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Her father is the 51st Victor of the Games. Resourceful, wildcard, the only volunteer of District Twelve: Eddard Stark, the boy who went into the arena with his sister and left without her.
It's the best tragedy the Games have ever had. They use it year after year, of Stark siblings on a chariot, Seam grey eyes and Seam brown hair and long, long faces, clammy hands and bumbling, humbling, endearing personalities.
Sansa has spent eleven years rewatching their Games. Rewatching interviews and the opening ceremonies. She has spent years watching young Lyanna Stark bleed out in a hot desert and call out for her dear big brother.
The Capitol likes to wrench apart families, which is why no one, not even her father, is surprised when Robb Stark is reaped, still fourteen, still a boy.
-
They love the drama; of sending a victor’s son to fight the victor’s fight. His arena is a nostalgic recreation of father’s arena; a gradient of climate from North to South, snow in the North, a harsh desert to the South. Robb is a diligent, respectful son, with brains and wits and an easy grip on a sword. He has bouncing red curls and eyes the colour as the sky, as the lakes and rivers, as fresh winter roses, and a kind smile. He looks like a merchant, the way their mother does, the way Sansa, Bran and Rickon do. He doesn't do a good job of charming the Capitol in his interviews and his opening ceremony.
They send the victor’s son into the arena but know nothing of the victor’s son.
They make a mistake when they choose Robb for the Games. They went looking for another Ned Stark, a resourceful and lanky teenager who didn't want to win, who loved his family, who couldn't stomach rich foods and had an adorably thick Seam accent, tongue curling fondly around his n’s and his o’s and his u’s. They wanted Ned Stark to show the people what obedient district folk are supposed to be like: humble servants, willing to comply with the Capitol.
(No one says anything about Sansa. Had she been just a year older, just a month older, she'd been called forth too, and everyone would wait with bated breath to hear that sharp ‘I volunteer’ echo throughout the crowd. It never came, and Sansa turns twelve while Robb runs through forests and lakes and trees.)
Robb isn't like his father. He has the wolfblood in him. There's something feral in his eyes.
“You think I'm here so they can sing songs about me?” Robb almost snarls, looking all the part in his long fur cloak that drags at his heels. He looks wild, and Sansa thinks this is on purpose. He stares right down the camera. “I'm here because I want to go home.”
People don't see reluctant Ned in his son, and that's what worries the Capitol. If they wanted humble bumbling no-trouble Ned Stark they should've sent his bastard in. The Capitol saw a bawdy young man that might have a chance, has a better chance than his aunt and father did.
(The districts see poor Lyanna Stark in his wolf eyes, bleeding to death but angry. So very, very angry.)
When the buzzer cuts off the interview, Renly Baratheon coughs uncomfortably while the next Tribute takes his place. Robb stalks off, thick fur coat dragging against the floor.
(Something then takes breath for the first time. A shuddering, life giving breath, and Sansa feels it waft through the country.)
-
When Sansa is nervous she pushes her tongue against the large gap between her front teeth. It's probably her biggest flaw, how open and awkward her mouth is, compared to the rest of her. It makes her look dirty, grimy, Seamish, where her dark red hair shines in the dull light, and how wide and bright her blue eyes are.
She spends the Games with her tongue pressed between her teeth, watching with the rest of their dear district, as Robb Stark does the impossible and survives.
Arya is nine and considered too young to watch, since her brother is a Tribute and no one even mentions Bran or Rickon. She could depersonalise it if it was any other person, any other face; but not Robb. For the districts, highlights decided by the Capitol—who have all hour access—are shown, and a great majority of it is spent with eyes on Robb, as he hunts. He makes it out of the bloodbath with a sword, a small backpack and blood on his hands; he took down the District 1 career quickly, right through the stomach and back out again. District 12, for the first time ever, really, claims the first kill of the Games, and Sansa wishes she wasn't proud.
