Tacit Whisky

---

They stop at a motel with a flickering neon light that informs them they’re at the Next Day Inn, and that it’s $20 a night for cable-tv, phone, and pool. Gravel crunches beneath the El Camino’s tires as Jon pulls into a parking spot near the front office. He swings his door open and steps out, pauses, then turns and leans back into the car, even in evening the California summer sun hot on the nape of his neck.

“You can stay here if you want,” he tells Sansa. “I’ll get us a room.”

Sansa shakes her head and steps out of her side of the car. “I’ll find a payphone.”

Jon eyes her, but only nods and turns to the front office. It isn’t your business, he tells himself: even though that’s exactly what he’d made it the moment he’d pulled out of the driveway of the Stark lake house with Sansa in the passenger’s seat, nothing packed and not a word to anyone.

---

“Don’t flake this year,” Robb had groaned over the phone when he called Jon months before. “Sansa’s finally dumped that Joffrey kid, so it’ll be like it was when we were kids again.”

It wouldn’t of course, and Sansa was exactly why, though Jon would never have told Robb that. The last time he’d gone to the Stark lakehouse she’d brought Margaery with her, and Robb hadn’t been able to stop gawping the whole time. Margaery was tall, statuesque, elegant curves flaunted in the pink bikini she’d sun in, sunglasses perched in her brown hair, a knowing smile playing at the corners of her lips.

But as gorgeous as Margaery was, it was Sansa who Jon’s eyes had kept drifting too. It wasn’t just how long legged and slim she’d looked in her daisy dukes and light blue halter top as she stretched out on the dock to sun with Margaery. Jon had wished it was. It would be easier to explain. But he’s always known Sansa was pretty, and that that prettiness would bloom into beauty with the onset of puberty.

But knowing and seeing were two different things. All that summer he’d been unable to stop his eyes from drifting to Sansa, and every minute of that summer he’d hated it.

But after two years of turning Robb down, Jon knew he couldn’t a third time, and so he’d packed the few things he’d needed in his El Camino, and started his trip cross country to the opposite coast.

---

Sansa is leaning against the El Camino when Jon returns from the front office, shades planted in her hair, face tilted back and eyes closed. No doubt she’s taken the chance to stretch her legs after hours in the car, and for a long moment Jon is tempted to let her be. To let her simply stand and soak in the sun. He doesn’t want to do this. Not after a day of driving and the beating sun, not after all that Sansa has already gone through today. But there’s no one else.

Her eyes blink open as his feet crunch the gravel.

“Were they there?” He asks.

“Yeah.”

“What did they say?”

She shrugs, gaze beginning to drift away.

“Sansa.” Jon tilts his face forward, catching her gaze before it can slip away entirely. “What did they say?”

“What do you think?” Sansa’s lips thin, narrow and tart. “What would your mom say if it was you? Your dad?”

He wouldn’t care. But Jon refuses to let the words touch him. “Do they know you’re ok, at least?”

“No,” Sansa snaps, “they don’t, Jon. They don’t think I’m ever going to be ok. But they’re not going to call the police either. You don’t need to worry about them coming after us, alright?”

A retort is already on Jon’s tongue, all the exhaustion and frayed nerves of the day tart on the tip of it, but then she juts her chin out and glares at him; a silent dare for him to say more in just the same way she does when arguing with Arya. And Jon is suddenly very aware of how much younger she is than him: three years younger and just out of highschool; of how though he’s always thought her the prim and perfect one of the Stark siblings there’d been a fault line lurking within; that despite how perfect he’s always thought her life today that fault line has ripped a gaping hole in her life that can never be closed.

Jon bites the inside of his cheek and crosses to the car. Sansa refuses to look at him as he leans against it beside her, a scowl on her face as she gazes sightlessly at the road, cars flickering across her sunglasses.

“The guy said there’s a diner a few minutes walk from here,” he tells Sansa. “We can get food there.”

Sansa clenches her jaw, a delicate muscle standing out. “I don’t have any money, Jon.”

He shakes his head and pushes off the car. “I’ll cover it.”

---

By the time they return from the diner the sun is down, all that’s left of the day long cool shadows. Neither of them packed, so there’s nothing to haul from car to room. Instead they simply slip in their room, the air inside musty and flat after a day trapped inside.

Jon crosses to the window and the wood rimmed and yellowed plastic AC unit perched there. He twists the nob and holds his palm over the ensuing stream of humid air that sputters from the vent. “You can take the shower first.”

Sansa doesn’t answer. A moment later the bathroom door clicks closed.

Jon wanders to the bed. The sheets are cheap, the pillows musty, and it is far, far too narrow. All the money they have is the handful of bills tucked in his wallet, and too many of those had to get them the luxury of any room at all, much less a room with a double bed.

Truthfully the possibility of getting a bigger room never occurred to him. Something about being on the road again had flicked on his childhood survival instincts when he and his mother had spent humid nights with the windows of their car rolled down, curled together even though their skin stuck to the cheap and cracked pleather in the humidity.

Jon shucks off his shoes and turns on the wood paneled TV just for something to fill the room. A newscaster rolls out the evening news as Jon sits on the bed, but he barely notices it next to the patter of the shower a wall away.

