Winterfell’s Bastard [Link] | annabeth_writes | “I have no future here,” Sansa said, advancing towards Jon. “I’m an orphaned bastard. Your father did his duty and protected me when I was a child but I have no right to burden him for the rest of his days. Uncle Ned should not have to live with his mistake.”
The Morning of Another Day [Link] | Mia Zeklos | 500 | It's the heart of the summer and the Starks are invited to a tournament. Jon isn't having a particularly good time until he happens on the company of Alayne Stone.
Together More Whole [Link] | dansunedisco | 1,285 | “I have no room to find offense in her words, as there is none,” Sansa said to Jon bitterly. “I am a Snow. Your half-sister. A bastard.”
Hounded [Link] | subjunctive | 2,887 | Deathly pale and half starved, she’d come to him for aid, just when Jon thought he’d never see any member of his family again. Only now, here at the Wall, he did not know what exactly he could offer her.
Sansa Stone [Link] | @tacitwhisky | 6,905 | Sansa is born the bastard of Littlefinger and raised in Kingslanding. When she travels to Winterfell with king Robert’s procession she meets the Stark bastard: long faced and grey eyed Jon Snow who may be the key to all she’s ever wanted.
A War Amongst Ourselves [Link] | dropofrum | 31,152 | Sansa Snow knew, from the time she was very young, that her life would be nothing like the songs. Princes don't fall in love with bastard girls, and she knows that, truly. Still, it's difficult to look at Jon Stark, with his dark hair and kind eyes, with his reluctant, shy smile, and not want.
I Loved a Maid as Fair as Summer [Link] | Various | 12,545 | Sansa Poole had once dreamed of being Lady of Winterfell, but now all she wanted was to be loved by the boy with the slow smile. However, the gods had other plans. When her charge, Lady Lyarra, is engaged to the crown prince of Westeros, Sansa is forced to leave the North she loves and her heart heads to the Wall as she makes her way South.
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Jon x Sansa - AU where Sansa is born the bastard of Littlefinger and raised in Kingslanding. When she travels to Winterfell with king Robert’s procession she meets the Stark bastard: long faced and grey eyed Jon Snow who she finds herself strangely drawn to / AO3 Link
Photo Credit: Sophie Starke
---
The white wolf gnaws at the chicken beneath the table, coat a shock of snow against the grey of the stone of Winterfell’s great hall, eyes gleaming like red coals in the dark beneath wood benches bowing under the weight of the dozens of squires and youths too low born to be seated closer to the high table of lords Baratheon, Stark, and Lannister.
Sansa Stone, bastard daughter of Petyr Baelish, kneels before the bench, lifting the hem of her skirt to avoid a puddle of spilled wine and ignoring the booming laughter and clang of cups filling the smoky hall. She’s heard of the Stark wolves of course. All of the king procession had on the road north to Winterfell. Half wild as the Starks themselves, Betta the homely baker’s daughter had whispered to Sansa in a scandalized tone, and they say they follow the children everywhere. But despite the four Stark children sitting at the high table this is the first of the pups Sansa has seen since the feast began.
She holds out a hand to the white wolf. Its red eyes study her warily, but slowly, it rises and pads over to sniff her outstretched fingers. Carefully, Sansa scratches its jaw, the wolf accepting her touch silently. “And whose are you?” She sing-songs. “What’s your name?”
“Ghost.”
Sansa glances up to see a long faced youth she hadn’t noticed sitting on the bench eyeing her curiously. He’s comely in a dark and slender kind of way, eyes grey and intent as he nudges his chin at the wolf. “For his coat.”
Sansa’s only friend as a child had been an old brown hound who’d ambled after her as she tottered around the grey and dreary keep she’d been raised in on the Fingers, stood still and patient as she brushed his coat and played with his ears and chattered of tourneys with knights gallant and ladies fair. Sansa smiles faintly as she runs her fingers through Ghosts’ ruff. “It fits him.”
Ghost blinks slowly, as though he can understand her. He noses Sansa’s palm, wet and cold, before turning and padding back to his half gnawed chicken.
“He doesn’t usually take to being touched.” The boy’s eyes watch Sansa careful as those of his wolf. “Not by most.”
“He’s beautiful,” Sansa says truthfully. The boy flushes, clearly pleased, and a part of Sansa notes and tucks the knowledge away. We men are but weak creatures, sweetling, she hears Petyr whisper just as he has half a hundred times, breath tickling the shell of her ear. Each of us holds a special need. Learn it and with but a smile you can capture the heart of any lord.
Sansa knows who the boy is of course: the Stark bastard, the one stain on noble Lord Eddard Stark’s honor, the one who’d inherited his father’s long face and the Stark coloring that all three of his half brothers at the high table lack. The lady Stark must mislike that, Sansa muses as she stands and smoothes her skirts, fingers still tingling. Is he bitter at having to sit so far from his brothers?
“And your name, ser?” She asks.
“Jon,” he answers, and Sansa doesn’t miss the way his eyes flick to the high table and his trueborn siblings . “I’m no knight though.”
“I’d heard there were less here in the north.” Sansa gathers her skirts and perches on the edge of the bench. Never forget your courtesies, sweetling, she hears her father whisper again. Men will always think you base because of your birth; your courtesies are your only armor against them. “Though northmen are said to be no less honorable.”
The boy shrugs, trying to hide it, but clearly pleased again. He tilts his head to the side. “I’ve given you my name.”
“And your wolf’s." Sansa offers him a smile and half courtesy. "I’m Sansa. My father is Petyr Baelish, the king’s master of coin.”
Jon’s lips purse as though around a sour taste. “Sansa?”
Sansa cannot help the laugh that escapes her, high and bright. “You should always compliment a lady on her name,” she teases, “even if you think it ugly.”
“I don’t think it’s ugly.” Jon says sheepishly. “It’s very pretty.”
A hundred men have told Sansa so before, but there’s an earnestness to Jon that makes her believe him somehow. Fool, fool girl. They never say what they mean.
Jon ducks his head and swallows from his cup. He eyes her, silently serious again. “We’re not often visited with ladies here beneath the salt. Much less a daughter of the master of coin.”
Sansa smiles faintly. “Bastard daughter,” she corrects, soft and precise.
Jon’s eyes flit to her face, studying it as though only now truly seeing her. “I’m bastard too.”
“Jon and Snow,” Sansa muses aloud. “Lord Stark’s bastard is called that, isn’t he?”
“My lord father.” Jon casts another glance at the high table. “The lady Stark didn’t think it right to sully the king’s table with a bastard.”
Petyr has no lady wife, but still Sansa knows the sting: of being cast out, of being pushed to the fringe of all she’s ever wanted. Her chest twinges. “A good thing,” she announces, and answers Jon’s sharp frown with a tilt of her head to the side and faint smile. “Else how would we have met?”
Jon flushes again. Sansa finds herself oddly pleased by it, though she doesn’t know why. It’s no great victory: from the heat of Jon’s cheeks she can see he’s deeper in his cups than he’s used to. She'd only had a half cup herself. It had not taken her long once her father brought her to Kingslanding to learn to take care in how much she drank at feasts, learn how men act in their cups: the way their hands roam, the liberties they think only natural to take with a bastard girl, how swiftly they grow wroth when that same bastard girl was less than willing to indulge those liberties.
Even without looking Sansa feels the eyes of the squires and youths seated around her skittering like roaches across her skin, across the flare of her hips, the slim of her waist, the modest cut of her bodice that nonetheless always seems to fit too snug around her chest no matter how many times she lets it out. Careless and unashamed gazes, for who is ashamed of staring at a bastard girl?
“Why, they stare for how lovely you are,” Petyr had told Sansa when she first came to Kingslanding and hesitantly asked him why the men of court always seemed to be looking at her.
“But I thought,” she’d started, unsure of herself, “in songs knights and lords never-”
“Ah, but life is not a song, sweetling, is it? And we men are but base creatures.” Petyr had smiled and tilted her chin up to him. His touch had made Sansa shiver, strangely uncomfortable as so many things with her lord father did. “Do not fear though. With me you will always be safe. And soon enough I will convince Lord Arryn to name you my trueborn daughter.”
She had wanted to believe him. For weeks afterwards Sansa had curled in her bed each night and dreamed that she could still be the lady of songs, that once the bastard taint was washed from her name knights would come and beg her for her favor just like in the songs, promise to prove their love with feats of valor and crown her queen of love and beauty at tourneys. But weeks turned to months and months to years and the dreams faded as word from Lord Arryn never came. It had hurt, hurt to face the truth, hurt like pushing a needle through her thumb to face that she would never be the lady of a song, that she would always be just a bastard.
The smoke and heat of the hall have turned Sansa’s throat dry. She reaches for an abandoned pewter cup and takes a careful sip of the wine left at the bottom, the taste of it spiced and sweet and thick on her tongue. “Will you go south with your lord father?” She asks Jon.
Jon eyes her curiously. “Why would he go south?”
“Why, to be Hand of the King of course.” Sansa knows she shouldn’t, knows men mislike a maid who knows more than they, but the wine has made her bold. She leans forward, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Robert is not the kind of man to let someone he does not know serve as Hand. And why else would the king travel so far north?”
