Chapter Text
The moment Sansa walked into the rooms she knew she couldn’t stay here. The rooms of her mother and father, the rooms where she and Arya had been born, her brothers, too. When she had been very little and the storms in the night had frightened her, she had evaded the arms of her nurse and scurried to this very room to seek the comfort of her mother and father. Lady Catelyn would stroke her hair and softly hum songs of the Riverlands until she calmed, and sometimes her father would allow her to wrap herself in his arms and touch his beard. When she was little, Sansa wondered if his beard was secretly the fur of direwolves, if he himself was secretly a direwolf. There were tales of her father, after all, spoken and sung and written all over the place and she had hardly been old enough to pay attention and so comprehension was well beyond her. She heard half a story and made up the rest in her head until Lord Eddard Stark was part wolf, and she too was so.
But looking around the rooms now that was not what made her skin crawl. Thoughts of her wedding night, of her months of marriage to Ramsay. No, not marriage. Enslavement. Over the edge of the bed he had bent her and torn her and snickered as she cried. That was only the beginning of it. Breathing in deeply, she could still smell the faint scent of blood; the iron clung to her nostrils. Swallowing hard, she swept from the rooms and did not look back. Her old bedchambers called.
The door swung open at her touch and she entered the room. It was smaller than her parents’, but bigger than the little chamber she had been given in the Eyrie and the one she had shared with Brienne at Castle Black. Dim moonlight streamed through the slits of windows along the south-facing wall, and a few small candles stood burning here and there. Sansa wondered if Jon had guessed she would come to her old room after all. It made her smile slightly. In the corner, her bed stood where it always had, a layer of dust covering the books on the small stand next to it. She padded over and sat on the edge of her bed and wiped away the dust from the top copy. The Seven Pointed Star. When Sansa had first learned of King Robert’s visit she had begged her mother for her very own copy of the book. She had hoped it would impress Joffrey if she knew a lot about the Faith. Snorting, she shoved it under her bed. The other volumes were poems and tales of handsome knights and their sweet ladies, of their romances and of their tragedies. What a foolish child she had been. Nonsense, all of it. Utter nonsense.
Idly she flicked through the pages until suddenly the door opened. She snapped the book in her hands shut and stood up quickly, heart pounding. Instinctively her hand went to her collar and held it close against her throat. In the doorway stood Lord Baelish.
“Forgive me, my lady,” he said, trying to look surprised. Sansa did not relax. “I was not aware you had taken up this room.”
“I find that hard to believe,” she replied dryly.
He made no reply and didn’t even have the courtesy to drop his gaze. The hand clasping her robes to her neck loosened, but only slightly. She stared right back at him. Gods, Sansa hated the smug look he always wore, the curl of his lip that took the place of a smile, the coldness in his eyes. There was a lilt in his voice that sounded almost eastern. Maybe he’d travelled in Essos for a time. Whored and lied his way across that continent too, maybe.
“You’re right,” he said after a moment. The silkiness of his voice made Sansa squirm. “I knew I would find you here.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Sansa replied defiantly.
Littlefinger took a few steps forwards, enough to close the door behind him, shutting her in the small chamber with him. “I knew I would find you here,” he repeated. “My lady, please. We have not spoken since Mole’s Town, not truly. I think it would be good if we cleared the air.”
Something inside Sansa was building. Anger. No, fury. “You also thought it would be good to take me to the Eyrie where my own aunt almost killed me. You also thought it would be good to send me back here to man who takes the greatest delight in peeling skin from men as they scream for mercy. Forgive me, Lord Baelish, but I don’t give a damn about what you think would be good.”
“Sansa, please-”
“Don’t touch me,” she snarled. Baelish had taken more steps towards her, reached out a hand to grasp her arm. Fiercely she pushed him away. “You left me here with a monster! You are no better, no better at all, than the man who raped me and beat me and cut me and mutilated me! You gave me to Ramsay and you did nothing to save me!”