He tilts his head back, stares at the yellowed ceiling, and hopes he hasn’t made a mistake.

---

It had happened late in the afternoon, the long shadows of the pines cool on his shoulders after the sun of the lake’s edge as he trudged back to the Stark house for another round of cokes, Arya’s whoop as she took another turn jumping off the tire swing faint behind him. The summer really had been just like when they were kids, even if the dock seemed smaller and when Arya forced Jon to take a turn on the tire swing to prove he wasn’t chicken he barely fit any longer. 

The only real difference was Sansa. She hadn’t brought Margaery with her this year, and seemed short tempered for it, snapping at Arya at the slightest provocation. Jon she’d barely spared a look for when he first arrived; an indifferent glance from behind some paperback she had her nose in, a swift inspection to see if anything had made her brother’s friend more interesting. Nothing had it seemed, and she’d turned back to her book, his existence already forgotten in lieu of the muscled man dipping a woman bursting from a corset into a swoon on the front of her paperback.

Not that Jon cared.

Most days she stayed in the house reading her book, though she never seemed to make progress in it judging from the glacial advance of her bookmark. She’s just afraid she’ll run into Joffrey, Arya had sniffed about it. Their lakehouse is only a couple away, though God knows she should stop sulking about breaking up. She’s better off without him.

That morning Robb had been able to drag her to the lake’s edge, dressed in the same light blue bikini top and daisy duke’s she had with Margaery. It was just as distracting as before, just as mesmerizing, and Jon had been thankful when she went back to the house early so he didn’t have to keep making a conscious effort to avoid looking at her.

Jon ducked his head to wipe the sweat from his forehead on the back of his arm as he reached the Stark porch, wooden floorboards still hot from the afternoon sun under his bare feet. With any luck he wouldn’t run into her. The kitchen overlooked the porch, and he wouldn’t need to go any further into the house to grab the cokes he’d come for.

But when he raised his head from wiping it on his arm he saw Sansa framed in the kitchen window.

---

Though Sansa has every right to take all the time in the world, after just a few minutes the shower shuts off and she slips from the bathroom dressed in the same clothes she went in; the only real difference the slick sheen off her red hair.

“We can stop by the store tomorrow.” Jon tells her as he rises from the bed, all to aware of the sweat wrinkled feel of fabric on his own skin. “Pick up clothes.”

Sansa seats herself on the edge of the bed and tilts her head to one side. She combs her fingers through the wet drape of her hair. “I told you,” she says quietly. “I don’t have any money.”

She’d never needed any. None of the Stark siblings had; the Starks came from old, respected money, and anything they’d wanted was theirs. For Sansa that had meant clothes and earrings and tennis lessons at the local club. Not spoiled exactly; but something like it, Jon had always secretly of Sansa. She fit the mold too perfectly not to be: pretty rich girl, prim and perfect and straight-A student, apple of her parents’ eye.

Everything she wasn’t now.

“It’s a long way to Wall-U.” Jon shrugs. “We’ll have to get some eventually.”

Sansa doesn’t object, and Jon leaves to take his shower.

The inside of the bathroom is cramped, the linoleum floor yellowed, but the water when he turns the knob of the shower is gloriously hot. Jon sheds his clothes and steps inside, lets the water’s heat soak into his shoulders and neck, leech some of the day’s tension from them.

As much as he would like to simply stand there in the steam and heat forever, Jon forces himself to reach for the soap. He lathers and rinses himself, and though it’s almost painful, turns the water off. His clothes feel all the more wrinkled and sweat stained after the shower, and he pulls them on reluctantly.

Sansa is on the bed as he slips out of the bathroom: curled under the covers, hands pillowed beneath her cheek. Jon closes the bathroom door behind him quietly, and pads to the lamp by the bed. Sansa doesn’t shift as he clicks it off, room black but for the thin stripes of neon pink and blue from the motel sign outside cutting between the slats of the curtain.

The couch is too short for his tall frame, but it’s an easy decision to take it. If Sansa was awake it would feel irritatingly posturing, a mawkish display of chivalry, but in the dark he simply slips off his shirt and lies back on the couch, heels over the edge of one side and head just barely fitting on the other. Not comfortable, but doable.

“Jon.”

Jon blinks open an eye. Though she hasn’t moved and her eyes are still closed, Sansa must be more awake than he thought. “You don’t have to sleep over there.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not.” Irritation slips into Sansa’s voice. “Get on the bed, Jon.”

For a moment Jon thinks about arguing further, but it’s been a long day, and the temptation of a real mattress is too much. Silently, he rises from the couch, pulls on his shirt, and lies down on the opposite side of the bed from Sansa; the mattress is narrow though, and even right on the edge they’re close enough that he can feel the wisp of her breath. In the dark only the faint lines of her jaw and nose and chin are left, a sketch lovely and vulnerable.

Jon closes his eyes, 

“We can go back.” He says into the dark. “I can drive you back tomorrow, if you want.”

“And if I don’t?” Sansa’s voice is soft.  She swallows and picks at a stray thread on the sheet between them, the back of her slim fingers only an inch or two away from brushing his chest.  “What if I don’t ever want to go back?”