Jon glances at the high table where Robert is roaring with laughter, his wine cup nearly sloshing over. “He and my lord father did ward together.”
“Exactly. And who better to take the place of lord Arryn than his other ward?”
Jon nods slowly, as if to himself, and looks back at her, eyes thoughtful and grey. “You see a lot.”
Sansa’s skin tingles, and for a moment she feels caught in his gaze: the clang of plates and murmur of conversation swept away and distant, leaving only and her and this slender bastard boy with his grey eyes. With an effort she leans back. “We bastards have to see more than others, don’t we?” She takes another sip. The wine, it must be. “Will you go south with him? Your father?”
Jon doesn’t answer. He looks down and skewers a sausage on the point of his knife, offers it to Ghost below the table. “I mean to go north, not south,” he says abruptly, ruffling Ghost’s thick fur as the direwolf snaps up the sausage, “to the Wall and the Night’s Watch.”
A haven for rapers and stableboys and thieves, Sansa has heard her father sniff of the Night’s Watch before. But that would hardly be courteous to say. “A noble order,” she offers instead. “I’ve heard them called the black knights of the Wall.”
Jon shrugs as he scratches Ghost behind the ear without looking up. “It’s the most I can hope for,” he says in a sudden, fierce rush. “And there’s honor in serving as a man of the Night’s Watch. Even for a bastard.”
A fool boy with a fool notion, she can hear her father sneer, but the Night’s Watch is the kind of noble cause a knight in one of the songs Sansa once believed in, the ones she’d loved so dearly, would pledge himself to: forswear wife and lands and sons for the good of the realm. Would any of the countless squires in Kingslanding that loved to boast of the great tourneys and battles they would one day win be willing to do the same?
“You’ll make a gallant man of the Night’s Watch.” Sansa says, the words leaving her fiercer than she meant them to. She finds herself unable to regret it though as Jon looks up, a hesitant smile touching his lips. She leans forward to stroke Ghost’s head, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear as she does. “You won’t be… lonely, though?”
In the corner of her eye Jon shrugs. “We bastards have to grow up faster than others, don’t we?”
“And who are you growing up faster than?” Breaks in a new voice as a man straddles the bench on the other side of Jon. He has the same long Stark face as Jon, though older and weathered, and is dressed in the blacks of a man of the Night’s Watch. He snags a roasted onion from a trencher, eyes tracing and lingering on the exposed line of Sansa leaned forward. “I’d no idea you kept such fine company here, nephew.”
Sansa’s skin prickles, the warmth of the hall fled in an instant, and she straightens stiffly. She’d forgotten for a moment: forgotten her place, forgotten that she’s a bastard and base by nature, wanton and willing and worthless. You know better, you stupid girl, a voice in her hisses, a sharp and bitter twist in her breastbone. Your courtesies are your only armor. Forget them and you’re no better than some serving girl giggling on a lord’s lap.
Jon flushes red, but his voice when he answers his uncle is firm. “This is the lady Sansa, uncle.”
It must be the wine, but an absurd spark of gratitude catches light and flushes through Sansa, and she finds herself staring stupidly at Jon. She tears her gaze away, schools her face, and smiles up at the man: light and lovely and nothing like she feels. “Lord Benjen Stark, I presume?”
The man raises his eyebrows in an expression of mild surprise. “I am, though my brother is the Lord Stark. I hope my nephew hasn’t been boring you.”
“He’s been merry company.” Sansa smiles at Jon and is rewarded by a sheepish grin in return. “And it’s kind of him to let a simple southern girl like me sit beside him.”
Benjen bites into the onion with a crunch, and turns to Jon. “Don’t you usually eat at table with your brothers?”
Jon shrugs stiffly, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “Lady Stark thought it might give insult to the royal family to seat a bastard among them.”
Benjen arches an eyebrow and glances over his shoulder at the high table. “I’d forgotten how things are away from the Wall.”
Jon bites his lip and glances at Sansa. “Take me with you when you go back,” he says in a sudden rush, turning back to his uncle. “If you ask, father will give me leave to go.”
Benjen frowns. “The Wall is a hard place for a boy, Jon.”
“I'll be sixteen on my next name day, nearly a man.” Jon draws himself up. “I’m old enough to take the oath.”
“To speak it maybe, but to understand it?” Benjen shakes his head. “It’s no small thing to take the black, Jon. We have no lands, no wives, no sons. Until you’ve known a woman you don’t understand what you would be giving up.”
“I don’t care about that,” Jon snaps hotly, oblivious to the way his voice is beginning to draw the gazes of the other youths at the table.
“You might if you knew what it meant.” Benjen’s eyes linger on Sansa. He puts a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “Come back after you’ve fathered a few bastards of your own, Jon.”
Jon pushes away Benjen’s hand and surges to his feet. “I will never father a bastard,” he spits. “ Never.”
The word rings in the sudden silence around them, and all at once Jon seems to feel the eyes of the other youths around the table on him. He glances at Sansa, cheeks crimson, but before she can do anything he’s whirling away and bolting from the table. His legs tangle under him and he lurches into a serving girl, the flagon of wine she’s holding crashing to the floor to explode in a hundred shards. Sansa reaches out to steady him but laughter is booming through the hall and he tears his arm away without seeing her, flees for the door with Ghost at his heels.
Sansa glances at Benjen as the laughter fades and the rest of the table goes back to its food and wine and murmured conversation. “That was unkind,” she says quietly.
Benjen shrugs. “He needs to know the truth. Taking the black is not a decision to be made on a whim. Jon is still a child.”
“He isn’t.” Sansa isn’t sure what makes her say it. Courtesies are a lady’s armor, and there’s no reason to defend some bastard boy she’s only just met, but she raises her chin and smiles sickly-sweetly at Benjen. “We bastards grow faster than others.”
Benjen snags Jon’s abandoned cup and drains it of wine with a swallow. “Mayhaps.” He shrugs and stands. “You’ll excuse me, my lady.”
Sansa dips her head as he leaves the table. She stands too, but doesn’t move away, instead gazing at the door through which Jon fled. What she’d told him is true: when Robert rides south lord Stark will ride with him as Hand. And where Lord Jon Arryn had always rebuffed her father’s petitions to legitimize her, Lord Stark-
Charm him, sweetling, Petyr had told her before she left Kingslanding, a faint smile on his lips as he stroked her cheek. Make it so he smiles when he sees you. You look so like his lady wife it should be simple. You are just as lovely as she was as a maid before he took her from me. Blush here, curtesy there. Make him fond of you. Make it so that when I ask him to wash the bastard taint from your name he never thinks to ask why or who your mother is until it is already too late.
It’s a secret none know; the secret Petyr had told her on her tenth nameday when he came to visit and she asked him shyly if he’d brought her a gift. “A gift?” He’d mused with a smile. “I do, though it is a secret. Can you keep a secret, sweetling?”
“What kind of secret?”
“The sweet kind.” Petyr had taken her hand and drawn her to him, perched her on his lap. “The one of your birth. The one of your mother.”
Sansa had pursed her lips, trying not to squirm, and nodded. And so he’d told her: told her she was no ordinary bastard, but the natural daughter of Lysa Tully, daughter of the most highborn house of the Riverlands. “When you are older I will convince our fat king to legitimize you.” Petyr kissed her cheek. “And then we will reveal that your name is not Baelish, but Tully. Is that gift enough for your nameday, sweetling?”
It was like something out of a song, the peasant girl who was a princess all along, and for months after Sansa had smiled into her pillow each night. Even once her father brought her to Kingslanding she’d clung to the knowledge, a secret all her own that none could touch. That she could still be the lady of songs, that once the bastard taint was washed from her name knights would come and beg her for her favor just like in the songs, promise to prove their love with feats of valor and crown her queen of love and beauty at tourneys.
Make lord Stark fond of you, sweetling, and it can all still be yours.
At a glance Lord Stark was not a man that looked fond of anyone or anything: face long and stern in a way that made Sansa shiver and remember the old tales of the hard winter kings who when nights were coldest came south of the Neck to pillage and plunder. But even across the hall Sansa has seen the gentle expression that tugs at his lips when he looks at his children. And just as some part of her had tucked away Jon’s words, some part of her that never rests, some part of her that is her lord father’s more than hers, had tucked the knowledge away in the ugly place deep inside her she wishes she could forget. The dark ugly place that sees others simple as pieces on a board, the same place that an idea has been welling within since she first saw Jon.
Is lord Stark fond of Jon in the way he is his trueborn children? Is he more like to think kindly of a bastard girl, to legitimize her, if his own bastard wants her?
Because she could make Jon want her: of that, Sansa has no doubt. So many men already do. She could follow Jon out into the cold and offer him comfort: a shoulder to lay his head on, a warm smile, fingers to lace through his. Use his moment of weakness. And after that it would be easy. Easy to make him like her, think of her, want her. To laugh and touch his arm, to cast him glances from under long eyelashes, to let her fingers linger when she tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. And from there it would be easy to convince him to go south; south with her instead of north to nothing.
You would be doing the boy a kindness, sweetling, she can hear her father whisper soft as though her were there beside her, breath tickling her ear. The Wall is a cold and frigid mistress, a home for rapers and murderers, and the Night’s Watch itself a fool’s errand.
