Chapter Text
The wedding goes as smoothly as it possibly could, given the circumstances – Sansa finds herself enjoying it more than she had expected to, and so do their guests, even though she hadn’t paid as much attention to them as it would have been polite. She agrees to the bedding ceremony when someone dares to suggest it – the last wedding she’d had in these halls had not had one, and it had, in a tragic twist of fate, been the wedding that had left her with less nightmarish memories than the one she’d had in the North. Just like everything else ever since Jon’s unexpected – but not unwelcome – proposal, it feels almost like a game; light and easy and carefree as nothing in the life of royalty should really be. She should be taking this a little more seriously, she knows, but it’s so easy to lean into this brief moment of respite that she does it wholeheartedly, laughing as she’s led away to the chambers prepared for the two of them and laughing, still, when Jon is pushed through the doors moments after her, his smile almost as wide as her own right before the door is slammed closed behind his back by their - doubtlessly well-meaning - guests.
All of a sudden, it all feels terribly serious. It’s not that her good mood from before had left her, quite the opposite: the terror that she had felt on her wedding night the first two times is nowhere to be seen, gleefully replaced by a sort of light-headedness that only happiness can bring, and Sansa does her best to calm her racing heart enough to make herself look as composed as possible.
It occurs to her as soon as Jon comes closer and climbs up on the bed next to her that she needn’t have bothered.
“We don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to,” he says, though that’s another thing that she could have understood with or without it being put into words. She knows that he would never hurt her, customs and tradition be damned. It’s not like they’re going to be a particularly traditional couple either way, given the way their marriage had come about.
“I know,” she says, delighted by the smile he offers in return, blossoming from a hesitant curl of his lips into the sort of grin that could put the stars to shame. She sees it so rarely and there are few things she loves more than being the cause of it. “I want to.” It sounds a little too brave given how unsure she feels, but it’s better than doubt; better than putting her fears under the light where he can see them. “Do you?”
He must still remember her, she thinks - the Dragon Queen. He’d loved her and killed her and it could not have left him without a scar, no matter how much he likes to pretend otherwise. A king should never appear to be regretful for the right decision, no matter how much it weighs on his conscience, and Sansa had told him so a million times, but there’s a part of her that wonders if perhaps he still regrets it, somewhere deep down. They would have never ended up here if it hadn’t been for the decisions he’d made that day - for the lies they had all agreed to tell in the name of peace - and the thought that he might resent her for what it had brought into his life one day is more than she can bear. Somewhere along the way, his acceptance - worse, his love - had become a part of her that she could not easily detach from the rest of herself. A part she doesn’t want to lose, no matter how dependent on each other it seems to make them, given his own willingness to bend to her wishes, even when they toe around the line of what he finds acceptable for a ruler.
“Yes.” He crawls up on the expansive bed until they’re face to face and cups her face with one hand when she bends her knees closer to her body in order to let him come near. His touch almost burns her with its quiet intensity and Sansa sits as still as a statue, waiting for something inside her to tell her whether she wants him to proceed or not. It’s still a process, letting someone in so close, but the fact that it’s him makes it infinitely easier, she suspects. No one else could have done what he does and the reason for it is ridiculously simple, no matter how many times she had explained it all away to herself in the past few months.
It’s love. What more is there to say about it? What more could she do? She had done her best to keep the budding emotion away from him, terrified to sway him in directions that he might have not gone in otherwise, but it had been there all the same, in the back of her mind, eager to leap forward at the smallest of gestures.
And there had been plenty of those - Jon had treated her more like a queen rather than his Hand for the majority of the time and she had done her best to shove that to the back of her mind, convinced that it means nothing, but he had persisted; had insisted on repeating how he doesn’t need a wife because he has a family already. It had all led her down a dangerous path and the proposal had sent her hurtling down the path in question. She’d tried to restrain the idea of how right it would all feel by masking it with the excuse of convenience and the need to get Jon’s Small Council off of his back, but it hadn’t been quite possible when he’d started approaching her at any and all times to ask about details of the wedding that she knows neither of them could care less about and, even more so, when he’d started reaching for her hand sometimes when each of them had sat on their own seats in the Throne room, the gesture absent-minded enough that she had suspected that he hadn’t realised he’d been doing it at all.