You will. But the words catch in Jon’s throat. It was one thing for him to accept what she was: he was the child of a single mother who had hopped from home to home, been to college and had his perspective of the world forcibly widened by Val and Alys, but the Starks…

Ned and Catelyn were good parents. Caring. Loving. But they were also, at their core, old money. They were respected in the community, and had expectations of their children. To marry well. To have good careers. As much as they might love Arya, her flower child tendencies were a constant source of tension brewing beneath the surface. And Arya had always been that way, the problem child who jumped in puddles and came home at night with tangled hair. Sansa…

Sansa had been their golden child.

“They’ll accept it,” Jon says softly. “Your folks. It just... it takes time.”

“And if they don’t?” Sansa’s voice wavers. Her fingers still on the sheet. “I know… I know you don’t have to do this. I know we’re not friends. That you’ve never even really liked me. Not like Arya or Robb, or even Bran and Rickon. But don’t… don’t take me back.”

He shouldn’t: not after what she’s been through today, not when he doesn’t have the right, but still Jon reaches up and covers her hand with his, squeezes it. “I won’t.”

---

In the kitchen Sansa stands framed by the window.

For a moment Jon thinks she’s in pain; half bent over the kitchen counter, arms stretched out to brace her, bottom lip caught between her teeth. But not pain, Jon realizes as Sansa’s mouth opens in a silent pant, fingers clenching white on the counter as she shudders.

Sansa catches the tip of her tongue between her teeth. She cannot answer truthfully. Her mastery of the Bene Gesserit voice is nothing compared to Olenna’s; the slightest waver in vocal intonation and the old woman will cut truth from lie cleanly as scalpel parts flesh from bone.

There is a reason high house and low call us witches, ignorant as it may be.

“I am both,” Sansa says carefully. “But I serve the Bene Gesserit.”

“You think yourself clever, don’t you? You’ve been too long among these simpletons.” Olenna cackles in a way that makes it clear to Sansa she has done nothing to deceive her. The old woman waves a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry girl, I won’t make you choose today. No, I’ve come on other business. Now take me inside. I have no wish to discuss it on your doorstep.”

Sansa dips in another curtsy, and leads Olenna inside. The tap of Olenna’s cane echos through the dark and humid stone halls of Castle Caladan, and soon enough they reach a chamber empty but for the shuttered crates the castle servants have yet to load into the guild transports. A glow globe hangs low in the corner, it’s golden light casting Olenna as a witch-shadow on the wall as the Reverend Mother hobbles to inspect one of the crates. She pokes it with the tip of her cane. “Your lord father truly means to waste guild fees transporting this cruft to Arrakis?”

“Cruft is expected for a great house of the Landsraad.” Sansa smiles and modulates her voice to innocent observation. “A noble house must project authority, you know, and such cruft holds power in swaying the people to-”

“Don’t lecture me, girl.” Olenna snaps. “I was the one that taught your mother the subtleties of statecraft when she was but a girl at my knee. It seems I should’ve insisted that she send you to our school as a child instead of letting her teach you our ways here where they could be infected with arrogance.”

Whatever Olenna thinks of her, Sansa is Bene Gesserit enough to recognize the flickering instinct inside her to defend Atreides pride against this quarrelsome old woman. But we will need whatever allies we can gain in the imperial court, pride be damned.

Sansa dips her head to Olenna. “My apologies, Reverend Mother.”

Olenna humphs at that. She jabs the crate with the tip of her cane again. “It is cruft. Does your father think it can protect him from the trap that has been set for you on Arrakis? Or perhaps he does not know it is a trap, is that it eh?”

“He does,” Sansa answers, and is unable to keep the coolness from her voice this time. So she does know. It was foolish to think the emperor’s own Truthsayer would not, but still the idea had still flitted across Sansa’s mind. “My father recognizes the Emperor’s gift as a poisoned one.”

He’d said as much when he summoned Sansa and her siblings to his chamber months before to tell of the imperial decree that ordered house Atreides from Caladan to Arrakis. All of her siblings it had been: herself, Robb, Arya, Bran, Rickon. Even Jon. While she yet lived her lady mother would never have allowed Jon to be part of a family counsel; but she’d breathed her last a year before Jon returned from the Ginaz Wall, and as a student of their school of swordsmanship he was too useful to be left out of council.

“But if we know it’s a Harkonnen trap, why give up Caladan?” Robb had objected when their father finished speaking. He flipped the kinjal in his hand pommel-tip-pommel, voice laced with anger. “Why not refuse Arrakis?”

“Because this is a trap laid not just by the Harkonnens, but the boy Emperor on his lion throne too.” Their father did not turn from where he gazed out the tall window of his chamber out at the rolling hills and sheer cliffs and vast stormy sea of Caladan. He’d taken the position when he first spoke, and had not relinquished it since, a tall and severe figure with his hands clasped behind him, the gold lettering on white paper of the imperial decree crushed in them.

 “No house may refuse an imperial decree without the full backing of the Landsraad.” Her father continued. “And they see no trap in Arrakis, only the gift of the one planet that can produce spice in all the imperium.”