It’s a noble cause, she protests silently, like a knight from a song.
Ah, but life is not a song, is it? And how long have we worked to wash the bastard taint from your name?
It's all Sansa's ever wanted. All she's dreamed of since she first came to Kingslanding and realized she was not the lady of the songs, since that first feast in the Red Keep when men had stared and leered at the pretty bastard girl, since that first night when she curled into a ball in the dark of this strange new city and tried to stifle her sobs as she wept for all the things she would never be.
A serving girl sweeps by Sansa, bringing her back to the here and now and clangor of the hall. She glances down, smooths her skirts to gather herself, and turns from the bench, turns her mind from thoughts of Jon and songs and foolish dreams.
But even as Sansa makes her way back to the center of the hall something of Jon lingers in her mind; the shy flash of his grin when he’d looked up at her, the flush of his cheeks, the way his grey eyes watched her silent and careful and piercing as those of his wolf.
Jon x Sansa - AU where Sansa is born the bastard of Littlefinger and raised in Kingslanding. When she travels to Winterfell with king Robert’s procession she meets the Stark bastard: long faced and grey eyed Jon Snow who she finds herself strangely drawn to / AO3 Link
Photo Credit: Sophie Starke
—
Down one of Winterfell’s dozens of old stone halls Sansa walks as outside the howl of a direwolf fills the air. The sound had woken Sansa that morning; too distant to hear, but she’d felt it somehow, a raw keening that clenched a fist of dread in her gut as she dressed and combed her hair and slipped out of her tent into the grey morning air.
Jon’s door is simple oak, the latch undone, but still Sansa pauses outside of it a long moment, chewing her lip. Despite her week at Winterfell she’s never once seen his room, and now...
Carefully, Sansa places a hand on the oak and pushes it open, slipping into a small and square room with a simple cot against one wall. On the edge of the cot Jon sits staring at his feet, Ghost beside him. The direwolf’s red eyes latch onto Sansa as she closes the door behind her and leans back against it, hands still clasped on the latch behind her.
“Jon?” She asks hesitantly, voice breaking the silence of the room. “I heard what happened.”
Jon shakes his head, not looking up from his feet. “It doesn’t make sense.” His voice is hollow. “Bran never falls.”
Sansa’s throat tightens. Perhaps a dozen words she’s spoken to Bran, but he’d been bright and shy each time, and the sight of Jon sitting dull eyed at the edge of his bed tears at Sansa, peels away something raw in her chest. “I’m so sorry,” she blurts, “truly, Jon, I am.”
Jon looks up at her finally, his normally piercing eyes clouded. “Maester Luwin says he may never wake.”
“He will.” Sansa swallows and crosses to the cot. She takes a seat beside Jon on the bed and tries to give him as reassuring a smile as she can dredge up. “He will, and when he does you’ll be there to see him.”
“I won’t though.” Jon shakes his head, voice small. “I’ll be at the Wall by then. And I won’t even have said farewell. Lady Stark hasn’t left his side since he fell, and I-” Jon’s voice catches and he looks away, angrily blinking back the tears pricking his eyes, face flushed with shame. “I’m a coward.”
“You’re not.” Sansa bites her lip. She reaches down and takes his hand, threads her fingers through his, and squeezes gently. “Don’t ever say that, Jon. Bran will wake, and when he does you’ll see him again.”
“Sansa-” Jon starts, then stops and swallows. He looks down at her fingers threaded through his, then up at her, eyes apprehensive. “You don’t have to stay.”
“But I will.” Her heart thuds loud in her ears as Sansa gazes back at him, very aware of how close they are: of the rise and fall of her chest, the dark of Jon’s hair and grey of his eyes and part of his lips, of how easy it would be to lean forward and kiss him just as she almost had the day before. You want him . The thought is strange, foreign, but so obvious Sansa feels a fool for not realizing it before. She looks down at their hands laced together, her heart in her throat. Is this what it’s like to want instead of just be wanted? “I’ll wait with you, Jon.”
Jon’s fingers whisper against her cheek as he cups it in his palm and raises her gaze to meet his again, eyes grey and somehow unimaginably fierce as he studies her face, fierce as though she is all there is in the world. “Thank you.”
All Sansa can do is nod, caught in his gaze, her mouth dry. Would it be so wrong? To kiss him, to give into what she wants, give into the heat and desperate ache in her? You could have it all. Petyr’s voice is a whisper, soft and sibilant. Not just him, but all of it, all we’ve worked for. It would be simple, wouldn’t it? You’ve done so well with him already. Let him do as he likes with you, take comfort in you, spill his seed in you. He will marry you for that: a son of the honorable Lord Stark, even a bastard, will do no less, and he has already said he will father no bastards.
Jon’s eyes flick from her eyes to her lips. Hesitantly, he leans towards her, his lips brushing hers feather-soft in a tentative kiss that nonetheless fills Sansa with something she cannot describe, coils the heat in her stomach and make her chest feel tight. And before she can stop herself she’s kissing him back, forehead pressed to his as she pulls a moan from low in his throat out through his lips. He slips his free hand to her other cheek, cupping her face as he firms and deepens the kiss in a way that flares the heat in Sansa’s stomach up through her chest and limbs until she’s flushed and aflame from her fingers to her toes.
Would it really be so wrong? Sansa pleads with herself silently. He wants you too, he does. Not just as some giggling serving girl to be used and tossed aside, not just some slender maid to be bedded and bragged of, not just some bastard girl, but you. You.
The knowledge shivers Sansa’s skin like a living thing, and she presses herself to Jon as if doing so can somehow contain it, can ease the ache in her chest that pleads for his hands to fit to the curve of her ribs and small of her back and warmth of her skin. But instead Jon slides one of his hands to tangle in her hair, fingertips pressing firm against her scalp as he draws her to him, and somehow that’s so much better, takes her breath away and makes her tangle her fingers in his shirt, makes her moan low in her throat, makes-
Let it happen, sweetling. It will be over soon. You’re doing him a kindness.
It hurts like a physical thing, like ripping the scab from a wound, but Sansa jerks her head to the side and tears her lips from Jon’s, forehead still pressed to his as she squeezes her eyes shut and takes a long shuddering breath.
“I didn’t mean to-” Jon’s voice is hoarse. “I’m sorry I-”
“Don’t be.” Sansa shakes her head, forehead rocking against his, eyes screwed shut. She runs a hand through the back of his hair, locks soft between her fingers, just the feel of them flushing heat through her anew. She shakes her head again. “Don’t be sorry, Jon. I’m not.”
For a long moment they sit: just as they had the day before, close and apart, Sansa’s breath evening and the heat in her slowly slipping away to leave a yawning, aching hole in its place.
It hurts all over again to draw back from Jon, to meet his sad eyes and try to smile. She’s always been so good at smiling: at hiding behind the curve of lips that always tempts men somehow, but the only one she has it in her now is small and sad. There is so much more she wants to say. So much more she wishes she could tell him. So much more she longs for. But she can’t. Not with the hole gaping inside her at the thought of never seeing him again.
Gently, she slips her hand from his and rises, turns and crosses to the door without looking back.
If she does she will be lost.
---
The next few days dawn cold and gray, the howl of the direwolves faint on the air. Sansa keeps to the king’s camp, helping Betta the homely baker’s daughter with her chores, or simply idly listening to the other lowborn girls of the procession as they gossip and laugh.
She doesn’t look up at Winterfell. Doesn’t look up at the castle that’s become more familiar to her than the Red Keep ever has. Doesn’t look up at where she knows Jon waits.
It wouldn’t have been right. She clings to the thought like a drowning man, clings to it as she walks between the tents of the camp or lifts a bucket with Betta or forces herself to smile at some joke one of the other young women makes, hearing it as if deep underwater. It wouldn’t have been right. Not like that. He deserves his song.
On the third day king Robert takes his leave of Winterfell, men collapsing the tent camp quickly and cleanly, folding great swathes of canvas and lashing the poles to the back of wagons. All around Sansa bannermen and washerwomen and riders hurry back and forth, the whole camp abuzz with activity. She finds herself apart from it, watching as if from afar, a stone at the bottom of a river as she walks the lane between collapsing tents.
It is only when the high walls of Winterfell rise above her does Sansa realize her feet have carried her to its gate. Sansa’s heart is a painful throb in her throat that she cannot seem to swallow as she gazes up at it, at the old dark stone ancient as the foundations of the world. Has he already left for the Wall? Through the open gate she glimpses lord Stark and his bannerman in grey and dark blue livery milling about as they mount their horses. And what would it matter if he hasn’t? He will soon enough, and you will never see him again.
“Sansa?”
Sansa turns to find Jon standing behind her, as though just come from the camp. His eyes are guarded and unreadable as they watch her. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Here I am.” A bitter laugh wells in Sansa’s throat as it strikes her suddenly: the cruel humor of where they stand, Winterfell behind her while the road behind Jon. She swallows down the laugh, forces herself to smile no matter how much it makes her ache inside to do so. “I meant to bid you farewell before you left for the Wall,” she says. And then, in a rush; “you’ll make a gallant man of the Night’s Watch, Jon.”
Jon blinks slowly. “I’m not leaving for the Wall.”
Sansa’s heart thumps to a painful stop. “What?”
