Chapter Text
Right Now.
In all the commotion, no one pays that much attention to Alayne Stone. And why should they? She is a bastard-daughter (and the daughter of a bastard, to boot). Alayne walks past the fluttering courtiers and grumbling lords and hysterical maids and around the winds that can scrape even the most protected corner of the Eyrie bare. She climbs up the stairs of the least used of the seven white towers, into a small room visited only by the birds now. Alayne walks to the window and leans her arms against the chill stone, breathes in the brisk air. Here, secreted and safe, she is still Sansa. And Sansa looks out the window to think.
That Petyr Baelish is a bad man is a fact borne out by fairytales. No good princes or knights ever schemed to poison or upend kingdoms. And Sansa’s quite sure pushing wives out of windows isn’t on the list either. Only, she isn't in a fairytale, and Littlefinger is very good at being bad - perhaps in a world with so little virtue, that is some. But right now, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing matters because everything is beyond her control. She has lost her family, her place, and been kissed then almost killed in the same day.
She stares out of the window, on the rime ringing the Eyrie and down to the Vale, tiny below. The sun, beginning to set, spreads golden fingers through ever-shifting clouds. A strange feeling begins to come over her. As if Sansa were in danger of dislocating herself from time, from here, from now. Sansa shakes her head, and tries to think of home, Winterfell, long ago and far away; of the hours she spent learning to become a lady, and petty fights with Arya and Bran and Robb and Rickon and even Jon, and dreaming of princes, certain that she would be romanced by them as in song. And her parents. How much she misses them! Although she often found her father gruff and frustrating, she knows now how very much she loved him, how much his warm hand on her hair and the stubble on his cheek when kissing her goodnight meant to her. She knows she will never feel that protection again. Not that kind, not in this lifetime. That life is a dream now, forever. A terrible aching rises up in her throat. She thinks how horrified her father would be, if he saw her now. And her mother, fierce and sometimes intimidating – but Sansa never doubted her love for her and her brothers and sister. Catelyn’s strong presence and warm hands were their anchor.
And they are both gone. Dead. As are her brothers, and Arya, and Lady. As are, she realizes, all her ridiculous dreams of courtly love and expectations of dignity and how-things-should-be. Sansa knows she is a selfish girl, yet she understands only now how she was bound and molded by how she was raised; it was impressed on her that honor was honorable, and that the world would be a certain way as a result.
But it is not the horrors she has seen and experienced that are making her feel so odd. What is it then? Perhaps...the realization that she is so small in this world, such a ridiculously tiny piece of the great and cosmic puzzle (which might be solved one day and might not): maybe Petyr kissed her because he wanted her. Maybe he kissed her because he knew Lysa would see them, and react so wildly. Or maybe he just hoped Sansa would fly into and out of the Moon Door, like a good little dove.
The oddest thing of all? Instead of making her feel frightened...these thoughts are making her feel free. If she is nothing, what does it matter if she tries and fails? If she were to jump off this parapet right now and her bones crack a thousand feet below? Or - as her heart beats wildly in her breast - she wants to play a hand before she goes, and try her wit against this great giant bloody joke?
The sun dips into the horizon, is warm and liquid. Embraces her, whispers to her to come, to slip away, to be unafraid because if all is gone and nothing matters, then what is there left to fear? Sansa clenches the stone railing, because it seems if she lets go, she will slide clean away from the present, out to lands unknown; clean away from whomever she was or was supposed to be, and even if she does feel free, who knows how far there is to fall?
Two merlins tumble into view, wing-wheeling and each mocking the other with high, wild voices.
When the sun is gone and the dusk dims the snow to grey, Sansa loosens her grip on the railing. Then Alayne refocuses her blue eyes, straightens her stiff shoulders, walks through the door, and closes it behind her.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Back Then.
Of course, gripping the sides of the rowboat with round and tender fists on the way to the Vale, Sansa feels nothing but nausea and bewilderment. There is nothing to make one feel a pawn like the slate-colored sea bobbing hungrily at one's boat.
Why is she on this thing? This is terrible! Her knuckles go whiter thinking of how much better – Sansa is sure – Highgarden would have been. While she’s glad to be free of the trap of Knight’s Landing (a viper’s nest! disgusting with rape and perfume and false people), part of her remains infatuated (out of foolishness or stubbornness?) with splendid knights and rose gardens, and it doesn’t seem the boat is heading to a destination with either. Her face shows her disappointment, while Petyr occasionally looks back to see how she’s doing, and instructs a servant to hold her hair back as she vomits.