“But if we did refuse?” Jon leaned against the wall beside Robb, but where Robb flipped his knife Jon was motionless: arms folded, eyes hawk-sharp in the way Sansa remembers them even as a child, before even they had been honed by his time in Ginaz. “What if we forced the matter with the Landsraad? They have more love for you than the Emperor.”

“They fear the Emperor’s Sardukar legions and look to me to protect them, but that is not the same as love. Bringing the matter before them would mean only exile for our house.” Their father’s voice had grown hard and dispassionate as he looked at Jon; it was not the Bene Gesserit voice, but had a power all it’s own. “You are my children. But this is my decision, and I will not see house Atreides become a rogue house with only our atomics to protect us.”

He turned from the window and crossed to the old, dark wood desk dominating the room. “You’ll go with the advance team to prepare our way, Jon. Our reports say the native population bristle under the Harkonnen yoke. Learn what you can of them. If we are to survive we will need their strength.”

“I should be the one to go.” Robb caught his kinjal a last time and sheathed it in a single movement. “I am-”

“The ducal heir.” Their father fixed Robb with a gaze that brooked no disagreement. “Jon will be our eyes and ears. Your place is here on Caladan.”

In the here and now, Olenna hobbles to the one remaining chair in the chamber and seats herself on the tapestried cushion of it. “Yes, I suppose your dukely father is too cunning not to see it as a trap. Not that it will do him any good.”

Sansa raises her chin. “He has seen our house through worse.”

Olenna bats away her words with a hand. “Oh, don’t take it as an insult, girl. There is a reason we gave your mother to him to weave his genes into our breeding program. The Atreides have a valuable predisposition to noblesse oblige, and at times remarkable practicality. The known worlds would be a better place if all great houses had those qualities. But our goals are longer than any one lord’s life.”

My father’s life, old woman. But Sansa does not say it. The Bene Gesserit do not intervene in the squabbling of the great houses of the Landsraad, and any argument she gives Olenna to aid them must be built on cold, hard reason and aligned with the goals of the Bene Gesserit.

“Whether we survive the Harkonnen trap on Arrakis or not,” she says carefully, “it will mean the loss of key bloodlines to the breeding program.”

“Loss? It is a waste of the worst kind.” Olenna shakes her head. “But it cannot be helped. No, don’t ask me to intervene on the part of the Atreides, girl. The trap is well and truly set and now we all must play our parts in it. I will do what I can to protect you, but for house Atreides family there is nothing to be done.” Olenna leans back in her chair, regarding Sansa with half lidded eyes. “Now tell me, have you divined why I’ve come, girl?”

Does it matter if you can do nothing for us? “I wouldn’t presume, Reverend Mother.”

From the folds of her robes Olenna slips a metal cube. She places it on one armrest of the chair, hand resting atop it. “Place your hand inside.”

Sansa approaches the chair. One face of the cube is open, but Sansa can glean as little from it as she can its other sides, nothing inside but a yawning black that seems to eat the light. “What’s in it?”

“A test. Your mother taught you in the ways of the Bene Gesserit, but now it is time to see if you are worthy of them. If you are animal or human.” She taps a sharp nail on the box. “Put your hand in the box.”

Fear is the mindkiller. The familiar words ease the tension tightening the back of Sansa’s neck. She kneels before the Reverend Mother’s chair and places her hand in the box; cool steel beneath her fingertips, a prickling along her skin as though she’d fallen asleep atop her hand. She raises her chin. “Is this all?”

Olenna rasps a laugh, and raises her hand to Sansa’s neck. Something cool and metal touches her, and Sansa resists the animal instinct to jerk away from it. “What is that?”

“The gom jabbar. A needle with poison on it’s tip swift acting enough to kill you before you could rise. If you take your hand from the box I will touch you with it and you will die.”

Fury wells in Sansa, a tide too strong to resist, and one she does not care to. “This is how you treat a duke’s daughter?”

Olenna’s eyes glitter in the seams of her face. “We have yet to see if you are even human, much less more than that. Don’t withdraw your hand from the box. You will feel pain, but if you withdraw your hand you will die.”

A faint heat begins to tingle along Sansa’s fingers in the box. She glances at it, but can see nothing beyond her wrist. The tingle grows into a buzzing itch as she gazes at the box.

“Here on Caladan you have some of the old Terranic animals, do you not?” Olenna asks Sansa as the itch burrows deeper beneath her skin like tiny, razor worms. “When an animal is trapped it will sometimes chew its leg off to escape. A human though? A human would remain in the trap. Endure the pain. Feign death that he might kill the trapper and protect others of its kind from the same fate.”

“And this test is to see if I will chew off my hand?” Sansa’s voice is cool despite the heat radiating up her arm, little worms of fire burrowing further and further into her hand. She presses her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Is that it, old woman?”

Olenna smiles, lips pulling back to reveal pink gums and yellowed teeth. “It is. Now be silent and still or die an animal.”

For a moment the possibility flits across Sansa’s mind that the Reverend Mother has come to kill her; that she has taken the side of the Emperor and the Harkonnens in their feud with the Atreides. Bene Gesserit or no, if it served the ends of their sisterhood Sansa has no doubt Olenna would dispose of her without a trace of hesitation.

