“I cannot stay.”

“I know.” Sansa could see very little from her position in the belly of the Red Keep, but Jon’s face she could make out well enough; he held a sputtering torch high enough for her to see the misery on his face, his ill-kept hair and greasy furs. Above them, dragons roared, as they had done for the fortnight since Sansa had arrived in King’s Landing - and as they’d done for many weeks prior, Sansa heard.

“Arya could get you out.”

“Arya could get us both killed.”

“The Queen would also be killed.”

“You don’t want her to die.”

Jon’s laugh was sudden and bitter, a wild self-hating thing. “I want her to give up this mad crusade. She will not.”

“She’s a Targaryen. Flip a coin -”

“I know.” He looked away. His hair was so dark, his face so much like Father’s had been. And yet they were only cousins, after all. “I’m a Targaryen too.”

“You’re a Stark. It’s why you’re going to hold Winterfell.”

She knew from his grimace and the way he wouldn’t meet her eyes that he didn’t precisely want to hold Winterfell. To Sansa it was unimaginable; she had been Queen in the North, after all, prior to her arrest for treason. Jon returned as the Queen’s vassal, but he returned also to foment treason. A mad Targaryen could not be permitted to keep the throne.

“I’ll do my best,” Jon said eventually. “Sansa - if I don’t see you again -”

“If I rot and die in here, you mean.”

He winced, but he didn’t argue the truth of it. “I love you.”

“And I, you. You’re our brother, Jon: you always will be. Live up to that. Winter is coming.”

Winter had sent snow into the corner of Sansa’s cell where the rock crumbled away. Jon’s eyes went to that spot, then back to Sansa. He nodded once. “Aye. Goodbye, Sansa.”

And again she was alone. ___

She had so much time to think, and so little to think about. Her situation was as simple as it had ever been: she would rot and die in this cell, having seen the Queen exactly once. At least she’d had the nerve to say what she’d been thinking, as the Queen shouted for her arrest. “You truly are mad,” she’d said, and had watched a proud, furious expression consume the Queen’s face.

That image sustained her, now. She hoped, as she died in the Queen’s dungeon, that her ongoing presence would haunt the Queen to even further madness.

No - she could not wish that. Madness would kill her siblings; madness would raze innocents in the street. Better that she prayed to the Maiden for the Queen’s sanity, that Westeros might yet survive the winter.

“Pious,” said the Queen, standing at her cell’s doors.

Sansa hadn’t realized she’d knelt in prayer. She sprang to her feet, regaining composure several seconds too late. “Your Grace.”

The Queen’s smile held a mocking edge that reminded Sansa of Cersei Lannister. More than one ghost haunted the Red Keep. “Not ‘my Queen’, then? Your brother bent the knee before going North. Would you not do the same?”

Jon had also fucked her. Sansa couldn’t see herself doing that. “Would you free me now, if I did?”

“That would depend entirely upon my understanding of your sincerity.”

“You are mad,” Sansa said, very sincerely, “and a madwoman cannot rule.”

“Nonsense. The Lannisters managed it for years.”

“And Cersei Lannister now lies dead. What point are you trying to make?”

She thought the point would be her own death: after all, why else would the Queen trouble herself with the dungeons?

“I’m not sure,” said the Queen. Her unnaturally bright eyes glinted down at Sansa. “If I’m a madwoman, must I have a point?”

Sansa pressed her lips together, resolving not to spend her final moments playing this ridiculous game. “Get to the point, please, Your Grace.”

For a moment, time seemed to stop. The Queen’s nostrils flared and she stared at Sansa with an unknowable expression, fury mixed with - with -

“Have her taken to my rooms,” the Queen said, and Sansa’s soul froze.

She didn’t panic. It was odd, after so long as one man’s prisoner or another; she had thought only yesterday, as the salt spray mingled with the stink of the guard outside her door, that she’d die if another man tried to break her. The Queen, in that respect, was as good as a man. Yet Sansa felt nothing. Her soul was an inert thing, a rock at the edge of the godswood.

They told her to bathe; she obeyed. They gave her the gown she’d arrived in, laundered with southern soap, too soft and smelling of flowers.

The Queen came to her as she stood in the window furthest from the door, thinking about jumping. She looked at Sansa and at the rocks and said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You threw me in a dungeon. Your Grace.”

“I suppose I did, but -”

“Cersei allowing her son to brutalize me taught me the power Queens have to delude themselves,” Sansa said. “I’ve no wish for further explanations.”

The Queen tilted her head. She really was astonishingly beautiful; Sansa understood Jon’s lust, a bit. “Are you trying to goad me into killing you?”

Yes. “Of course not.”

