Chapter Text
…
One. Ethereal.
“I might have gotten myself in trouble.”
Sansa Stark didn’t lift her eyes from her computer screen as her fingers continued moving over the keys. She was on deadline, and nothing was more important than finishing this piece. Jon Snow collapsed himself heavily into the chair next to her desk. He picked up her Winterfell snow globe as he always did to shake it and as always, Sansa took it from him and safely put it to the other side of her desk, all without moving her eyes from her computer.
“Knowing you, probably,” Sansa answered.
She read one particular line over again and frowned to herself. She didn’t like how it sounded. It didn’t flow. She read it quietly, out loud, to herself to see how it sounded to her ears. She squinted one eye shut as she thought. With a sigh, she grabbed her nearby thesaurus.
“I’m already on the dead desk. If I am in trouble, what else can they do to me?” Jon asked.
Sansa flipped through the pages until she found the appropriate letter. She was hardly listening to Jon, she admitted. She had to get this story in and was on a time crunch. Normally, Sansa wasn’t under deadline like this. She usually had her stories completed long before they were actually due. But this week was Winterfell Fashion Week and as the newspaper’s only Fashion & Lifestyle reporter, this was her week to shine. She had press access to every designer’s show and had written thousands of words for her various stories printed across these five days. She absolutely loved Winterfell Fashion Week, but it was always a stressful time for her.
Next week, it will be back to stories on the latest style of winter home décor, and which boots to wear with what scarf. Next week, Sansa could get back to breathing.
“What’s the word?” Jon asked, noting her growing frustration. He stood up and came behind her. Bending down, he read over her shoulder. She noted that he smelled of cinnamon gum. He had recently begun the effort of quitting smoking and cinnamon gum seemed to be his favorite.
“Elegance. Second to last paragraph,” Sansa pointed to the word on the screen. “I want to say something more, but I also don’t want the readers to feel like I’m exaggerating.”
“None of your readers would ever think that.” Jon didn’t skip a beat, and he sounded so certain of that fact, Sansa couldn’t help but smile.
She would never tell him this, of course, but she had always considered Jon to be a better writer than her. Maybe it was because they wrote such different kinds of articles for the paper and Jon received so much attention for his works. There was little prestige in the articles printed under Sansa’s name so, if he thought that every reader would take Sansa’s word as gospel, Sansa would consider it to be a compliment.
“Maybe ethereal?” He then suggested.
“That’s exactly the word I was thinking, but again… exaggerating or being too wordy.”
“Use ethereal,” Jon said firmly. He sat down again, and Sansa deleted elegance and typed in the words she had been wanting to use.
Susan Mordane was the largest, most successful fashion designer to come from the North. She could easily live down in King’s Landing, the fashion capital of Westeros, but she made the decision to stay where she was born and bred. Designers from all over Westeros and Essos flooded Winterfell for Winterfell Fashion Week, but it always closed with Susan Mordane’s latest collection and was always the event most attendees looked forward to most. Sansa included. Even those who really didn’t care one foot about fashion of any kind seemed to be able to at least recognize Susan Mordane’s name when asked. Northerners were always very proud of their own – especially when one was just as successful as someone from the South.
Sansa was a nonpartisan journalist, so she refrained from absolutely gushing over the woman’s latest line, but it truly had been beautiful, and Sansa wanted her readers to know that. She finished the last paragraph with no further problems and gave it a quick read through. She then quickly emailed it to the night editor and stood up at her desk as she did.
“Luwin!” She called out over the cubicles and other reporters’ heads in the open newsroom. “I’m sending you my article on the Susan Mordane show! And I’d like to keep ethereal in the second to last paragraph!”
Luwin Sumpter, a small man with grey eyes and thinning hair, but still with power and authority in his stance, stood up from his desk to look at her. “Just got it! And I’ll keep it if it should be kept!” He sat down again, and Sansa rolled her eyes before settling back down in her chair.
Now that her article was in before the deadline in just a few more minutes time, she felt much more relaxed and in the right headspace for the man sitting next to her desk. She looked at Jon. She never expected them to work together. She had known Jon Snow since before her brain could even fully develop memories. Her older brother, Robb, came home from his first day of preschool and declared that he had made a best friend and that best friend was Jon Snow. And all these years later, the two were still best friends.