But what purpose would my death serve?

The pain in her hand grows impossible to ignore, waves of searing heat. Sweat pricks Sansa’s skin as pain throbs up her forearm. She tries to flex her fingers, but finds she can’t, muscles clenched in a rictus. Bene Gesserit training had the singular goal of placing mind above body in the order of things, but Sansa feels her mind unable to push down the swelling wave of animal instinct that screams to remove her hand from the burning pit of a box and stop the pain

She’s breathing in gasps she realizes; tries to slow her breathing and finds herself unable to. Terror fills her at the realization. Fear is the mindkiller, she tells herself desperately, fear is the little death. But this isn’t only fear: it’s pain, searing and impossible to suppress. She can feel her skin curling in black flakes from her hand, crisping away to expose the red and raw meat beneath.

Murk swims at the edge of Sansa’s vision. She flees present-awareness as her mother taught her, retreating inside herself to  the memories of the long hours sitting with her mother and listening to the murmur of her voice. But the pain is there too, clawing and gnawing.

Deeper insider her she flees from it, tries to summon the present-awareness of memories, hyper-fixated details a wall against the pain: sitting with Bran as he recites his lessons, arguing with Arya, sticking her tongue out at Robb, watching Jon from afar and flicking her gaze away when his eyes met hers, sitting on her mother’s lap as she brushed her hair to a copper sheen.

But no matter where Sansa flees the pain follows her, each door she locks behind her consumed in the wildfire of it, wood shriveling like kindling, her mind a house crumbling in the blaze.

Fear is the mindkiller, her mother had whispered to her as she lay dying. It is a memory Sansa has never been able to forget and yet one she shrinks away from even as the blaze of pain licks at her back. Her mother; thin and frail in the bed she birthed Rickon, smile weak from fever but the fingers laced through Sansa’s tight as steel bands. But fear is not the only mindkiller, Sansa. Grief, pain, anger; all are a little death. Let them wash over you, and when they are passed look back at their path.

And where they have been only you will remain.

Only you will remain.

Only you will remain.

Only you will remain.

And suddenly, the pain stops.

Sansa’s eyes fly open and she stares at the box. Outwardly nothing about it has changed, but it’s like a switch has been thrown, the burning charnel pit it had been a moment before gone, only the prickling echoes of pain left.

Olenna’s hand falls from Sansa’s neck, and she replaces the silver glint of her gom jabbar in her robe. “Take your hand from the box, newborn human.”

Sansa hesitates. Instinct screams what she will withdraw is a blackened stump, raw meat peaking through cracks of black seared flesh. The terror that rises in her is a muted and far thing though, a distant bloom against the wall of her reinstated Bene Gesserit training.

She pulls her hand from the box, and stares at the result wordlessly. Pale. Five fingered. Intact. Echoes of pain dance up and down her fingers as she flexes them, but nothing like the searing fire from minutes before.

“How?” Sansa asks, still staring at her hand. “I felt it burn.”

“Pain by nerve induction.” Olenna slips the box back into her robe and clucks her tongue. “Do you truly think we would maim all new humans? The Bene Gesserit do not waste what may be used.”

“You did this to my mother?”

“We do it to all Bene Gesserit. Our training is too dangerous to be wielded by animals.”

Sansa lets her hand fall and takes a long shuddering breath, tries to regain something of her composure. It is gone though, she knows; any facade at dignity, that she and the Reverend Mother are on anything like even footing. She saw to that quick enough. Whatever game played I have lost.

Olenna seems to know her mind; she nods approvingly to herself. “You are humbled now. That is for the good. I did not make the long journey to Caladan simply to test you though. I have a task for you, girl. Stand up.”

Sansa obeys. She smooths her skirt as she regains her feet, hand still tingling with remembered pain. She eyes the Reverend Mother. I will not betray my family no matter what pain you put me through, old woman. She lets her chin drop though, seemingly submissive. “What would you have of me, Reverend Mother?”

Sansa catches the tip of her tongue between her teeth. She cannot answer truthfully. Her mastery of the Bene Gesserit voice is nothing compared to Olenna’s; the slightest waver in vocal intonation and the old woman will cut truth from lie cleanly as scalpel parts flesh from bone.

There is a reason high house and low call us mind witches, ignorant as it may be.

“I am both,” Sansa says carefully. “But I serve the Bene Gesserit.”

“Clever you think yourself, don’t you?” Olenna cackles in a way that makes it clear to Sansa she has done nothing to deceive her. She waves a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry girl, I won’t make you choose today. No, I’ve come on other business. Now take me inside. I have no wish to discuss it on your doorstep.”

Sansa dips in another curtsy, and leads Olenna inside. The tap of Olenna’s echo through the dark and humid stone halls of Castle Caladan, and soon enough they reach a chamber empty but for the shuttered crates the castle servants have yet to load into the guild transports. A glow globe hangs low in the corner, it’s golden light casting Olenna as a witch-shadow on the wall as the Reverend Mother moves to inspect one of the crates. She pokes it with the tip of her cane. “Your lord father truly means to waste guild fees transporting this cruft to Arrakis?”

