Summer of ‘73 | Ch1
/ AO3 Link /
In the summer of 1973 Jon and Sansa cross the country in his battered El Camino.
“The AC doesn’t work,” Jon warns Sansa as they catch the highway, wind whipping her red hair to life. “We’ll have to keep the windows down.”
Sansa combs back her hair with her fingers, California hills flitting across her sunglasses as she gazes out the window. “It’s fine.”
It is the only thing either of them say for the next hundred miles.
---
They stop at a motel with a flickering neon light that informs them they’re at the Next Day Inn, and that it’s $20 a night for cable-tv, phone, and pool. Gravel crunches beneath the El Camino’s tires as Jon pulls into a parking spot near the front office. He swings his door open and steps out, pauses, then turns and leans back into the car, even in evening the California summer sun hot on the nape of his neck.
“You can stay here if you want,” he tells Sansa. “I’ll get us a room.”
Sansa shakes her head and steps out of her side of the car. “I’ll find a payphone.”
Jon eyes her, but only nods and turns to the front office. It isn’t your business, he tells himself: even though that’s exactly what he’d made it the moment he’d pulled out of the driveway of the Stark lake house with Sansa in the passenger’s seat, nothing packed and not a word to anyone.
---
“Don’t flake this year,” Robb had groaned over the phone when he called Jon months before. “Sansa’s finally dumped that Joffrey kid, so it’ll be like it was when we were kids again.”
It wouldn’t of course, and Sansa was exactly why, though Jon would never have told Robb that. The last time he’d gone to the Stark lakehouse she’d brought Margaery with her, and Robb hadn’t been able to stop gawping the whole time. Margaery was tall, statuesque, elegant curves flaunted in the pink bikini she’d sun in, sunglasses perched in her brown hair, a knowing smile playing at the corners of her lips.
But as gorgeous as Margaery was, it was Sansa who Jon’s eyes had kept drifting too. It wasn’t just how long legged and slim she’d looked in her daisy dukes and light blue halter top as she stretched out on the dock to sun with Margaery. Jon had wished it was. It would be easier to explain. But he’s always known Sansa was pretty, and that that prettiness would bloom into beauty with the onset of puberty.
But knowing and seeing were two different things. All that summer he’d been unable to stop his eyes from drifting to Sansa, and every minute of that summer he’d hated it.
But after two years of turning Robb down, Jon knew he couldn’t a third time, and so he’d packed the few things he’d needed in his El Camino, and started his trip cross country to the opposite coast.
---
Sansa is leaning against the El Camino when Jon returns from the front office, shades planted in her hair, face tilted back and eyes closed. No doubt she’s taken the chance to stretch her legs after hours in the car, and for a long moment Jon is tempted to let her be. To let her simply stand and soak in the sun. He doesn’t want to do this. Not after a day of driving and the beating sun, not after all that Sansa has already gone through today. But there’s no one else.
Her eyes blink open as his feet crunch the gravel.
“Were they there?” He asks.
“Yeah.”
“What did they say?”
She shrugs, gaze beginning to drift away.
“Sansa.” Jon tilts his face forward, catching her gaze before it can slip away entirely. “What did they say?”
“What do you think?” Sansa’s lips thin, narrow and tart. “What would your mom say if it was you? Your dad?”
He wouldn’t care. But Jon refuses to let the words touch him. “Do they know you’re ok, at least?”
“No,” Sansa snaps, “they don’t, Jon. They don’t think I’m ever going to be ok. But they’re not going to call the police either. You don’t need to worry about them coming after us, alright?”
A retort is already on Jon’s tongue, all the exhaustion and frayed nerves of the day tart on the tip of it, but then she juts her chin out and glares at him; a silent dare for him to say more in just the same way she does when arguing with Arya. And Jon is suddenly very aware of how much younger she is than him: three years younger and just out of highschool; of how though he’s always thought her the prim and perfect one of the Stark siblings there’d been a fault line lurking within; that despite how perfect he’s always thought her life today that fault line has ripped a gaping hole in her life that can never be closed.