(Everyday since Robb and Jon were eight, their father would take them to the meadow on the opposite side of the district and deep into the woods, with short thin swords that were sharp enough to leave some damage. Robb may not be a career but he is trained by a Victor. A victor who spent the first seventeen years of his life ducking under a broken electric fence and into the forest with his father and brothers and sister, armed with bows and swords and traps. Sansa and her siblings do not have the life her father did, and in some ways, the only way Ned is glad he won the Games.)
His skill is indisputable, but what really sends the whispering rumours across the country is when Robb befriends a Capitol mutt. For some joke this year, the forest is infested with the sigils of the districts. Roaming lions for 1, a horde of stag for 7, thick, winding thorns and poisonous flowers for 9, slithering snakes hidden in the grass for 4, giant direwolves for 12. Sansa is thankful they’ve avoided the dead dragons of the lost District 13.
A direwolf, right to his chest, all grey fur and slim amber eyes does not rip his throat out, does not try to kill him, does not, most definitely, attack him. Instead, for the whole world to see, Robb rubs his hand against the wet snout and laughs, sending echoes through the trees, and the light that bends through the bark. Later that night, on camera, he cuts just below the wolf’s ear and pulls a chip from it, the mainframe, the brain behind the beast and leaves a direwolf, completely free of the Capitol hardwiring. To Capitol citizens, it's a blatant display of peace, of equality, of friendship.
(To the districts, it sends a very clear message.)
(It shows they can be beaten, and they can be controlled.)
In the arena Robb is the only tribute to sleep easy, without the threat or fear of having his throat slit in the night. The wolf is called Grey Wind, and he is already fiercely loyal to Robb. Grey Wind wakes him up, alerting him of anyone lurking, but Robb’s the one to take the sword and fight, until the blood is crimson, and the cannon echoes.
(“The one who passes the sentence should swing the sword.” Father mutters, one night, and catches Sansa’s eyes. “It’s an old District saying,” he sounds far-off, a hard solum tone to his voice. “I thought he’d forgotten it.”)
Robb wins the Games weeks later, alive, breathing, hardly hurt. There was no final battle, no fight to the death, no gutsy, swinging fight between two children who just want to live. Robb doesn't set Grey Wind on him either.
Instead, timid little Olyvar Frey from District 5, who hid himself in the trees and trailed the careers, stabs himself, right through the eye, with his last words being cut off from the broadcast.
(“What did he say?” Sansa will ask later, when Robb has returned. His eyes will now be lighter, less like spring pools and more like the colour of ash, or burnt winter rose petals.
And Robb will look deeply into her eyes and tell her the truth. “He told me to fight back for him.”)
The final scene from the Games, excluding the Victor’s interviews and the victory tour, is when the hovercraft to the arena touches down in the scorching southern desert, and Ned Stark slips on the sand, holding his son and collapsing into a heap of bodies, Grey Wind suddenly snarling at the Capitol soldiers who come to take Robb away. It is the most touching scene the Capitol has ever seen, and it is the incomplete ending to the 51st.
(The world knows that Ned Stark should've been able to save Lyanna. Lyanna, fourteen and angry and tired, should've lived with her brother, and everyone, even stuck up Capitolites with no heart and soul, are saddened by that young girl’s death.)
(The district knows the Capitol kept Lyanna on the brink of death until Ned arrived, to find her, to film the reunion and her final breaths.)
They cut out the part where Robb swears to kill them all, kill them all kill them all kill them all. With a swift wind and sharp breeze, Robb Stark becomes a threat.
xx
Here is what the Capitol does for Robb, as victor of the 71st Hunger Games.
They let him keep Grey Wind. Grey Wind, who is now more wolf than machine now, his fast-reproducing cells growing over the hardware and any of the small software chips. No matter how hard they try, Grey Wind is now an incomplete vessel. They can't even put a collar on him before the poor thing is howling for Robb. He rips a technician's fingers off when Robb collapses due to dehydration, minutes after winning. When Robb goes on for his victor’s interview, Grey Wind follows, dutifully, and boy and wolf merge on screen, for everyone to see.