“I’ve thought about this for a while now,” he had confessed one day on their way to their respective bedrooms, forehead pressed against hers, lips almost touching - almost. Wordlessly, they had both agreed to keep this particular bit of their new life for the day of their wedding, as if that would somehow carve into stone what they had already decided. There is a power in firsts, Sansa knows, and more power still in waiting for the right moment to take a step forward. “Putting a crown on your head. You were born to be queen, Sansa. It’s not quite the same as what the Targaryens of old used to do and,” he’d laughed, evidently nervous, “I’m hardly a Targaryen, am I? Tyrion thinks the people have been accepting the news easily enough so far.”
She couldn’t care less what the people of King’s Landing think about her life - not after so many years spent among them as both the King’s Hand and as a prisoner of war before that - but this isn’t how a queen should think, so she’d carefully pushed the thought away. “You have?” In a bout of bravery that she might not have otherwise had, she’d toyed with the string keeping his tunic together at his shoulders. “You never said.”
“I never thought you’d want to hear it,” Jon had admitted, going so still under her hands that he might have as well been made out of the same marble as the wall her back is pressed against. “I thought you’d had your fill of marriages. And I never knew— it’s not— even back in Winterfell,” he’d started anew. “Back when I was crowned, I had half a mind to offer you the power too, but how could I? What would they think of me? What would you think of me? The things I was thinking— they scared me. It was never something I could have had. You were my sister, then.” He had stepped closer, pressing tighter against her still, if it had been possible. “And I wanted more. Horrible of me, really.”
“I wouldn’t say so. Or, well,” she had amended, “I couldn’t. It would be horribly hypocritical of me, given that I thought the same.”
She had not brought up Daenerys Targaryen then, assured that she could be a bigger person than that. In a few short weeks, she would be the queen consort of the Seven Kingdoms. She does not need to open old wounds just to satisfy her own curiosity; her own thirst for having something - someone - entirely her own. These are terrible thoughts, and not befitting a lady, let alone a ruler.
How silly it had been to assume that she would be judged for it now that she had finally faced Jon and asked him almost outright. Is it me you truly want? Ever since the Wall - ever since they’d started getting to know each other better than they ever had in the years they had spent together in childhood - he had understood her better than anyone else and had still admitted to loving her, despite of - or perhaps, in her wildest dreams, because of - everything she is, greed and ambition and a desperate thirst for love all wrapped up in one. She had never asked the question before, but the answer had been in front of her the entire time.
“How about this,” Jon starts now, voice careful but laced with a sort of impatience she wouldn’t mind satisfying in the slightest. When he continues, it’s as if he had read her mind. “We know each other better than anyone, Sansa. If either of us wants the other to stop, the easiest thing to do is say so as soon as it happens, isn’t it?”
It’s a more reasonable solution than most she had thought of and Sansa nods, straightening up and kneeling on the bed to wrap her arms around his back and bring him closer, lips meeting his halfway when he leans in, warmth rushing through her from head to toe as soon as they touch.
He’s infinitely gentle; it’s the first thing she notices - his hands on her are so light that they might as well not be there at all, moving down her body and to the edge of her underclothes, still just as hesitant as he had been with everything else about the wedding until now, as if a rougher touch would break her. She might try and correct that notion, but perhaps it’s better to wait for another time - for now, she’s not entirely sure that it won’t break her. A part of her - one she desperately tries to bury every day, but especially today - remembers hands tearing at her dress; eyes on her body, both Ramsey’s and Theon’s, terror and the need to inflict it mixing into one somewhere behind her back. But this is all ashes now - Ramsey and that night and that memory, even - and there’s no need to inflict it on herself on what has to be the best day of her life so far, so Sansa pushes it further back, desperate for distraction - for proof that what she has now is far too different to even stand the comparison.
She’s seen the way Jon’s hands wrap around a weapon; the way they grip the handle of his throne when some particularly infuriating situation presents itself in court. One day, she wants to be handled with the same determined, rough care - more than that, she wants to tell him as much. But not tonight.
“Sansa.” He’d pulled back just enough to be able to draw a breath, and her name sounds breathless on his lips despite that; sounds almost like prayer had, when she’d still believed that there had been someone to pray to. His palm is still warm against her cheek, the absent-minded strokes of his fingertips keeping her grounded in the world that they’ve created, the one limited to just this room - a world with a population of two, meant for them alone. “We said that this is all a technicality, remember? That it should make things easier but doesn’t actually have to change anything.” He laughs at her mystified nod and there’s a note of self-deprecation about it. “I wouldn’t say that I don’t want to change anything.”
