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Sansa had her first dream the night Arya was born.
She went to bed slightly disgruntled that her new sister was such a little thing. She’d thought that sisters were for playing with, like Robb and Jon were to each other as brothers, and wasn’t expecting the tiny foggy-eyed tube of a creature who couldn’t even hold the doll that Sansa had picked to give her. Her parents had laughed at her, and promised that Arya would get bigger faster than she could imagine, but she wanted it then, wanted a little sister who knew what was going on enough for her to play with, and show off to, and become a lady with.
Then she closed her eyes and suddenly Arya was so much bigger than she was—only Sansa herself was bigger still—and looking so much like the statue of Aunt Lyanna that her father had once shown her in the crypts when he’d introduced her to the family they’d lost that Sansa wondered if it made him cry seeing her.
“We both wanted to be other people when we were younger,” Arya was saying to her coolly, and as she went on speaking Sansa feared her, and adored her, and still felt the long-hidden pain of missing her like she’d miss a severed limb, and Sansa loved her, and loved her, and loved her.
And Sansa woke, filled with emotions too big for her body that her mind could hardly process. Her feet hit the floor before she even fully woke up, and it was late enough that no one noticed as she toddled her way out of the nursery and to her mother’s bedchamber where her sister slept in her cradle. The woman who’d been brought in as its rocker had fallen asleep at the fire so Sansa was able to tiptoe right up and peer over the side without a pause, peering down at the tiny scrunched up face peeping out of its swaddling, trying to see some resemblance to the girl in her dream.
“Sansa?” She was so focused on the baby that she didn’t even startle at the sound of her father’s sleep-roughened voice behind her, where she hadn’t noticed he’d chosen to stay with her mother for the night. She didn’t even turn at the shuffling sounds of his approach. “Couldn’t sleep? It has been an exciting day.”
“No, I dreamed,” she whispered as he sat on the floor beside her then lifted her up, letting her feet settle on his knees and looping an arm firmly around her waist so she could lean over the cradle more comfortably. “I dreamed Arya.”
“And what did you dream?” he asked, his voice warm with amusement, “Already imagining the adventures your dolls will have?”
“No,” she said again, frowning as she tried to remember exactly what the dream had been like beyond those feelings it had left her with. Arya’s soft steady tone had hardly been noticeable over the chaos in Sansa’s heart. She reached down slowly, and brushed a fingertip gently down Arya’s cheek. “She gets faces,” she said slowly, “Faces to be knights.”
She was six, and gaining a reputation for being an odd girl—though those who said it were always swift to approvingly add that whatever oddness there was she also was learning the skills of a lady as quickly as if she’d been born knowing them—the day that she scrambled into the training pen and grabbed at Theon’s left hand heedless of the way Robb almost fell over himself changing the trajectory of a swing he’d been aiming their way.
Theon at ten had had little to do with her in the two years since he’d come to Winterfell. The boys had already been old enough to have moved out of the nursery when he’d arrived, and hadn’t much interest in sharing their new playmate with the babes still in it. It was expected that one day they would hopefully be as close as siblings, like her mother told Sansa she’d been with her father’s ward in the stories about her own childhood Sansa’s dreams had made her push her for, but that time hadn’t come yet. She couldn’t grab at him like she could at Jon or Robb without anyone blinking at it.
But luckily at six and ten a little side-eying was all that they would do, chalking it up to another oddness of their Lord’s eldest daughter when she rubbed Theon's fingers between her own, counting them under her breath one-by-one.
Theon blinked down at her, then looked over her shoulder at Robb. “Your sister has a funny way of saying she wants to play,” he called out, then looked down and put on an awkward smile for the child he’d always had little interest in. “You should go to your brothers if you’re curious how calluses grow, Lady Sansa.”
The laughter in his voice faded when she suddenly grasped two of his fingers tightly in her small hand and stared straight into his eyes. “Stay away from Ramsay Bolton,” she said fiercely, then a touch of confusion entered her face and she corrected herself, “Ramsay Snow? Bolton. Snow.”
Theon barely had time to process his confusion at this cryptic warning before she was looking past him to Jon, and whatever she saw in his expression had her dart away to fling her arms around his stomach. They were close enough that Theon could hear her mumble “It’s not because he’s a Snow” to her bastard brother, but when he looked whatever expression Jon had shown that made her feel the clarification was necessary had already been wiped away by the soft look he always had for the little sister who always made it clear how dearly she held him no matter how much her mother frowned.
