Chapter Text
On the day that Ned Stark went down to Kentucky to die, this was the state of affairs in his household: he had six children, a loving wife, a crumbling two-story farmhouse in West Virginia, a crystal meth empire, and half a tin of chewing tobacco in his back pocket—his only personal vice.
His flip-phone had been buzzing all day: calls from Bob, his partner down south, who was in deep, deep shit. The man who had taught them both how to wheel and deal, everybody’s favorite Great Uncle Jon, had died in the night, foul play suspected. The loosely congregated group of meth-peddling hillbillies was no Mexican cartel, but the game still had rules. Bob seemed to have trouble understanding that. He never saw the trouble coming, not when he had married his snake of a wife, not when half the state had turned against him, and certainly not now.
Robb, Ned’s eldest, had been named for old Bob, and he was similarly guileless. A big, thick-armed, floppy-haired, golden-retriever-type twenty-something who had never strayed far from his family home and his father’s instruction, Robb had never been disliked and had never done any disliking. He was the exact opposite of his brother, who was only younger by one year. Dark-haired, sullen, quiet, and quick to fight, he had been generally detested among the teenage boys and generally adored among the teenage girls. Nobody about town was actually sure where Jon had come from—he was no son of Cat Stark’s, that much was obvious—but they did know that as soon as he had turned eighteen, he had been sent packing straight to the Army recruiter’s office. Sansa was next, a typical teenage girl who was a lot smarter than she looked in her plastic bracelets and her jeans with bedazzles on the ass. She was going out with Joff, Bob’s eldest son, a Justin-Bieber-looking twat who had never gotten past second base with her or anyone else. Then Arya, a scrappy little tomboy, dirty and defiant.
The doctor had advised Cat Stark to stop having babies after Arya had been born. It had been a difficult delivery; the baby had come early, had been small, had needed oxygen. Cat was getting old, even then. Her body had given its all to her first three. But she was devout; she didn’t believe in birth control. Every child was a gift from God—if they had special needs, then that was His test for her, and her place in heaven would be all the more heavenly for it. Sure enough, her next child, Brandon, had been born with spina bifida. He was wheel-chair bound, and while the state payed for the majority of his expenses, the boy weighed heavily on the family's conscience and their checkbook alike. Ricky was the youngest, a miraculously healthy child, born just before Cat's merciful descent into menopause.
Robb Stark and Joff Baratheon were poised to inherit two halves of Appalachia’s biggest crank operation, and neither of them had any idea what that entailed. Ned barely even knew what it entailed. He had always busied himself with the day-to-day minutiae while Bob worried about the grandstanding, the show-making, the fear-inspiring. He had always been better at spraying people with bullets and Ned had always been better at hacking deals and making sure there was actually shit out there on the streets for them to sell. With Uncle Jon dead, there was no way that Bob could hold Kentucky all on his own, not with his wily brother-in-law Jaime and his sneaky father-in-law poking around, veritably spitting on Uncle Jon's grave.
That day, Arya and Ricky had found a Real Big Turtle in the ditch in front of their house and were poking at it with a couple of sticks, screaming in delight every time it moved. Sansa was on her way down the yard at her mother’s behest to identify whether or not it was a snapping turtle when Ned came marching out of the house with his shotgun in hand, trailed closely by Robb and his ever-present best friend, Theon.
“If it’s a snapper it’ll bit your fingers clean off!” she hollered at her siblings. “Leave it alone!” The two children, however, had completely lost interest in the cranky old turtle and were racing headlong toward their father.
“Daddy, where you goin’ with your shotgun?”
“Daddy, can I come?” Sansa stood there staring at the muddy amphibian, the size of a dinner plate, moving painstakingly along the drainage ditch on its wrinkled legs before she turned around, her skinny white arms folded over her push-up bra. She had a bad feeling about all this business. That, and she didn’t like it when her father got too close to her boyfriend, geographically-speaking. She didn't like it when they talked.