She laughs too, now, and it comes out just as easily as everything else does tonight - easy as a child’s game. “I think I could figure that one out, somehow.”
His expression relaxes by a fraction even as he glares at her in mock disapproval. “It’s not very queenly to mock your king.”
Her king. It sounds even better than she had always imagined that it would, and despite herself, Sansa feels drunk on it - drunk on the thought of them, of what they’re capable of together with the power they hold, of the fact that she’s his queen as much as he’s her king. Laughter bubbles up her throat again, and there’s a hysterical edge to her amusement: she had assured her mother, time and time again, that the best course of action for her would be to become queen. If only you could see me now, Mother. What would she have said? Would she have hated her? She’d be disgusted, no doubt, with how swiftly all of her fears about her husband’s supposed bastard had come about. Not that Jon had done it all alone, of course; not at all. The majority of it had been her and Tyrion and their careful reassurances that Bran would be the one to sit on the new Throne as soon as it’s built, only for her to go back on that same word as soon as the ships of their enemies had left the harbour. Jon would have never allowed himself any of this if it hadn’t been for her and the thought makes her feel too proud for words. Neither of them will ever see the majority of their family again, but just this once, she desperately wants to offer them a glimpse of the future they would never know; to show them how far they had come, after all. Even to her mother, afraid of her judgement as she has been ever since she’d first started feeling the tentative tendrils of the feelings that would bring her where she currently is. It was all me, mama. I’m queen to the best king there could be.
She had known since the start; that he would be better at this than any other she had seen attempt it. She had certainly known when she had brought the idea to Tyrion Lannister along with the revelation of Jon’s true heritage. It had had nothing to do with his Targaryen blood, as the queen he’d initially bent the knee to had proved, but everything to do with him and the story that Bran and Sam had spun about it had been an excellent excuse to channel her vision through. The fact that he had met her halfway on this just as he does on everything else, deeming her just as worthy of the crown as she’d deemed him, had been only a pleasant surprise, even if it might seem otherwise in the eyes of the Westerosi Lords.
But they don’t matter here, she reminds herself again; not in this small world. Here, there’s nothing but her and Jon, and, “Perhaps I don’t want to be queenly.” She steals another kiss, playful but infused with enough meaning for him to feel it even without further explanations. “Perhaps I just want to be your wife.”
And oh, this smile is one she hadn’t seen before, she thinks - it’s honest and open and a little disbelieving; the last one most of all. He had never thought he would have this, Sansa knows, and it’s a thrill; knowing that she’s the one to give it to him. A bastard would have been wary of reaching for any of it, especially a honourable one like him, but Jon hadn’t been stopped being a bastard the day the North had crowned him king. It had never mattered whose seed he’d come from, but she knows that a part of this new life bears this kind of relief for him, too - now, he gets everything he’d watched their brothers be prepared for; a wife and a legacy and a child, perhaps, one day. The thought makes her heart jump in an odd combination of excitement and distant fear of the unknown and Sansa kisses him again to drown it out, determined to keep this part of herself quiet, too. Tonight, none of it would come to haunt her, not the past and not the future, and she will be just what she had said she means to be for him - his wife, and he would be her husband. It’s easy. Simple. She wants it to stay that way forever.
“That should be easy,” he boasts and the nervous, uncertain energy that had laced his words so far had suddenly vanished in favour of humour. “Being your husband is the least I could do, considering that I’ve only just married you.”
“Give it a year.”
“I plan on giving it a lifetime.”
She laughs into the kiss, hands reaching up from his shoulders to free his hair from where it’s tied up high on the back until his curls fall back down around his face and she can bury her fingers in them; keep him close as if he would disappear from under her touch if she doesn’t pay enough attention to the here and now. Her lips open under his like flower petals when he asks for it - wordless but careful, ever so careful - and Sansa lets him lay her down on their bed and lean over her, one knee pushing between hers so that he can lean over her. She’s acutely aware of the fact that they have next to no clothing left to separate them and even more so when Jon pushes her shift upwards until it’s over her head, leaving her as bare as the day she’d been born, and he lets go of her long enough to let her lean back onto the pillows before following his hands’s path with his mouth, pressing fervent kisses over her jawline and then her neck, leaving a trail down to her breasts where he wraps his lips around one nipple while one of his hands slides down her body, the other tangling in her hair. She expects it to be too much any moment now - suspects that she’ll have to tell him to stop and ruin what little peace of mind she’d afforded herself - but somehow, it never comes; somehow, she feels, as long as she can sense him under her touch, ever so gentle and unmistakably Jon, there isn’t much that could set her off.