Theon never got any more information from her about why she thought he should avoid Bolton’s bastard, but from that day forward whenever she woke from her dreams pale and trembling she was like as not to find him in some quiet place and grasp his hands between hers again, counting out five on his left hand and five on his right again and again. Theon didn’t know what baffling comfort she found in his having all ten of his fingers.
Yet somehow he could never bring himself to yank his hands away.
It was eight months later that Bran climbed the wall for the first time.
It was Catelyn who raised a fuss over it, casting out the servant who was meant to be watching him and first yelling at the little boy then wringing promises out of him that he would never do that again. Behind her back his brothers and Arya grinned at him about his little adventure, and how well he’d done at it.
Sansa had just watched quietly with a small, thoughtful, frown on her face and a distant look in her eyes, like she was searching within herself for what her reaction should be but couldn’t find the answer. In the end she just quietly told Bran that he should listen to their mother, while confessing to Arya that night that she wasn’t sure if it was right to stop him from enjoying his legs in every way he could.
Arya was too used to the strange things that tended to come out of her sister’s mouth at night, and too young to recognize anything worrying in the question, to think anything much of it. She just shrugged and said, “You can tell him he should run?” which seemed like a good enough answer to Sansa’s problem in her mind.
Sansa just hummed quietly in response, and dreamed that night of Bran.
The next day, his sibling’s smiles sticking more in his mind than his mother’s distress, Bran dashed away and set up a wall once more. He’d barely made it off the ground when there was a scream behind him like someone was being murdered.
It wasn’t long before the courtyard was filled with people, Ned himself rushing in with his sword drawn when he recognized his daughter’s voice in the shriek. But all anyone found was Sansa shaking Bran, clutching his upper arms so tightly they’d show bruises in the shape of her fingertips for days as she repeated again and again, “Not the tower, Bran. Anywhere else but never, ever the tower,” sheer terror for him in her voice.
Sansa was seven when she buried herself in her mother’s skirts one day at breakfast and sobbed for her as if her heart was breaking.
Three months more before she did the same to her father.
She was eight-and-a-half, and the whispers about her had already started shifting from ‘odd’ to ‘green’ when Robb was the focus of her tears. Though her family tried to brush aside the rumors about her Ned’s face still went pale behind his beard and Catelyn’s cup clattered to the floor as they both stared at their two children and tried to disbelieve what her tears might mean for their eldest son’s fate.
Only Theon saw her crying for him, tucked in a quiet corner of the Godswood where no one was likely to find them. Once more she was counting along his fingers, her slight form a now familiar presence near his side as she went through this strange ritual of hers, but this time slow silent tears rolled down her cheeks as she counted.
“You didn’t deserve it, by then,” was all she would tell him about whatever she’d seen in her sleep. “You saved me. You saved him. You gave Arya the opening to save us all.”
The implication that he would have deserved it at some point before then rested uneasily within Theon’s mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask why. Instead, for the first time, he pulled his hand out of Sansa’s grasp so he could wrap his arm around her shoulders and tuck her properly against his side. He stared out over the Godswood with a carefully blank look on his face as he waited for her tears to end, but couldn’t stop the flush that crawled across his cheeks when she turned her face to bury it in his shoulder.
No one ever saw the tears she shed for Rickon, or would have understood them if they did since they came three years before the boy was ever born.
But it was noticed that she never became as close with her fourth brother as she was with all her other siblings, even her bastard brother to her mother’s clear despair. Everyone around them took it as a simple consequence of the age difference between them, the baby coming just as Sansa reached the age when she left the nursery herself.
No one ever recognized that she looked at the little boy like he was a ghost haunting her life from the start, no memories of a time when she knew him in this life without knowing his death to bind his living into her mind like she had with everyone else she’d one day lose. Even in the life that haunted her dreams she saw so little of him, almost all of the memories happening at a time when he was gone from her life in one way or another.
It was easier to simply be kind when he crossed her path but otherwise turn her eyes away from him, to spare her heart some measure of the pain that was stretching its fingers out to her from the future.
