Chapter Text
It starts, as all the worst things tend to do, because of Joffrey.
Sansa’s heart is racing a mile a minute as she tries to keep the smile on her face, as she tries not to look out into the live audience. Behind the host desk, Taena holds her own smile, and Sansa swears she sees something glint in the woman’s eyes.
This shouldn’t be happening. Her team had explicitly told Taena’s production that her love life was off limits. And yet the question hangs in the air between them.
Now that you’re single, who are you crushing on?
Sansa had tried to laugh it off, to deflect, but Taena kept pushing, and now she feels backed into a corner. Does she make it awkward and shut this line of questioning down completely, or does she give an answer to appease the host and the waiting crowd? She wants to do the first, but Sansa has always been a people pleaser, and she can’t quite make herself say it.
But that means she has to give an answer, and her mind has completely blanked. Who does she say that won’t cause a problem later? It can’t be anyone married, or openly in a relationship, and it cant be anyone she works with, or might work with in the future.
Her mind spins and whirls in a panic, until she remembers an article she had seen in the car on the way here - a Rolling Stone piece about some band’s breakout album that’s up for a Grammy. She remembers thinking the guitarist was cute, as she idly scrolled through the pictures of the Instagram post about it and scanned through the caption underneath. And clearly Rolling Stone did, too, since he was featured in the pictures more prominently than even the lead singer. What was his name?
The smile on her face softens, becomes less strained, and she leans towards Taena, as if she’s sharing a great secret.
“Well, there’s this band,” she starts, then glances out towards the audience, who waits for her answer with baited breath. “Kings of Winter?” Just as she suspected, there’s a ripple of excited cheers from the crowd. “Their guitarist is pretty cute. Jon Snow? Definitely crush-worthy.”
Taena’s smile is just as fake as hers, though Sansa doubts the audience can tell.
The rest of the interview is a blur, and it’s only when she’s backstage that she lets her frustration show.
“Stupid,” she whispers. Mostly to herself, but she knows Brienne hears it. “I should’ve said Margie or something.” Everyone knows she and Margie are friends, and Margie would have reveled in the attention.
“I don’t know how that happened,” her manager frowns. “Your love life was on the list of barred topics.”
“That might be my fault,” her assistant Jeyne says with a wince, as she joins them in their walk, along with Shae. “Yesterday, a PA called and asked to clarify that Joffrey was off limits, and I said yes. I didn’t think there were any questions they could ask about your love life that weren’t about him. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Sansa sighs once they reach the dressing room, where she changes back into civilian clothes. It’s easier to get around the city unnoticed when she isn’t in an evening dress. “I shouldn’t have said yes to doing this interview. I knew Taena was in Cersei’s pocket.” Then, with a wince, “was it obvious I panicked?”
“No, you handled it perfectly,” Shae assures. That makes her feel better. Shae’s her PR manager, and if she’d actually fucked up, Shae would be going into crisis mode right now.
“And hey, I’m sure you made that guy’s day,” Jeyne adds. “What band was that?”
“I don’t even know,” Sansa groans. “I saw an article about them like five minutes before getting here. I think they’re new. I don’t even know if I got his name right.”
“Well, either way. Anyone would kill to be name-dropped by you, especially if they’re just starting out in the industry,” Jeyne says, as if that makes all of this a win-win situation. Maybe it does. Sansa got to dodge the question, and this random band gets a publicity boost.
“Yeah,” Sansa agrees, just to try and calm the nerves that still buzz through her. “You’re right.”
She quickly forgets all about the incident.
The press tour for The Last Hero: The Long Night is a whirlwind. Sansa had built her career on TV before switching over to movies, and it’s not like she’s only done small projects, but this is her first big blockbuster. She’s been acting since she was sixteen - almost eight years now - but she still isn’t prepared for the onslaught of attention that comes from joining a massive, billion dollar franchise.
And so she forgets all about the interview, and the name she said, until a month later when she is reminded of it in the worst way possible. Maybe that’s hyperbole, but it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.
“Rude,” Shae frowns, thumb pressing the replay video button.
Sansa doesn’t want to watch it again - once was quite enough, thank you - but it starts over and she’s forced to see it for the second time.
Four men walk the red carpet, in outfits that are much too casual for the Grammys, in Sansa’s opinion. She can tell they’re new to all of this, uncomfortable in front of the flashing cameras and interviewers shouting questions at them.
And there he is - Jon Snow.
“How does it feel to have Sansa Stark crushing on you?” a reporter asks. A smaller outlet that Sansa’s never even heard of before, clearly trying to get a soundbite to go viral. And did they ever.
The man - Jon Snow, what a stupid name, now that she thinks about it - blinks at the camera, then says, “who?”
“Sansa Stark,” the reporter laughs. Sansa can’t tell if it’s out of discomfort, or if they’re delighted by this development.
“I don’t know who that is,” stupid Jon Snow says with a casual shrug, a hand coming up to scrub at his beard. His long hair is styled into messy curls that shouldn’t work, and that seems like the most effort he’d put into his appearance that night. He’s lucky he has a good jawline, Sansa thinks bitterly.
The video cuts off there, and Shae scowls and replays it.
Sansa, in turn, gets off the bed and stalks over to the minibar.
She doesn’t usually drink. She’s found over the years that drinking is a great way to get herself into bad situations, that she makes poor decisions when drunk, and so she only does it when she feels completely safe. Right now, in her hotel suite with just her team, she does.
Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t even care about some random guitarist not knowing who she was. Except this isn’t normal circumstances.