Jon bites the inside of his cheek and crosses to the car. Sansa refuses to look at him as he leans against it beside her, a scowl on her face as she gazes sightlessly at the road, cars flickering across her sunglasses.
“The guy said there’s a diner a few minutes walk from here,” he tells Sansa. “We can get food there.”
Sansa clenches her jaw, a delicate muscle standing out. “I don’t have any money, Jon.”
He shakes his head and pushes off the car. “I’ll cover it.”
---
By the time they return from the diner the sun is down, all that’s left of the day long cool shadows. Neither of them packed, so there’s nothing to haul from car to room. Instead they simply slip in their room, the air inside musty and flat after a day trapped inside.
Jon crosses to the window and the wood rimmed and yellowed plastic AC unit perched there. He twists the nob and holds his palm over the ensuing stream of humid air that sputters from the vent. “You can take the shower first.”
Sansa doesn’t answer. A moment later the bathroom door clicks closed.
Jon wanders to the bed. The sheets are cheap, the pillows musty, and it is far, far too narrow. All the money they have is the handful of bills tucked in his wallet, and too many of those had to get them the luxury of any room at all, much less a room with a double bed.
Truthfully the possibility of getting a bigger room never occurred to him. Something about being on the road again had flicked on his childhood survival instincts when he and his mother had spent humid nights with the windows of their car rolled down, curled together even though their skin stuck to the cheap and cracked pleather in the humidity.
Jon shucks off his shoes and turns on the wood paneled TV just for something to fill the room. A newscaster rolls out the evening news as Jon sits on the bed, but he barely notices it next to the patter of the shower a wall away.
He tilts his head back, stares at the yellowed ceiling, and hopes he hasn’t made a mistake.
---
It had happened late in the afternoon, the long shadows of the pines cool on his shoulders after the sun of the lake’s edge as he trudged back to the Stark house for another round of cokes, Arya’s whoop as she took another turn jumping off the tire swing faint behind him. The summer really had been just like when they were kids, even if the dock seemed smaller and when Arya forced Jon to take a turn on the tire swing to prove he wasn’t chicken he barely fit any longer.
The only real difference was Sansa. She hadn’t brought Margaery with her this year, and seemed short tempered for it, snapping at Arya at the slightest provocation. Jon she’d barely spared a look for when he first arrived; an indifferent glance from behind some paperback she had her nose in, a swift inspection to see if anything had made her brother’s friend more interesting. Nothing had it seemed, and she’d turned back to her book, his existence already forgotten in lieu of the muscled man dipping a woman bursting from a corset into a swoon on the front of her paperback.
Not that Jon cared.
Most days she stayed in the house reading her book, though she never seemed to make progress in it judging from the glacial advance of her bookmark. She’s just afraid she’ll run into Joffrey, Arya had sniffed about it. Their lakehouse is only a couple away, though God knows she should stop sulking about breaking up. She’s better off without him.
That morning Robb had been able to drag her to the lake’s edge, dressed in the same light blue bikini top and daisy duke’s she had with Margaery. It was just as distracting as before, just as mesmerizing, and Jon had been thankful when she went back to the house early so he didn’t have to keep making a conscious effort to avoid looking at her.
Jon ducked his head to wipe the sweat from his forehead on the back of his arm as he reached the Stark porch, wooden floorboards still hot from the afternoon sun under his bare feet. With any luck he wouldn’t run into her. The kitchen overlooked the porch, and he wouldn’t need to go any further into the house to grab the cokes he’d come for.
But when he raised his head from wiping it on his arm he saw Sansa framed in the kitchen window.
---
Though Sansa has every right to take all the time in the world, after just a few minutes the shower shuts off and she slips from the bathroom dressed in the same clothes she went in; the only real difference the slick sheen off her red hair.
“We can stop by the store tomorrow.” Jon tells her as he rises from the bed, all to aware of the sweat wrinkled feel of fabric on his own skin. “Pick up clothes.”
Sansa seats herself on the edge of the bed and tilts her head to one side. She combs her fingers through the wet drape of her hair. “I told you,” she says quietly. “I don’t have any money.”
