Chapter Text
Pacing anxiously in the breakroom of Lannister Industries, gritting her teeth as she strode the length of the deserted room for the umpteenth time, Sansa Stark was quite positive that at any given minute, her entire head would absolutely and unequivocally explode. For months now, Sansa had been harboring a guilty little pleasure on her company’s computer. Although time and time again she had meant to swipe those naughty nuggets off her hard drive once and for all, Sansa never assumed that she had any pressing need to rush. However, when she reported for duty this morning in the Marketing Department of the enormous conglomerate, Sansa realized far too late that there indeed had been a sense of urgency of which she had not privy.
Without warning to the staff at large, the nerds in the tech department had descended in the wee hours of the night, long after the rest of the employees were fast asleep, and like a bunch of geeky secret-spy assassins, they had quietly removed every piece of desktop computing power within the entire building, all on the direct orders of corporate, who had called them in to try to solve the mystery of a sudden malware invasion attacking the company’s server.
And that could only mean one thing.
Any moment now, Sansa’s dirty little secret would be exposed.
Fanfiction.
Yes, Sansa Stark, the prim, proper, straight-laced young woman who always minded her courtesies and outwardly projected herself like a true highborn lady loved nothing more than to wallow in the deep, deep quagmire of online smut, gleefully reading and writing countless tales of erotica and various forms of hardcore porn.
Think, Sansa, think. . .
Against her better judgment and the sound of advice of Margaery Tyrell, her colleague and fellow fanfic aficionado, Sansa had been churning out countless one-shots and longer tales during business hours when she was supposed to be analyzing market research and compiling statistics for the head honchos. The problem was not that Sansa was writing drabbles and the like, really. Her performance on the job was always above-board, her reports meticulously researched and annotated, presented in the appropriate color-coded and superiorly cross-referenced format as required.
For Sansa, the problem with writing fanfiction was that she had made one seriously heinous rookie error. She had failed to maintain that much-needed buffer between her passion for writing and her need for gainful employment. Instead of saving her work on a flash drive or on her own personal computing system, Sansa had been careless; she had been saving her fiction on her corporate-owned laptop because her upload speed was substantially faster here at the office than at home. She had become lazy, keeping her files stored on her work computer so she could transfer her raunchy masterpieces directly to her online fanfiction account with much greater ease.
Faster uploads meant faster kudos.
But now, as Sansa all but spoke in tongue and gnashed her teeth, she faced the cold, hard reality that at this very minute, some gamer goober was probably locked away in the bowels of the building down in the tech department, jacking off to one of her recently discovered epic sagas of lust, longing, and light bondage.
“Would you please sit down already?” Margaery sighed heavily, watching her tall, redheaded best friend mercilessly pace the length of the breakroom.
“How can you be so calm?” Sansa squeaked. Her pumps smacked the black and white checkered linoleum like a herd of angry elephants, pausing long enough to rub her crystal blue eyes in frustration. “I’m so going to get fired over this. God, if only I had listened to you. . .”
“Well, it’s too late to worry about that now.” Margaery sighed again, shaking her head and brushing her long, blond hair off her shoulders.
“Oh, God, I can just see Cersei’s face now. . .” Sansa groaned. Releasing her eyeballs, she resumed her back and forth march of doom. “Ever since I dumped her sadistic little jerk son, Cersei has had it in for me. She’s always looking for a way to undermine me in staff meetings. Ugh, how could I have been so stupid! This is exactly what she needs to get me fired!” Sansa was coming up dry on how to explain herself to her supervisor once the truth about what was stored on her computer was finally revealed. There really seemed like no way of getting ahead of this terrible, terrible mistake.
“Now, Sansa,” Margaery grinned, “you’re not giving up that easily, are you?” She uncrossed her shapely legs as she leaned on the small round table where she sat.
“What else can I do?” Sansa snorted with her well-manicured hands waving wildly in the air. “I mean, they have my lap top. How am I supposed to get my stuff back without them seeing it first?”
Margaery smirked as she rose to her feet, placing her hands coyly on her hips. “Well, for starters, you don’t even know if they will bother to scan your computer.”
“But. . .”