Jon Snow had just always been there. Sansa was used to it being her brothers, sister, and Jon. They had never been exceptionally close to one another. Friendly, sure. Spending so much of their childhood together, there was some kind of friendship between them, but nothing too deep. But writing together at the Winterfell Post for these past three years, Sansa thought they had developed their own friendship after all these years. Being coworkers gave them things to talk about and experiences to share that Jon didn’t have with the other Stark siblings and Sansa admitted to always liking the warm feeling she got when they could share an inside joke in front of the others and no one else was able understood it.
“Alright,” Sansa exhaled a deep sigh and turned in her chair towards Jon. “What did you do?”
…
For four years, Jon Snow was one of the star reporters at the newspaper. His stories were often run on the front page, above the fold – a most coveted spot for reporters desperate to be read. He was responsible for tracking down all sorts of stories and Winterfell Post, as a result, was often the first to break a major occurrence before anyone else. Jon was hungry when it came to chasing down leads and he would follow a story no matter where it took him.
That was what happened to him last year. He had gone to Dreadfort to write a story about the ongoing garbage collector’s strike that was ongoing for more than a month. The Dreadfort city council and the garbage collector’s union could not come to any sort of agreement. It didn’t take Jon long to sniff out that there was much more going on.
Putting his nose to the ground, Jon did what he did. He dug. He found that while the city council claimed that they just didn’t have the funds in their budget to give the garbage collectors more money, that wasn’t true. Jon dug through past financial records with his trusty highlighter and found that the Dreadfort mayor, Roose Bolton, made numerous sizeable donations – on behalf of the town – to the Dreadfort Historical Society, where his son, Ramsay, just happened to work. Ramsay then made several land purchases until the Bolton family basically held control over all of the woods that surrounded Dreadfort. Roose was clearly using his position to rob from the town and make him and his own family very wealthy in return.
It was all there in the financial records open to the public. It just took someone to take the time and effort to find it. When Jon wrote the story and the Winterfell Post printed it on their front page, it quickly reached international coverage, and everyone caught up in the scandal was ruined. Roose and Ramsay were arrested and tried for fraud and racketeering and sent to (white collar) prison for a few years. Jon should have won every single journalism award for his reporting if the paper would nominate him.
Instead, and unfortunately, he nearly lost his job. Walder Frey was the owner of not only the Post and several other large papers in Westeros, but he was also a close friend of Roose Bolton. Walder wanted Jon’s head – especially when, in the meeting to discuss his future at the paper, Jon wondered out loud if Walder was involved in the land grab scheme as well. Luckily, all of the editors of the paper defended their reporter and pointed out to Walder that if they fired the reporter who broke one of the largest stories to hit Westeros in years, that would look bad on all of them. There would be no way to explain their actions.
So, Walder said that, for the next year, Jon would write for the Obituary section. The dead desk. Maybe being stuck there for some time, Jon would learn that while he was a very good reporter, he needed to be reminded of his place. With Jon’s demotion, it was obvious to all of them that Walder Frey was dirty as Hell, but they obviously couldn’t say that about the paper’s owner.
…
To no surprise, Jon was going crazy, writing the obituaries for quasi-famous people who passed as well as the normal people whose families paid the paper for the obituaries to be written, and he liked to now pass his days, seeing how much he could get away with in his stories. It was nothing if not entertaining for him. Sansa thought he should just shut up, keep his head down, and be grateful that he still had a job. His punishment was only a year. He’d be back to writing his front-page stories in no time. But she didn’t tell him that. She understood that he was angry and hurt over being punished for just doing his job, but there were many things in this world that were just unfair – especially when people in power were involved.
“Walda Bolton’s mother passed away. I wrote a very lovely obituary for the woman.”
“I’m sure,” Sansa said, struggling to bite back a laugh.
Jon grinned. “I’m sure Luwin will easily see the poetic prose of the adjectives I used.”
“SNOW!!” Luwin’s voice suddenly boomed across the newsroom and for being an old man, his voice, when angry, could still shake the light fixtures.