By the time he touches her - truly touches her, his deft fingers pressing into her core, still careful but curling back towards him idly to watch her gasp and tighten her legs’s grip around his waist - Sansa feels what little resolution to keep her distance she’d had left slip away, replaced entirely by his presence. After all, she thinks as the pleasure slowly takes over her mind, what’s the point in pretending? They had both danced around this long enough.
~.~
Her first days as a queen are, surprisingly, not too different from what she had already been doing ash Hand. It’s all the same, in practice - she’s there to be Jon’s closest advisor and right hand, now more figuratively than literally, given her change of title, and the only material difference presents itself in the way they’re allowed to interact in public. By now, it’s all right if Jon is a little too familiar with her and it’s all right for her to respond; more than anything else, the word ‘queen’ slipping into the conversation brings forward fond smiles rather than titters. On some level, she’s grateful for everyone who had come before them, seeing as how the population had been desensitised to the sort of couple they make for centuries and had deemed it acceptable if restrained to the King and Queen. Jon is not quite her brother, after all, but everyone still sees him precisely that way and she’s grateful to slip into the relative normalcy that not having to hide their affections anymore offers them.
Better still, they don’t have to hide the affections in question from each other any longer, and she enjoys that much more than she does the public approval. Their days end so differently now - instead of parting in the corridor between their chambers with a thousand unsaid things between them, Jon and Sansa follow one another into the same room, meant just for them. She can kiss him hello and goodbye and not have to think twice about it; she can be as open with her every feeling as she had wanted to be for over two years now. The fact that it’s reciprocated makes it better than anything.
Arya’s arrival, of course, puts a swift end to that comfort.
It’s not that Sansa doesn’t want her there - she’s ecstatic that she’d finally chosen to come home, really. She has a number of glorious plans for her now that Yara Greyjoy has shown herself as quite as disloyal as both she and Jon had suspected she might end up being and she’d hoped that her sister would be enjoy the opportunity enough to stay more than a few days before either taking off again in a new direction or returning to Winterfell. If she has no interest in the role, of course, she’ll be free to go home, but it’s not precisely a desirable outcome. In the void she’d left behind by becoming Jon’s queen, Tyrion had been promoted to the role of Hand and the split of the realm between their houses - and the more minor, adjacent to either of them, families - are a frequent subject of conversation, She rarely involves Jon in them because she’s aware that he’s thoroughly bored by it all at this point, having watched them bicked over this for the better part of a year. Therefore, Arya’s supposed ladyship over the Iron Islands is entirely her responsibility and there are few ways she can think of to sell it as something better than it is to make her stay in Westeros. Despite her sister’s thirst for adventure, Sansa had missed her, and she would certainly sleep better when knowing that they’d put yet another kingdom in safe hands.
It wouldn’t have to be a temporary stay if she’d grown used to the life at sea, after all - the Ironborn are not known for staying in one place for too long and the only rule there really is to set about this is that Arya would have to refrain from letting them demolish the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. Tyrion had been visibly relieved that the Greyjoys had finally been wiped off - apparently, there had been a long-standing tradition of destroying one another’s armadas between the Iron Islands and the Westerlands that had finally been put to rest - and really, he should be pleased to learn that someone he knows would be in charge of them now. He’d been pushing another lord for the position over the past fortnight - one from one of the smaller islands, and one Sansa supposes is bought and paid for with Lannister gold, much to her exasperation - and Arya’s return had put a stop to that as she’d promised that she’d give the idea at least several days of consideration.
As per usual, Jon had wanted to hear none of it. Really, Sansa, sometimes I think you would have been perfectly happy married to him had been all he’d said on the matter when the topic had been brought up again over yet another Small Council meeting. She hadn’t been particularly amused, but she hadn’t brought it up after that, either. Jon makes a fine king, but he’s not quite as suited for the pettier sides of politics. He certainly doesn’t amuse himself with the kinds of debates that she so frequently gets caught up in and instead of letting their Hand coax her into yet another fight on the matter, she’d decided to wait out Arya’s pondering.