Not long after she began writing letters to family. Her grandfather, Uncle Edmure, and the Blackfish at Riverrun. Uncle Benjen at the Wall, once along with a pair of dragonglass daggers she'd found being sold as ornamental baubles on a trip to White Harbor and chipped to true sharpness under Jon and Theon's baffled eyes (Keep them close for good luck, she wrote, not knowing if it would do any good at all, And use them when you see eyes glowing blue.). Her Aunt Lysa and Jon Arryn in King's Landing. Through them it was an easy thing to look up sweetly at her mother, no guile apparent in her eyes, and say that she'd like to write to Petyr Baelish too, because he was like her uncle wasn't he? And Catelyn looked back and saw a little girl too young yet to hear the story of why her father's former ward might not welcome any letters, so she sighed and acquiesced and trusted that however badly she'd misjudged his feelings towards her she'd at least known his character well enough to trust that he'd respond kindly to a child seeking connections with her Southern family.
Most of her letters sounded the way that Sansa herself did more and more over the years. A little too old for her years, a little strange, a little too knowing about the world outside of Winterfell without ever giving anything solid away. In comparison anyone who saw her letters to Littlefinger would be startled by the contrast. In them her writing went from the shockingly elegant handwriting that Septa Mordane claimed made it look since the first day she began learning her letters as if she'd been born with a quill in her hands to the carefully rounded and well-spaced letters of any child new to writing, very similar to Jeyne Poole's who learned beside her. There was nothing strange in their contents at all for a girl her age, except that they should come from a girl her age who was not Sansa. A girl who played with her dolls to have stories of their adventures to pass on, or whose embroidery did not come to her so beautifully and neatly that she'd have reason to make minor complaints about how hard it was to learn.
No one at all would have understood the nerves she felt in sending out that letter, and then others later when he began to respond. She couldn't help but feel that he, of everyone she'd ever known, would be able to read the secret message hidden beneath every letter that she sent him.
I'm a child, I'm a child, I'm a child was hidden in every line. I'm a child, I'm a child, never stop writing until you'll never be able to look at me without seeing a child, as she fabricated a complaint about Arya stealing her doll to play at soldiers with and he sent back a beautifully crafted replacement for each of them, one dressed as a lady with red hair and blue eyes and the other with brown hair and grey eyes dressed in delicate armor (and gave away too much about eyes he might have on the Stark family in doing so, Sansa thought; she had never given him their descriptions). It's alright if you love me, your love is useful for a girl surrounded by enemies who might never find a way out on her own to have, but love me as your little niece who you've known since she was barely old enough to hold a quill, as she told him how she wished he, and Aunt Lysa, and Uncle Edmure, and all of them would come visit one day, because it was so hard to just write all the time and she could show them where the stable cat had her kittens or the best hiding places that even the older boys couldn't find if they let themselves get pulled into a game of hide and seek. It's alright if you want to teach me, your lessons are the best I'll ever have, but let the intentions you're hiding behind them be to shape me into the child you wish you could have had with my mother, not to shape me into a woman you'd like to stand by your side, when he began to slip in small political observations that she could see as the test they were, and her own responses became more carefully considered than ever; clever enough that he might find it interesting to once again start teaching her things it might be useful to know, but not so clever as to go against the core message that she still, that she always, tried to get through to him.
I'm a child. I'm a child, I'm a child.
She only wrote to the king once, after considering that Littlefinger and Jon Arryn were close enough that he might one day somehow learn of her letters to them and feel slighted that she'd declare the ward of her mother's house "Uncle Petyr" and not call the man who'd grown up as a ward with her father "Uncle Robert". The letter was as childish as the ones to Littlefinger and played up her girlishness even more than that, hoping that perhaps she could work on making him see her as someone he wouldn't want to force his horrible son upon.
The response she received was in the spiky black writing that she knew came from the queen's hand, for all that it was signed by the king.
It was polite enough, maybe even slightly kind, as far as anything that came from her hand could be. Perhaps even Cersei wasn't willing to be casually cruel to someone she saw as just a little girl trying to make a family connection, or maybe she knew that if Robert happened to read what he was signing he would be enraged if she was any less gentle to a Stark child reaching out to him, or maybe she was simply still young enough that her heart hadn't yet died completely within her when it came to anyone besides her brother and children.