“See?” Jon’s grin widened and Sansa couldn’t contain her laughter. Jon gave her a wink. Or rather, he tried to give her a wink. Jon Snow could do many things, but winking was not one of them. It really was just a rapid blink. It only made her laugh further as Jon pulled himself from the chair and left her cubicle to go explain himself to their editor.
…
Writing was something Sansa fell into completely on accident. Like most teenage girls, she didn’t think too much about what she was going to do in the future. She was all about now. She loved clothes, experimenting with makeup, having a new celebrity crush every month, spending time with her friends, and going to the high school sports games. She did well in school because it was what her parents expected of her but not even going to college was a thought she had. She would go to college, of course, but that was far enough away where she didn’t think of it yet. She had more important things in her life to think about. Like what boy would ask her to go to the upcoming Homecoming dance and what color her dress would be.
English class was something she did enjoy though. She couldn’t really explain it, but she loved the beauty of words. Language fascinated her. Her parents had bought her a linguistics book for Christmas one year and Sansa read it from cover to cover within two days. She loved the words that hardly anyone used; words that were old enough for not even a spellcheck to recognize.
Whipmegmorum (n.) – a noisy quarrel about politics
Naufragous (adj.) – causing a shipwreck
Vinomadefied (adj.) – utterly soaked in wine
Supervivant (n.) – a survivor
Sansa didn’t know why she loved words. She just knew that she did. And knowing and loving words always made writing papers for class come so easily for her. Her friends were all jealous of her when their teachers assigned five-page reports to write and Sansa was able to write five pages, easily, that very night. She always received top marks, too. But Sansa didn’t feel the need to apologize or feel embarrassed. Her parents told their children that they were all good at something even when they all went through moods when they felt like they were good at nothing. The more papers assigned as she went through high school, the more Sansa fell in love with writing and finding just the right words.
Her first day of college, the quad was packed with tables and students, trying to entice the new freshman class to join their clubs and organizations. Sansa walked, perusing the offerings. She didn’t know what she wanted to devote her spare time to; only that she did want to be involved. She stopped when she saw Jon Snow sitting at a table in the way that someone would stop when they saw a familiar face in a crowd. She approached him and he broke into a smile, getting to his feet as she neared. She finally looked at the banner strung across the table. Winterfell University Weekly – the student’s campus newspaper.
“Hey,” another student standing with Jon said once she stopped in front of them. “Interested?”
“I don’t know,” Sansa shook her head honestly.
“This is Sansa. She knows more words than anyone,” Jon told the guy.
Sansa rolled her eyes, letting Jon know that that sounded ridiculous. Jon’s smile widened.
“Awesome,” the guy didn’t question it. “When the paper gets together for drunk Scrabble, you can be my partner. What’s your major? Not that it matters. Our sports reporter is a chemistry major, if you can believe it.”
“English with a minor in linguistics,” Sansa answered. There was a pile of newspapers on the table, and she picked up a copy to look through it. She noted Jon’s by-line on a story on the front page – a column along the side about the university’s newest major offering – the study of Taylor Swift music and lyrics and how this proved that there was no hope for the future. Sansa smiled as her eyes quickly scanned the article. It had a very Jon Snow sarcastic and bleak tone to it. “I’ve never written a news article before.” She had never written anything other than a paper on a teacher’s chosen topic.
“We’d teach you,” Jon said. “But I think you’d get the hang of it pretty quick.”
Sansa looked at Jon and she didn’t know why, but him saying that made her smile and her cheeks felt a touch warmer. “Alright.” She swiftly signed her name to the clipboard. She wanted to join something, and this was as good as anything. It helped that she already knew someone, and she knew that he wouldn’t let her sink.
…
Jon Snow was true to his word. He taught Sansa how to write articles for a newspaper, she quickly got the hang of it, and she fell completely in love with it.
…
Before shutting her computer down for the night and leaving, Sansa stopped off at Luwin’s desk. He shared a cubicle with another night editor, Kennet. He was another older man who had been writing at the Winterfell Post long before Sansa even picked up her first pencil. While Luwin was a hard critic of his reporters, wanting their absolute best with every story they turned into him before deadline, Kennet was an absolute stickler for proper grammar. He grumbled constantly that these young reporters, green behind their gills, didn’t know anything when it came to writing and Kennet and his red pen was as feared among the cubicles as Luwin with his yelling.