“Cruft is expected for a great house of the Landsraad.” Sansa smiles and modulates her voice to mild observation. “A noble house must project authority, and such cruft holds power in swaying the people to-”

“Don’t lecture me, girl.” Olenna snaps. “I taught your mother the subtleties of statecraft when she was but a girl at my knee. It seems I should’ve insisted that she send you to our school as a child instead of letting her teach you our ways here where they could be infected with pride and insolence.”

Whatever Olenna thinks of her, Sansa is Bene Gesserit enough to recognize the flickering instinct inside her to defend Atreides pride, to quarrel with this old crone. But we need whatever allies we can gain in the imperial court.

She dips her head to Olenna. “My apologies, Reverend Mother.”

Olenna humphs at that. She jabs the crate with the tip of her cane again. “It is cruft. Does your father think it can protect him from the trap that has been set for you on Arrakis? Or perhaps he does not know it is a trap, is that it eh?”

“He does,” Sansa answers coolly. So she does know. It was foolish to think the emperor’s own Truthsayer would not, but still the idea had still flitted across Sansa’s mind. “He recognizes the Emperor’s gift as a poisoned one.”

He’d said as much when he summoned Sansa and her siblings to his chamber to tell of the imperial decree that ordered them from Caladan to Arrakis. All of her siblings it had been: Robb, herself, Arya, Bran, Rickon, and even Jon. Her lady mother would never have allowed Jon to attend when she still lived. But her mother was two years in the grave when he’d returned from Ginaz, and as a student of their school of swordsmanship he was too useful to be left out of council.

“But if we know it’s a Harkonnen trap, why go?” Robb had objected when their father finished speaking. He flipped the kinjal in his hand pommel-tip-pommel, voice laced with anger. “Why not refuse Arrakis?”

“Because it is a trap laid not just by the Harkonnens, but the boy Emperor on his lion throne too.” Their father did not turn from where he gazed out the tall window of his chamber out at the rolling hills and sheer cliffs and vast stormy sea of Caladan. He’d taken the position when he first spoke, and had not relinquished it since, a tall and severe figure with his hands clasped behind him, the gold lettering on white paper of the imperial decree crushed in them.

“No house may refuse an imperial decree without the full backing of the Landsraad.” Her father continued. “And they see no trap in Arrakis, only the gift of the one planet that can produce spice in all the imperium.”

“But if we did refuse?” Jon pressed. He leaned against the wall beside Robb, but where he flipped his knife, Jon stood motionless: arms folded, eyes hawk-sharp in the way Sansa remembers them even as a child, before even they had been honed by his time at the Ginaz Wall. “What if we forced the matter with the Landsraad? They have more love for you than the Emperor.”

“Then it would be exile.” Their father’s voice had grown hard and dispassionate as he looked at Jon; it was not the Bene Gesserit voice, but had a power all it’s own. “You are my children. But this is my decision, and I will not see house Atreides become a rogue house with only our atomics to protect us.”

Finally, he turned from the window and crossed to the old, dark wood desk dominating the room. “You’ll go with the advance team, Jon. Our reports say the native population are unhappy with the Harkonnens.

“I should be the one to go.” Robb caught his kinjal a last time and sheathed it in a single movement. “I am-”

“You are the ducal heir.” Their father fixed Robb with a gaze that brooked no disagreement. “Your place is here on Caladan until it is no longer ours.”

In the here and now, Olenna hobles to the one remaining chair in the chamber and seats herself on the tapestried cushion of it. “Yes, I suppose your dukely father is too cunning not to see it as a trap. Not that it will do him any good.”

Sansa raises her chin. “He has seen our house through worse.”

Olenna bats away her words with a hand. “Oh, don’t take it as an insult, girl. There is a reason we gave your mother to him to weave his genes into our breeding program. The Atreides have a valuable predisposition to noblesse oblige, and at times remarkable practicality. The known worlds would be a better place if all grout houses had those qualities. But our goals are longer than any one lord’s life.”

My father’s life. But Sansa does not say it. The Bene Gesserit do not intervene in the squabblings of the great houses of the Landsraad, and any argument she gives Olenna to aid them must be built on cold, hard reason.

Olenna leans back in her chair, regarding Sansa with half lidded eyes. “Tell me, have you divined why I’ve come, girl?”

“I wouldn’t presume.”

---

They stop at a motel with a flickering neon light that informs them they’re at the Next Day Inn, and that it’s $20 a night for cable-tv, phone, and pool. Gravel crunches beneath the El Camino’s tires as Jon pulls into a parking spot near the front office. He swings his door open and steps out, pauses, then turns and leans back into the car, even in evening the California summer sun hot on the nape of his neck.

“You can stay here if you want,” he tells Sansa. “I’ll get us a room.”

Sansa shakes her head and steps out of her side of the car. “I’ll find a payphone.”

Jon eyes her, but only nods and turns to the front office. It isn’t your business, he tells himself: even though that’s exactly what he’d made it the moment he’d pulled out of the driveway of the Stark lake house with Sansa in the passenger’s seat, nothing packed and not a word to anyone.