“No, you can’t come,” Ned Stark was saying, shooting some brown chew spit out the side of his mouth. “We’ll be back tomorrow. Uncle Bob just needs a hand down in Kentucky. You two take care of Sansa and your mother."
“I want to come to Kentucky!” Brandon called from inside. “Daddy, I wanna come!”
“Ain’t nobody comin’ to Kentucky!” Ned Stark barked back, losing patience. “Boys, get in the truck.” Cat Stark, the matriarch of the clan, appeared in the doorway, in her Sunday best as usual, a long skirt and a well-pressed blouse. Sansa hated her mother’s embarrassing Mormon clothing. Cat had been raised down-mountain in the LDS church; she had scandalized everyone by marrying out of the faith and moving up to the holler. Sansa had always hated that story, the sparkle-eyed devilishness with which her mother told it. Some fuckin’ scandal.
“You bring my son back, Ned Stark,” she cautioned, drying a glass on a tattered dishcloth. She looked serene enough. The warning was habitual, fond, without expectation of any actual danger.
“I will, darlin’,” he promised, kissing her on her white-powdered cheek. He spit more chew. “Sansa, come over here and give your daddy a kiss.” She took her time picking her way across the muddy yard. She kissed her father’s prickly cheek, leaving a little smear of cherry lip-gloss behind.
“See you tomorrow, daddy.”
“I’m gonna kick your boyfriend’s ass, Sansa,” Theon teased, cranking down the window so he could lean out and leer at her with his sharp joker's face. “Me and Robb are gonna duct-tape him to a wall.”
“Leave Joff alone,” she snapped. “Daddy, tell them to leave him alone.”
“Nobody’s gonna duct tape anybody else to a goddamn wall,” Ned promised, swatting Theon on the head, taking his keys out of his pocket. Sansa watched them bounce off down the rutted dirt road, absently-mindedly fingering the cell-phone in her pocket. Behind her, she would hear crashes and shouts from the house, the kids rough-housing. She dialed a number.
“Hey, Maggie. My daddy’s gone for the night. Come over. Yeah, you know mama, she’s gonna be Xanax-ed out by nine-thirty. We’re goin’ out.”
*
A Brief Introduction to Theon Greyjoy, Who Lives Over There by the Lake, and What He Does With His Free Time:
Theon Greyjoy had been Robb Stark’s best friend since elementary school. He was generally known as a venereal-disease-carrying ladies’ man who did not know how to keep his mouth shut, when in reality he was a self-loathing, closeted homosexual with a burgeoning meth addiction who did not know how to keep his mouth shut. If you asked anyone in the holler, they would have pointed vaguely west and told you that he had been born over there, by the lake to one of those white trash families that even other white trash families found too trashy to palate. Once upon a time, his daddy had given fly-fishing tours in the mountain rivers and run a quaint little bait-n-tackle shop, but after the death of his wife and his two eldest children, things had rapidly gone sour. The already-uneasy family unit had disintegrated, surrendered to alcoholism and violence. The bait-n-tackle store was still up and running, but since his sister Yara had run off to join the Navy, things weren’t looking so hot. If Theon wasn’t selling so much meth out of the back of the store, it probably would have gone under by now. He had never gotten around to taking down the Christmas lights that his father had put up in ’03, the last year they had been any kind of family at all. They had all burnt out by now, sagging and broken, but it was part of the rustic charm.
The drug-dealing and womanizing was no secret, but Theon did keep a few secrets, even from Robb. Once a month or so, he would disappear for a couple of weeks; everyone assumed that he was on some kind of bender fucking some kind of hot mess, which was, generally speaking, extremely accurate.