“Sansa. Jon spoke very highly of you.”

“Are you still in love with him?”

She winced as soon as she blurted it out; she sounded like a fool, worse than a fool. The Queen clearly thought so, too, blinking in unabashed surprise before shaking her head. “I cannot say that I am, no.”

“But -” Her breath caught in her throat as the Queen walked towards her. She came to a halt mere inches in front of her; she could feel the Queen’s skin, the dragonfire of her.

“I have bargained with countless men, using my body as currency,” the Queen said. “When I ask my spies about you, they tell me tales of brutality. Very well: you think me brutal, too, don’t you?”

“You burned King’s Landing to ash.”

“Yes,” the Queen said. “I’m very worried I might do so again. I expected Jon to stop me: but he is gone now.”

The way she said it, he might as well be dead. Perhaps to the Queen, men died when they left her grasp. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Sansa said, too tired to prevaricate.

“I find myself enamored of Starks,” the Queen said. She reached out, slowly enough that Sansa could have stepped away, could have fled through the window or the door.

Could have. Did not. The Queen stepped close enough that Sansa flinched to feel the burn of her skin, and she kissed Sansa very softly.

She didn’t really know how to kiss, Sansa thought distantly. Well, that made two of them; it was awkward all around. Somehow her hands had gone to the Queen’s hips. The Queen herself had unyielding fingers pressed into Sansa’s arms.

“Men have fucked me for power, and they have begged me for mercy,” the Queen said. “Which do you think your brother did?”

This was easy enough to answer. “I don’t want to talk about men.”

It was the curve of the Queen’s smile that did it. For a moment her eyes lit with surprise and she looked almost sane. “Why, Sansa, I think -”

Sansa kissed her again, desperately, forgetting to feign submission. She tangled her hands in the Queen’s hair and bit her lip and - turned them, pressed the Queen against the wall, her movements hardly feeling like her own.

She had been fucked by men. She had fucked men. She had thought - very often, after waking from nightmares she longed to forget - that there was nothing more for her to learn about sex.

She was wrong.

The Queen only made a few passing attempts at dominance. She tugged Sansa’s hair and bore her down on the bed, but it was Sansa who became mad with passion. The Queen tugged Sansa on top of her, and Sansa grabbed her thin wrists and pressed them into the mattress. Not cruelly, but firmly - and then she said, “Stay there,” and the Queen obeyed with wide eyes.

Sansa knew what she liked, just as she knew what she feared. She surveyed the Queen: impossibly small, skin warm even in the winter air, nipples hard through her flimsy foreign dress. The Queen could call one of her Dragons right now and Sansa would be killed: that, she feared. But the Queen would not call her dragons; her thighs trembled as they spread for Sansa, her breath coming in short gasps. Sansa liked that. She wanted more of it: the Queen, beneath her, eyes pleading for more.

She said, “Show me how you please yourself, when there are no men to watch you.”

The Queen untied her dress, opening the sash that crossed her chest and leaving the fabric pooled against her sides. Her nipples were as dainty as the rest of her, and her breasts swelled only a little. She was young, Sansa realized. She might even be Sansa’s own age. What an odd thing.

“I rarely please myself, for I am rarely alone.”

“You killed hundreds of thousands of people. I’m glad you’re being watched.”

“Robert Baratheon had my family raped and murdered.”

“Your family killed my aunt.”

“Enough. This isn’t what I brought you here for.” The Queen moved as though to pull Sansa down to the bed.

But Sansa had height and weight. She grabbed the Queen’s wrists and held them still. “What did you bring me here for?”

“I told you: I miss being fucked by a Stark.”

But that wasn’t what she’d said at all. Enamored of Starks, she’d said; she had loved Jon. Perhaps she still did. It hardly signified right now, for she watched Sansa so intently that Sansa knew her attention wasn’t elsewhere.

She didn’t want this to be violent and terrible. The whole world was unbearably violent and awful. Winter had come; winter was coming; they would not see a summer’s day for years yet. Deep down, all she wanted was to kiss a pretty girl. The desire rose in her like the first tender greenery poking through the frost, impossibly fragile and all too easy to ignore.

The Queen shifted a little, and Sansa realized she still had her in a deadlock. She lowered the Queen’s wrists to the bed one again. “I changed my mind. I’ll show you what I want,” she said.

The Queen did not move. Her pulse beat against the thin skin of her wrists, flushed from Sansa’s grip. It was as good a place to start as any; Sansa bent down and kissed the pulse, flicking her tongue out to taste.

Oil of an unknown provenance. Sulfur, a bit, not so much a taste as a smell. Westeros’ Queen was a monster, but she couldn’t be called a fraud. She truly was a dragon.