Whatever the case she claimed, pretending it was the king's words, that it was a joy to hear from one of Ned Stark's children, but that as he was a king Sansa must understand that he did not have much time for letters from children and if she wrote again she could not expect that he would always write her back.
Sansa stared at it for a long time, considering her options. It might be worth it to continue writing, knowing that Cersei was the one receiving her letters and hoping that she might find a way to make the woman grow fond of her. But then she considered whether it would ever be possible to win her over enough that she would chide Joffrey's actions for Sansa's sake.
No, she knew. That would never happen.
She did not write again.
When she was ten the boy found her, guiding Arya though exercises with a dulled sword in the Godswood. She'd taken to staying near the training pen whenever her brothers and Theon were there, closely taking in all their drills, every action praised and every correction given, so she could pass them onto her sister in the dead of night.
She didn’t know if she was really helping, not when she’d never truly learned any real swordsplay herself and was guiding Arya with second-hand knowledge, but she knew that of them all her sister was one of the ones who would need training most badly. How much good might it do her to have a few more years of experience within her if the world still forced her to run? Sansa would leave it to Syrio Forel to smooth out any mistakes in that training.
“Lady Sansa,” a voice said behind her, and Sansa started but did not scream. At the same time Arya whipped around and brought her sword to the ready, for all that the edge was too dull to do anything but bruise.
The boy standing there was unfamiliar to Sansa, which was a rare thing even with those she was meeting for the first time. He was maybe Arya’s age, with large eyes and ruffled blond hair, and he seemed neither distressed at the sword pointed his way nor bothered that he’d startled them, just watching their reaction with a slight smile. Then another form shifted behind him and Sansa looked past to a face she did know, though it was much younger than the few times she’d seen it in her dreams. “Meera Reed,” she said quietly, then turned her eyes back to the boy. “You’re Jojen.”
His smile grew and he bobbed his head towards her, “And you’re the other rumored greenseer in the North. Are you?”
She blinked at him, thrown off by hearing the word actually directed her way for the first time. She’d caught whispers now and then, but no one had ever actually asked her about their suspicions. The closest anyone had ever come to saying anything was a time Old Nan had brushed the hair from Sansa’s cheeks when her siblings were all dozing off after a story and said, ‘You did have some green in your eyes as a babe, did you know? Before they darkened to Tully blue.’
“I don’t know,” she admitted, feeling the eyes of the heart tree on her and thinking she shouldn’t lie about this thing beneath them. “I’ve never seen the three-eyed raven. I don’t see visions I need to puzzle out, or anything about anyone else unless I’m there or it’s told to me. I only dream my own memories, from a time that hasn’t happened yet.”
“Memories?” he echoed, his head cocking to the side as he went on staring, “Is that what they are?”
“I—” Sansa started, then stopped, considered. “No, I’m there. In my dreams it’s happening to me then, right then, not thinking back on it later.”
Beside her Arya hissed and took her hand, and when Sansa looked down she saw she was glaring at Jojen as fiercely as an eight-year-old was able to. “Don’t bother my sister,” she said, prodding towards him with her sword. At once Meera was between them pushing it aside, though her parry was gently done since there was little danger in the weapon itself. For just a second Arya’s gaze shifted into an impressed glance at a girl acting as a bodyguard, but then her eyes narrowed again, “If she doesn’t tell us much about what she sees then you don’t get to try making her tell you.”
He laughed and held his hands up, “Peace, Lady Arya, I promise we’re not enemies.”
“As long as you don’t try stabbing my brother,” Meera added, before Jojen nudged her knifehand down.
“I only came to see for myself if your sister is like me.”
Sansa realized she should question whether such a young boy came all this way on his own or if there was more to the visit than he was saying, but instead all she found herself asking was, “Do you think I am?”
He stared into her eyes for one more long silent moment, his expression going more serious as he did, then he shook his head slightly, “But I didn’t think you would be. I wondered what you were, when every time new rumors spread about hints Lady Sansa has given about the future my own dreams start to shift. Nothing changes with the greensight, so what are you doing instead?”