“I’m staying. Until Bran wakes. Or… until he doesn’t.” He shakes his head. “I have to know.”
“I’m glad.” Something tight and painful lodges in her throat. “You- you deserve to be here come what will, Jon. He’s your brother.”
“If not for you-” Jon’s jaw works silently. “I wouldn’t have had the courage-”
“You would’ve. You’re braver than you know, Jon.” Sansa looks down to the worn cobbles of the road and forces her voice high and bright, pushes through the smiling girl she should always be. “And after? You’ll go to the Wall then?”
“No, I-” In the corner of her vision Jon takes a step forward, then stops. “I’m not going to the Wall,” he says softly. “After Bran wakes I mean to follow my father south.”
Sansa snaps her gaze up to Jon, hear pounding in her ears, breath caught in her throat as she searches his face, hoping, fearing- “Truly?”
Jon nods, a smile tugging at his lips. “Truly.”
A giddy warmth flushes through Sansa, and she cannot help the smile that splits her face: wide and foolish and nothing like the restrained and light and faint expressions her father has taught her, but Sansa cannot bring herself to care: not here, not now, not with her heart singing in her chest as though at any moment it will burst.
A horse neighs as it leaves Winterfell’s gate, and Sansa flushes and steps back to give it a chance to pass. She smooths her skirts to gather herself, and when she looks up again Jon has crossed the road and stands only a pace or two away, eyes watching her hesitantly. “Do you… do you have to go now?” He asks.
Sansa nods, though it hurts to do so. She looks around her, to Winterfell rising high above her and the long desolate hills in the distance that she wishes she never had to leave. “I do.”
Jon bites his lip and nods. He sweeps his gaze to where the riders and wagons of the king’s procession have already begun to trundle down the road as they spoke. “Do you have a horse?”
“Not all of us have a stable of our own, Jon.” Sansa tries to grin, but it is a strangely bashful thing. “The back of any of these wagons will do as good as another for me.”
Jon smiles faintly. Together they walk slowly to the nearest, Sansa all too aware of the prickle of his shoulder so close to hers. The wagon is a sturdy thing, the back stacked with tent poles and folded canvas, but there’s enough space left on the edge for a person to sit.
“Here,” Jon says, turning to her as she makes to hop on the edge. In a single smooth motion his hands circle her waist and he lifts her onto the edge of the wagon. The movement steals the breath from Sansa, and she finds herself staring into his eyes, caught by the grey of them as he gazes back into hers, faintly aware that he hasn’t stepped back, that his hands still circle her waist. Their breathes mingle in the cold, the scent of leather and thyme and pine filling her nose.
Jon’s dark hair falls over his eyes, and Sansa reaches up and brushes back his hair, realizing as she does that perched on the edge of the wagon she is for once the one a head taller than him. Somehow it makes her bold. She shouldn’t, not here where all the world can see, but there is nothing in her that cares for that as she loops her arms around Jon’s shoulders and dips her head to kiss him: presses her lips to his as she’s wanted to since that day in his room, long and desperate and hungry. He kisses her back, shy and fierce and sweet, hands around her waist, anchoring her as Sansa lets the world slip away from around her, lets herself melt against him, lets the clatter of hooves on stone and shouting of men and creak of wagons fall away.
When their lips eventually part for breathe Sansa doesn’t pull away, arms looped loose around Jon’s shoulders: unwilling to leave the shelter of their arms just yet, the world there, the way her heart is singing in her chest. “Come south when you can, Jon Snow,” she whispers, lips tingling. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
“I will.” Jon grins back; small and fierce and just for her, here in their little world. “Nothing could stop me.”
Sansa Stone is a little unusual as a story as I had the whole thing outlined, and even released the outline, before I started writing it. As such I thought it would be fun to go through the original outline and look out how and why it changed in the actual writing. I love reading this kind of thing when other writers do it, and there’s nothing writers like more than talking about themselves. It also just helps me think through my decisions and hopefully become a better writer.
Note that this will only really make sense if you've already read the story. Which you really should, I'm quite good at writing. You can also find the original outline I released and will be quoting here. The original prompt was:
Sansa really is born as petyr baelish’s bastard, who he persuades Robert to legitimize and raises from a toddler as his heir. Sansa somehow meets Jon and falls like an avalanche. bonus points if she gets daddy to help her marry jon.
The idea of Sansa as Petyr’s true bastard immediately clicked with me and got me thinking how it would’ve shaped Sansa: in canon she’s at the top of the social ladder and by the time she becomes Alayne her personality is already set. How does it change if she’s been shaped since she was a child with the stigma attached to bastards in westeros? That ended up being such an interesting idea to me that I kind of forgot the part about Robert legitimizing her. That’s kind of how prompts and ideas work sometimes; you pursue the parts that speak to you and discard the parts that don’t.
In canon Petyr actually did have a bastard with Lysa Tully, but it was aborted by her father. For this AU let’s assume that child wasn’t aborted and Petyr took her after she was born, though no one but him and Lysa know her true parentage. It explains why this Sansa has red hair and the Tully look. He names her Sansa after one of Catelyn’s favorite songs because he is a massive creep, and also Stone because he says she was born in the Vale (but mostly because to me Sansa Stone sounds a lot better than Sansa Rivers).
This seemed like a really tidy and neat way of making the premise work, and also opens up all kinds of interesting plot opportunities. Now, in an outline its relatively fine to frontload all this exposition, but in the actual story itself, putting it at the beginning obviously doesn’t work. At first I tried to move the reveal to the middle of the feast (the section where Sansa kind of zones out before she starts drinking), but it didn’t really work there, and eventually got moved to the end of the chapter.
Partly this is because reveals like that add narrative momentum and escalation, but mainly the move was just logistical: Sansa’s true birth is too much information to unload on the reader all at once. Because I decided to start the story when Sansa first meets Jon (I’ll go into that in a moment), there’s already a huge amount of world building and exposition that has to fit cleanly and organically into a very small space: who Jon is, what Sansa thinks of him, the physical setting, the rest of Sansa’s backstory.
To slap on top of that all of the backstory of her being a secret cousin to the Starks is a lot, and it just hurt the flow of the chapter, and story, as a whole. Putting that material at the end of the first chapter also just gives it a lot more space to breath and be explored.
(I actually considered just cutting that entire part of Sansa’s backstory because it would slim down the story and doesn’t really add anything on a plot level, but ultimately it felt too important to her character’s interiority to cut)
Sansa Stone spends the first five or so years of her life being raised in Petyr’s old home, with him visiting her sporadically. When she’s six he takes her back to Kingslanding with him and quickly begins teaching her how to navigate court life. Dearly she’s always loved songs and ladies and kings and queens, but now that she’s at court Sansa finds the reality different to what she thought. As a bastard she can only ever be on the fringes of all she’s ever wanted.
She clings to her courtesies and ladylike behavior (sewing, singing, etc) because on some level she believes that if she can excel at those maybe, just maybe, they can make up for her bastard birth. Her sexuality is also something she’s much more aware of then in canon; as a girl thought to be base by nature men feel comfortable leering at, even knights and lords she thought noble. It disillusions her and makes her think of herself as dirty or tainted somehow. Not that she shows it beneath her smiles and courtesies.
Keeping all of the core Sansa things (ladylike aspirations, love of songs, idealism) but changing the context fundamentally changes in a lot of ways her reasons for doing them, and that’s such a fascinating idea and character to explore to me.
There’s a world where I write Sansa’s childhood and upbringing in Kingslanding in a kind of lyrical, lilting passage of time chapter before the rest of the story. And while I love writing that kind of thing, for this story it felt like an unnecessary approach. I’m a big proponent of starting stories as close to the middle as possible, and the ‘scenes’ of this story really start at the next part when Sansa actually arrives at Winterfell, so it made the most sense to start there. Considering most of the above material got folded into the first chapter pretty easily and cleanly, I think it was the right decision.
Sansa meets Jon when she journeys north with the king’s procession when Robert goes to ask Ned to be Hand. There in Winterfell she meets Jon sitting exiled at the low table during the feast. She approaches Ghost, and Ghost lets her scratch him behind the ears, which surprises Jon. She asks about Ghost and they talk, bastard to bastard, connecting despite their differences in temperament. He tells her his plan to go to the Wall. The black knights of the Wall, she tells him she remembers them called. A noble cause.
I did a thing here that’s fine when first writing an outline (when all that’s important is getting the idea no matter how rough on the page), but is a bad habit of mine and is a pain if I don’t fix it in a second draft. And that thing is that I tend to skip over specifics in outlines.
I want to stress that this is fine to do in a first outline. Really. But when you go to expand it in prose it causes problems. ‘They connect despite their differences in temperament’ seems fine, but what are the actual words involved in illustrating it? In turning it into actual dialogue? Being vague and skipping over that stuff has become the bane of my existence with outlines. To combat it I often go through an outline and highlight the points where I skipped over details to force myself to try and fill them out before starting on the actual prose.
So, for example, in my first outline I wrote after the above:
Sansa witnesses Jon’s conversation with Benjen and him storming out of the hall.
