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Nobody on the flight knows her name.
It’s going North, right back home. Well, home for her. The stories of everyone else are their own and unknown to her. Looking around, she sees the only other people on board are a few elderly couples, three middle aged businessmen who are probably (begrudgingly) leaving their Flea Bottom California mistresses to return to their Winter’s Town families, and her of course—Sansa Stark, the shiny, heartbreak pop princess on every damn radio station in Westeros. One Grammy for Album of the Year and five lesser awards. People are supposed to know her. But no one on her flight seems to know or even care about the little star in their midst. She feels a little thrill about that. No one knows who she is. That hasn’t been a thing in years.
The captain says something over the staticky intercom that sounds like five hours until we reach White Harbor airport and the realization that she’s going home curls around her throat a little tighter. The airline stewardess locks the doors. Her nails scratch against the plastic armrest.
It’s too late to call up and run out of the plane now.
Sansa sinks down into the worn out seat, checking her phone, ignoring the messages that take up her lock screen, a photo of her garden— NEW YEAR’S EVE CONCERT? Her manager. CAN YOU BE IN NEW YORK TONIGHT? Her concert promoter. YOU WENT BACK HOME DIDN'T YOU? Harry.
Sansa didn’t tell anyone she was coming home this year. It’s not an annual thing. Her team knows what happens every time she does; they worry, worry, worry, and she hates them for that. They don’t know what goes on in those freezing parts and she forbids them from accompanying her, all they know comes back a little tougher, another wall gets built around her heart, and sure it means the songs come out like a fucking flood and while that’s all good for the label and her fans and her financially , Tyene and Myranda and Harry the only ones who witness Sansa mixing expensive red wine with antidepressants and sleepless nights.
They think it’s her family. Of course they do. Who else is there in Winterfell that can affect her like that?
No one knows about him.
And if Sansa knew what was good for her, she’d pretend she didn’t either.
Once they land in White Harbor, one of the businessmen tap on her shoulder as they wait for their bags. He’s handsome and rugged in the way Northern men always are. Her heart clenched.
“I’m sorry to bother you, you must get this all the time, but I’d be flogged if I didn’t at least ask,” He’s holding a paper and pen on a random magazine that she happens to be on. She can’t remember that photoshoot. “My little girl is a really big fan.”
Sansa smiled. “How old is she?”
He shows her his phone screen. There’s a dark haired little girl with grey eyes and a missing tooth. “Ten.”
Sansa was ten when her Dad died. It was a holiday, too. She signs the magazine. “Cute. Good age,” She tells the man. “Tell her thank you. And to hug her dad real good.”
The man looks like she just gave him a million dollars and not some scribbled signature. Sansa watches him leave and bundles herself up a little tighter after. As she drives down snowy roads, she realizes just how fanciful she was for thinking she’d ever be able to be unnoticed again...
Jon Snow doesn’t ask for much during the holidays.
He’ll probably ask his mothers Gods, the Old ones, for the snow to let up during the mornings on his way to work. Less drunks at the Crows Bar on tenth street. For Tormund to remember to lock up the shop when he leaves. All little things, reasonable things. He might even ask for the grocery store to pack his favorite coffee, the darkest roast they have. Or just for some damn sun on Christmas day…
There are things he’ll never pray for, on the off chance praying for shit might jinx it, is seeing her back around this town.
It always works.
Without fail, it’s two days before Christmas, and there she is; Sansa Stark is bundled up to the tee in a fancy blue pea coat that matches her eyes, black leather gloves, knocking on his door at a quarter to eight. Her nose is red and her cheeks are too, but she isn’t shivering. He’s heard her brother call her a summer child once...but she’s not a child and the cold out here would make any summery girl freeze at the first breath. The kind of cold that fogs up windshield glass. Sansa never freezes. She will always be a Winterfell girl.
He wants to stare at her longer, take in the snowflakes gathering in the waves of red on her shoulders, marvel at the purple crescent moons under her eyes— she hasn’t been sleeping well and he’ll get her to tell him why later— and the sharper edges of her jaw and way she just looks older but she’s not. She's twenty-three. She shouldn’t be this tired. He should look like that. His sister made him blow out thirty-one candles just the month before.
Jon pulls her in his house, out of the cold, into the comfortable warmth his fireplace gives his little house and it’s general lack of a central heating system. The front door only closes when Jon pushes it shut with all his strength. He hears a giggle behind him and it makes him smile. She's putting her gloves in her purse, tossing it on the couch.
“What are you giggling at, huh?” He asks her, wasting no time, tugging her to him.
