your sister, but I would have,” she says on a voice far steadier than she expects, eyes flickering open to catch his.

Jaime glances to her with furrowed brows, all tense muscles and hardened angles. All sharp grief. He simply looks at her. She almost looks away.

(Almost, but not quite.)

“Given the chance, I would have,” she tells him, more sure this time, voice hardly trembling, hands hardly curling and uncurling at her back, chest hardly heaving.

Something startlingly like a chuckle issues from his lips, and then he’s wiping his good hand over his mouth, shaking his head, and he looks like he’s about to cry, or break something – break her, maybe.

Brienne keeps Oathkeeper hovering half-unsheathed in the air.

And then his chuckle catches in his throat, a sharp bark of laughter bubbling up, and he’s turning round, taking in the hall, slowly circling back toward Sansa, his laughter spent and hollow and tear-laced now. Jaime sniffs, brushing a hand under his nose. When he looks back up at Sansa, there’s nothing of fury in his face. “No, you wouldn’t have,” he tells her surely.

Sansa’s mouth parts, her denial ready and scathing on her tongue.

Did he know what Cersei had done to her? Did he know how she kept all she held precious at a knife’s edge? Did he know how small and lonesome and wrong she had made her feel? Did he know how she imagined winding her own bare hands around her golden neck and wringing her breathless?

Did he know?

Did he know how she had ruined her?

(How she had made her?)

Sansa stares at Jaime, spine tingling, nails digging half-moons into her bundled palms at her back. She doesn’t trust her voice just yet.

Jaime nods, seemingly to himself, eyes drifting to the floor between them in the sparse room. “No, you wouldn’t have, little dove.” There is no doubt in his voice.

Sansa recoils at the moniker, her voice lodged in her throat. She stumbles back a step, finding Brienne’s sure hand at her back, staying her.

She wants to spit at his feet. Wants to kick his teeth in. Wants to grab him by the collar and shake him and shake him and shake him until he could see.

Until he could see.

She would have killed her. She would have.

Sansa feels the tears rising without her bidding.

She would have, she tells herself.

She would have.

Her hands itch for his throat, for his face, for his eyes.

(She only needs him to see.)

Because she would have – she would have – she would have –

(She wouldn’t have.)

* * *

Sansa requests an audience with Olenna Tyrell the moment her forces arrive in Riverrun, and the two find themselves in Brynden’s solar that very evening, with the setting sun casting orange slants of light through the open windows beside them.

Sansa folds her hands demurely before her, offering a soft smile in greeting. Behind her on one side is the Blackfish, her sworn shield and Tully ally. On the other side is Baelish, or at least, the face of him. Olenna grants the false Baelish a single, appraising glance, but it isn’t enough to garner mention. Instead, she offers her greetings, settling into the chair opposite Sansa with two Tyrell guards at her back. Sansa barely notes their presence.

“I had feared the worst for you when I heard of your marriage to the Bolton bastard. I’m glad to see he’s gotten his due.” Olenna fixes her skirts around her, leaning back with a comfort that irks Sansa, though she finds it difficult to place why.

“Are you?” she asks, a single brow raised.

“Of course, my dear girl.”

“I am not your ‘dear girl’,” she answers back, face blank. “I am a lady of my house and you will address me as such, my lady.”

Olenna thrums her fingers along her armrest, an interested smirk playing at her lips. “Very well, my lady. Let us not dither about then, hmm? Why have you summoned me thus?”

“I have not ‘summoned’ – ”

“For one who demands transparency, you’re awfully keen to deflect it, Lady Sansa.”

Sansa purses her lips. She likes Olenna Tyrell, she finds. She always has, if she thinks too long about it. But liking her has done nothing for her. ‘Liking her’ has not changed the fact that she indirectly shouldered Sansa with the blame of Joffrey’s death, pinning her with Cersei’s ire, as though she hadn’t enough torment from that woman.

No, this could not stand. But Sansa is not foolish enough to throw away a card worth playing simply because of honor.

She’s seen what that does to those she holds dear.

“I’ve called you here to negotiate your allegiance,” she says at length.

Olenna rests her elbows along her armrests, folding her hands before her in a casual, disinterested manner Sansa has never been able to master. She cocks her head with that familiar, nonchalant smirk. “My allegiance, hmm?”

Sansa nods.

“And where do you propose it should be?”

“With the North.”

Olenna fairly nearly snorts, if a snort could sound lady-like. “It is a fool’s errand, this war of yours. Old tales of even older threats. Dust on the wind. A falsity.” “Then why are you even here?”