“He's terrifying.” Renly says offhandedly, the audience chuckles, then awes, when Robb ruffles him just behind the ear.
“He's meant for me, I think. We're very alike.”
(From then on, they call him The Young Wolf, and no one knows the bloodshed it will bring.)
As a gift, they give all of his brothers and sisters their own wolves. Sansa names hers Lady and weaves ribbons in her hair. She is still only twelve, and Lady is the prettiest of the pack, with a short blonde coat and bright blue eyes. Jon and Ghost, Lady and Sansa, Arya and Nymeria, Bran and Summer, Rickon and Shaggydog. Ghost is smaller, like the runt, an afterthought of the Capitol, but Jon still smiles when Robb hands him the wolf by the scruff of his neck.
Mother frowns at them, and their huge coats and makes an oath to never have to be responsible for them, that the wolves belong to them and therefore need to be looked after by them.
Later in the night, when the peacekeepers are gone and it’s just their sheltered little family, Sansa presses kisses into Lady’s head while Robb looks for the bits the Capitol left in. His knife cuts below Lady’s heart, Ghost’s stomach, dug into Nymeria’s paw, behind Summer’s eye, in Shaggydog’s mouth,. Lady whimpers for hours afterward, they all do, their cries echoing in the victor’s village, all around the District. District 12 has its coal and its snow half the year, but it’s been generations, not since the First Rebellion, have the cries of Direwolves been heard.
It makes the blood thrum in Sansa’s veins.
xx
Robb moves into their home in the Victor’s Village, when he wakes up screaming, a horrible, rotten sound that pulls itself out of his mouth. He vomits down his shirt and breaks the window trying to get some more air in the room. By the time Sansa makes it to him, his mouth is wet, his eyes are sore and the crimson blood shines in the moonlight.
He’s already told mother to stay away, before he does something, before he hurts her too. It’s father that approaches him, head on, takes his face between his hands and makes him look at him.
“You’re home.” He says, always a man of few words and fewer actions. “You’re home and you’re here. You’re not in the arena.”
Robb’s eyes widen, pupils blown. The closer his Victory Tour gets the worse he does; going in and out of periods of never sleeping, gaunt and purple bruises dragging down under his eyes, and then sleeping for days, locking himself away, or waking up to find him and Grey Wind missing, already out in the meadow, away from their family and the games.
“I’m, here.” Robb stutters out, swallowing thickly. Even Rickon is awake now, only up to Sansa’s waist but his wide, sad eyes are trained on the pool of blood on the white carpet.
Robb moves out a week later, bringing Grey Wind next door. Sansa wants to ask why, watches as he leaves his whole room where he left it, the clothes stay in the drawers, the posters stay on the walls, and their home gets a little duller. It’s like the time he spent in his Games, where the house was empty, and they all went from one day to the next.
Sansa is five months twelve when she asks why he left, why he’s gone, why he’s not the same as he was when he went away. At first she thought things would be easier to understand, when she passed into the reaping bowl. Like wisdom and maturity came hand in hand with that little slip of paper.
“It’s like every time I’m asleep, I’m in the arena again.” Robb says, like that’s the only answer, and all Sansa wants more than anything, desperately, is to understand. “I can’t bring you all into it.”
And then the victory tour comes, and the silver suits and grey fur cloaks arrive with his stylist, and he’s on the train again, back into the world he tries to escape each and every night.
“The districts could topple the Capitol,” He says, after their parents retire to bed, and it’s only the six of them. Robb brings presents home, little trinkets gifted to him by the districts, given by the families’ of the tributes. He breezes over District 5 and the surging force of the rivers, no mention of the people, no mention of the land, or the hydropower planets they have jumping through . It makes sense, how the place would disturb him. When it came down to it, at the end, it was him or Olyvar Frey, and Olyvar made that choice for him.