Sansa cups his face. She looks happy now. Her cheeks are redder now, eyes shinier. It makes his heart heavy, “Still haven’t fixed that door?”
“I’ll get to it,” He goes to kiss her.
“You said that last year,” She puts her fingers on his lips. He kisses them. “Do you want me to buy you a door?”
Jon glared, though there was nothing in his eyes that told her he meant it, “I can buy my own door.”
“Of course you can,” Sansa says. She touches his beard. “You never let me get you anything for Christmas though. Me , a gift giver. A nice, shiny red door will do this place some good.”
“Red?”
“Like Ghost’s eyes.”
He hums, “Or like your hair.”
She blushed. “Where is Ghost anyway?”
“Work.”
Sansa furrowed her brows in questioning.
“Robb’s kids wanted a full sleddog roster for their Christmas chaos...”
That makes Sansa giggle again. He wants to kiss her even more. “Are Hoster and Cat terribly big now? I see them on Jeyne’s instagram and they grow every time but in person? It must be different.”
Jon is more than happy to tell her anything. He knows her own issues with calling home and most of them have little to do with him, “Robb and I said that if we give it a year,” He tells her, grinning, “Hoster at four years old will be taller than Arya.”
“That’s not saying much.” She smiles though.
“They miss you.”
“I know. I miss them.” Sansa has a habit of looking down at her hands when she talks about her family.
“I don’t need a door,” Jon tells her. She looks unconvinced but he adds, “You’re all I need.”
She doesn’t ever hide her affection for him; he loves that he can see it plain as day in the baby blues of her eyes. Whatever emotions given to her by the mention of her family vanishes, and she recovers, and she moves forward to him, meeting his lips with just as much eagerness. “Happy holidays, Jon….”
Jon is always reminded just what's missing all the other days of the year when Sansa is there. He’s gotten good at pretending, five years has made him an expert. Jon’s pushed through the harder days all while staring into her family’s eyes and acting like the sight of red hair and ocean eyes doesn’t make him itch for a glass of something strong enough to make his vision blur. There’s an ache in there that she leaves in him every new year without meaning to because he knows her.
They don’t ever mean to hurt each other.
It happens anyway.
But when she’s here it’s like every feeling he’s felt and anything he wants her to know throughout the year is spoken when they’re like this.
When he leads her to his bed and she throws her coat on the chair in his room she knows is there without even glancing it’s way. When he lets her undo the buttons of his flannel because whatever control she doesn’t get in Kings Landing in front of all those people, he’ll give it back to her. He’ll grab her face while he kisses her because Seven help him, she is still the most beautiful thing he’s ever been lucky enough to have in his life. He’ll call her his girl while he kisses up her neck, up, up, up, until he’s back to her lips again and she tangles her long fingers in his hair. He groans when she tugs a little bit. Memories of her hands playing a guitar at a concert on the TV hit him and the remembrance of missing her so godsdamn much hits him in waves. She kisses him into silence again. Her skirt is gone, her blouse thrown somewhere, too, both of them tugging and careful not to rip until everything is gone.
The control he gives her is taken for a moment if only for him to lay her down on the bed, to pin down her thighs that bloom red when he grabs ever so roughly. There’s aches three hundred and fifty some days a year, the ones she gives him, the ones he gives her, but it’s all gone now.
“I’ve missed you,” He tells her because he means it and they never say things they don’t mean. Jon will practically chat it, pressing his warm lips on the skin of her thighs, kissing her there, adding a finger and two, earning little gasps from her. He hums with his mouth on her, just how he knows she loves.
He stares at her after, when she’s a panting mess and her cheeks are blooming with color, rosebud lips parted in content. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world. No one could compare.
“Don’t look at me like that,” She said, without any bite in her words.
“Like what, baby?”
She lifts herself up, pulling him to her. She kisses him before she answers. Her eyes are dark and hooded when she pulls away. “Like you're in love with me…”
“Would that be such a surprise?” He’s got his hand around the nape of her neck. She stares back at him, waiting. “If I were?”
“Not a surprise,” She said, a bit sad. “Just a lie.”
He feels his heart clench.
A lie.
Of course she thinks that. He made it so.
Because see, Jon knows he’ll have to give her up when the snow lets up. It’s always like that. He’ll go back to work at the garage his uncle Jeor owns and she’ll be the lyrical princess returned to her little hometown, they’ll pretend they’re nothing more than family friends, and all will be right with the world. He knows that all he can ever give her is this , them, in each other’s arms fucking like they’re touch starved once a year in the darkness of his shitty one bedroom while he smells of cigarettes and her like perfume with a French name he can’t pronounce. So he’ll take her however she wants him, while she still does, while he can still have her this way. Because she’s always wanted more than all this and she could keep telling him she’ll take him back with her a million more times, tell her family and the world, (they’ve had this conversation before) but Jon has only ever been this and she’ll see that one day...