And in my second draft of the outline I expanded it to:
Benjen straddles the bench on the other side of Jon. My lady, Benjen greets her with a tilt of his head. He grins at Jon. I’d know idea you kept such beautiful company. Jon flushes and mumbles something. Sansa understands. She’s well used to being a bastard, to be considered base, to be flirting with a man simply by sitting next to him. She answers Benjen’s compliment with a smile though, tells him that Jon has been most kind to let her sit next to him. She’s only a simple southern girl, after all, and unused to the north.
This is more fleshed out, and gives me more hooks to lay the prose and dialogue on when it comes to write the scene. One thing I wanted to emphasize is just how constantly aware of her social position and image Sansa is, that she knows she’s a sexualized object.
This is also a good example of how something can say ok in an outline, and then not work when you go to write it. Having Jon be embarrassed by Sansa seemed ok when I was outlining it: he’s drunk and easily embarrassed to begin with, and it’s a very human reaction. When I actually wrote it out though, it mostly just came off like Jon being a dick. And it also just didn’t feel like it fit his character. Right from the first chapter of A Game of Thrones he appears in he’s someone who’s willing to sacrifice having a direwolf of his own so that his brothers and sisters can have theirs.
Once I changed it I realized (though I really should’ve before) how important it is to the entire chapter and story that Jon stand up for Sansa here, how it’s part of his strength of character that Sansa is attracted to, the boy who really tries to live up to the songs.
She witnesses his conversation with Benjen and him storming out of the hall. Maybe she follows him and comforts him after, or maybe just watches from the benches. Either way, in the dark scheming Petyr part of herself she doesn’t like to acknowledge, a plan starts to form in Sansa’s mind. For years Petyr has petitioned Robert to legitimize her, but always been rebuffed. But Jon’s father will be Hand soon, and he could legitimize her. She could charm Jon, Petyr has taught her how to use her sweet smile that way, and have him lobby his father to legitimize her.
One of my all time favorite conflicts for a character to have is between doing what they know is right on the one hand, and what their desperate and selfish want on the other. It’s such a lovely source of angst and also a really legitimate conflict we all go through in life. Hopefully if I’ve done my job right as a writer, the audience feels just how desperately Sansa no longer wants to be a bastard.
Through Jon she could finally be a bastard no longer, but that would require manipulating him not to go to the Wall, and the only way to do it would be to seduce him, bed him; he would marry her for honor after that, she knows, a son of Lord Stark could do no less and Jon has vowed to father no bastards. But too, it wouldn’t be right.
I ended up deciding to move this specific thing, baby trapping Jon, to later in the story for escalation and because it just felt sort of abrupt and out of left field this early on. It’s another example of how tone and pacing in an outline can get kind of wonky and not work when it’s dramatized in prose.
Separately, I’m not entirely happy with how the last third of this chapter turned out after Benjen leaves. Generally it’s bad writing to have a character simply sit around and think about things; which is what Sansa does here for nearly a thousand words. In the case of this story I think it works because of how well the scene otherwise plays out and where the reader’s interest lies, but I’m not sure I could get away with it in an original story where the reader wasn’t already so invested in Sansa. It’s an example of how writing original fiction and fanfiction can be very different.
In the following days Sansa meets with Jon and spends time with him, tries to shove down and not listen to the whispers of Petyr’s voice that tell her she could entrance him easily, so easily. She finds herself drawn to Jon in a way none of the squires at court have ever interested her, something intriguing in his dark eyes and long face. It’s strange, makes her feel naked to be the one that wants instead of being wanted.
This is the part of the story that got expanded the most. What’s a paragraph here ends up being a full chapter. I originally wanted to keep it just in lyrical montage, but that’s always my instinct and not always what’s best for the story. There’s still a little of that summarizing in the middle of the released chapter, but it’s bookended by two solid scenes.
I’m going to quote from the completed version of the fic for a bit because otherwise this turns into just a wall of text. I’ll let you know when we get back to the original outline.
“I’m not a lady. Not yet.” Arya scrunches her nose, but seems to suddenly remember her own courtesies, and gives a grudging curtesy back. She eyes Sansa curiously. “Why don’t you have to do needlework?”
I originally wasn’t going to have Arya show up in the scene where Sansa and Jon watch the boys sparring in the yard, but the Stark girls are simply too great a dynamic not to explore at least a little, especially with how it would change with Sansa as a bastard.
Now, I did want to avoid the trope fic writers tend to fall into when they write divergent fic like this where the characters are all chummy and the conflicts in canon are ironed out just because one character was raised different. It always feels like wish fulfillment to me and like the character conflicts in canon are some puzzlebox to be fixed.
And ultimately it felt right to me that Sansa and Arya even in this universe wouldn’t get along that well. In all likelihood they would probably actually get along worse since they don’t have that sister bond under their disagreements: though their relationship might be interesting to explore how it grows once they’re both in the Red Keep.
(I also just find it endlessly hilarious that Sansa thinks that she and Arya would closer if they were raised together. You sweet summer child, you.)
Another route I thought about going down is having Sansa be resentful of Arya: after all Arya has everything she’s ever wanted and more or less just spits on it. I read an excellent meta once talking about how in canon that’s why Jeyne is so mean to Arya. Despite being better at feminine pursuits and closer with Sansa, because of her birth she’ll never be as good as Arya.
I ultimately didn’t go down this route just because it didn’t feel right: it makes Sansa a less likable character, and this Sansa is still a very kind character who doesn’t even know Arya well enough to warrant that kind of bitterness. It also undercuts the longing Sansa has in this world for siblings or family of some kind beside Petyr who is a creep.
Sansa grins back and combs back her hair from a gust of wind, looks out at the rolling and empty hills around them. There is a bleak beauty to them and the blue-grey sky and chill wind, and despite how different it is from Kingslanding Sansa feels a desperate yearning inside her to never leave, feels as though she could spend all her life here and be happy.
I liked the concept of Sansa in this world feeling out of place, there being some kind of echo of canon in her situation, an itch she can’t quite scratch. It’s also an interesting contrast to canon where Sansa is perfectly happy to go south and is coded more with southern courtly culture than the north initially. In this verse she’s already been disabused of her view of songs and chivalry and just like Jon has a deep yearning for belonging. Home for a bastard is a fickle thing, and really a metaphor for the way they’re inherently destabilizing to the westerosi social hierarchy and can thus never fit into it. It’s something I explore a lot in my Jon of the Kingsguard fic too.
Jon bursts into laughter, easy and warm, and Sansa has the sudden and reckless urge to lean across the gap between their horses and taste it, press her lips to his and find out if it’s as warm and free as it sounds. Squire after squire, knight after knight, lord after lord of the Red Keep has flirted and courted and wanted her. Comely and ugly, fair and dark, bold and shy, laughing and serious: all had wanted her and none had ever made her feel like this, flushed and breathless and skin tingling with each brush of the wind. The feeling is strange, uncomfortable, and Sansa looks out to the hills around them, longing for something she doesn’t understand blooming painfully beneath her breastbone.
I played around a lot in this scene with how much Sansa should realize her attraction to Jon. It’s such an interesting idea to me that Sansa is perfectly fluent in one half of attraction but not the other: she knows with exhausting detail what it’s like to have men be attracted to her, but has never really felt much of an attraction to anyone to the point where she probably doesn’t even realize that’s supposed to be a part of love.
After all, in a lot of those chivalric songs they talk a lot about the knights love for the maiden, but kind of skip over her interest in him (this attitude is still really, really common in our media nowadays). It’s part of the way chivalry in westeros makes women into objects. Wanting and hunger on the part of the woman is destabilizing because it isn’t under male control, and thus is gross and wanton and penalized.
“Winterfell.” The word is sad and hopeful and longing all in one, and something in it clouds Jon’s eyes. He looks down at the reins in his hand. “I dreamed of my father naming me his heir and giving me Winterfell, of becoming it’s lord.” He shakes his head, voice touched with an old and bitter shame. “I would never betray Robb like that. Never. But still I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like if it was mine. If only we’d born opposite. I know I shouldn’t, that it’s a bastard’s curse to be envious and faithless-”
“It isn’t.” Sansa reaches over and touches Jon’s arm, voice hot. “It isn’t, Jon. We- there’s nothing wrong with wanting. Not for us. We cannot help what we want.”
If there’s a central theme to this story, it’s wanting, and whether it’s right or wrong to want. For both women and bastards it’s wrong to want because it destabilizes the westorosi social contract, and so both Jon and Sansa have internalized a certain amount of self hate for wanting the things they want. And they’re not dumb: they both know that taking the things they want will hurt others, Robb and Jon respectively. And that’s kind of the resolution of the theme by the end of the story: it’s ok to want, but you shouldn’t hurt others to get what you want.
Getting back to the original outline:
After Bran falls Sansa comforts Jon in his grief. I can’t stay at Winterfell, he tells her quietly. She bites her lip, because in that moment she knows he’s teetering, that she has him, that in this moment of weakness she could kiss him and comfort him and let him have her body. She cradles his head and they kiss, and it unlocks something in Sansa, a desperate yearning, an ache to have him inside her. It would be so easy. So easy to tangle her fingers in his shirt and draw him down to his bed.