Olenna considers her a moment, a wrinkled finger drawn over her lips in contemplation. “Our people are tired of war.” She is suddenly older and frailer than Sansa remembers, an intangible exhaustion writ across her face.

Something softens in Sansa. A memory, maybe. A fondness and recollection so far gone she’d thought it lost. The taste of lemon cakes. Olenna’s weathered hand in hers when she tugged her toward the garden – speak freely, child – and the tender caress she gave her cheek at Joffrey’s wedding.

The caress that stole the vial of poison from her necklace – the ruse in her touch.

Sansa’s face hardens at the remembrance. Wolves aren’t the only ones who protect their own. This she knows. And she loved Margaery, more than she will ever be able to say aloud (because such affections outside of family have never ended well), and some part of her – the part that had watched her father’s head tumble down into the mud, and the part that had borne bruises like penance for a brother who never came, and the part that remembers Baelish’s kiss like a wounded animal remembers the lance – that part of her will always hold tight to her heart the memory of Joffrey choking on his own terror, face purple, eyes bulging, mouth gaping like a slaughtered boar.

And even still –

She had run into the hands of yet another terror. Another manipulator. Cersei, at least, had the decency not to hide her intentions.

No, Sansa reminds herself. Olenna had done her no favors.

“The people are tired, and so am I,” Olenna sighs.

Sansa watches her, mouth pursed tight.

Olenna huffs, straightening in her seat. “I’ve lost my granddaughter. My son and my grandson. House Tyrell ends with me. But the Reach shall not – if I have anything to say about it. And I have much to say, as you well know.”

Sansa can’t help the slight smile that pulls at her lips, the chuckle that begs her tongue for release. She shifts in her seat, hands unfolding to grasp at her armrests. “I hoped as much.”

A raised brow is her only response.

Sansa cocks her head. “If you truly desire peace for your kingdom, then your best interest rests in backing the North.”

Olenna offers a rueful laugh. “I fail to see why.”

“You killed Joffrey.”

A silence pervades the room. But it lasts only a moment. Olenna smooths over her skirts, deliberately not looking at Baelish (but Sansa doesn’t need such a cue, not when he already spilled his secrets like the blood he left on the snow floor of the godswood). “History,” she states, calm and unmovable. “I don’t see how that – ”

“I’m sure Jaime and Tyrion Lannister would love to know the truth of his death.”

Olenna only stares at her, bemused smirk securely planted across her face, eyes unblinking.

Sansa takes a deep breath, releases it just as slowly. “Jaime Lannister may not be the man he was, perhaps not even the man he pretends to be, but he is surely a Lannister, and Lannisters always pay their debts, didn’t you know, Lady Olenna?”

At her silence, Sansa continues. “And Tyrion. I’m sure he’d like to know who’s at fault for his trial, for the crime that nearly took his head and then took everything else from him.”

“You think I care what those dolts think of me?”

“No,” Sansa says, “But Tyrion is Hand of the Targaryen queen now, and even if she didn’t care about her Hand’s grievances, she surely couldn’t be seen denying him retribution when the truth comes out. And the Lannisters are practically at your door, I hear. I highly doubt Jaime would call off his men at such news.”

Olenna leans back in her seat, appraising Sansa with a quiet, tense deliberation. Her arms move back to the armrests of her chair, insultingly plush beneath her tapping nails. And then she huffs a laugh, short and deliberate. “I fashioned you a bird, Lady Sansa, a little caged bird,” she laughs, biting it off with a resigned sigh. “But you were a wolf all along.”

“You had to have known I wouldn’t let such trespass lie.”

Olenna shrugs as though it’s another conversation over lemon cakes and cheese, as though King’s Landing’s gardens are once again at their backs, as though Margaery is lingering just at her peripheral, popping a bite of sweet into her mouth with a look of mischief.

Sansa’s chest aches suddenly, and oh, how she misses Margaery. How she always will.

“Truthfully, I hadn’t expected you to live long enough for this conversation,” Olenna throws out casually.

Brynden doesn’t disguise his grunt of disapproval at her back, but Sansa looks at him with a glance of forbearance, her hand raised in a motion of calm.

Olenna smiles at the display despite herself. “You’ve found yourself quite the circle of swords.” She glances to Baelish, a steely glint to her eye now. “Some more sharp than others.” There’s something accusatory in her glare with the words, but Arya does not betray anything, keeping the perpetual smugness to Baelish’s face, hands held securely behind her. “Be careful they do not find your back a more tempting target,” Olenna warns.

Sansa doesn’t let the smile linger long. “I shall keep that in mind, my lady. And you?”

Olenna offers her a dull gaze. “And me?” she prompts.

“Your allegiance – ”

“Yes, yes, Highgarden shall fight with the North,” she waves away, already impatient to end the conversation.