Until then, he’ll do his best to try and make that day too far for either of them to see it.
He lifts her like nothing, a slight groan leaving him that makes her smile just a bit. ( You’re getting old, she tells him. Too old for you, yet he kisses her.) She sits on top of him, her pearly skin illuminated by the golden light of the fireplace in his room. He grabs her waist how she likes, letting her set the pace, her in control, watching her as she rolls her hips into his, her eyes fluttering shut when he starts meeting her halfway, the repetitive movement making her hold on his forearms to steady herself. It’s that way the whole night. They fuck in all the ways they know each other likes; five years of knowing each other’s bodies can do that. Sometimes slow and rough, others gentle but fast, and they only make love when they can look into each other’s eyes long enough or when Sansa starts crying from the pleasures and the pains of it all. When he’s too rough and he fucks and holds her face to watch her crumble beneath him, her eyes telling him that she loves it as much as he does. Then the resentment comes in and there’s no more love making. It’s two people fucking for a semblance of control neither of them will ever have. No one else makes them feel this much and they hate each other for it until they don’t.
“I’ve never lied to you, Sansa,” Jon tells her after they’re done for the night, taking the way she looks in the darkness. The flames of the fireplace make her hair look like spilled fire across his white pillows. “I’ve only ever told you the truth.”
“No, you haven’t,” He sees her eyes water.
“I have.”
“You lie to me...like you lie to yourself.”
Jon can’t look at her.
“Then you break my heart as long as we’re apart,” She continued, almost to herself. He shut his eyes for a moment and he felt her hand on his shoulder, running down his bicep. “But I keep coming back. And you always expect me to.”
Jon swallowed thickly. “Not always … sometimes I hope…” He stopped himself. I hope you don’t come at all. I hope that you do. I want you and I hate you and I love you, everything I am is You— “Sometimes I hope you show up to tell me you don’t want anything to do with me anymore.”
Sansa smiled. It was the saddest thing. “I hope for that, too, sometimes. I think I won’t show up but I always find myself here...” It hurts to hear it as much as it hurt to say it. “Everything always leads back home, back to you, Jon.”
“There’s more for you here than just me.”
She shook her head, tears falling down her cheeks as she did. “You know that's not true...”
He does. She’d never step foot in Winterfell if it wasn’t for him. He’s a fucking bastard, he knows, sleeping with his best friends little sister for a weekend every year but he knows what’ll happen when he ends it for good. She might never come back. Her mother is overbearing on a good day. She thinks her eldest brother is a mockery of Ned Stark. She never made it a deal to get too close to Arya, sun and moon, Ned used to call them, or quiet Bran and Rickon, who was just a boy when she left for King’s Landing and made it big. Whatever the young ones knew about their elder sister it was from magazine interviews and word of mouth and family tapes and the thought made Jon terribly sad.
He knows what she wants. A love like her parents Ned and Cat. Cat and Ned. He doesn’t care if the man was someone he cared for, Jon is not Ned Stark. Jon and Sansa are not a summer girl and the winter's son. She wants what he can’t give her. She wants consistency and dependability, a brood of children with her hair and his eyes, she wants forever. She wants burnt pancakes in the morning and someone to cook dinner for. She wants toys scattered around a living room. Dogs barking. Hectic mornings. Her songs as lullabies. His handiwork to build them a home, to fix a broken window, a drawer, him soft enough enough to mend a heart…
“It shouldn’t be,” Jon said. “Your family loves you. They miss you.”
“I left them,” Sansa said, her voice broken. “I don’t deserve their love. I come because they offer. Because they think they have to. I’m a stranger when I go over there.”
“That’s not—”
“My niece and nephew call me the singing lady. ”
Jon has no words for that.
“I left them,” She said again. “My dad died and my mom couldn’t leave the bed. Robb didn’t know what to do and Rickon was just a baby and Arya was Arya and I just left …. ”
“You wanted to sing. You wanted something else.”
“No,” Sansa shook her head. “I wanted what my mother had,” She confessed simply, because they never lie to each other, not really. “But I saw her crumble apart when my dad died, she left us to fend for ourselves, and I just couldn’t … I knew I wouldn’t be that. I couldn’t forgive her either.” She looked back at him. “And you know that.”
Jon only ever assumed. “Yes.”
“So you know I never want to love someone that much.”
He nodded, it was all he could do.
“And it’s why you say no when I asked you to come to California with me,” She's crying again and he nodded as he wiped her tears. “And why you lie about how much you love me...”