Her breakup with Joffrey is still so recent, and his fans are still actively harassing her any chance they get. She’d refused to start blocking people or deleting comments, because Shae had warned her it might have the opposite effect and draw attention to the whole thing rather than make it go away. Now, she doesn’t even check her own social media. That’s Jeyne’s job, and while Jeyne tries to downplay it all, Sansa knows it’s still happening.
Joff’s fans can be rabid, and it’s not like she didn’t get hate while they were dating, but that had been a small subset of them. Now it’s all of them. Picking apart her appearance, calling her all sorts of names she won’t repeat, making up rumors about her that are so far from the truth she doesn’t even know where they came from. And now those fans have a new meme to latch onto.
Rickon had been the one to send it to her, because he just thought it was funny. A gif circulating Twitter of Jon Snow asking, who? Rickon hadn’t realized it was being used by every anti-Sansa Stark account in existence.
She thought she’d dodged Taena’s trap, but it had sprung on her in a way she never anticipated. All thanks to stupid Jon Snow.
Is he in Cersei’s pocket, too?
After pouring herself a glass of wine, she takes it back to the bed, settles in, then grabs her phone off the nightstand and starts googling.
His label is just a small indie outlet - who probably aren’t prepared for all the attention this is bringing them - and she even dives into the credits on their album to see if there’s any names she recognizes. There aren’t any, but that doesn’t mean Cersei didn’t get to him somehow. Cersei has her ways.
If she’s being honest with herself, Sansa is almost impressed by how deeply Cersei has sunk her claws into the entertainment industry. Her father had been - and still is - a producer, and Cersei had gotten her start in modeling before moving on to acting. When she retired from acting - when the roles dried up as she got older - she moved on to managing her son’s career.
Sometimes Sansa feels like she’ll never escape. Like the Lannister’s reach is too big. They’ll always find her and drag her back in, no matter how hard she fights to get free.
“Do you want me to ruin him?” Shae asks.
Sansa lets out a groan, lowering her phone and taking a large gulp of the wine. “No,” she finally sighs.
“You never let me ruin anyone,” Shae grumbles, and replays the video again.
It’s tempting sometimes, but if there’s one thing that her years spent under Cersei’s tutelage has taught her, it’s who she doesn’t want to be. Petty and vengeful and paranoid and miserable. When she catches Brienne’s eyes, she can see the agreement in them, and it makes her feel better about her decision.
When her own moral compass goes awry, she can always count on Brienne to keep her on course.
“I can’t believe you ruined a perfectly good band,” Arya’s voice whines from her phone's speaker.
“You cannot seriously be taking his side in this,” Sansa huffs, struggling with the zipper of her dress before Jeyne bats her hands away to do it.
“Who said I was?” her little sister answers. “That’s why I said you ruined them. That album was a fucking banger and now I can’t listen to it without hearing you talk about your gross crush on Jon Snow. Especially with some of their lyrics.” Arya gives an exaggerated shudder.
Sansa doesn’t know what lyrics she’s talking about. So far, she has staunchly refused to listen to a single Kings of Winter song. “I don’t actually have a crush on him,” Sansa argues. “I pulled a name out of my ass because Taena cornered me. I didn’t think anything would come of it.”
She doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, and so she asks Arya how her latest fencing match went, and Arya luckily takes the topic change.
Adrenaline surges through her, and her arm tightens in Robb’s.
“Thank you for doing this,” she says.
“Of course,” Robb answers, placing a hand over hers.
There are parts of being famous that Sansa likes, but there’s a lot that she doesn’t, and red carpets are one of them. There’s no PR agreement to keep someone from asking her invasive questions like there are on talk shows, she can’t pre-plan every single aspect like she can in social media posts, there isn’t anyone editing her like there is in movies and TV. Maybe people will make fun of her for bringing her brother to the premiere, but at this point, that’s the least of her worries. Robb is here to help calm her nerves.
It goes as smoothly as she could hope for, until she runs into a team from the King’s Landing Star. There’s two interviewers from KLS who play off each other well and tend to go viral because of it. She’s interviewed with them before and has always had decent interactions, and so she isn’t expecting it when she’s beckoned forward to be interviewed, and one of them says, “now, who are you again?” before holding the mic towards her.
Sansa freezes.
It’s just a joke, her brain screams, but she can’t get her mouth to move. She can see on the interviewer’s face that they know they fucked up.
“Oh please,” the other one cuts in, with a dramatic roll of his eyes. “That joke is so overplayed. And I’m sorry, I can’t even pretend like I don’t know who Sansa Stark is.”
She forces out a light laugh and pastes her best smile on.
“That was humiliating,” she whispers. The bathroom is blessedly empty, and she fans her face and tilts it up towards the ceiling to stave off the rush of tears. Her team spent hours making her look perfect, she refuses to ruin it because of one stupid joke.
“It wasn’t, I promise,” Jeyne says. “It was a bad joke, they’ll likely cut it out of the interview entirely. I bet you Shae’s on it as we speak.”
Sansa knows she’s right. The interviewer had apologized and started over, and it had gone fine after that. She doesn’t know why she’s so upset.
It’s so stupid and she knows that. But she’s worked so hard, for so long, and one of the first things she hears at her first big red carpet premiere for her first big movie is who are you? All because of some asshole guitarist and a meme Twitter can't let go.
She takes in a deep breath and squares her shoulders, before looking at herself in the mirror.
She is going to go out there and she isn’t going to think about it anymore. She’s going to enjoy her big movie premiere, and she isn’t going to let some nobody like Jon Snow ruin it.
Fuck him.