Chapter Text
Sansa winces as her car hits another bump and jolts her in her seat.
“You owe me,” she huffs out, hands tight around the wheel.
“I know, I know,” Robb's voice comes through her sound system and fills the car. He's distracted, she can tell, and she bites back a snippy comment. Robb's just so busy, he couldn't possibly get away.
That's not fair, the small part of her brain that's still rational thinks. Of course Robb couldn't drop everything and come out into the middle of nowhere to deal with their Great Uncle Brynden's estate. He's got a new baby and a wife and a job.
Robb's got a baby, Arya's got her tournaments, Bran has school, and Rickon's still underage. All of her siblings have lives they can't get away from. All except her. No significant other, no kids. A tenuous career that she can technically do from anywhere.
“Oh no,” she breathes, when the house finally comes into view through the trees.
“What's wrong?” Robb asks, his full attention back on her.
“Robb,” she whines, the car coming to a pathetic stop on the overgrown gravel drive. “It's a mess. ”
“A mess?”
She doesn't answer, too busy staring at the building in front of her. It's still house-shaped, but... The roof is missing shingles in multiple places, the windows all seem busted out. The steps up to the covered front porch are fine, but the porch itself has a massive sinkhole.
Gods, if this is what the outside looks like…
“What kind of a mess?” Robb asks. She's just about to start listing the many problems when she hears another car approaching.
“I've gotta go,” she tells Robb. “I think the lawyer's here.” She hangs up before Robb can answer and watches the other car slowly emerge, past the rusted gates that she had spent an embarrassing amount of time pushing open, up the long, bumpy road, and onto the circular gravel drive. It stops behind her and a man gets out. She gets out, too, phone clutched in her hand, just in case.
“Miss Stark?” the man asks, and his face splits into a kind smile when she nods. “Perfect, perfect. I'm Samwell Tarly. It's nice to finally meet you.”
Sansa moves forward to shake the lawyer's hand. He isn't what she was expecting from the emails they exchanged. He's young, for one – maybe only a few years older than her. And he seems just as nice in person as he'd been over email. She didn't think lawyers came in nice. Maybe she’s just watched too many movies.
“We should have met at your office,” she says, eyeing up the weeds brushing against her ankles. They're unavoidable. “I didn't realize it was so...”
Mr. Tarly laughs. “I assumed you knew the house had been abandoned for a while, or I would have warned you,” he says. “So it’s probably good you’re seeing it first.”
“We didn’t even know this place existed,” she grimaces, imagining all the bugs that are getting brushed up against her ankles along with the weeds.
“Ah,” Mr. Tarly nods. “I can’t say I ever met your uncle-”
“Great uncle,” she corrects automatically.
“But I heard he inherited this and didn’t want to be tied down to anything. From what I hear, he spent most of his life traveling.”
“That’s definitely true,” Sansa says, feeling a fond smile form. The few times Great Uncle Brynden came to Winterfell, they’d all had a great time. She didn’t know him that well, but she was still sad when she heard he’d passed.
The smile slips off her face as she looks back at the house.
“Don’t know why he never sold the place,” Mr. Tarly shrugs. “I guess because it’s been in your family for so long, and he still respected that even if he didn’t want to live here. From what I could tell from the paperwork, there was a trust that automatically paid the property taxes, but otherwise, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s actually been inside in ages.”
Sansa looks at the lawyer then, and she can see the muted excitement in his eyes, like maybe he wants to see inside. The estate is nestled in the woods outside of town, and she wonders if everyone who lives in Riverrun is curious about it. She knows she would be, if there were some big, old, abandoned estate right at the edges of her town.
And she can appreciate that Great Uncle Brynden respected their ancestral family home, but she wishes he’d respected it a bit more, instead of leaving it to rot in the middle of the woods. Despite its condition, she can tell it was once beautiful.
To be fair, though, does it really make a difference? If it were in perfect condition, would it change her mind?
“Well, let’s get this sold as quick as possible,” she sighs. “Do I just need to sign some paperwork to get it on the market?”
“Let’s head back to my office,” Mr. Tarly suggests, and she nods. She had this whole picture in her mind of meeting a friendly old lawyer and sitting down with him in the dining room of some dusty old house. Except in reality, the lawyer isn’t old, and she’s pretty sure she’d fall through the floor of the dining room if they tried to go inside.
She gets back into her car, somehow maneuvers an awkward ten-point turn in the overgrown gravel drive, and follows Mr. Tarly back down the bumpy road.
Six months and the house still hasn’t sold.
Sansa frowns down at the text from Mr. Tarly. Once again, they’d had someone inquire about the property,only to back out almost immediately, and she stares down at Mr. Tarly’s text with something like dread in her stomach.
We knew it would be a hard sell, but don’t get too discouraged!
It turns out, the old Tully Estate is considered a historical building. At some point in time, in some war, it had been used as a headquarters for some rebelling faction and their chosen king. If she’s being honest, Sansa was never very interested in history. Or, she thinks, she wasn’t very interested in learning about war, which is all their history classes seemed to focus on in school.
