#vixleonard

That’s nothing, though, compared to her social influence. By her third year, she’s one of the most popular girls in school. Robb near loses his mind when boys start asking her on dates to Hogsmeade every weekend. It falls to Robb and Theon to keep him occupied at Weasleys or the Shrieking Shack, if just to let Sansa have her own fun for just a few hours a week.

“What d’you think’s gonna happen? Y’think Rosemerta’s gonna give a fifteen year old a key to an upstairs room?” Theon bursts out one day when Robb is listing all of Dickon Tarly’s faults, from priggishness to his bollocks quidditch skills. “It’s nothing more than you ‘nd I’ve done, mate. Buy a cute girl a butterbeer or two, compliment her hair, fiddle with her hands, hope she won’t mind a quick snog behind the Zonko’s displays.”

Robb stares at Theon, agape, without any rejoinder. Jon takes the opening to clap his cousin on the shoulder and chime in, “It’s Hogsmeade, not Knockturn Alley.”

But Sansa’s Slytherin loyalty can’t be understated, either. She wasn’t ever interested in Quidditch until Hogwarts, when the games turned into key social events. She takes to the stands every game, cheering on the Slytherin team in head-to-toe green and silver.

“It’s disgusting, is what it is,” Robb grumbles one day in fifth year, while Gryffindor House took to its brooms to face off against its sworn nemesis.

“Hm?” Jon glances away from game play--Edd and Tormund passing the quaffle swiftly between them, trying their best to shake the Tyrell siblings’ double threat at their heels--and is surprised to see Robb’s omnioculars aimed not skyward, but straight across the pitch. “What are you talking about?”

“Sansa!” his cousin huffs, gesturing wildly at the opposite stands with his free hand. He pulls his omnioculars and passes them to Jon. “Just when I think she’s gone as far Slyth as one can go…”

Jon runs the glasses across the far bank of stands, catches a flash of auburn, traces it back to Sansa. She’s front and center, pink-cheeked in the cold and from screaming encouragement up at her playing housemates. Her hair is plaited with green and silver, she’s waving Slytherin banners, and she’s got a snake crown jammed down over her forehead.

He’s seen all this before, even thought that the color looked nice in her red hair (a thought he promptly shoved into an already-cluttered box of “NO” at the back of his mind). The paint is new, though. A stripe of something shiny on her cheekbones, right under her eyes. Something green shimmers over them. Jon adjusts the omnioculars and sees enchanted snakes twisting back and forth over each other.

Jon doesn’t see the goal, but he hears it. The stands around him groan and jeer. Across the pitch, Sansa’s serious, focused expression breaks into a victorious grin. The new paint sets off the blue of her eyes; he can see how they crinkle at the corners when the Tyrells perform twin barrel rolls and revel in their housemates’ applause.

“Yeah.” He passes the omnioculars back to Robb. “Totally barbaric.”

*****

By her fifth year, her prefectship is a given. Jon and Robb missed out on this particular honor for Gryffindor, something Ned and Cat had grimly accepted and never again mentioned. But when Zabini’s sleek black owl alights on Winterfell Cottage’s windowsill with the notice of her official position, their approval is lukewarm. The green seal next to Zabini’s signature seems to physically repel them.

Luckily, Sansa doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest, and darts upstairs with a gleeful shriek. “Mya is going to scream,” she shouts from the top of the stairs.

Jon’s pretty sure he’s the only one to follow up with her later on. He crosses his arms and leans against her doorjamb, watches her silently for a moment as she finishes out a short missive to a friend.

He waits until she drops her quill in its inkwell and starts to blow on the parchment before he clears his throat. “Congratulations,” he says, when she glances his way. “On making prefect.”

She smiles, openly, and the midday sunlight makes her auburn hair glow like a halo. Something squeezes in his chest.

“Thank you, Jon.” She waves the parchment through the air a few times, then folds it into a triangular note with a few quick strokes. The next glance she shoots him is conspiratorial. Another squeeze. “Make sure to tell Robb that I won’t be lenient if I catch you two skulking around poor Barnabas and his trolls.”

“We’ll make sure to do our skulking when we know you’re in class,” Jon replies, keeping his face straight for as long as possible. He can’t hold back his full grin, though, when Sansa rolls her eyes and turns back to her desk, all cluttered with succulents and half-eaten pastries. “But seriously, Slytherin has to have prefects, and you’re a far better choice than...Merlin, Viserys Targaryen.”

Housemate or not, even Sansa has to pull a face at the mention of Hogwarts’ biggest bully. The look she gives her circle of newly propagated succulent leaves is so withering that he’s surprised they spontaneously combust. 

“I can’t believe I have to share a common room with that prick,” she mutters. She rakes her fingers through her hair, shaking a few waves loose to flutter around her face. She’s been spending lots of time in the garden and orchard this summer, and it’s brought out a pretty sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks. “But yes, I’m sure you’re happy to have a semi-sane person wandering the halls.”

Jon snickers. “I’d certainly rather be cornered by you in a corridor after midnight, that’s for sure.”

Whatever reply Sansa was near giving dies on her lips when a door downstairs slams. Ned calls out for Cat, and Cat calls back, and Sansa and Jon are left looking at each other across the space of her bedroom, small smiles tucked into the corners of their mouths.

Jon tears his eyes away to the far corner of the room, where her narrow bed sits primly made under the dormer window, then to the floor in front of him. He scuffs the toe of his shoe and pushes off of the doorjamb.

“Congratulations, again,” he says, and immediately wonders why his voice has gone so low.