---

Sansa is leaning against the El Camino when Jon returns from the front office, shades planted in her hair, face tilted back and eyes closed. No doubt she’s taken the chance to stretch her legs after hours in the car, and for a long moment Jon is tempted to let her be. To let her simply stand and soak in the sun. He doesn’t want to do this. Not after a day of driving and the beating sun, not after all that Sansa has already gone through today. But there’s no one else.

Her eyes blink open as his feet crunch the gravel.

“Were they there?” He asks.

“Yeah.”

“What did they say?”

She shrugs, gaze beginning to drift away.

“Sansa.” Jon tilts his face forward, catching her gaze before it can slip away entirely. “What did they say?”

“What do you think?” Sansa’s lips thin, narrow and tart. “What would your mom say if it was you? Your dad?”

He wouldn’t care. But Jon refuses to let the words touch him. “Do they know you’re ok, at least?”

“No,” Sansa snaps, “they don’t, Jon. They don’t think I’m ever going to be ok. But they’re not going to call the police either. You don’t need to worry, ok?”

A retort is on the tip of Jon’s tongue, all the exhaustion and frayed nerves of the day tart on the tip of it, but then she juts her chin out and glares at him; a silent dare for him to say more in just the same way she does when arguing with Arya. And Jon is suddenly very aware of how much younger she is than him: three years younger and just out of highschool; of how though he’s always thought her the prim and perfect one of the Stark siblings there’d been a fault line lurking within; that despite how perfect he’s always thought her life today that fault line has ripped a gaping hole in her life that can never be closed.

Jon bites the inside of his cheek and crosses to the car. Sansa refuses to look at him as he leans against it beside her, a scowl on her face as she gazes sightlessly at the flicker of cars on the road.

“The guy said there’s a diner a few minutes from here,” he tells Sansa. “We can get food there.”

A muscle stands out from Sansa’s delicate jaw. “I don’t have any money, Jon.”

Half forgotten images had risen to the surface as Jon stared down at the date: pastel streamers and white birthday cake, Sansa pink cheeked and beaming and radiant in her yellow summer dress, a paper crown perched at a jaunty angle on her head, giggling as her family sang her happy birthday, the slim line of her neck as she leaned forward, the laughing purse of her lips as she blew out the candles.

It had been her thirteenth birthday and the last for which her family had been alive.

The memory of it had risen burning and bitter as bile in his throat as Jon stared down at the visitation request, a nauseous wave that made him want to stuff the form under his mattress and his memories with it, shove them away where he would never have to feel them again.

“Who’s it from?” Grenn had leaned over from the top bunk, bald head catching the light as he frowned at the paper. “You never get visitation requests.”

“No one.” Jon folded the paper and pocketed it, voice hard and bored. “My lawyer.”

Grenn eyed Jon, but shrugged after a moment and turned away. They were cellmates and something like friends, but on the inside everyone knew better than to ask about the outside world. There was no point. Castle Black Penitentiary was a federal supermax prison and most of them would never leave it, would serve out their life sentences within its concrete walls.

On the other side of the glass Sansa leans forward and unhooks the phone from the side of the booth, and on his side of the partition Jon mirrors her. Her face has lengthened since he last saw her, lost it’s baby fat, but her hair is just as red as he remembers, the deep auburn of autumn leaves.

And what does she see?

Jon knows; knows he’s become gaunter and leaner since they were teenagers, his face hard and the scar he'd gotten from a Wildling in his first year cutting his left eyebrow knitted and poorly healed. A maelstrom of prison ink sleeves his right arm. It was an ugly thing, his sleeve, a gaunt wolf and raven pecking blood the only easily recognizable shapes among the dozen lesser tattoos snarling around them, crude and black as though seared into his skin.

Sharp, tingling energy like soda frizz runs up and down the tattoos as Sansa’s eyes fall to them, the same prick of pins and needles he feels in the mess hall when a Wilding boy was looking at him or in the yard before a fight. It’s worse somehow though, his chest tight, fingers numb as frostbite.

How many hours did you play and replay what you’d say if you ever saw her again?

A thousand and one it must’ve been, staring up at the cold concrete of his cell, the grey twisting and swirling. But he can’t remember a word of it now, every one of them shriveled and dead.

Coward.

“I didn’t get the form till yesterday.” It's a pointless thing to say, and the voice he says it in is somehow just as hard and bored as the one he answered Grenn with the day before. He leans back in his chair. “The guards like to fuck with them.”

“Yesterday was the earliest I could submit it.” Sansa’s voice is tinny through the phone, but somehow still bone jarringly familiar even after all these years, soft and precise. “Minors aren’t allowed to visit without parental consent.”

Parental consent.

She doesn’t have parents. Not anymore, not after the neighbors had found Mr. and Mrs. Stark on the floor soaking the carpet with their blood, bits of bone and brain matter spattered-

Jon still remembers the moment he’d known, realized, the twisting and horrible recognition of the Stark carpet in the background of the blown up pictures the detectives had slapped down on the steel table before him as he sat clueless and shivering in the interview room of Wintertown PD.