With its historical status, that means the building can’t be torn down. Which means land developers don’t want it, and regular people looking for a home don’t want it, either. It’s too much work and too expensive, and they’d have to follow strict restoration codes.
What if we find someone who’d want to turn it into a B&B? she texts back.
Mr. Tarly’s response comes within five minutes. I think it would make an excellent B&B. We would just have to find the right person. Someone who wants to take on that big of a project.
No one wants to take on that big of a project.
It’s been nine months since Sansa went down to check out the house, and it still hasn’t sold. It’s frustrating, even more so because none of her siblings seem to care that much about it. And she gets it, they all have their busy lives and had dumped this issue on her, but technically they all inherited it and it isn’t fair that she’s the one doing all the work.
Okay, so technically Mr. Tarly is doing all the work, she’s just responding to texts authorizing things, but still.
“It’s not like it’s costing us money,” Arya shrugs, taking a sip of her beer. She’s back in town for a month, and they’re all celebrating her return. The bar isn’t too loud tonight, so they don’t have to yell, which is nice. “That trust pays for the land taxes, right?”
“So what,” Sansa frowns, finger idly swiping at the condensation that drips down her glass, “we just let it keep rotting in the woods like Great Uncle Brynden did?”
Arya shrugs again. “Yeah, who cares? Let it rot, and then maybe once it’s too far gone, it won’t be considered historical anymore and they can rip it down and… I dunno, put a strip mall up. Or a hundred townhomes that all look exactly the same.”
Sansa’s frown deepens, because she doesn’t love the idea of that. Yes, the house had been in poor condition, but it had been beautiful once. She knew selling it to a land developer would result in something like Arya said, but she’d always kept a secret hope that some miraculously wealthy person would come across it and decide they wanted it. Clearly that isn’t happening.
“Just let it rot,” Arya says. “We didn’t know it existed before, forget it exists now.”
She loses her job.
Her career, if you could call it that, was always tenuous. She edited articles for an online newspaper, but with the economy struggling the way it is, they needed to trim the fat. Which apparently included her. She’d been fired in a group Zoom meeting along with six other people, which had been a new kind of humiliation for her. They couldn’t even fire her individually.
She lays on her bed and stares at the ceiling and wonders if she should have majored in something different. What good is a Literature degree these days? What good is anything? What does she do now? She’s applied to about thirty jobs in the week since she’d been fired, and has gotten one generic rejection email back. She hasn’t heard anything from the others, and despite everyone telling her that employers might take some time to review applications, she doesn’t have much hope. She has a useless college degree, barely any work experience, and has to explain that she got fired to any prospective employer.
A lump forms in her throat, and she tries to tell herself to stop being pathetic. So what if she’s not married with a kid like Robb? So what if she doesn’t have an exciting life traveling the world playing in poker tournaments like Arya? So what if she’s not smart enough to be on a fast track to a doctorate program like Bran? And she’s not a kid anymore like Rickon. No career, no significant other, no kids. But she still has her family, and she has her friends, and that’s more than a lot of people have, she reminds herself.
Still, she can’t help but feel like a complete loser. She can’t help but resent her younger self a bit, who had been so certain she would marry Joffrey and be a happy little housewife that she hadn’t taken school very seriously. That she never thought about her future outside of Joffrey. That it took her years to accept that Joffrey was a monster, and that if she didn’t get away from him now, she never would. It’s been eighteen months since she left him, but she still doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.
Maybe she needs a change. Maybe she needs to do something drastic.
“Miss Stark, it’s so nice to see you again,” Mr. Tarly grins, waving her into his office. “I was surprised to hear you wanted an in person meeting. Kind of a far drive for you.”
Sansa sits in the offered chair, her heart beating too fast for something this low-stakes. There’s nothing truly on the line here.
“Now, what can I do for you,” Mr. Tarly asks, settling behind the desk. Just like last time, there are about a dozen picture frames on the desk, all of the same woman and baby. It’s cute.
“The house isn’t selling,” she says, and Mr. Tarly nods ruefully. “But I can’t stand the idea of it just… sitting there and rotting away to nothing.” That’s not entirely true. That’s not the real reason she’s here, but she's not about to tell this practical stranger that she's latched onto this because she has nothing else. “So I was thinking - we both agreed it would make a good bed and breakfast, right?”
“We used to have a big hotel, but there was a fire and I guess the owners decided not to rebuild. We still have a few smaller ones, but tourism has been down ever since, and I think another place to stay would help,” Mr. Tarly agrees.
“What if I got the place into some semblance of order?” she asks. “What if I fixed it up enough that we could actually market it that way? No one wants to spend all that time and money restoring it, what if I do it for them?”
“That would be very expensive,” Mr. Tarly warns. “It’s not just the materials, it’s the labor that’s-”
“I’d do it myself.”
Mr. Tarly’s brows raise, and she can see the skepticism in his expression. She tries to blink away the tears that rush to her eyes, because of course he’s skeptical. He should be. What is she even doing here? Why did she think she could do this? She has no idea how to restore a house. She could barely hang curtain rods in her apartment.