Sansa can’t stifle the confusion. “Robb! You can’t say that!” Sansa knows that thoughts like that could get him killed, or worse. It’s all well and good to let your hatred fester in your head, but you can never let them escape.
“Sansa! Don’t yell at him!” Arya’s already leapt up at the table, her hand coming to rest on Robb’s shoulder.
Robb doesn’t say anything, looking weirdly shrunk in between Bran leaning against his shoulder and Arya’s teeth bared. Jon, next to Sansa, doesn’t say anything either, only inhales sharply, his grey eyes closed.
“You both wouldn’t understand.” Robb’s voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t shake. Of course, Robb has been outside of the world before, outside of their border district, seen the Capitol. There’s a whole life Robb has now that Sansa can’t understand, but the hatred, this vitriol of the Capitol is new, something gained overnight, like facial hair, or extra inches of height. Something Robb had to grow into. “But Sansa’s right, I can’t talk like that.”
Pride surges up in her, to see Arya’s face drop. The vindication doesn’t last long, when Robb clenches his fist so hard she swears he’ll leave little half-moon indents in his palm.
“Is my present next?” Bran pokes the side of his cheek, dragging their brother back to reality.
Robb perks at this, stretches his fingers into starfishes. He opens the next parcel, a heavy one, and gives it to Bran, smiling as he rips open the parchment.
xx
The visit is planned well in advance, but Sansa still gets giddy when she sees the train pull into the station. She knew this was important the second mother took them all, even Jon, into town to look in her family’s shop, to browse at fresh pressed shirts and long dresses with tulle. Sansa picks a nice grey one, with an under skirt that flares when she spins, and Arya wears winter blue, as icy as her eyes. The boys wear a multitude of dull coloured shirts, red for Robb and his hair, brown for Jon, to wash out his face, Bran and Rickon in matching grass green, and black breaches for them all. Robb and mother have an argument under their breaths over who’ll pay for the new clothes; the old money they’ve always had, never left without, or Robb’s new money, still a novelty from his winnings.
“I don’t know why we even have to buy new clothes.” Robb says after he loses, Rickon perched on his shoulders. Sansa’s bag hits off his leg. “I’m sure Jon and I could’ve just worn things from the Victory Tour.”
Arya nods in agreement, dragging her heels all the way home. She almost had a tantrum in the fitting room, kicking Aunt Lysa’s deft hands away from the hem in a huff.
Sansa knows better. “Lord Baratheon and his wife have already seen all of your Victory Tour outfits, they’d notice. No one wants Victors wearing the same things all the time.”
“Does it even matter, Sansa?” Arya quips, running ahead so she doesn’t lag behind.
“Why does Robert Baratheon even want to come to 12? He’s from 7.” Jon asks.
“Probably for some Capitol news, or whatever. Him and father are good friends, you should’ve seen them before the Games.” Robb’s face falls at his words, a small detail everyone else, all but Sansa, would’ve missed. He forges on, the gates of the Victor’s Village coming into view, smoke rising from one chimney, Grey Wind snoozing in the garden of the other. It’s a desolate corner of their district.
The Victor before their father, Alarra Mormont, won the Twenty Ninth Games, dying three years after father won, leaving him in the little ghost estate until Robb joined them. Sansa is sure, absolutely, that in the other districts, the Victor’s Villages thrive with people. With heroes who have settled for the remainder of their lives, wisdened warriors the districts write songs about.
(They write songs about Robb, but no one’s allowed to sing them, not unless the Peacekeepers know.)
“Surely they could’ve just written a letter?” Bran giggles, eager to get home and off into the garden, beyond the dead fence and into the forest with his trees.
“That’s what father said.” Jon nudges Robb, and they share one of their broad, open mouthed smiles that makes their similarities, what makes them brothers, shine through.