This mostly stayed the same, just expanded and dramatized. I also punched up why Sansa’s attracted to Jon, not just that he tries to stay true to idealism and songs, but that he doesn’t have the objectified and hyper-sexualized view of her that others do. And as I mentioned above, Sansa doesn’t really understand wanting someone for herself, and thus it’s so much harder for her to control herself.
I should mention that in the abstract this whole element of Sansa’s sexual desire being tied up with moral wrongdoing is kind of super problematic considering how much female sexuality tends to get penalized, but for some reason I feel like in the actual implementation it isn’t too bad? I tried to make it clear here and later that her sexuality and wanting isn’t wrong, just the consequences of it in this specific situation.
But Sansa forces herself to break their kiss, rests her forehead against his and takes a deep breathe. Jon pulls back, an apology already on his tongue, but she shakes her head firmly and smiles at him even as she can feel a hole yawning open in the pit of her gut at the thought of never seeing him again.
One of the hardest things for me to write is a character drawing back from the brink of temptation. They can’t almost do something, and have every reason to do something, and then just not do it. As a writer you have to find some element that sparks them to make the right decision. Here it’s Littlefinger’s creepy inner voice that makes Sansa realize what she’s doing isn’t right and is something she’ll be ashamed of later.
Littlefinger in this story as a whole was a little tricky to write. I wanted it to be clear that there wasn’t any actual sexual abuse between him and Sansa, but I still wanted a certain amount of his creepiness and possessiveness to come through: for example, when I describe in the first chapter his breath rasping her ear or him stroking her cheek.
Even in the completed chapter the, ‘Let him do as he likes with you, take comfort in you, spill his seed in you’ / ‘Let it happen, sweetling. It will be over soon’ she mentally hears him say is pretty rapey language. It’s there to emphasize the control he has over how Sansa views herself, and the ways she’s been shaped to be passive in her sexuality.
The next day the king’s procession makes ready to go south and Sansa slides up on to her horse. Jon rides up to her and despite the sadness in her Sansa offers him good luck on his journey north, tells him he will make a fine knight of the black. Jon looks at her a moment before answering, gaze intent. I’m not going north, he tells her softly, I’m going south to Kingslanding with my father. Sansa’s heart leaps into her throat, and she smiles, not the carefully manicured expression Petyr taught her, but a blinding and uninhibited thing. And together, the two turn their horses south.
This is an example of something that makes sense when you write in an outline, and then you write the thing and it doesn’t quite make sense any more. Once I’d made it such a point that Jon didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to Bran, I couldn’t just have him up and leave at the end of the chapter. Having Jon promise to follow Sansa also leaves the ending a little more bittersweet, which fits the tone better (it also opens up all kinds of sequel plottage if I ever decided to go there).
It’s a bit of a thematic cop-out to have Jon just decide to not go to the Wall: Sansa’s challenge in this fic is to do the right thing despite how she has to sacrifice her happiness for it. For her then to get what she wanted anyway kind of betrays and undermines that theme. But, you know, I’m not Hemingway and I’m not trying to write the next great American novel. I mostly just want my favorite characters to smush faces.
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In all, while I love all my stories, this is one of my favorites so far. There’s so much thematic and character richness to this version of Sansa, and the way she relates to Jon. I have an idea of where it would go if I ever decide to continue and have a few chapters outlined, but there’s a few factors in why I probably won’t write it.
First, I have too many WIPs right now. Second, while I know where this story would go for a few chapters, continuing it past that turns it into a full on series AU and that sounds exhausting. I kind of did that with Jon of the Kingsguard, and even cutting out a bunch of canon elements that turned into fourteen chapters and 50k words. And third, I kind of want to file off the serial numbers and turn this fic into an original story, especially if I’m going to write a novel sized continuation of it anyway.
Basically, the future is a little unclear for this fic, but I do genuinely love it and this version of Jon and Sansa. Hopefully you did to.
(If there’s any specific part of this fic that I didn’t talk about here that you want me to go more in depth with, just hit me with an ask or quote it in the ask box and I’ll expound on it.)
After years spent in the Red Keep Winterfell is not so large as Sansa might have once thought as a child when all she knew of the world was her father’s dreary keep on the Fingers.
Still it takes her half the morning to find Jon.
Not that she told anyone she was seeking him. As she made her way through the castle in the crisp morning chill she’d stopped here and there to speak with castle servants and stray squires, to hear the gossip they thought nothing of sharing with a bastard girl, smile and laugh and when one of the serving girls from the night before bemoaned that she couldn’t watch golden haired prince Joffrey practice in the yard with the Stark sons, Sansa had known where to look.
She finds Jon sitting on the sill of a covered bridge that spans Winterfell’s armory and Great Keep, one leg drawn languidly up to his chin as he looks down at the training yard below. Her skirts swish over the wood boards as she crosses the bridge, but it is only when Ghost pricks up his ears and pads over to greet her does Jon seem to notice her presence. His cheeks flush faintly when he does, eyes flicking over her before glancing quickly back down at the yard. “How do you find Winterfell?”
“It’s lovely.” Sansa stoops to scratch Ghost behind the ears. For a moment she considers teasing him about the night before, but the red of his cheeks makes her discard the idea. She knows too well how bitter a cup shame is to sip from. “I didn’t think to find you here,” she says instead.
“Ser Rodrik gave me the day free.” Jon smiles, faint and bitter, down at the yard. “It’s uncouth to let a bastard bruise a prince, it seems.”
Sansa gathers her skirts and perches on the sill beside him. She’s taken care in dressing this morning; a simple cut green gown of lambswool sewn with dancing autumn leaves at the sleeves and bodice in gold thread. “And how does our prince fare this morn?”
Jon x Sansa - AU where Sansa is born the bastard of Littlefinger and raised in Kingslanding. When she travels to Winterfell with king Robert’s procession she meets the Stark bastard: long faced and grey eyed Jon Snow who she finds herself strangely drawn to / AO3 Link
Photo Credit: Sophie Starke
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After years spent in the Red Keep Winterfell is not so large as Sansa might have once thought as a child when all she knew of the world was her father’s dreary keep on the Fingers.
Still it takes her half the morning to find Jon.
Not that she told anyone she was seeking him. As she made her way through the castle in the crisp morning chill she’d stopped here and there to speak with castle servants and stray squires, to hear the gossip they thought nothing of sharing with a bastard girl, smile and laugh and when one of the serving girls from the night before bemoaned that she couldn’t watch golden haired prince Joffrey practice in the yard with the Stark sons, Sansa had known where to look.
She finds Jon sitting on the sill of a covered bridge that spans Winterfell’s armory and Great Keep, one leg drawn languidly up to his chin as he looks down at the training yard below. Her skirts swish over the wood boards as she crosses the bridge, but it is only when Ghost pricks up his ears and pads over to greet her does Jon seem to notice her presence. His cheeks flush faintly when he does, eyes flicking over her before glancing quickly back down at the yard. “How do you find Winterfell, my lady?”
“It’s lovely.” Sansa stoops to scratch Ghost behind the ears. For a moment she considers teasing him about the night before, but the red of his cheeks makes her discard the idea. Were you any less foolish the first time you drank more than you should? “I didn’t think to find you here,” she says instead.
“Ser Rodrik gave me the day free.” Jon smiles, faint and bitter, down at the yard. “It’s uncouth to let a bastard bruise a prince, it seems.”
Sansa gathers her skirts and perches on the sill beside him. She’s taken care in dressing this morning; a simple cut green gown of lambswool sewn with dancing autumn leaves at the sleeves and bodice in gold thread. “And how does our prince fare this morn?”
“The little one or the ass?” In the yard below two heavily padded figures totter back and forth whacking each other with wooden swords. Sansa recognizes prince Tommen’s cap of gold curls, and the other padded figure of one of the younger Stark sons. My cousin, she reminds herself, though the thought is more strange than else.
Jon nods his head to where Joffrey lounges under the shade of Winterfell’s high stone wall ignoring his brother and idly laughing with his sworn swords and landed knights. “Joffrey has yet to grace us with his swordwork.”
The first time Sansa had seen Joffrey was only a week after she arrived in Kingslanding, the city still new and shining and like something from a song. The golden prince of a hundred songs Joffrey had seemed too, and more gallant and noble than all of them put together. That first time she saw him he’d smiled at her, and for days afterwards Sansa had giggled and flushed every time she thought of it, turned it over and over again in her mind when she curled in her bed at night, secretly dreamed that when he was king he’d lift the bastard taint from her name and take her as his queen.
It was only later that the golden sheen had rusted and tarnished and peeled away. Joffrey was gallant and generous with other lords and ladies, but when none were watching that golden face blistered and slipped away and he sneered and laughed at servants and his lessers. Perhaps if she was a highborn lady Sansa would never have seen it, could have put it from her mind, but as a bastard it was hard to forget. Fool, fool girl. Life is not a song.
Joffrey laughs at something one of the sworn swords says. “Gossiping seems to suit him more than swordplay,” Sansa observes.
Jon grins, glancing at her for the first time since she sat. “Joffrey is lucky you aren’t in the yard this morning. Your tongue would bruise him more than my sword.”
Sansa laughs, high and warm. My tongue doesn’t always bruise, she wishes she could tease. There is something in Winterfell’s chill morning air that makes her feel young and free and bold, something that makes her want to smile and laugh and tease in a way she hasn’t since she first came to Kingslanding, makes her want to forget all her courtesies.