“Do you… have experience…” Mr. Tarly starts, clearly trying to be as kind as possible about it.
“No. But I’m willing to learn. And my siblings have agreed to help with the cost of some things.”
“Miss Stark, I’m sorry,” Mr. Tarly says with a sympathetic wince, “but as your attorney in this matter, I’d have to advise against this. There’s a lot of regulations you’d have to follow and I just don’t think taking on a job this big by yourself…”
“I mean, I’d hire people to do things I couldn’t,” she says. “But I’d do anything I could by myself to help cut costs. I have no time restrictions-" because I don’t have a job "-the trust pays for the taxes, and I was thinking…”
She falters at that, but Mr. Tarly waits patiently for her to finally say what is maybe her dumbest idea.
“I was thinking I could monetize it,” she says. “Make YouTube videos or something. I’ve seen stuff like that before, I was looking into restoring old houses and people watch that sort of thing. I’d create a channel and use a bunch of buzzwords and hashtags to draw people in. Something like, I Bought an Abandoned Mansion in the Woods.”
She wouldn’t even need that much revenue from it, just enough for her to live off of while she restores the place. The trust would keep paying the taxes, she could hopefully use it to pay the electric and water, she’d do a lot of the work herself, and her siblings would help with expenses where they could. She still can’t believe they agreed to that, and she tries not to think about how it was probably out of pity.
“I’m not looking to restore it to perfection or anything,” she continues. “Just enough to make it attractive to buyers. We get it restored to where it’s not an immediate no, market it as a cozy B&B, and someone will want to buy it. Then we sell it for a bunch of money that makes up for any of the costs.” She says it with more confidence than she feels.
“If you’re sure,” Mr. Tarly says, clearly still skeptical. But she (and her siblings) own the house, and he’s just the lawyer she retained, so he can’t tell her no. “For my own conscience, I once again have to advise that I don’t think it’s a good idea, but if you’re going to do it, might I suggest hiring a contractor to oversee things? Someone who understands building codes and all of that?”
Sansa fidgets in her seat. That probably would be a smart idea, but she also kind of loathes it, too. The whole point was for her to restore the place on her own, not have someone else come in and tell her what to do. Even though she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. At all.
Her confidence plummets. She’d been so certain, back in Winterfell, sitting in her apartment watching house restoration videos. I could do that, she’d thought, a confidence that came from complete delusion, she’s realizing now.
“I could hire someone,” she concedes, already feeling resentful of this imaginary contractor, though she knows that’s stupid. She’s just resentful that Mr. Tarly is right. She’s just resentful that she’s weak and useless and not good for anything.
“Well, obviously you should hire who you want,” Mr. Tarly continues on, oblivious to her quickly-dropping mood. “But if you want a recommendation, I know a guy. He’s local, and very good at his job.” Then Mr. Tarly grins and says, “he also happens to be my best friend, so maybe I’m a little biased.”
Sansa stands next to her car and thinks that the first thing she’s going to do is weed the front drive. The first and only other time she’d been here, she’d gone back to her hotel and scrubbed herself raw, imagining all the bugs crawling on her.
(Why did she ever think she could restore a house? She can’t even stand in some weeds without freaking out.)
But she wore boots today with her jeans tucked into them, so she feels less like bugs will crawl up her legs this time. As she stands there, her eyes scan the front drive, then the house itself. Her confidence, which keeps wavering from why am I doing this to I can totally do this, is faltering again. Even the small task of cleaning up the front seems daunting.
The engine of a car makes her turn back to the road, and she sees a red pickup bumping up the drive. It’s old and scuffed, with big metal boxes in the bed. A work truck if she ever saw one. The figures inside are shadowy, but she’s pretty sure the one in the passenger seat is Mr. Tarly. Sam, he told her to call him.
Sure enough, when the truck comes to a stop, Sam hops out of the passenger side with one of those big grins.
Sansa stands with her arms folded, even though she knows she needs to be friendly. She needs this contractor, Sam was right about that, and she needs to not be resentful about it. Especially since she’s going to have to ask more of him than most clients would. She doubts many of his jobs require him to be filmed.
The driver door opens, and a man steps out. “Sansa,” Sam says, leading the other man over to her, “this is Jon Snow. Jon, this is Sansa Stark. Brynden’s niece.”
“Great niece,” she corrects automatically, though she wishes she’d kept her mouth shut. She sounds pedantic. Forcing herself to uncross her arms, she extends a hand towards them with a hopefully pleasant sounding, “it’s nice to meet you.”
Jon Snow nods, and after a moment’s hesitation, takes her hand and shakes it. In that moment, she notices two things: he’s handsome in a dark, rough-around-the-edges sort of way, and his arms are corded with muscle. Despite the fact that she’s sworn off men, she’s not blind. He’s… well, he’s sexy.
For the first time since she came back down to Riverrun, her hope rises. A hot contractor who, if Sam is to be believed, agreed that she could film while they worked? With those arms?
Not a bad way to get clicks, is it?