Two days later, the train arrives, with the usual packages of supplies for the District. Electronic appliances from 3, fish from 4, lumber from 7, grain and v from 9. The boxes come with their sigils branded, the falcon from 3, the spear and sun from 4, the deer from 7, the rose from 9. They send the coal out too, in big metal crates stamped with the howling direwolf. This time it looks more threatening, more menacing, watching it drive off.
Once the supply carriages are cleared and the coal is packed, the next input into District 12 arrive. One by one, men and women, emerge from the final carriage, held in chains. Sansa watches, with bated breath, as their eyes travel upward, where the blue sky meets the blue ice of the Wall, glistening in the morning light.
They send their criminals North, to serve for their crimes on the border. What’s beyond the Wall is unknown to Sansa, what the Capitol could possibly try and keep out. Erected once the War ended, built by one of Sansa’s long-gone ancestors, the Wall towers over their District, always in the distance everywhere they looked.
Robb grasps Sansa’s hand when the final carriage opens, and out steps their guests. The children seem to tumble out, restless from travelling, but the man, an old Victor who won back to back with her father, makes a beeline for them with a shout. Robb squeezes when he gets closer.
(“Our guest,” She’d heard him spit, pacing after the letter arrived. “Was a Gamemaker for my games. He sent children to their death–he planned their deaths. Their blood is on his hands, and he’s visiting, because it’s his right as a Gamemaker.”
Jon hadn’t said anything, just let him rant and ramble until he couldn’t find the words anymore, and whistled Grey Wind out of their house and to his own next door.)
“I told you I’d come up your way sometime Ned.” His face is red, exerted and out of breath. Robert Baratheon is almost a disappointment, with his fat stomach and wiry hair, tangled beard that goes unkempt. His family are too busy gazing at the Wall, their hands coming to their eyes to protect themselves against the shine of the ice.
“Can’t say I’m ready to go to 7, Robert.” Their father has friends in 12, good friends, like Joer Mormont, Howland Reed, Rickard Karstark. It’s jarring, to hear father talk so warmly, so friendly, to someone Sansa had never met before. “But please,” He diverts Robert’s sound of protest. “It’s time you met my family.”
Sansa peers around Robb to watch their mother’s reaction to this strange, brutish man. She extends her hand to his and is met with his arms flung around her, shaking her from side to side. Mother fretted all morning before the car came to take them to the station, walking in circles at the idea of entertaining them for so long, in the isolated Victors Village.
He meets Robb with a friendly smile, another generous hug with plenty of shaking and laughter. Like old friends, Sansa muses, wanting to understand what they say, how they know one another.
Robert doesn’t hug her when he reaches Sansa. He takes her extended hand in his and presses a hard kiss to her knuckles, laughing at her recoil. “Your father has shown me pictures over the years, but you and your mother are dead ringers for each other.”
Sansa looks like her mother, these things are hardly new, but she still blushes at the comment, tucks her hair behind her ear.
But when he gets to Arya, his blue eyes lose their brightness, his smile drops. Arya meets his with one of her usual glares, always either aimed at Sansa or their mother, but in this instance, Sansa wants to join her, pull her away from their guest.
“I’ve seen pictures of you too. You always looked like her, but… in person.”
“I know Robert,” Father intervenes, patting Robert’s shoulder. His eyes find Arya’s, oddly sad, and he mouths his apologies while Robert isn’t looking.
(Sansa looks like her mother, these things are hardly new, but Arya looks like Lyanna, who died in the hot sand, and no one lets Arya forget.)
By the time he moves on to Bran, Robert’s wife stands in front of Sansa, her thin lips pulled into a clean smile. Her blonde hair is impossibly bright, face smooth and clear of wrinkles, hardly any signs of age to her, and her green eyes are vibrant, green and leering while she kisses Sansa on both cheeks. Capitol enhancements, Sansa remembers suddenly, as her sweet scent of honey blood overwhelmed her. Cersei’s father became Head Gamemaker ten years before Robb’s Games, but had been a Gamemaker since his own, decades before Sansa was even born. His aptitude, his strength, his cunning, gave him the chance to move from District 1 to the Capitol, one not given to everyone. He left his son Jaime, left him to train for his own victory, but brought his daughter and youngest son with him.