“If they do, they probably won’t even spend ten minutes messing with it. They’re looking from some virus, not documents.”
“Yeah?” Sansa pondered the idea. “You think so?”
“Sure, I do!,” Margaery nodded. “Who’s to say that they will even notice your files if they do happen to skim over your hard drive? Didn’t you tell me you had the files stored in a folder labeled, ‘Recipes?’”
“Uh. . .yeah. . .” Sansa agreed. That had been a stroke of genius on her part.
“So, you see? The techies won’t give two shits about your little folder of fics in the first place.”
“You think?” Sansa blinked rapidly as her friend’s assessment of the situation overtook her. Maybe Margaery was right. Maybe the guys down in the dungeon of nerdville wouldn’t think twice about her collection of Word and PDF files. Maybe she could escape unnoticed after all.
“Then again,” Margaery grimaced, pursing her lips together, “they may go over our laptops with a fine-tooth comb.”
“Oh, God,” Sansa moaned. She braced herself on the kitchen counter of the breakroom. Heaven help her but she felt dizzy. The breakroom was about to spin. Life as she knew it was about to screech to a highly dramatic and completely embarrassing halt. Any minute now, she would be called into Cersei Lannister’s office, the chopping block laid out and the ax raised high. . .
Margaery interruped Sansa’s current round of overactive imagination. “I have an idea.”
“You do?” Sansa wondered if this was what a near-death experience felt like.
Margaery nodded. “You’re going to go down to the tech department and fetch your computer.”
“And just how do you propose I manage that?”
“Why, by utilizing your God-given, feminine charms, of course!”
Sansa chewed on her bottom lip for a moment as she mulled over Margaery’s plan. “My charms. . .” Her mouth quirked at the corners as she realized the brilliance of her buddy’s scheme. “I think you’re on to something.”
“Of course, I am,” Margaery laughed.
Sansa resumed her pacing, albeit at a much slower, methodical pace this time. “So, you think if I go down there and flirt with one of the techies, I can get them to do what I want.”
“Certainly!”
“Well, you and I both know that I’m not the best at flirting. . .”
“We’ve been friends for over a decade, right?” Margaery asked.
“Uh. . .”
“Pretend you’re me. They won’t stand a chance.”
That statement made Sansa chuckle. Margaery was the queen of seduction.
“Alright, I’m in,” Sansa said. She took a deep breath to prepare her mentally for the pending challenge. Although she was quite proficient at writing seduction, executing it in real life was not something she excelled at.
“Good. Now let’s rehearse a few things. . .”
Before Margaery could continue, Sansa blurted out suddenly. “Oh, God. What if ‘you-know-who’ is down there. Ugh, I am so not flirting with that giant moron.”
Trying not to let her lips upturn into a grin, Margaery bit the inside of her cheek to hold off her laugh. “Again, with this?”
“You know he hates me just as much as I hate him,” Sansa huffed indignantly. “Hateful man. He’s always making his little snarky comments while pretending to be so damn polite. ‘Miss Stark’ this; ‘Miss Stark’ that. Please. I’ve heard him talking with Bronn and Tormund in the break room when he doesn’t think anyone is listening. Dude has a foul mouth like -”
“Did you just admit to spying on Sandor?” Margaery giggled as she shook her head at her ginger friend.
Sansa gasped at the suggestion. “What? Me? Spying on the likes of him? Really?”
“Uh-huh,” Margaery sniffed in amusement.
“I don’t like him!” Sansa pouted, folding her arms in front of her ample bosom. “He thinks he’s smarter than all of us, stupid techie dork.”
Margaery smiled. “Still haven’t gotten over him switching out your printer without telling you?”
“No!” Sansa barked, “You see? He loves messing with me! Ooo, if I could just - ”
“Okay, okay,” Margaery chuckled as she grabbed Sansa’s forearm, “I’ve heard enough. Let’s go hole up in my office and work on our plan to get your laptop back so you can escape complete and total humiliation for real, hmm?”
“Fine,” Sansa sniffed petulantly while Margaery drug her along with her, “but God as my witness, I will never, ever in my natural born days flirt with the likes of Sandor Clegane!”