A cool breeze plays with the strays of her hair, and she brushes them back and smiles at Jon. “It’s good to see you improved from last night.”
Jon’s cheeks flush a shade of scarlet Sansa finds herself oddly pleased by. “I drank too much. I’m sorry if you- if I gave you insult.”
“Only a little.” She gives Jon a teasing smile as he glances at her. What are you doing? A voice in her wonders idly. What do you hope to accomplish with this bastard boy? “I had to finish the feast alone, you know.”
Jon flushes brighter and ducks his head. He looks back down at the yard. “Perhaps my uncle has the right of it and I am too young for the Wall.”
Sansa’s tongue plays between her lips. She could comfort him, reassure him, or… or she could plant a seed of doubt that the Night’s Watch was a fool’s errand, the Wall cold and lonely, that he would be wasted taking the black. You would be doing the boy a kindness, she hears her father whisper again. And how long have we worked to wash the bastard taint from your name?
“Jon?”
Sansa glances over to see a small, pale girl with dark hair and a long face looking back and forth between Sansa and Jon with a frown. Beside her a grey direwolf pads forward to nuzzle Ghost.
Jon raises a quizzical eyebrow at the girl. “Shouldn’t you be with Septa Mordane and the princess, little sister?”
The girl makes a face. “I hate sewing. I wanted to see the boys fight instead.”
“You must be the lady Arya.” Sansa slips from her perch on the sill and dips in a curtesy. “I’ve heard much about you.”
“I’m not a lady. Not yet.” Arya scrunches her nose, but seems to suddenly remember her own courtesies, and gives a grudging curtesy back. She eyes Sansa curiously. “Why don’t you have to do needlework?”
Sansa shrugs and smiles lightly to cover the pang in her chest. Because bastard girls don’t sew with princesses. Bastard girls don’t sew with anyone.
“Here,” Jon says, motioning for Arya to sit next to him, and only as his eyes move to his half sister does Sansa realize how carefully he’d been watching her. “It may not prove as exciting as needlework, though.”
“It can’t be more boring,” Arya shoots back and clambers onto the spot Sansa vacated. She swings her legs over the edge and peers down at the yard where the padded figures of the young boys still circle each other. “I could do as good as Bran,” she announces. “He’s only ten. I’m twelve.”
Jon raises a skeptical eyebrow. “A skinny thing like you? Can you even lift a sword, little sister?”
“Of course I can,” Arya snaps with a glare, but Jon only grins in answer and musses her hair, a fond and familiar movement that sends a flush though Arya’s cheeks. A pang fills Sansa’s chest as the two of them look back to the yard as Joffrey and the oldest Stark boy raise their voices in argument. She’d had no brothers or sisters as a child, just an old brown hound and half deaf septa in a cold grey keep. What would it have been like to have a sister like Arya or a brother like Jon? Someone to run through the halls of her father’s hall with or whisper secrets to giggle over at night.
The argument below turns to shouting, the Stark boy cursing Joffrey as the prince smirks and sweeps away. Jon shakes his head and leans over to scratch Ghost behind the ears. “You’d best get back to your needlework, little sister. If you don’t, Septa Mordane will have you sewing all through winter and we’ll find you come the thaw with a needle frozen between your fingers.”
Arya scowls and jumps down from the sill. She looks up at Sansa, chewing her lip. “You could come back with me,” she offers uncertainly, “if you want. Though I don’t know why you would. I hate sewing.”
Sansa smiles and shakes her head. “You’re kind my lady, but Jon’s offered to show me more of Winterfell. I might help you with your stitches another time if you like, though.”
Arya frowns as she looks back and forth between Sansa and Jon, clearly misliking the idea. Nonetheless she calls her wolf to her, the grey shape of it padding beside her as she turns reluctantly and leaves the bridge.
Sansa stands watching as she disappears behind a corner. “I don’t think she likes me,” she says to Jon, and finds herself strangely sad at the thought. It would be different if we hadn’t been raised apart.
Jon shrugs. His knee is still drawn languidly to his chest, head tilted to the side, grey eyes watching her calm and half lidded. A faint smile plays at his lips. “I don’t remember offering-”
“No?” Sansa cuts in innocently. There is something in Jon’s grin, in Winterfell’s chill morning air, that makes her feel young and bold and reckless. “Should I find someone else to guide me then…?”
Jon laughs and stands, whistling Ghost to him. “No, I’ll show you.”
---
That day, and the ones that follow, pass swiftly. Though Winterfell is not near as large as the Red Keep or Kingslanding, there is still plenty for Jon to show her. Each day they meet in the morning, each day his face turns sheepish as Sansa takes him firmly by the arm, and each day he shows her a different part of Winterfell: it’s high grey towers, the solemn silence of its Godswood, the town clustered close beneath its walls.
The other Stark sons she meets: little Rickon who is barely seven, Bran who smiles shyly up at her, Robb who from his grin and the flush of Jon’s cheeks she knows must’ve teased him mercilessly about her. In them Sansa glimpses a different side of the slim serious boy she met at that first feast: the easy banter he shares with Robb, the fond smile when he musses Arya’s hair, the soft and encouraging note in his voice as he shows Bran how to better pull a bow, the grin that splits his face when he grabs Rickon and swings him around until the little boy is helpless with laughter.
A strange pang fills Sansa’s chest as she watches him with them, her cousins, the same pang that had filled her above the yard when Jon mussed Arya’s hair, the feeling welling from some hollow deep inside her. What would it have been like to be raised beside them, cousins in truth and not just by blood? All she’s ever had is Petyr. Petyr who’s one visit a year as a child she’d desperately awaited but felt strange and uncomfortable beside when he did come. Petyr who strokes her cheek. Petyr who’s breath tickles her ear when he whispers that he will always love her better than anyone else in the world.
She finds herself forgetting him sometimes though as she spends her days with Jon, forgetting Kinsglanding and the Red Keep and court, forgetting why she came north in the first place. It all feels very far away compared to the warm of Winterfell’s walls, the crisp of fresh fallen snow, the shy of Jon’s grin.
She shouldn’t, not without a Septa or other woman present, but when Jon asks Sansa if she wants to go riding one morning she accepts. The horse he fetches from the Winterfell stables for her is a pretty grey filly that snuffles at her face, and Sansa cannot keep from laughing as she wards her away. Ghost is a white shadow as she and Jon ride out into the hills beyond Winterfell, the wind streaming through Sansa’s hair making her feel more alive than she has in years, cold filling her throat and lungs, crisp and clean.
They slow a mile from Winterfell, and Sansa leans forward to pat the neck of her filly, breathless and flushed. “I never knew the north was so beautiful.”
Jon grins at her, just as breathless and flushed. “I’ve never heard it called that before.”
“Isn’t it though?” Sansa grins back and combs back her hair from a gust of wind, looks out at the rolling and empty hills around them. There is a bleak beauty to them and the blue-grey sky and chill wind, and despite how different it is from Kingslanding Sansa feels a desperate yearning inside her to never leave, feels as though she could spend all her life here and be happy. “Beautiful.”
“You’ll say different come winter.” Jon shakes his head in mock despair. “Those southern dresses of yours will never do against a proper northern frost.”
“I can sew new ones.” Sansa sticks out her tongue at him, trying not to laugh and spoil the effect. “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
Jon bursts into laughter, easy and warm, and Sansa has the sudden and reckless urge to lean across the gap between their horses and taste it, press her lips to his and find out if it’s as warm and free as it sounds. Squire after squire, knight after knight, lord after lord of the Red Keep has flirted and courted and wanted her. Comely and ugly, fair and dark, bold and shy, laughing and serious: all had wanted her and none had ever made her feel like this, flushed and breathless and skin tingling with each brush of the wind.
The feeling is strange, uncomfortable, and Sansa looks out to the hills around them, longing for something she doesn’t understand blooming painfully beneath her breastbone. “When will you leave for the Wall?” She finds herself asking.
“When my uncle leaves.” In the corner of her eye she sees Jon shift on his horse. “Lady Stark… once my father goes south I won’t have a place at Winterfell any more.”
“Is that why you mean to take the Black?” A half formed hope fills Sansa, but Jon is shaking his head before it has a chance to touch the light. “No. I meant to take the black before I knew my father would go south. There’s honor in the Night’s Watch. Even for a bastard.”
Enough to scour the shame away? It’s a question Sansa’s picked at a thousand times in the dark of her chambers until its edge is threadbare as a well worn tapestry: if she curtsies and sews and smiles sweetly enough will it somehow prove wrong her birth? The thought draws her throat tight, and Sansa looks out to the hills around them. “You’re lucky to have been born here.”
Jon nudges his horse beside hers. “Where were you born?”
“The Riverlands somewhere. I was raised on the Fingers though, in my father’s keep.” Sansa smiles faintly. “The Drearyfort he used to call it when he visited. It was, too; dreary and dark and damp always. I used to curl up at night and dream of somewhere warm and green, with fields and forests and blue skies. Those are always where songs happen, where knights save maidens and fight for them in tourneys and crown them queens of love and beauty. I used to dream of that.” She clears her throat and forces a light laugh through it. “Foolish, I know.”