“Hello, Sansa.” Her voice is as smooth as satin, possibly another enhancement. Her decades of life in the Capitol waffs around her like perfume, a smell that follows her everywhere, mingled with the honey and blood. “You’re as beautiful as your mother.”
Sansa blushes again, this time her eyes darting to the Wall, and the glint against the train. “Thank you,” She bobs her head.
“These are my children; my eldest Joffrey, my daughter Myrcella, and my youngest Tommen.”
All blond, all beautiful, but in a natural way, save for the eldest, who’s green eyes are brighter than the rest, like they’re made of pure wildfire, where Marcella is a field of grass and Tommen’s are like the dark leaves that grow from the trees.
But Joffrey looks at her, and doesn’t act like the boys in their district. Sansa has merchant looks, but her father is a Victor, and there's only Jeyne Poole for company. It’s lonely, being the daughter of Ned Stark.
Maybe Joffrey Baratheon feels the same. With a shy smile, Sansa realises she’s never met another child of a victor, save her brothers and sister. Maybe he’s lonely too, she hopes, when he returns her smile with a wide one, his mouth is full of sharp teeth.
xxx
Arya screams so loud her face goes bright red.
“I won’t go! You can’t make me!” She’d yelled, and even mother didn’t have the heart to disagree with her.
Sansa however, didn’t.
“Will you stop being such a brat for once!”
“Sansa, not a word like that against your sister-” Father’s voice had a tired edge to it when he yelled at them, like he really and truly didn’t want to be in that position.
“But father-”
His eyes are almost white in the lamplight, shining faintly. He looks like Arya when he gets like this, too stubborn to cry. “Not a word, Sansa.”
“Please, can I just stay here, I don’t want to go to the Capitol.” Arya pleads, looking far younger than her ten years. “Please don’t make me go.”
“Arya-”
“Sansa’s right.” Robb says suddenly, rising to his full height. He throws his eyes to the window, bloodshot and blue, the purple rings under his eyes only getting worse. He turns to Arya, with a tremor in his voice he’s only just found, an afterthought from the arena, to sound so scared all of the time. “Any of you could be reaped, children in the Capitol aren’t reaped, you’d be safe—you’d be happy, you wouldn’t have to do what I did.”
Robb trails off, pushing a hand into Bran’s curls, holding Arya’s cheek, fresh tears falling when he lands on Rickon, and fear is all that’s left for Jon and Sansa. Arya, Bran, Rickon, all years away from the reaping bowl. Jon’s already survived three, Sansa right around the corner.
His eyes are brighter than father’s. “Tell Robert yes, tell the President you say yes, become a Gamemaker—I don’t care, just make sure they’re safe.”
Sansa’s crying too, but she’s quieter than Arya. Arya folds herself up into Robb and doesn’t leave for a few minutes, but when she pulls away, there’s tear stains on his shirt. Only mother won’t cry, but her face is tight, her eyes cold, almost as if she’s run out of tears.
(Of course she did. She spent two weeks wondering if she was going to watch her son be murdered on live TV, for all of the country to see.)
At the heart of all of this misery, despite Robb’s plea, Arya’s screams, Jon’s tears and Bran’s whines and moans, Sansa wants to go to the Capitol. She always has, and even before Robb’s games, before she was able to match the name of tributes to faces in her school, in the town, in the sept, Sansa would cling to father’s leg and beg he’d take her with him, so she could see the lights, see the stars under a different sky.
Sansa wants to go to the Capitol because she doesn’t want to die in the Games, like her aunt did, for the whole world to see. Sansa wants to stay away from that daunting, almost certain future. Sansa wants to see Joffrey Baratheon again, fall into father and Robb’s sweet stories of the neon, of the parties, of the world held away from the Districts.
