Chapter Text
Sansa knew that if she was going to truly escape her husband, she’d have to do it right. She couldn’t simply run away. That left the opportunity open for him to find her, and find her he would.
Jon Snow was at one time a sweet shy boy that hardly ever spoke up even when he should have. He used to be the sort that when a girl said “Go away” he went away.
He was no longer that boy. He was a man now, and a ruthless one.
He’d never been quite the same after her brother (and his best friend) and her father (the man who’d brought him in the family business) had been killed. He’d become the killer the business painstakingly molded one into.
For a while with her things had been different. Behind closed doors when it was just the two of them, her husband sometimes even wept in her arms. He lamented touching her with so much blood on his hands. She would tell him that no matter how much blood he had on his hands she would always love him. She’d loved him as kids when he got along better with her sister Arya than her, and she loved him as a teenager when she realized that Jon Snow was a hot older boy and found herself suddenly afraid to talk to him even though she so desperately wanted to. And then she loved him as an adult when they both, according to Robb (her brother, his best friend) “gotten their heads out of their asses” and finally got together.
She’d known him all her life so if their courtship was a whirlwind consisting of dating for all of two months before moving in together and then getting engaged, for them it made sense.
To Sansa, it was just a testament to how in love they were. How they were meant for each other. How he was her soul mate, her twin flame, her knight in shining armor. He was Spencer Tracy to her Katherine Hepburn, Bogie to her Bacall.
She’d been so happy, and she thought that if the business didn’t change Jon the way it had her father and her brother, and if it didn’t take him the way it had taken them then she could pretend that part of their life didn’t exist. She could pretend that his sins were absolved by his confessions to her in the darkness. That his tears purified him just as her arms holding him so tight did.
Slowly though, Jon started to change. He became harder. He always looked angry and on edge. He didn’t cry in her arms anymore. He didn’t talk to her anymore. He said he was protecting her. He said that she was the most important thing in his life and his enemies knew that. If she knew too much she became a target.
He told her she was a target already.
When Myrcella Lannister had run into Sansa at the supermarket one afternoon and told her that she “should be taken care of”, Sansa hadn’t really put too much into it. Myrcella was young (twenty), and Sansa had seen her comment as flexing her Lannister muscle. Her words hadn’t carried any weight.
Sandor Clegane, her guard (and her favorite one) didn’t see it that way and told Jon, who also didn’t see it that way.
Jon had her killed. Later, it was discovered that Myrcella was pregnant.
While Sansa had sobbed for the girl and for the child that would never be born, Jon hadn’t held her as she had held him in the past. He just watched her, eyes cold and dark and said, “She threatened you. I did what I had to do to protect you.”
Sansa hadn’t been able to forgive him for that. An anger had taken root inside of her borne out of despair and helplessness. She had lost Jon. The man she was married to was not a man she knew any longer. What was more – he wasn’t a man she wanted to know.
She was done.
And when she discovered she was pregnant herself, she was definitely done. Having killed Myrcella had made the fight between the Lannister and Stark organizations worse. Both were out for blood and now the Lannisters had grief to fuel them.
Sansa had realized she didn’t have much time. Not if she wanted to leave. So, she had to make it quick, but she had to ensure that it would be difficult to look for her.
Or make it where he wouldn’t think he had to look for her…
She had to fake her death.
And so she planned it all out. She’d take the boat out. Alone. She did that sometimes; he would think nothing of it. She would purchase a spare raft and a motor, with cash, so that he wouldn’t suspect she’d simply gotten herself to the next town’s docks (and then the bus station, and then a train) as she’d planned to do. And, of course, she’d leave a note. A suicide note. She’d let him believe she’d drowned herself.
It twisted her heart and her stomach to think of it. And then she thought of Myrcella and her child. Thought of Jon not even reacting to Sansa’s grief over what he’d done, and telling her he had to do whatever it took to protect her. That just made her feel as though it was her fault.
All her planning had worked.
She was in California three days after motoring away from the boat. She was in Wales with a new name and had cut her long auburn hair to her chin and dyed it dark brown two days after that.
Sadly, she’d lost the baby shortly after she’d arrived in Wales. She’d sobbed for the life that had been lost, and the fact that she’d not have something of Jon, something as pure as he’d once been. She convinced herself that it was for the best. It would have been hard to raise a child alone, and it would have been doubly hard to keep the child she’d conceived with Jon away from him.
She had to continue on, forge this new life without Jon. She had her freedom now. She could live a normal life and put the mob behind her. Her heart broke for what had been before the mob had taken her brother and father and changed Jon. She knew he could be killed too, just as Robb and her father had been and Sansa didn’t have it in her to survive that.
It was better this way.
For three years she’d lived as Alayne Stone in Wales. She had a job teaching Year One students, and lived in a first floor flat that was spacious and had lots of light She had friends that didn’t ask too many questions and didn’t press her too much when she would shut down from time to time.
And then one evening when she came home from the market all of that had come to grinding screeching halt with the appearance of Jon sitting at her kitchen table.