“You’ll leave because you should,” His voice is low, barely a whisper. “You were never meant to come back forever. That’s why I stay.”
Sansa held him. “And that’s why I go.”
They’ll see each other twice more.
At Christmas dinner, with all the Stark’s, new and old, loud and fighting over the wishbone of the turkey and the drumstick of the chicken. They’ll meet each other’s eyes a few times. Jon to make sure Sansa is breathing fine and well and Sansa to make sure Jon is actually smiling and not brooding too much in a corner. He’ll derail too personal questions asked by Catelyn, do you have a special someone, Sansa, what about that actor i saw you with on TV? Harry Hardyng was it—? by tickling one of Robb’s kids until they shriek and grab everyone’s attention. She’ll make a note to walk into another room when Robb asks about that pretty blond, Tormund’s cousin, the one who’s all smiles with you and takes her in her car for fake repairs...
Sansa will forget all mentions of blond Wilding girls named Val when she’s back in Jon’s bed and they’re both focused on making each other oblivious to the real world.
If there’s anything they’re good at, it’s convincing each other they belong together; even if it’s just for a weekend. Even if she’s leaving. Even if she has to leave the warmest bed she’s ever known.
Sansa doesn't go home the year after. Or the year after that.
She kisses wine glass after wine glass instead. Wins another Grammy and another. She gives them everything. She deserves it. She sings her heart out and dies a little bit every time she sings that damn song about him...the one about the holidays and roads not taken looking like the right choice and always leading to him and their hometown.
They wonder who broke Sansa Stark’s heart so bad but not even the so-called friends who write books about her for a quick buck can figure it out.
( He’s the one thing they’ll never get from her. )
In true Jon fashion, he doesn’t pray to any Gods, Old or New, for her to come back.
She does this time; she doesn’t tell her family she’s home so she can spend every moment with him. He’ll bring her home Cat’s leftovers from Christmas dinner and she’ll eat a piece before she cries, feigning a loss of appetite. He thinks she should realize by now that only he could know which smiles she’s faking.
But he doesn’t push. He only gets her for so long.
Sansa doesn’t question the scent of someone else’s perfume in his house the year after.
Time has flown by. She’s back because Arya is engaged. Her little sister, before her. It’s about time she should be, too. The tabloids wonder when actor Willas Tyrell will pop the question. They wonder if her last song, the one saying she should’ve made a lovely bride if she wasn’t fucked in the head, was her refusal of it. Sansa doesn’t think she’s in a position now to deny anyone who’s willing to promise her forever...
And now Jon, clearly he’s brought someone else in here. Before, all she used to smell was him. Two-in-one generic brand shampoo and woodsy aftershave, motor oil and snow. It’s all different now.
They ride around in his truck.
“Val stayed for a few weeks. That’s what the perfume was,” Jon tells her once they stop to take in the view of the stars like they’re teenagers. “Her house flooded...Tormund thought it was a good idea,” Then, almost shyly, “Nothing happened.”
Sansa said nothing at first. “She likes you.”
Jon doesn’t say a word.
“Arya said so,” She went on. “She says she calls you pretty and she hates everyone but she doesn’t seem to hate you.” She pinned her eyes on him, because she’s twenty-six now, he’s nearing mid thirties, they don’t dance around anymore. “Do you think you could like her?”
Jon doesn’t hesitate. “Maybe.”
Sansa doesn’t respond.
“For that to happen,” He laughed then, it was a wrong laugh though, it was bitter and twisted, but most of all, it was sad, “You would have had to just not exist. Isn’t that fucking something?” He turned to her as well, his eyes so bright with pain, she could see the faint traces of indigo in them, “I can't have you and I don’t want anyone else…”
Sansa finally says, “You always could have had me, Jon.” She looked right at him, angry, tired, but just done with him being the one to think they could just call it even every time. Like her leaving could justify him pushing her to do so. “In any way you wanted. I have always belonged to you.”
A while goes by.
“I know, Sans...” She looked at him. She thinks he’ll ask her to stay this time. But his eyes fall down his hands, and she knows . They’re the biggest cowards alive. Instead, she watches Jon pull back, unwavering as his position of being her secret hometown glory. “What time is your flight back?”
“Tomorrow,” She sighed. Then adds, “I don’t think I’ll be back. Not for a long time...”
Jon looked at her again. “I know.”
It’ll be two months later when she’s glaring at two pink lines on a test that she realizes Jon Snow can never know a thing about her ever again.
The next time she comes home, she brings home a little girl and a husband.