She’d never needed any. None of the Stark siblings had; the Starks came from old, respected money, and anything they’d wanted was theirs. For Sansa that had meant clothes and earrings and tennis lessons at the local club. Not spoiled exactly; but something like it, Jon had always secretly of Sansa. She fit the mold too perfectly not to be: pretty rich girl, prim and perfect and straight-A student, apple of her parents’ eye.
Everything she wasn’t now.
“It’s a long way to Wall-U.” Jon shrugs. “We’ll have to get some eventually.”
Sansa doesn’t object, and Jon leaves to take his shower.
The inside of the bathroom is cramped, the linoleum floor yellowed, but the water when he turns the knob of the shower is gloriously hot. Jon sheds his clothes and steps inside, lets the water’s heat soak into his shoulders and neck, leech some of the day’s tension from them.
As much as he would like to simply stand there in the steam and heat forever, Jon forces himself to reach for the soap. He lathers and rinses himself, and though it’s almost painful, turns the water off. His clothes feel all the more wrinkled and sweat stained after the shower, and he pulls them on reluctantly.
Sansa is on the bed as he slips out of the bathroom: curled under the covers, hands pillowed beneath her cheek. Jon closes the bathroom door behind him quietly, and pads to the lamp by the bed. Sansa doesn’t shift as he clicks it off, room black but for the thin stripes of neon pink and blue from the motel sign outside cutting between the slats of the curtain.
The couch is too short for his tall frame, but it’s an easy decision to take it. If Sansa was awake it would feel irritatingly posturing, a mawkish display of chivalry, but in the dark he simply slips off his shirt and lies back on the couch, heels over the edge of one side and head just barely fitting on the other. Not comfortable, but doable.
“Jon.”
Jon blinks open an eye. Though she hasn’t moved and her eyes are still closed, Sansa must be more awake than he thought. “You don’t have to sleep over there.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.” Irritation slips into Sansa’s voice. “Get on the bed, Jon.”
For a moment Jon thinks about arguing further, but it’s been a long day, and the temptation of a real mattress is too much. Silently, he rises from the couch, pulls on his shirt, and lies down on the opposite side of the bed from Sansa; the mattress is narrow though, and even right on the edge they’re close enough that he can feel the wisp of her breath. In the dark only the faint lines of her jaw and nose and chin are left, a sketch lovely and vulnerable.
Jon closes his eyes,
“We can go back.” He says into the dark. “I can drive you back tomorrow, if you want.”
“And if I don’t?” Sansa’s voice is soft. She swallows and picks at a stray thread on the sheet between them, the back of her slim fingers only an inch or two away from brushing his chest. “What if I don’t ever want to go back?”
You will. But the words catch in Jon’s throat. It was one thing for him to accept what she was: he was the child of a single mother who had hopped from home to home, been to college and had his perspective of the world forcibly widened by Val and Alys, but the Starks…
Ned and Catelyn were good parents. Caring. Loving. But they were also, at their core, old money. They were respected in the community, and had expectations of their children. To marry well. To have good careers. As much as they might love Arya, her flower child tendencies were a constant source of tension brewing beneath the surface. And Arya had always been that way, the problem child who jumped in puddles and came home at night with tangled hair. Sansa…
Sansa had been their golden child.
“They’ll accept it,” Jon says softly. “Your folks. It just... it takes time.”
“And if they don’t?” Sansa’s voice wavers. Her fingers still on the sheet. “I know… I know you don’t have to do this. I know we’re not friends. That you’ve never even really liked me. Not like Arya or Robb, or even Bran and Rickon. But don’t… don’t take me back.”
He shouldn’t: not after what she’s been through today, not when he doesn’t have the right, but still Jon reaches up and covers her hand with his, squeezes it. “I won’t.”
---
In the kitchen Sansa stands framed by the window.
For a moment Jon thinks she’s in pain; half bent over the kitchen counter, arms stretched out to brace her, bottom lip caught between her teeth. But not pain, Jon realizes as Sansa’s mouth opens in a silent pant, fingers clenching white on the counter as she shudders.
And that’s when Jon sees Cersei behind her.