“Changes?” Sansa whispered, a sudden hope trembling within her. “None of my dreams begin for years, I don’t even know if they’re real yet. How could they be changing anything?” True, she had seen Rickon before his birth, but that was no proof on its own. Her parents relationship was a loving enough one that another child was no surprise, and after naming two sons for his best friend and brother it could be expected that her father would name a third for her grandfather. Sansa might even have let the name slip herself at some point.
She could have asked her father if what she knew about Jon was true, but didn’t dare.
He shrugged slightly, “You’re the only one who could see what might be different from your dreams, Lady Sansa, but things are. Paths that are being walked differently than they would have been, hearts that have shifted. Try to look for them.” He glanced away from her, towards the buildings of Winterfell, and his smile flickered slightly, “I would have liked a chance to meet Bran while we’re here, but we’ll all be caught if we don’t leave soon. We ride with my father’s party to Deepwood Motte, where he’ll negotiate a betrothal with Lord Glover between me and his daughter that won’t go through. Father won’t stop here, because he knows how much it would worry Lord Stark to have him in the same place as his son. But I saw that I’d have just enough time to meet you if we snuck away and took the right path tonight. I’m glad for the chance to see the truth of you, Lady Sansa.”
“And what do you think I am?” she couldn’t help asking, though she knew enough from things Bran would one day tell her to realize if Jojen Reed said they had to go then they had to go.
“Something new!” he said with another bright laugh, before turning to start leading his sister back along whatever path through the Godswood he’d seen that let them sneak into Winterfell without being noticed.
Meera started to follow then hesitated and turned to dart back, grabbing Arya’s hand and adjusting it on her sword. “Like that,” she told her, “If you’re going to trying learning without lessons at least try to get your grip right.”
She gave Arya no time to thank her advice before returning to her place beside her brother. That last Sansa knew of them was Jojen calling back, “Keep an eye out for those changes, Lady Sansa. Find them for yourself.”
It was three weeks of frantically searching for any signs that things were different from her dreams before Sansa found the change she sought.
It was a warm day so she’d been allowed to take her needlework outdoors, and she settled where she could watch Bran at his riding lessons. He wasn’t yet old enough to have been given a pony of his own, and the one that had been given to him that day for usually being a mellow creature was acting friskier than usual and paid little mind to a small boy’s attempts to control it.
Finally Hullen growled a curse under his breath and called to the stables “Wylis, ready Shadow! Mallow’s being useless for the boy today!”
Sansa had seen Wylis before, of course she had, he was second only to Joseth in the ranks of Hullen’s underlings in the stable. But he was always quick about his work, and knowledgeable at what he did, and once or twice had even stopped while she was watching her brothers at their training to point out quirks in their form and share a story or two about how he’d once done the same with her aunt.
She’d thought that her memories of a future life had contained nothing of him. It wasn’t so strange, the earliest of them started not long before going away for a long time to King’s Landing, and by the time she made her way back to Winterfell at last so many of the people there were lost. The Sansa she was in her dreams hadn’t spent time near the training yards or the stables, it wasn’t a surprise for her to be unfamiliar with their stablehands.
It was only now, searching for glimmers of her dreams within her waking life, that she finally looked at the large man leading a new pony out and it suddenly struck her that she did recognize his frame and face, if she imagined him with a greatly different stance and expression. “Hodor?” she whispered.
He blinked at the apparently nonsense word as he walked past. “My lady?” he asked, tilting his head towards her.
“Wylis, you’re Old Nan’s son, aren’t you?” she asked slowly, hoping that she was right, that she wasn’t just imagining a resemblance because he was so tall and broad.
His face twisted goodnaturedly as he nodded, “Has she been telling stories about me to the little ones again? I’d be grateful if you’d ask her to stop, My Lady, she might listen to it coming from you.”
“She’d only talk about you because she’s proud,” Sansa offered absently, her eyes fixed wonderingly on Bran as he tried to insist that he could control Mallow, really, “She has every reason to be.”
She is twelve when Arya stomps into breakfast, glowers down the table at Theon, and asked, “Is Sansa going to marry him?”
“What?” Sansa asked, at the same moment as her father said “Possibly,” and her mother, “Preferably not.”
At the other end of the table Theon choked on his food. He hardly even seemed to notice the slight in Catelyn’s turn of phrase, not even when she proceeded to smooth it over slightly by adding, “This is nothing against you, Theon, but when it comes to the politics involved…” then trailed off when nobody seemed to care.