Little Minisa looks nothing like her brown-haired, brown-eyed father, Willas. She has blue eyes so dark they look navy. Her hair is dark, curly, Stark hair. She doesn’t look like Sansa’s daughter more than she looks like Arya, but then the girl sings and everyone goes ah, that’s Sansa... If anyone notices her resemblance to Jon and Val Snow’s son, a year younger than Minisa, may it be in the nose or the eyes, they’ll never say a word about it, no matter if Sansa’s mother will dart her eyes back and forth between the children like she's trying to find something no one is saying.
Jon kept his old home, it was his mother’s. She knows he’s waiting for her there some nights, demanding answers, hoping for a kiss, and there are moments where she thinks she might go...
But Sansa has a little girl who's waiting for her mother to sing her a pretty little song, like the one life is, like how Sansa said it was. Minisa will sing along and there’ll be something in her smile that makes Sansa feel like the terrible girl she once believed herself to be.
Maybe she still is.
Minisa kisses Sansa’s cheek on Christmas morning, echoing a saying she heard her uncles and aunts say, “Happy Holidays, Momma…”
Jon doesn’t show.
Sansa doesn’t hate that.
“Minnie looks like him.” Jeyne tells her.
“A little bit.”
“She’s still all you.”
“For her sake,” Sansa kisses her daughter's brow. Minisa fast asleep, her tablet in her lap, playing a disney movie. They’re on the tour bus somewhere in Essos and it’s late and Jeyne and Sansa are on liquid courage. “Let’s hope she has a little more sense with her...Seven knows neither him or I had much of it.”
“Tis the damn season,” Jeyne smiled a bit sadly, beyond pity. It was something more. “I did the math, Miss Stark...
Sansa sighed, looking in the mirror. “It’s Tyrell.”
“Why didn’t you tell him? He married that Val girl after Min was born.”
”I never did tell him to wait for me...”
“You love breaking your own heart.”
“It was never whole to begin with.”
It’ll be Minisa’s fifth Christmas when Sansa divorces Willas (irreconcilable differences) and she’ll move back home because by this time, she has too much money and too many awards for her old house and it’s location to mean a thing. She could make a song in a ditch and people would eat it up. She spends a ridiculous amount on making a dream house, Minisa calls it Winterfell Castle, if only for its grandiose size. It looks like a glorified cabin in all honesty. But Sansa loves it so dearly. They have it decorated like there’s a competition. Their door is red. Like Sansa’s hair. Like the eyes of the stray husky pup that Minisa all but begs her mother to let her keep.
It’s a house she doesn’t plan on running from. Not when Minisa loves it so much. Not when her cousins are near and her Gramma Cat and Uncle Bob and Auntie Nene and any other ridiculously cute name she could give their family members on a whim...
Jon shows up at her house. Life is funny that way.
“You got the red door.” He said, staring at her.
“Like Ghost’s eyes.”
“Like your hair,” Jon doesn’t smile though. He just stands at the door and looks at her, at how beautiful she still is, looking like a Christmas card, and marveling at how he still feels like he’s missed something for a whole year. “I don’t know why I’m here, Sansa.”
Sansa leaned her head on the door. “You do. But it’s all different now,” There’s delighted shrieks coming from inside the house. Sansa’s daughter. She smiled. “My boss has ordered the making of Snowman cookies.”
Jon looked down. He came because Val had asked, is there anything I should worry about with Sansa Stark, Jon? He didn’t know what to tell her. Worry? You don’t have to worry about anything. But Jon had always known himself to be the greatest lying bastard alive. He was looking right at what all his lies costed him. What he could’ve had if he only paid Sansa with the truth.
Sansa moved forward. For a second he thinks she’ll kiss him right there, but she doesn’t. She pushes his hair back, smiling sadly at the grays in the sea of black, and tells him, “Happy holidays, Jon.”
The red door shuts behind her.
When Jon Snow, his lovely wife, and their son and flitter back into their family circle, Sansa has already been pregnant for months and she knows Val had every reason to be cold and apprehensive of the songbird her husband can’t take his eyes off of for more than a second. A boy is born soon after; with her hair, red as the door, as the eyes of then pup Minisa named Snowflake. Some say Willas is the father. Or the flirty Jarrold Forrester who is starstruck and enamored by Sansa. Others think is Harry Hardyng who visited for Easter. They’ll never get close to the truth, Sansa made it so.
The truth is messy as the truck tires in the mechanic shop of her children’s father.
But as her little boy sleeps in her arms and her daughter is just as spent curled up on her side, the notion that she’s not Catelyn Stark and that she’s made so many errors to ever be... Sansa Stark thinks the road not taken looks real good now.