Lemon cakes and warm afternoons and a frail touch to her wrist.

Sansa swallows tightly. “I’m sorry,” she says, before thinking better of it – not even knowing what it is she’s sorry for. Perhaps everything. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps for thinking that ‘sorry’ could ever be enough.

Olenna eyes her quietly, shifting in her seat. She shakes her head, hands drawing back together. “You aren’t.”

Sansa almost refutes it, mouth open, but no words come.

“And you shouldn’t be,” the other woman finishes, head cocked in something Sansa might have called fondness if she had known her better. Olenna flexes her fingers, mouth curving into a smile she hasn’t used in many years. “Were you my granddaughter, I’d have been proud of you.”

Something swells in Sansa – unnamable and out of grasp. Margaery always had kind eyes, even when they were narrowed in calculation, even when they were fixed to the crown, even when they shed no tears.

She was always kind to her.

It’s the sort of kindness Sansa has always made excuses for – the sort of kindness that never looked for its own gain.

Because what could the Rose of Highgarden have ever gained from a winter thorn?

“Cersei is dead.” It’s the only comfort Sansa can offer now, scant as it is. Her mouth goes dry with the words.

Olenna nods, looking out the window at their side, the faint lip of the sun barely discernable over the river’s gleaming horizon. “And so is Margaery. So are the rest of House Tyrell. You can keep your paltry consolation, Lady Sansa, I’m much too old to care for it now.”

They share a hard silence. Nothing moves. Nothing sounds.

Sansa thinks she knows the weight of such grief. She sees it in the direwolves she stitches along her handkerchiefs, and the dutiful, singularly focused way Arya sharpens Needle, and the dust-lined, unopened threshold of Robb’s rooms.

Olenna blinks back at Sansa, a heavy breath pulled through her lungs, and her hand raises slightly, before lowering back to her armrest, as though she intended to pat Sansa’s hand, as though she meant some meager comfort in the midst of all this ugliness.

Sansa watches the motion with steel-cut eyes, never betraying her sorrow. “Let them rest,” Sansa whispers in what she hopes sounds like solace, soft and genuine.

Olenna tilts her head, lips pinched tight. A look of pitying disdain crosses her features. “Can you, my lady?”

“I must,” she answers almost instantly, and she doesn’t think she’s ever said something so true, so needful.

Nodding silently, Olenna grips her hands before her, looking back out the window, watching the dying glint of sunlight cast its shadow across the still rivers.

The sun sets completely before either of them finds the will to part.

* * *

Daenerys Targaryen is the last to arrive at Riverrun, her army of Unsullied shadowing the plains like a plague, her dragon’s beating wings blacking out the sun that crests the hills when she lands. Dawn has never seemed so dark before.

She’s beautiful, Jon discovers. As beautiful as the rumors say, or maybe even more so. But it’s the sort of beauty that feels vaguely untouchable – like the high branches of an old oak, the leaves glinting light off the winter sun in an iridescence that momentarily blinds. And there’s a mournfulness to such unreachable beauty – for leaves come untethered from their branches all the same, after all, and winter will see them snow-laden and trodden beneath boots soon enough. There is nothing enviable about beauty when it’s the lonely, distant sort.

“May I present Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen,” Tyrion begins with a respectful gesture to the dragon queen now before them.

Another woman at Daenerys’ side opens her mouth, as though to introduce her further, no doubt with the many titles Jon has grown weary of reading in their shared missives, but Euron Greyjoy interrupts her then, striding forward with a smug look and a hand hefting his belt up higher. “Your queen,” he says with dramatic admonishment, before turning to Daenerys beside him with an exaggerated look of awe. “As she is mine.”

Daenerys suffers him a tolerant smile and a quick nod, before her attention returns to Jon. “You must be Jon Snow.” Her voice is clipped, her smile stiff.

“You’ve been misinformed, Your Grace,” Sansa says beside him, before he can voice his own response.

Jon shoots a glance at her, his brows furrowing.

“This is King Jon of House Stark,” she corrects, her eyes shifting to Euron for only the briefest of moments, a glance so cursory it could hardly be called acknowledgement. “As he always will be.”

Tyrion gives Sansa a desperate look that she dutifully ignores. Behind her, Brynden muffles his chuckle with a forced cough, a fist shadowing his smirk. Daenerys flashes violet eyes at her, her smile so rigid, Jon wonders at how her face doesn’t crack beneath the force of it.

“Lady Sansa, I presume,” she says, ignoring the correction of her address. “I’ve heard much.” She glances to her Hand, and Tyrion clears his throat in response.