Sansa was almost more surprised that no one save Theon himself seemed as shocked as she was than she was at the question itself. “Why would I marry Theon?” she managed to ask, then flinched at the hurt look he shot her like he thought she was asking as a question of his worth rather than simply having no idea how this could be a possibility that everyone else was already aware of.
“Sansa,” Ned said slowly, “everyone knows that you may be a Greenseer.” The word fell heavily out of his mouth, the entire family stilling at it. The possibility had never been spoken aloud between them before. Only Arya turned towards Sansa and raised both of her eyebrows high, knowing as well as Sansa did that if Jojen Reed were to be believed her dreams were something else entirely. “And everyone has seen the way you’ve turned to Theon for comfort ever since you were a child. If your dreams have shown your fate tied to his, the Lords of the North would not argue that we should go against the Greensight if you were betrothed. But,” he dragged a hand tiredly down his face, “I have no intention of keeping you from your home when the time comes to return, Theon, and they would also be loathe to see a Northern Greenseer taken away to the Iron Islands. Sansa, the only place you may be able to leave the North for without causing an outcry would be if you sat beside the Iron Throne itself.”
Sansa’s stomach twisted at the suggestion, and she turned once more to look at Theon. Their eyes met and held, and though he still looked confounded his gaze slowly turned questioning under hers. “I would rather it be Theon,” she said. “I would rather it be Theon over most any Lord you could name.”
She heard her mother’s exasperated sigh, and Robb’s laughter at the sudden flush that spread through Theon’s face, but she didn’t look away from him, wondering all the while if this might be the escape from the future, from both their futures, that she needed to find.
They found the direwolves in the snow just when she’d known they would, just when she’d hoped they wouldn’t.
Her dreams came in mismatched pieces, jumping wildly back and forth across a number of years with no rhyme or reason that she’d ever been able to find, but she thought the direwolves were the earliest of them all. When word came of the Night’s Watch deserter, when she watched her father chose to bring Bran with them to the execution, when she realized what age she was at she knew, she knew, but still she hoped.
That hope didn’t didn’t stop her from grabbing her father’s arm before he could leave and saying, “If you find a direwolf who's been killed by a stag on your way back, if you find our pups, then all my dreams are true.”
When he rode back, the party cradling small direwolf puppies that she knew would one day grow massive if they could only live long enough to do so, his face was pale and he was stiff and silent looking down at her before he vanished into Winterfell.
She took Lady into her arms, cradling her close for the first time in so many years, for the first time in her life, then pressed her back into Theon’s grasp. “She might be safe with you,” she whispered as the puppy whimpered and twisted in his arms, already trying to get back to her after one brief moment of contact, “she won’t be with me.”
Then she turned and walked back into Winterfell, all the way to her room, feeling numb inside.
Her father had never announced a betrothal between herself and Theon since the one time they’d spoken of it, likely thinking there was plenty of time left before he’d need to make a sure decision about giving his eldest daughter up in a poor match to his ward. She was not claimed and so the king would claim her, he’d care nothing about Northern superstitions if it meant making Ned’s family part of his own at last.
And her father, as much as she loved him and for all that he might believe her now if she sat him down and told him everything she’d ever seen, would not be able to deny Robert Baratheon. He would swear to see her happy, swear that he would help shape Joffrey into a boy who was not a monster, but he would not deny his oldest friend. Not without some other match in place to hold up before him, and the King’s party would arrive too soon for him to work out any betrothal arrangements from nothing with Balon Greyjoy.
Maybe if she cast aside the idea of Theon as her escape, if they turned to the son of a Northern lord close at hand, perhaps even Jojen who could put his visions of what was going to be together with her memories of what had been and help her work out more ways to drag them all off the path she’d seen. But that too wouldn’t work, because the Lords of the North would only begrudgingly accept a match between her and Theon because they believed her a Greenseer and mistook her clinging because she’d found counting his intact fingers one of the easiest ways to prove to herself that then was not now when an especially bad dream-memory was haunting her as proof that she’d seen them bound to each other. Betrothing her to one of their own sons instead would require picking apart a mess of politics and potential hurt pride, every House wanting the eldest Stark daughter for itself if her family wasn’t going to spend her marriage on forging some more desirable tie with a House not already sworn to it.