About halfway between Ned Stark’s property and the lake was Roose Bolton’s trailer. A long-faced, crooked-toothed, sour son-of-a-bitch with plenty of illusions of grandeur, he could often be found in the cook-house rather than at home. He didn’t like to spend too much time with his son, whom he referred to only as “the boy,” and who gave him no end of grief. There was a tall chain-link fence around the yard, containing about ten-odd mean-looking dogs. There were some good, strong-bred hunting dogs, blue-tick coonhounds and pointers, but also a good mix of mutts that had been rescued from the side of the road, muscular, flat-headed pit-bulls, little scrappy terriers, one massive, shaggy black monster with only one eye. Mismatched as they were, they all loved their master, Roose’s boy Ramsay, who was the type of young man Cat Stark might generously describe as “not quite right” in that back-handed sympathetic way of hers.
Ramsay’s pastimes included hunting out-of-season game, breaking people’s kneecaps with a Louisville Slugger, selling crank in bulk out of the back of his truck, and trying and failing to come to terms with decades of psychological trauma at the hands of his father. He was well-known in the holler for being a.) bat-shit fuckin' crazy and b.) a connoisseur of the meth-induced fuck-a-thon. You couldn’t meth-binge too often, not every weekend. Not even every-other-weekend. Once a month, maybe. Ramsay sure as fuck wasn’t looking to become one of those oily, meth-mouthed zombie-freaks he sold to. He had met Theon Greyjoy (you know, the one who lives over there, by the lake, try to keep up,) through the Starks, who partnered very closely with his father, and not long after, the two of them had started buying a lot of rolls of tinfoil together at the Family Dollar. This might have seemed benign anywhere else, but in the holler, there was only one thing two twenty-somethings could be doing with tinfoil, and it had nothing to do with baked potatoes.
Don't forget any of this. It's gonna be important later.
*
It was just after dawn the next day, a wood smoke, orange-Fanta sunrise, just a little bit spring-cold. Sansa was just sneaking back into the house, holding her high-heels to avoid making any noise. Her face felt stiff with a sticky combination of makeup, spit, tears, and sweat. It had been a typical night with Maggie Tyrell, her high-school best friend—they had been down at the muddin' pit, a former lake that the county had drained years before. They had spent the night pulling donuts in Joff's truck, drinking a nauseating combination of Coors Lite and some neon-colored wine coolers, surrounded by other bored teenagers doing the same. As usual, there had been a fight, some crying, and a lot of making up and declarations of never-ending friendship. Sansa had only had to spend a few minutes alone with her boyfriend, which was what she preferred, those days. He was getting nasty-mean, but she was too afraid to break up with him. He had a temper and his daddy had given him a gun for his birthday. She had just finished finessing the squeaky door open when Ned’s pickup truck skidded to a noisy stop outside of the house. Without a word, Theon stepped out, slammed his doors, and walked around to the back of the truck to help Robb, who had been riding in the bed with…
Sansa dropped her shoes and ran over, hissing,
“What happened?” Robb waved his arm at her frantically, tears in his eyes. His white wifebeater was stuck to his chest with patches of browning blood.
“Go inside, Sansa,” he rasped. “I’ll be in soon.”
“Oh, God,” Sansa breathed shrilly. “Oh my God, daddy…” In the filthy, oil-smeared bed of the truck, Ned Stark’s body was laid out on Robb’s flannel, his skin a mushroom shade of blue-white, a gaping bullet wound turning the left side of his head into a grisly jigsaw. Everything was crusted with rusty flakes of blood. “Is he okay?”
“He’s dead, Sansa,” Theon said, putting his head on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m real sorry.” The girl was nudged off aside as the men hefted the body between them and began to lug it into the house. She did the only thing she knew how to do: she said the Lord’s Prayer as she trailed behind them, bare-footed and crying black mascara and glitter. She lingered outside of the open door even after they’d gone in until she heard her mother shrieking, until she heard Arya and Ricky start to wail, until she heard the foreign sound of Robb’s deep, chesty sobs. Then she sat down with her back against the wall and put her head between her knees and told God that she was sorry for doing all those things she had done, for drinking and driving, for sneaking out, for being mean to her sister, for smoking weed, for making fun of her mother, for letting Joff touch her boobs, for letting him finger her that one time, for wearing her shorts too short. She promised that she’d cut it out and be a good Christian if only he’d take the bullet back.