Chapter Text
It had been the wrong day to wear what she was wearing, that much Sansa knew.
She had driven back home straight from work, still dressed in her dark pencil skirt and demure kitten heels, and was now trying to wrestle her newly-delivered floor lamp all the way to her apartment on the third floor.
Her new apartment, she thought. Her new home.
She had only moved in three days ago, spending all her time trying to make the place look habitable, but progress had been slow. There had just been so much to do. She had spent the last few days scrubbing down all the surfaces in the house, tediously blow-drying carpet glue off the hardwood floors, and hand-sewing breezy linen curtains to frame her large bay windows.
Now, panting slightly, she put the very tall cardboard box down on the first floor landing, stretching her arms above her head to bring some feeling back into them. She quickly thought of running up to her closet and changing out of her heels, but she shook her head.
“Get it over with,” she whispered quietly to herself.
She wrapped her slender fingers around the surprisingly heavy box, and began the ascent again, awkwardly maneuvering around the corners to keep the box from hitting the bannister.
She heard heavy footsteps approaching, and looked up towards the sound. Despite herself, she gasped, losing her footing on the steep steps. She felt herself tumble backwards, not helped by her tight skirt and the heavy package weighing her down.
Iron fingers caught her by the wrist before she could fall.
Her heart pounding hard in her chest, Sansa looked up at the person who had made her stumble in the first place. He was the largest man she had ever seen - swathed in black, his long hair hanging loose against wide shoulders. But it wasn’t his sheer size that made her choke out a startled gasp and lose her balance. It was his face - the left side covered in mottled scars, raw and fissured, like a wax candle held up to a flame.
The man only looked at her, his heavy brow lowered in something like resignation, his eyes dark. Slowly, he pulled her forwards until she found her footing again, releasing her wrist as though her flesh burned.
She forced herself to take a deep breath, feeling a prick of shame at the back of her throat. She could not bring herself to say anything, and so she only looked at him, her blue eyes wide.
Don’t stare, she thought to herself in a panic, and immediately lowered her head, biting her lip.
She could feel his gaze on her for a moment. Slowly, he took a step forwards, stopping a stair up from where she stood. When he didn’t move, she turned to look, and realized that the back of her package was angled in front of him, blocking his path.
“Sorry,” she said quickly, swinging the box around a bit too eagerly, pivoting the top half to make way. But the box was heavy, the momentum carrying it further left than she had wanted. It hit the man’s shin - a hard thwack that made her flinch.
“Sorry,” she said again, even though he did not cry out, did not even budge. Her cheeks were flushed now, a primal panic clawing at her throat. Awkwardly, she hugged the package close to her body, finally taking it out of his way.
The man sighed, looking almost half-bored, and began to climb down.
“Thank you,” she said softly as he passed her. He did save her from tumbling down, after all.
As he went down the stairs, she thought she heard him scoff.
****
“Yes, mum, the apartment’s great,” Sansa chimed into the phone. “I’m almost settled in.”
She twirled her fiery auburn hair around a finger as she surveyed her living room guiltily from her couch.
Stacks of boxes dotted the room, her pastel boho rugs still rolled up in the corner, her furniture covered in the blankets and plastic she’d back-breakingly wrapped it in before moving.
It was a mess, she admitted, but she was getting there slowly.
Sighing, she stretched out on the couch, only half-paying attention to her mother, who had now begun talking about the women in her prayer group.
She was eager to step out of her work clothes, to scrub the exhaustion of her new job off her skin, but her mother always had a knack for calling her at exactly the wrong time.
While her mother talked, she found her mind going to random parts of her week - Petyr's pedicured hand on her arm, the landlord's text about her deposit, the expensive blouse she'd ripped while assembling her kitchen shelf.
Her thoughts then went to the man in the stairwell - how poorly she had reacted to his scars, how small her voice sounded when she had mindlessly repeated her sorrys and thank yous.
I was just surprised, that’s all, she told herself quietly. She had learned, in the past few years, that people were a lot more than what they looked like.
I must be nicer to him the next time I see him, she told herself.
“Sansa?” her mother asked, sounding concerned.
“Sorry, here,” she replied quickly.
By the time her mother had hung up, it was already time for dinner, and Sansa was starving. She opened up her fridge, letting out a small groan as yesterday’s leftovers stared her in the face.
Idly, she thought of going down to the Braavosi place she’d heard really good reviews about and having a guilt-free dinner-for-one, but it was one of those grand plans you make when you know you’re not really going to follow through.
Especially not alone.
She chewed slowly, skewering a bell pepper on her fork. The whole ordeal up north had been so confusing, so painful, that she had only now begun to realize how much she missed being around people.
She wasn’t even really sure if moving had been the right decision - her mother had insisted she stay back, even that she move in with them, but Sansa was twenty-four, set in her habits, and hadn’t wanted to move back in with her parents. Rather than shrinking back and tucking herself into safety, she had decided to take a risk - perhaps for the first time in her life.
New city, new me, she repeated to herself for the umpteenth time, and all of a sudden, she wasn’t very hungry anymore.
****
It was on the fifth day that she discovered the secret garden.
She had agreed to rent the place so hastily that she hadn’t really had a chance to explore it too well. An old man had vacated his apartment to live out his retirement on a farm up north, and Sansa had immediately scooped up the place, as well as the first job that was offered to her, desperate to start afresh.
Now, she found out that the nondescript metal door at the end of the corridor on her floor led to a small balcony full of tumbling greenery. There was a small trough full of brightly coloured flowers, a row of scrubbed wood vertical planters laden with herbs, and mismatched ceramic pots full of all kinds of plants she could not even name. A weight bench was pushed to one side of the garden, right opposite a two-wide park bench.
Sansa smiled, moving slowly onto the balcony, taking her time to explore all the colour around her. She took a deep breath, and something in the crisp air smelled so much like home to her - like running in the sprawling gardens of her childhood house, trying to catch up with her brother Robb but never being able to. Or sitting at the bottom of the large weirwood in her backyard while her sister Arya climbed its chalky limbs, shaking its red leaves free like so much confetti.
Quietly, she sat down on the bench to the side of the balcony. The view from it wasn’t much - just the same grey urban landscape that she could see from the windows of her own room, but the vines creeping along the wooden lattice muted some of its dreariness, making her smile to herself again.
Over the next few days, she settled on something close to a routine. She would come to the balcony early in the morning, hands wrapped around a cup of lemon tea, and it would be like a small pocket of calm before she had to head in to work and face the rest of the day.
She thought of it as her secret garden, because no one else ever visited it. Once or twice, the door would creak open, and she would turn to look behind her before it closed, leaving her alone once again. She always felt a small pang in her heart at this, at the fact that she couldn’t share its beauty with anyone else, but it was her secret garden, after all. It wouldn’t be a secret if she weren’t -.
“Alone,” she scoffed idly, sighing to herself as she stretched out on the bench, hearing the dim sounds of morning traffic from the street below. She had wished she could talk to someone - about work, about all the new things she was experiencing in the south - but she did not have many friends now, not after what had happened.
Her family was very supportive, and she knew her sister Arya especially was the sort of person who would pack her bags and drive all night to be beside her if she even had an inkling that Sansa was lonely, or scared, or worried about the future.
She thought she was a little bit of all of those things right now, in truth.
But she did not want to worry her family, so she stayed quiet, sending excitable texts to her family and having quiet conversations with them over the phone - laced with false smiles and half-lies.
And when things got difficult, she would seek out the secret garden, and close her eyes and think of home.