At the back of her mind, Sansa tries to muster up the shame, so she doesn’t look as happy that her dream will come true soon.
Jon’s eyes are dark, and disapproving, so maybe she’s not doing a good enough job.
xxx
Joffrey’s kisses are clumsy, awkward, too wet and strange for her to like what he’s doing. He’s thirteen come November, and even though he makes her smile and calls her pretty, Sansa doesn’t think she’ll ever stop regretting that she was with him when they told her about Bran’s fall.
Little boys like Bran just don’t fall out of trees, trees they’ve climbed hundreds of times. He’s so like a little bird, leaping and jumping from branch to branch.
Bran is too small to die. Robb survived the Games, Robb survives his nightmares, Bran can survive his fall.
Mother has him stretched out and waiting for the maester by the time she gets home. He’s lying on their kitchen table, the same sturdy oak that their father brought from the Seam, the same table they’d eaten breakfast at, lunch, dinner, the table that meant family, that meant home, that meant together, holding her baby brother up, not even straining under his weight.
“Here,” Cersei Lannister had been so silent, Sansa hadn’t even heard her. She looks distressed, if her brow was allowed bend to show it, but her eyes are soft, almost sad. She hands mother a slim wooden box, and when mother opens it all Sansa can see is vials of purple and clean, pristine syringes. An oddly touching gesture, for a woman so severe. “It’s morphling, in case he needs it.”
Bran hasn’t made a sound since Sansa arrived, not even a whimper. Wherever he is, Sansa hopes he’s not in any pain.
“Sansa,” Mother says, with only pain in her voice. “Go next door, stay with Robb. There’s a bullet train coming with doctors, and medicine for Bran, there’s no need to worry.”
She sounds dead, lifeless even, as if she’s trying to convince herself more than Sansa.
Sansa can’t stand the sight of Bran’s small, tiny body, and goes out to the garden that brings her to Robb’s. The budding leaves just remind her that summer is coming quickly, and soon the Games will be upon them.
“This is my fault!” She hears Robb hiss, daring to peer above the window and into his house. Father just sits and stresses, rubbing his temples, as Robb paces a path into his plush grey carpet. “This is for my stunt with Grey Wind, I knew Tywin Lannister and the President hated me for that but I didn’t think they’d try to kill a seven year old boy!”
In the back of her mind, in a voice that sounds as angry as Robb, as angry as Arya, Sansa thinks about how the Capitol rarely shies away from killing children.
“You wouldn’t be the first victor that this happened to.”
(Uncle Brandon—He’s thinking of his brother, who once attacked a peacekeeper when they took Lyanna, even as she screamed, even as she cried. Father came back from the Games and he was gone.)
“Look what they did to me,” Father cries a lot these days, crying for Robb, for Arya, for Sansa, and now Bran. “They brought you to the Games.”
“If we don’t leave soon, they might still put Jon and Sansa’s names in the reaping bowl. Bran can join us when he’s better, when it’s safe for him to leave 12, but until then… until then we have to go, we have to run.”
“There’s nowhere to run-”
“What about District 13?” Robb asks, as quietly as possible.
Sansa’s eyes widen, clutching her hands to her chest. Robb’s always been so angry, born with a sword in his hand. The Wolf Blood, everyone says, because he was the fastest runner in his class, the best at wrestling, the most eager to duck between the bent wires in the fence at the meadow. Then Robb’s Wolf Blood brought him to the arena, and now he’s a rebel.
“If you have an ounce of care for your sisters, and your brothers, you will never mention District 13 again.” Father’s voice is dangerously low, dangerously quiet, and for the first time in Sansa’s life, she understands just how horrible this world is.
The Capitol won’t keep you safe. Only Father, only Robb. Joffrey could, Cersei could. Robert could. Whatever is coming, whatever is on the horizon, whatever District 13 brings, but the Capitol could stop the perils of her fate.
The bullet train arrives the next day, and it is the last time Sansa will see her brother for a long, long time.