A muscle in Littlefinger’s jaw twitched. Sansa saw him swallow, and his eyes looked damp. He opened his mouth to speak again but she suddenly crossed the chamber to him and shoved him roughly. “No! You don’t get to speak! You don’t get anything from me, do you understand? You took everything I had left from me! While I was in King’s Landing I had the queen, I had Olenna Tyrell! They protected me, and so did Tyrion! You stole me from there and sent me here and left me to rot as Ramsay’s newest plaything!”
“You were not safe in King’s Landing,” Littlefinger hissed softly. “Lady Olenna used you as a pawn to kill Joffrey and Tyrion was so focused on his whore mistress that he would never see the dangers you were in. You know this already. I saved you. And then I made the mistake-”
Sansa’s fists curled into the seams of his cloak and she pulled them tight, jaw tight and eyes aflame. “You made more than a mistake, Littlefinger, you-”
“- made the mistake of my life. And I put my life on the line to make it up to you.”
Sansa’s lips curled back over her teeth in a silent hiss and let him go. Counting slowly to ten, she took in deep breaths. It would do her no good to murder Petyr Baelish in her own bedchamber, not with the forces of the Vale still answering to him. After a long moment, after she had composed herself slightly, she turned back to him.
“Where is Ramsay?”
Baelish’s lip twitched in the hint of a smile. “He is waiting for you in the kennels. He has not fed his hounds in seven days.”
“Where is he?” Sansa asked a maid as she swept through the great hall, adrenaline making her shake.
“M’lady?”
“Lord Baelish, where is he?”
“In the watchtower, m’lady. Would you like me to send for-?”
Sansa was gone before the girl could finish her sentence.
Sansa Stark’s feet knew the halls of Winterfell better than they knew any other place. Without even thinking they took her to the great stone staircase that led to the watchtower, the one that stood high enough to see for three leagues on a clear day. Her shoes echoed against the worn stone of the steps and although the winter wind whistled around her she did not feel the chill. Ramsay was dead, and she had never felt more alive.
Baelish was looking out over the dark land surrounding the castle when she reached the viewing platform. The guard, wearing Arryn colours, stood to attention at her entrance.
“Leave us!” she said hastily. “Tell the others to go too. We’ll be safe for tonight. Go!”
Baelish watched her with an unreadable expression as all the watchmen left on her word.
“You made this happen,” Sansa said once they were all gone. She spoke quickly, excited and exhilarated and nervous and gods’ knew what else. She wrung her hands and began pacing along the cold platform. “You brought the Arryn forces and saved Jon and his army and without that Jon would have died and I would have too and all the wildlings and the other men who pledged themselves to us but they didn’t die, and you are the reason! Yes, you sold me out to the Boltons but you aided me when I most needed you to and I am alive because for once you did the right thing and gods! I hate you for all that you have put me through and for all the wrongs you have done me but-!”
She came to a standstill, cheeks flushed and eyes bright. He would never wrong her again, that Sansa knew. He was utterly in love with her, that she knew too. She certainly didn’t love him, but…
In a haze, she closed the space between them, flying against him and digging her hands into his shoulders. She kissed him hard. It took him a moment to respond but suddenly his hands were in her hair, gripping it, his lips parting hers and suddenly their kiss was sharp with teeth and tongue and lips and-
Sansa pulled away, eyes wide. “I…”
Littlefinger was breathing hard, eyes on her lips, pressing close to her. “Sansa,” he murmured. “What is it?”
“I want to,” she whispered, dazed by the high of Ramsay’s death, dazed by the taste of Baelish’s mouth.
“You want to what?”
Slowly she licked her lips, eyes still wide. Slowly she let go of his robes and took half a step back. “Don’t make me say it outloud. You know. But I need it a certain way. I need you to trust me.”
She was in a state. Nervous, excited, afraid, strong, vulnerable, all at the same time. Baelish gave her half a smile as his breathing slowly returned to normal, but his heartrate did not. “I trust you, Sansa. I trust you with my life.”
“I hate it when you say things like that,” Sansa admitted, holding his eye contact.
Grinning, Baelish replied. “I know.”