When Sansa bit the meat of her shoulder, the Queen gasped. When Sansa kissed her, she moaned. There was something fascinating about being like this, pressed against the Queen’s naked skin while she herself wore layers of warm clothing. It would all need to be washed after this; she could feel the Queen’s wet warmth through her skirts.

They kissed again, dirtier, the Queen biting her lip as though daring Sansa to retaliate. Sansa twisted the Queen’s hair in her grip and smiled when it made her gasp, her spine arching so sweetly against Sansa.

“Is this what you need, then?” the Queen said. “To be in control, to make up for your…damage?”

“Of course not,” Sansa said. She trailed fingers down the Queen’s arms, watching her shiver. The Queen was wet, so wet; Sansa smelled it before she touched it, parting the Queen with two fingers, sinking in so very easily. “It’s what you need, Your Grace,” she said, and bit down on the Queen’s breast as the Queen moaned and bucked her hips into Sansa’s hand.

“Sansa - more, please. More.”

Sansa ignored her. The Queen’s skin was tan but bruised easily; Sansa sucked her nipple and then the side of her breast, watching as a bruise bloomed under her lips. The Queen was tight as a harp’s string, her muscles trembling, but she kept her hands above her head as Sansa had instructed her.

At first, as Sansa fucked the Queen, it was easy enough to forget her own body. The Queen was a landscape of possibilities, after all; Sansa had never seen someone so exquisitely attuned to someone else’s touch. She was beautiful, and powerful, and for the moment entirely content to let Sansa fuck her.

But as it went on - as the Queen grew wetter around Sansa’s fingers, as she started to whimper and moan as she moved her hips - Sansa stopped being able to ignore herself: how warm she was, the ache between her legs. She wanted so badly to let the Queen touch her.

“I won’t come like this,” the Queen said. She probably meant to sound imperious, but in truth she mostly just sounded whiny. “Touch me, please, Sansa.”

“I am touching you.” Sansa curled her fingers and thrust harder to make her point.

And of course, she knew what the Queen meant; she was so wet and so swollen, and Sansa hadn’t touched her but to fuck her, hadn’t sucked her clit or even pressed a finger against it. But it was just so distracting, watching the Queen move restlessly on her hand.

“Sansa,” the Queen said again. “Please, please.”

She was so beautiful that Sansa could only assent. She pressed her thumb against the Queen, hard, and then she had only to watch as the Queen fucked herself to orgasm on Sansa’s hand.

Sansa thought she would be ordered to leave, was so certain of it that she found herself dizzy when the Queen said, “My turn,” and shoved Sansa down on the bed.

She waited for the familiar panic; it didn’t come. Looking up at the Queen, she felt only desire. Need.

Triumph glinted in the Queen’s eyes, and she kissed Sansa, stroking her jaw gently and tugging at the laces on the back of Sansa’s dress.

Undressing, for Sansa, was a much more dramatic affair. She almost wanted to run away, but the Queen watched her with that odd gaze, a smile teasing the edge of her mouth, and -

Well, she wanted to run towards the Queen, as well.

“Lie down, darling,” the Queen said. Sansa had scarcely obeyed when the Queen was looming over her, her mouth -

Her mouth.

It all became very scattered after that. Fingers on her, in her - a mouth sucking, smirking as Sansa gasped, then begged - a too-warm palm pressed against her own, anchoring her as she screamed.

She drifted off, sated. When she woke, the Queen was watching her, and so were one of her dragons, peering in through a window of the Red Keep. The Queen had pulled a sheet over her, as though modesty before her dragons mattered to Sansa.

“I have informed the residents of King’s Landing that they may expect a winter program of food and wages put forth by the Queen in the North, my consort,” the Queen said.

Sansa stared at her. She stared at the dragon. She stared at the ceiling. “You are mad.”

“Oh, quite,” the Queen said. “But I had some time to think while you slept. I concluded that I am mad, but you are not: so I will simply follow your advice.”

Simply. It didn’t work that way. “My Queen -”

A harp string, again, the shuddering of the Queen’s spine, the heavy pleasure in her gaze. Well, Sansa had learned how to manipulate from the best in Westeros. “My Queen. I accept this position, but I must demand my own room, my own -”

“Allowance?”

“Servants,” Sansa said, barely concealing her frown.

But the Queen saw it. Her eyes flicked over Sansa the way Sansa herself might examine a shipment of grain.

Well. Rather more amorous than that. “Done,” the Queen said.

It was a bad idea. A terrible one, in fact. But Sansa found she didn’t mind.

“Come here,” Sansa said, and the Queen obeyed.