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Theonsa Soupversary
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Published:
2023-04-21
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When the Night Ends

Summary:

Theon is wounded but survives the Battle of Winterfell. Sansa, realizing some things about her own feelings, cares for him in the aftermath.

Notes:

Written for the 2023 Theonsa Soupversary

Work Text:

When they part on the night of the battle, Sansa can feel her heart hammering like a caught rabbit in her chest, getting stuck in her throat. Theon looks so serious, so resigned. So alone, even with his men waiting only a few paces away. She wants to close the distance between them, to pull him close again, like she had done in the Great Hall, to say something girlish and romantic, the kind of thing she hadn't felt an affinity for since before her father's execution.

Her feet move without her bidding and she's suddenly standing right before him, reaching up to touch his face, cold fingertips against chapped skin. He lets his eyes fall half-closed against her touch, standing still with the snow melting in his hair. "Theon," she starts, but the rest gets caught somewhere in the tangle of her nerves, fades into the space between them.

"Stay safe, my lady," he finally says, takes the hand against his cheek and brings it to his lips. It's her turn to lower her eyes, savor the sweet longing spreading through her limbs. She thinks, before the war, as a boy, he would have said it with a smirk. At least she thinks he would have. She doesn't remember. For all she had screamed at him about Bran and Rickon being his brothers, that was but her own pain and fear and grief bleeding out. Back then, she had paid no more attention to Theon than she had to Jon. No one had paid attention, save perhaps Robb.

We were awful, admit it. Here is not the time nor the place. He'll argue with her about it, and she doesn't want that now.

She watches him leave into the snow, melt together with the darkness.

 

When the night ends, the snow is stained crimson.

 

Sansa spends a fortnight at his bedside, nursing his fever and praying to all the gods she knows that he pulls through for her. She learns that it soothes him when she runs her fingers through his hair and when she sings. She learns that milk of the poppy can take away pain but not nightmares or delirium.

The night he talks about Robb, she cries herself to sleep, curled up beside him, their fingers intertwined. The night he asks repeatedly for his sister, Sansa sends a raven to Lady Yara, begging her to come North before it’s too late.

She forces herself to pay perfunctory attention to the matters of state that come before her, now that Jon’s gone South and Bran still refuses to participate in the world of the present. After, she prays to her mother’s Gods in the half-ruined sept – to the Mother for mercy, the Father and the Warrior for strength, the Smith for healing, the Maiden for divine sweetness and respite from pain, the Crone for guidance. Sansa lifts her eyes to the Stranger last: “Not him,” she pleads. “You’ve taken my mother and my father and two of my brothers. Not him. Please.”

She pleads with the Old Gods as well, but the godswood is as silent and still as the sept, weirwood leaves like bloody handprints on fresh snow.

 

Theon’s fever breaks on the first day of the new moon. Sansa wakes to watery yellow sunlight creeping across the stone floor and Theon watching her curiously from behind a tangle of tousled curls. She gasps and reaches out to push the hair out of his face, pressing her lips against his forehead to check if perhaps the clarity she had seen in his eyes is deceptive, and sighs in relief.

“Did you sleep here?” he asks, dubiously.

She half-laughs, half-sobs at the question. If he only knew how many nights. “How are you feeling?”

“Been worse,” he settles on after some consideration. The casual way he says it distresses her, but there’s naught Sansa can do about that.

What she can do is call in the maester to check the dressings and adjust the regime of medicines. She can send down for breakfast in the hopes that he will be able to now keep down more than the few spoonfuls of tea and honey that she would usually only be able to get him to take. She can do all the things she had done before, but with more certainty that this time when he falls asleep, he’ll wake again.

 

Theon sleeps, deep and peaceful, his head pillowed against Sansa’s chest. Sunlight paints his hair honey-gold.

Sansa runs a hand through his hair, savoring the maester’s words from his last visit: he’s coming out of the woods now. I’d expect him to improve with every day.

She smiles and leans down to kiss him, tender and feather light so as to not disturb his rest.

He’d come back to her. He’d stayed with her. Against the snow and the dark and the Stranger. But all of that is behind them now.

Sansa’s dress is pastel blue, and in the yellow sunlight, neither of them needs to be alone ever again.