But as the week had stretched into a month and the raids on the mainland had started up again, tentative but growing in frequency, she’d proposed that perhaps a trip to the region would be enough to sway her mind one way or another. Arya had been, to her confusion, more irritated by the idea than anything else.
“You’re really certain about this, aren’t you? I’ve told you before; I wouldn’t make the sort of Lady that you’re hoping to instate there.”
“You sell yourself short,” Sansa says with a shrug, because it’s true and because really, she and her sister had been raised much the same. Anything one of them could have done, leadership-wise, the other could have managed either. She hadn’t precisely asked her to rule the Seven Kingdoms, really, and as far as said kingdoms go, the Iron Islands should be rather manageable. “We could sway them into leaving the kingsmoot behind as an idea - they’ve yet to put one together either way, and their previous ruler has been dead for months - and even if they refuse, I’m sure you could do a convincing job out of wanting to lead them.”
“I’m not sure I want to lead them.” Arya’s expression turns thoughtful as she pokes at her food. They’d retreated from the goings-on in the Red Keep for lunch, but as the rest of the court’s most inner circle has yet to join them, she’d apparently felt free to be entirely honest. “What happened to Yara Greyjoy anyway? I don’t think you ever said.”
This gives her pause for all of a moment - there’s really no pretty way to tell this story, considering that her sister had been on edge ever since she’d arrived in the capital - and Sansa braces herself for the potential reaction before she’d even began.
“Execution; that’s what happened to her, as it tends to happen to all traitors.” It comes across as a little defensive, she notes distantly, and that’s not a thought she wants to entertain. There is nothing for her to be defensive over, after all. They’d had every right. “She rebelled against the crown, so Jon went to war. We crushed them before it had even started.”
Though she clearly has more questions, Arya nods her understanding. “She wasn’t too pleased by any of this to begin with, was she? Kept calling us traitors.” That had been true to a degree, even if all of their actions had been justified, and her sister must have arrived to the same conclusion, because she continues a breath later. “So she finally turned on the crown?”
Sansa nods. “Over gold, of all things.” The times had been difficult – still are, to a degree – but that had been no reason for measures as drastic as the one she’d taken. Sansa had never doubted her judgement on the matter and she knows for a fact that Jon hadn’t, either – they had discussed it quite a few times, both before and after the fact. “There was nothing we could have done outside of making an example out of her. No one else dared after that.”
They’re both quiet for a little too long and when Arya speaks again, her voice is both thoughtful and a little suspicious. “Is that why you want to make me Lady of the Iron Islands? So that you can be sure that no more rebellions will follow?”
That’s part of it, if she has to be honest, but, “Not at all. I thought that a nation of travellers would be the perfect one for you to rule over if you want to rule over anyone at all. If you don’t, that’s all right. Tyrion always has a list of suggestions for the position ready to go.”
Her sister grimaces. “Is this what this is? Either he puts someone in charge of a castle or you do? If there are any deserted regions, shouldn’t Jon be the one to decide who gets what?”
“Jon does decide that – or rather, the decisions go through him before they’re announced. I never took the liberty to do anything official without his knowledge as Hand; I wouldn’t do it now as his queen, either.”
The next words, when they come, are so gently dipped in venom that it stings more than it hurts, but Sansa notes the edge that they carry all the same. “You’re good at this.” It doesn’t sound like praise at all. “Being queen.”
“Thank you.” Despite herself, she beams back at her at the words. Compliment or not, it’s a good thing to hear from someone who isn’t too fond of her power-related whims. “Jon says so, too, and it’s still something I’m getting used to, but I suppose I’ve been trained for it long enough. After all this time, it only makes sense.”
She had been half his queen before Daenerys Targaryen and the war for the dawn and any of it, really; he had wanted her by his side already by the time he’d been crowned King in the North, even if they’d had their disagreements about how the North in question should have been kept in check. She had wanted nothing more than to see his rule prosper and it’s the same thing that drives her now – that had been one of the few things to remain unchanged when she had switched titles from Hand to Queen.
Arya’s expression only darkens further for reasons Sansa can’t quite put her hand on, but she doesn’t say a word.