“Yes, well – ” he begins, before being cut off.

“To the best of my knowledge, the Riverlands do not answer to any king,” Daenerys says, eyes flicking back toward Jon. “Unless I’ve been misinformed of that as well,” she adds dryly, a challenge in her tone.

Jon sighs, jaw working. “No, they do not.”

She lifts a single brow, lips drawn in a self-assured smile.

Something tugs at the space between his ribs – coarse and impertinent. “The North believes in independent autonomy. We recognize our allies as fellow sovereigns, not subjects.”

Daenerys offers him a calculative gaze. “Yes, I suppose you would.” She purses her lips in thought.

Stepping from behind her, a war-worn man inexplicably reminiscent of the North moves forward. “Khaleesi,” he says, voice warm in its urging, “We’ve traveled far. You should rest before the summit.” He glances up to lock gazes with Jon. “I’m sure our hosts are eager to have us settled. We all need clear minds to garner peace.”

Daenerys inclines her head to her advisor, the harshness bleeding from her features, a flicker of quiet acquiescence passing through her eyes. “Of course, Ser Jorah. That is why we’re here, after all.”

A silence suffused with apprehension blankets the courtyard, until Daenerys plasters another stiff smile upon her regal face, hands coming to wind together before her expectantly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jon can see the way Brynden nudges Edmure with an impatient elbow. Edmure steps haltingly forward, hands held stiffly at the edges of his jerkin, as though he doesn’t know where to place them. “Your Grace,” he greets, clearing his throat. He stills momentarily when her violet gaze shifts toward his. He licks his lips, standing straighter when he tells her, “Riverrun is the ancestral home of the Tullys, and as their ruling lord, I humbly offer you a welcomed stay. Your chambers have already been prepared.”

“How gracious of you,” Daenerys answers with perfect poise, an inclination of her head just low enough to be proper but never low enough to be servile. Her eyes flicker briefly to the Starks once more, before she follows Edmure Tully into the main hall off the courtyard, disappearing into shadow.

Jon looks to Sansa beside him. She looks resolutely back at him.

She is the beauty of roots, he realizes. And he knows now how to recognize the fleeting and the lasting.

(Winter never takes the roots.)

Come the next morning, the summit has officially commenced. By the time introductions are made and seats are taken and all of Westeros’ lordships and sovereigns are gathered in the great hall, the sun is high in the sky and Jon’s patience has waned into a taut edginess. He takes a long, slow look about the hall. It is a room full of enemies. It is a room full of allies.

Daenerys sits regally, glaring across the room at Jaime Lannister, who flicks imaginary lint from his tunic in his best show of nonchalance. Lady Olenna scrutinizes the dragon queen behind a veil of disinterest. Euron eyes the hall predatorily, fingers thrumming along his armrest when he catches sight of Theon at Sansa’s side, a knowing smirk lining the edges of his cruel mouth. The Blackfish muffles his rumble of displeasure at the leer the Greyjoy sends his niece and Edmure Tully tugs on the ends of his jerkin, adjusting the fit as he straightens in his seat. Robin Arryn looks positively bored next to a stout and attentive Lord Royce, with False-Baelish filling the seat between him and Sansa, and the lesser lords of the Stormlands and the other kingdoms, as well as his own Northern bannermen, Mormont and Glover included, pepper the remaining seats about the hall.

Tyrion clears his throat beside his queen, and it begins.

‘A room full of enemies’ seems the more apt choice, Jon finds. He sighs, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

“You’ll be fighting their battles forever.”

Amidst the rising voices and the flaring tempers and the perfectly veiled threats, Jon begins to understand something he hadn’t before.

He glances to the dragon queen – all fire-lit ire and impossible demands and a curl to her lip like tempered madness – the beauty of impermanence marring her features.

(He sees the bodies swaying in the wind, the dark crimson of his blood still caked beneath his betrayers’ fingernails.)

Jon understands now that some nooses will always be self-made.

* * *

{She likes to think it’s remorse that has him turning his head, but the reality is closer to indifference when he answers her, “Yes

Sansa stands swiftly, hands wringing together (if only not to wring him), her breath coming in short, shallow draws. “This isn’t – Bran, you can’t…you can’t do this – you can’t just –”

“It’s already done, sister.”

She stops then, something aching in her at the endearment. But it’s not enough. It’s not enough to beg her forgiveness. Her vision nearly goes white with the rage. “I should have stopped this.”

“There was never any stopping it.”

Her mouth parts, her feet taking a step toward him without her knowledge. “Bran – ” She will never admit to begging, nor to the violent current thrumming through her palms, itching for his pale throat.

“Fire sows no seeds,” he tells her.}

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