“It isn’t.” Jon is looking at her Sansa realizes, gaze at some point having turned from the hills when she was speaking, eyes quiet and calm and piercing, and Sansa suddenly feels very naked, as though Jon can see under her dresses and courtesies to the lonely bastard girl who’d curled into a ball in the dark of a strange city and wept for all the things she could never be.
It makes her want to run, to shrink away, to hide her nakedness, but Sansa shivers and swallows, forcing herself to push down the light and meaningless courtesy welling on her tongue to keep the feeling at bay. She latches onto Jon’s gaze, clings to the piercing grey of his eyes. “What did you dream of as a child, Jon?”
“Winterfell.” The word is sad and hopeful and longing all in one, and something in it clouds Jon’s eyes. He looks down at the reins in his hand. “I dreamed of my father naming me his heir and giving me Winterfell, of becoming it’s lord.” He shakes his head, voice touched with an old and bitter shame. “I would never betray Robb like that. Never. But still I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like if it was mine. If only we’d born opposite. I know I shouldn’t, that it’s a bastard’s curse to be envious and faithless-”
“It isn’t.” Sansa reaches over and touches Jon’s arm, voice hot. “It isn’t, Jon. We- there’s nothing wrong with wanting. Not for us. We cannot help what we want.”
A muscle plays in Jon’s jaw, and he nods sharply, looking down to her hand on his arm, but making no move to push it away. For a long moment they sit like that: close and apart, silent but for the wind whispering over the hills, still but for the idle shift of their horses beneath them.
Sansa’s filly eventually huffs and shakes its mane, and Jon clears his throat and rearranges his reins as she slips her hand back. “The Wolfswood is only a few minutes from here. Would you… do you want to see it?”
He glances up at that last, eyes hesitant, and Sansa combs back the strays of her hair and smiles softly in answer. “I’d like that very much.”
---
Come nightfall they return to Winterfell, cold air nipping at Sansa’s cheeks as they ride. They dismount once in the walls, and she walks with Jon as he guides their horses back to the stable, leaves him there with a smile and nod and promise to meet the next day.
Fool, fool girl, a voice in her whispers as she makes her way back to her tent, unable to stop the thudding of her heart beneath her breastbone. What do you hope to accomplish? He will go to the Wall and you to Kingslanding. But the voice is faint and Sansa pushes it away as she dresses for bed and braids her hair. She snuffs out the light and, in the dark of her tent where no one can see her, smiles into her pillow: smiles at the warm of Jon’s laugh, the quirk of his lips, the murmur of wind over the hills around them.
Let me dream, she whispers to the voice, just for tonight.
The direwolf gnawes at the chicken beneath the table, coat a shock of white against the grey of the stone of Winterfell’s great hall, eyes gleaming like red coals in the dark beneath wood benches bowing under the weight of the dozens of squires and youths too low born to be seated closer to the high table of lords Baratheon, Stark, and Lannister.
Sansa Stone, bastard daughter of Petyr Baelish, kneels before the bench, ignoring the clang of cups and laughter filling the smoky hall and careful to lift the embroidered hem of her dress to avoid a puddle of wine. She holds out a hand to the white wolf. It’s red eyes study her warily, then, slowly, it rises and pads over to sniff her outstretched fingers, red eyes still wary on her. Sansa reaches beneath its muzzle to scratch its jaw. The wolf accepts her touch silently, and a shiver washes over Sansa, prickles her cheeks like sitting before a fire after trudging through snow. “And whose are you?” She sing-songs to the wolf. “What’s your name?”
“Ghost,” says a voice, Sansa glances up to see a long faced youth she hadn’t noticed sitting on the bench a few feet away. He’s comely in a dark and slender kind of way, cheeks flushed from the heat and clang of the hall. He eyes her curiously. “For his coat.”
Sansa smiles faintly down at the wolf. Her only friend as a child in the grey and dreary keep she’d been raised in on the Fingers had been an old, half blind brown hound who had ambled after her and stood still and patient as she brushed his coat and played with his ears and chatted of tourneys with gallant knights and beautiful ladies. “It fits him.”
Ghost’s eyes blink slowly, as though he can understand her. He noses Sansa’s palm before turning and padding back to his half gnawed chicken.
“He doesn’t usually take to being touched.” Though grey in place of red, the boy’s eyes study Sansa careful as those of his wolf. “Not by most.”
“He’s beautiful,” Sansa says truthfully. The boy flushes, clearly pleased, and a part of Sansa silently notes and tucks the knowledge away for later. We men are but weak creatures, sweetling, she can hear Petyr whisper, breath tickling the curve of her ear. But each of us holds a special weakness. Learn it and with but a smile you can capture the heart of any lord.
She knows who the boy is of course: the Stark bastard, the one stain on noble Eddard Stark’s honor, the one that had inherited his father’s long face and the Stark coloring that all three of his half brothers sitting at the high table lack. The lady Stark must mislike that. All bastards were stains on the honor of a marriage bed, but it must sting that her lord husband’s bastard looked more trueborn than her own sons.
Is he bitter at having to sit so far from his brothers? Sansa muses silently as she stands and smoothes her skirts, fingers still tingling. She offers Jon a smile; a touch shy in the way men liked. “And your name, ser?”
“Jon,” he answers, and Sansa doesn’t miss the way his eyes flick to the high table and his trueborn siblings. “I’m no knight though.”
“I’d heard there were less here in the north.” Sansa gathers her skirts and perches on the edge of the bench. Never forget your courtesies, sweetling, she hears her father whisper. Men will always think you wanton because of your bastard birth. Your courtesies are your only armor. “Though northmen are said to be no less honorable.”
The boy shrugs, trying to hide it, but clearly pleased again. He tilts his head to the side. “I’ve given you my name.”
“And your wolf’s. Mine is Sansa, daughter of Petyr Baelish the king’s master of coin.”
Jon’s nose twitches in the faintest wrinkle. “Sansa?”
Sansa covers her mouth with her hand, but can’t help the laugh that flits from between them. “You should always compliment a lady on her name,” she teases. “Even if you think it ugly.”
“I don’t think it’s ugly.” Jon says sheepishly. “It’s very pretty.”
A hundred boys and men have told Sansa so before, but there’s an earnestness to Jon that makes Sansa believe him somehow. She favors him with another smile, and Jon ducks his head and takes a swallow of wine. “We’re not often visited with ladies here beneath the salt.” He eyes her, silently serious again. “Much less with a daughter of the king’s master of coin.”
Sansa smiles faintly. “Bastard daughter.”
Jon’s eyes sharpen as though only truly noticing her for the first time now, fix on her the same way his wolf’s had. “I’m a bastard too.”
“Jon Snow.” Sansa muses aloud. “Lord Stark’s bastard is called that, isn’t he?”
“My lord father.” Jon casts another glance at the high table, voice flattening. “The lady Stark didn’t think it right to sully the king’s table with a bastard.”
Petyr has no lady wife, but still Sansa knows well the shame of being cast out of, of being pushed to the fringe of all she’s ever wanted. Her chest twinges. “A good thing,” she announces, and answers Jon’s sharp glance with a quirk of her lips and arched brow. “Else how would we have met?”
Jon flushes again, and again Sansa finds herself oddly pleased.
---
Preview of the Below the Salt fic I’m working on where Sansa is born the bastard of Littlefinger and raised in Kingslanding. When she travels to Winterfell with king Robert’s procession she meets the Stark bastard: long faced and grey eyed Jon Snow who she finds herself strangely drawn to. If you’re interested in reading the whole thing when it’s finished, you can follow me here @tacitwhiskyor at my AO3.
This story comes from a prompt I got. You can read the original prompt here, but do so at your peril as I outline the fic and spoil the whole thing.
Down one of Winterfell’s dozens of old stone halls Sansa walks as outside the howl of a direwolf fills the air. The sound had woken Sansa that morning; too distant to hear, but she still had somehow, a raw keening howl that clenched a fist of dread in her gut as she dressed and combed her hair and slipped out of her tent into the grey morning air.
The door she’s looking for is simple oak, the latch undone, but still Sansa pauses outside of it a long moment, chewing her lip. Carefully, she places a hand on the oak and pushes it open, slipping inside. Despite her week at Winterfell it’s her first time seeing Jon’s room: small and square, a simple cot against one wall. On the edge of the cot Jon sits staring at his feet, Ghost beside him. The direwolf’s red eyes train on Sansa as she closes the door behind her and leans back against it, hands clasped on the latch.
“Jon?” She asks hesitantly, voice breaking the silence of the room. “I heard what happened.”
“It doesn’t make sense.” Jon shakes his head, not looking up from his feet, voice hollow. “He never falls.”
Sansa’s throat tightens. Perhaps a dozen words she’s spoken to Bran, but he’d been bright and shy each time, and the sight of Jon sitting dull eyed at the edge of his bed tears at something within Sansa. “I’m so sorry,” she blurts, “truly, Jon.”
Jon looks up at her finally, his normally piercing eyes clouded. “Maester Luwin says he may never wake.”
“He will.” Sansa swallows and crosses to the cot. She takes a seat beside Jon on the bed and tries to give him as reassuring a smile as she can. “He will, and when he does you’ll be there to see him.”