Sansa is looking at him, Jon realizes, waiting for something, eye piercing and blue, and Jon clenches his jaw against them. He’d thought he was stronger than this. Numb to it. Numb after four years on the inside, numb after thousands of hours shivering in the cold of Castle Black’s concrete walls, of shuffling with other inmates as they were herded like cattle in their orange jumpsuits, of the throbbing pain of his first beating from a Wildling a month after he’d been locked inside.

"The clock is broken." Jon jerks his chin at the circle of cracked glass on the wall to their left. Say it, a part of him wishes he could scream, say you know. Say you know I did it . It would hurt, hurt like the drag of a knife ripping off strips of skin, hurt the same as the white hot slash of shiv against bone when his eyebrow was cut open, but at least it would be done. At least he wouldn't have to feel this horrible, twisting thing beneath his breastbone. "It's ten minutes till visitation is over."

“I know. The bus leaves in twenty.”

“You should say it then.” The voice he says it in doesn’t feel his; too flat, too bored . “Whatever it is you came to say, you should say it.”

Sansa stiffens in the chair. “And what did I come to say?”

“You know.” Jon laughs, the sound scraping his throat, cement on cement. He clenches his jaw hard enough to make his teeth ache, swallows a second laugh sharp as bile. It leaves him hollow, somehow tired beyond words. “It’s ok, Sansa. Really. You never got the chance. You were the only one who couldn’t, and you’re the one that deserves to. Out of everyone-”

“Shut up, Jon.”

The words crack through the phone, a punch to the gut that steals the words and breath from Jon. Behind the glass Sansa’s face is tight, angry, hard. “Do you really think that’s why I came?” Tears prick her eyes. “That that’s what I believe? That you did it? That you killed them?”

She jerks her face to the side, glares at the wall and wipes the moisture from her eyes with an angry swipe. “I know you didn’t, so just shut up.”

Jon’s heart thuds against his ribcage like it’ll crack. “How?” He eventually rasps. “You can’t know that, Sansa.”

“I can. I looked at the case files. Petyr forgot to lock his desk once. I read it all: the police report, the deposition in the station before you had your lawyer, the one they said incriminated you and hung their whole case on.”

Jon works his jaw. “But the gun,” he starts, not knowing why, not knowing why he’s arguing what he knows is true. It’s too easy. A hundred times he’d had this conversation that first year: the police at the station with his hands cuffed to the table; the public defendant he'd been assigned in a cold concrete room; the judge in an empty courtroom, jury staring down at him impassively as they read the sentence.

Eventually he’d learned to stop telling it. None of them had believed him. Why would they? He was only some bad seed who’d bounced from foster home to foster home all his life until he’d eventually been taken in out of pity by the Starks when he was thirteen.

“The gun had my fingerprints,” he starts, “the forensics showed-”

“Only because dad showed you and Robb how to use it the week before. They didn’t believe you, but I remember it. Your lawyer wasn’t on your side, Jon. He should never have pled guilty or let you be tried as an adult. You were barely seventeen.”

“I thought-” there’s a great sucking hollow in him that pulls the words from him, a void that won’t let him think, “when you weren’t in the courtroom- when you didn’t answer my letters- didn’t come to the courthouse-”

“That first year-” Sansa swallows, and for the first time since she sat down Jon realizes just how young she is, four years younger than him, barely eighteen, skinny and coltish. “I thought- it wasn’t until I found Petyr’s papers that-”

She swallows again, the movement harsh. “I tried to come after that. But they wouldn’t let me in without parental consent. I got a fake I.D. but they spotted it immediately. And Petyr, fucking Petyr wouldn’t-”

“That’s who they put you with?” A vague, half forgotten memory rises to the surface of Jon’s mind, and he frowns at the glass. “Didn’t he have a case against him by a minor?”

“It was settled out of court.”

“Still, to get custody-”

“Lysa’s my aunt.”

“But he’s in the same house-”

“Jon,” Sansa’s voice is flat, “leave it.”

Jon pauses, studying the tightness of Sansa’s face, the muscle clenched in her jaw. Anger flushes through him. “Fuck him, then.”

A tight smile twists Sansa’s lips. She clears her throat. “I’m going to mail you some paperwork later. It’ll make me your legal advocate. Not a lawyer, because I don’t have a degree, but I’ll still have access to the evidence in your case.”

Jon frowns. “Sansa,” he starts slowly, “what are you doing?”

“If we can find new evidence, we can reopen your case.”

“What for? Their case was airtight. And you’re not a lawyer.”

“Not yet.”

For a long moment all Jon can do is stare at her. When he speaks though his voice is hard. “You can’t be serious. You have your whole life ahead of you. You haven’t thought this through.”

“No, I have.” Sansa leans forward, brushes back a stray lock of hair from her face, eyes fierce. “I’ve done nothing but think about it for four years, Jon. You don’t deserve to be here. I talked to a few lawyers, but Petyr drained most of my trust fund and they’ll never take the case otherwise. I even tried to talk to some of daddy’s old friends, but none of them will help either. So I’ll do it. I’ve already signed up for classes.”

They stay staring at each other silently until the clock on the wall ticks the hour and a door opens behind Jon, a prison guard behind it.

He blows out a hard breath. “I can’t ask you to do this.”