The fact that Theon was the only one amongst them who she would want to marry wasn't even something she could allow to be part of her concerns.
Revealing the truth about Joffrey’s parentage and escaping by way of Robert having no trueborn sons to marry her to would also be impossible. Her family might believe her if she told them, but that wasn’t an accusation they could make based on her dreams alone with no other evidence.
Even if they did, and they were believed, she wasn’t entirely sure she’d trust King Robert not to just turn around and declare her his own bride after beheading Cersei for treason. He would get his family ties with Ned, he would get his own Stark bride at last, and, though he would at least be a better choice than Joffery (or, her mind recoiled to even consider the notion, Ramsey), if she needed to marry some member of the King’s party again she would sooner corner Tyrion and beg him to elope with her. At least she knew that he would treat her well, and Tywin would certainly back the union as the one good piece given to him as the rest of his family fell apart.
The only thing she could think of was that she had to make it so that Joffery wouldn’t want her, that none of them would. That nobody would but those who already loved her or those who so obviously wanted to use her that even her blindly noble father would see straight through them.
Memories from that past that may be the future echoed through her mind as she considered what she could do. ‘Gregor never said a word, he just grabbed his brother by the scruff of his neck and shoved his face into the burning coals.’ she remembered as she slowly turned towards the fire. ‘Held him there while the boy screamed, while his face melted.’
“Thank you, Petyr,” she murmured across time to that version of him who would only accept the title of "Uncle" as a passing guise while she dropped to her knees before the grate, “for one last piece of guidance.”
She tore strips from one of her old dresses first, soaking them in her water basin. The fire itself was too large for her purposes but it was easy enough to scoop a pile of embers out onto the stone hearth. For one long moment she stared down at them, bracing herself, then tied the soaking cloth around her eyes to protect them and blindly pressed her face down into the glowing wood.
It was agony, but she had been in agony before. Would be in agony again, if she wasn’t able to stop it in its path. She clenched her jaw tight to hold in any screams, held her body rigid to keep it from instinctively scrambling back, felt part of her hair catch and let it, and burned and burned and…
There was a sharp bark rushing towards her, broken now and then by a piping mournful howl, and feet stomping down the hall. The door slammed open and Theon burst through, right behind Lady who kept up her stream of wailing little puppy barks. “Sansa, what are you doing?” he shouted, grabbing up her bedclothes to pile around her, stifling the flames starting up in her hair.
Then she was in his arms, herself and Lady who’d burrowed into the blankets with her and refused to be budged, and he was dashing towards Maester Luwin’s room as if they weighed nothing. “Find Lord and Lady Stark, tell them Lady Sansa’s been injured!” he barked at someone she couldn’t see as they ran by. The only thing that was visible to her, when she reached up to pull the cloth around her eyes aside, was his terrified face above her, the shroud of blankets still around her blocking everything else.
“I had to do it,” she whispered to him, seeing the tension in his face growing tighter when she spoke, “I won’t marry Joffrey Baratheon.”
“Of course you won’t,” he bit out, glancing down at her just long enough for her to spot the pain in his eyes, “You’ll be marrying me remember?”
“Maybe now,” she said with a smile, leaning closer against his chest. There was pain still, but pain would never break her, “When I’ll be too ugly for him to want me.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, and she could hear the frightened tone in his voice under his attempts to keep his words light for her sake, “Prettiest girl in the North, you are. I’d be the envy of every Ironborn even if I’d been fool enough to ignore the pup panicking and you’d been left alone until your face burned black.”
And he meant it, he really meant it, she realized when he flicked another glance down at her and this one was long enough that she could see that while there was pain there his eyes didn’t hold any disgust towards whatever she’d made of her face. Maybe, she realized with a start, that was another thing she’d changed without even realizing it. Maybe this world had gifted her a Theon who didn’t need to be mutilated before he became a man who’d stand firmly by her family’s side regardless of whether he ever got tied to them by marriage.
She closed her eyes, listened to his heart hammering in his chest, buried her fingers in Lady’s fur, and smiled. “You’re going to make a better future with me, Theon Greyjoy,” she told him.
And for the first time since that day had proven her dreams to be real she found it within herself to really believe it.