Chapter Text
BRAN
How had he missed it?
That raw, pure, unadulterated magic.
Sansa’s magic.
Because Lady had died, Bran had assumed that his eldest sister’s magic had died too, and he had never thought to look for it.
But now he could see it.
It was still there—just dormant, but growing.
Gods, she had the strongest magic among them, and currently, Winterfell housed two Targaryens!
And to make everything even more risible—
She was the one who had no idea of her own magic.
Daenerys was a dragonrider. Jon considered himself a warg and a dragonrider. Arya was a warg and a Faceless Man. Bran was a warg and a greenseer.
Sansa was just Sansa.
A girl who had been broken and hurt, and remade herself into someone so strong, yet still so kind—so eager to defend those she saw as hers to protect. No dragons at her back, no faces to wear, no direwolves to run with, no dreams to guide her. Only an unending determination to see her family safe, even at her own personal cost.
She had grown into a good player: smart, intelligent, and ruthless when needed.
And it seemed that, all this time, her magic had grown with her.
Sansa was a fighter, but not a warrior. And even if she were, they didn’t have time to train her. But there was one crazy little idea that had formed in the back of Bran’s mind.
“This is madness!” Sansa said, looking at him. Her voice was plain, matter-of-fact—the tone she rarely used with them. “First, I have no magic. Second, if you can send us to the past, why not to our past selves? Why the Dance of Dragons of all freaking periods?”
“Because our objective is to avoid the Dance of Dragons and make sure the dragons survive,” Jon said.
Bran smirked at him, but Sansa looked at them with narrowed eyes.
“Why only the three of us?”
“Because your magic is strong enough to send three.”
“And you?”
“I don’t know if I can send even one,” Bran admitted, and Arya sighed.
“How can we stop the Dance?”
“I would position you in the right places, of course,” Bran said, and Arya nodded.
“If—and I’m saying if—we do it, what will it change?” Sansa asked.
“Everything,” Bran answered honestly. “We probably won’t exist as we do now. We may come to live, but differently. Every action you take there will have a consequence. Your birth alone will have consequences.”
“But we could give the North a better chance if we do it?” Sansa asked.
“You would.”
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.Robert Frost
SANSA
Sansa looked at the poetry in his hand. Centuries old, written by a member of the long-gone House Frost, it seemed so contemporary and so true that it made her question if Robert hadn’t been a greenseer himself.
The world as they knew it now would end soon.
Either by the fire of mad queens, or the ice of dead kings.
But they had a flimsy chance of changing everything—all of it—just by being reborn as Targaryens, right when the bloodline was at its most destructive.
The worst part was that she had agreed to this stupid, annoying plan.
“Why do I have to go last?”
“Because when you go, the magic closes the passage,” Bran explained with a complacent tone.
“I want to go first,” Arya said with an impish smile, and everyone turned to her. “I think it’s only fair! I was the younger sister in this life—now I get to be the oldest!”
“You are older than Bran,” Jon pointed out.
“Bran doesn’t count now, does he? He likely has more knowledge than the rest of us!”
“Technically, I have thousands of years of accumulated knowledge,” Bran said with an accomplice-like smile to Arya.
Sansa pinched the bridge of her nose in despair and exasperation.
“Okay, so first Arya, then Jon, and then me,” Sansa said, then turned to Bran. “What do we do?”
“I need you to trust me,” he said, and she nodded with a grimace.
Sighing again, Sansa took the hand Bran offered her, and they formed a circle, holding hands.
“Sansa, you’ll feel as if you’re being drained, but you have more than enough magic for this task, so I need you to stand firm.”
“I will,” she promised.
If she could stand after everything Ramsay had done to her—after the beatings, the raping, and the flaying—she could stand for her brother’s task.
Soon she felt dizziness, and that draining sensation Bran had promised.
But she stood with her head high and took deep breaths to make the feeling more bearable.
One by one, their eyes turned white, then blue, then closed. Arya fell first, then Jon. Then she felt her own legs wanting to give in—but she stood still, even with her hand still holding Jon’s, though he had already fallen to the ground.
She closed her eyes.
She stubbornly stood, clenching her jaw and breathing slowly and deeply.
She heard the howling of wolves; she heard the birds chirping and the ruffle of their feathers. She heard Rickon’s joyful laugh, and Robb’s victorious cry. She heard her mother’s gentle sigh, and her father’s exasperated one.
No matter how much it hurt, no matter how much she wanted to cry, she stood.
Until she heard Bran’s amused voice in her head.
You can let it go now, sister.
And only then did she let it go.