Luwin spun in his chair away from his computer to look at Sansa. “Ethereal stays,” he said.
Sansa’s smile was instant. “Thank you.”
“It was the right word,” Kennet agreed and when it came to Kennet, that was a high compliment.
She exhaled her breath through slightly parted lips. “Thank you both.”
“Good stuff this week,” Luwin added. “What’s next for you?”
“Both of you, get ready. Plum is the hottest winter color, and you will learn all about it.” Sansa smiled and considered herself a success when Luwin actually cracked a smile and Kennet chuckled. “If you don’t need anything else from me tonight, I was going to get out of here.”
“Go,” Luwin ordered and spun back towards his computer.
“Good night,” Sansa said to both men. She smiled as she returned to her desk to gather her things. She couldn’t wait to get home and sleep. Winterfell Fashion Week was done for another year, and she had, once again, survived. She had earned a good night’s sleep.
Bundled up and with her bag slung onto her shoulder, she headed for the bank of elevators, smiling at other reporters still at their desks, typing away before Luwin could start yelling at them. She knocked on top of Jon’s cubicle wall as she passed and poked her head around the side. He was leaning back in his chair, relaxed and drinking from a can of Coke, reading through what he had written on his screen. He turned his head and smiled when he saw that it was her.
“Heading out?” He assumed.
“I am officially done and Luwin said that ethereal was the right word,” Sansa couldn’t stop smiling. It was just one of those days. Her article was in, her editor liked it, and now, she had her pajamas and a warm dinner waiting for her. It was so funny. Teenage Sansa would have thought all of this was so boring, but adult Sansa couldn’t be happier with the little things like that.
“Stop bragging,” Jon frowned even though she knew he didn’t mean it.
Like he had done at her desk, Sansa stepped closer and sat down in the empty chair next to his desk. She rested her bag in her lap. “How goes it?” She asked.
“I have to rewrite it. I’m shocked,” Jon said, and his lips twitched upwards. He leaned further back in his seat, balancing himself just right where he didn’t fall backwards. He took a sip of Coke. “I feel like if I just take out all the adjectives for portly, Luwin will pass it through.”
Sansa’s mouth fell open. “You called a woman portly in her obituary? That’s a new low, Jon.”
“Is it? Her daughter is married to Roose Bolton. I feel like using adjectives for portly are the nicest adjectives I could have used. I can’t believe I even have to write this obituary. This should be considered a conflict of interest.”
“If you keep this up, the dead desk assignment will be stretched out longer past a year.” This wasn’t the first time Sansa warned him of that very thing, and it wasn’t the first time that Jon waved her concerns off like he did now.
“I just need a suspicious death to come across my desk and bam. I’m back to writing a real story,” he said. He sat forward again and moved his keyboard further towards the screen so he could rest his arms on his desk. “But what if that does happen? What if someone asks me to write an obit, and I look at it and something just doesn’t seem right? Luwin would be forced to hand the story off to someone else. A real reporter.” He talked quietly so no one overheard.
“You are a real reporter, Jon,” Sansa matched her tone volume with his. “You’re the best there is.” She completely meant it. Jon stared at her with his dark grayish eyes, and she wanted him to believe her. That’s what she really thought about him. He was the best reporter at the Post and even being on probation for these past few months, no other reporter had been able to match him. Everyone knew it, too. Sansa reached her hand out and rested it on his arm. “It’s just a few more months. You can make it.”
Jon didn’t say anything about that, but he was still staring at her so Sansa liked to think that at least a part of him believed what she was saying. She smiled faintly and squeezed his arm before pulling her hand away. She wasn’t an idiot nor was she blind. She was well aware of Jon Snow being a handsome man, but the truth was, she had never really paid attention. He was Jon. Her brother’s best friend. Her coworker and her friend. Jon.
He tilted his head back and drained the rest of the Coke from the can. He then crushed it in his fist and tossed it into the blue recyclable bin against the wall of his cubicle. “Come on,” he said, standing up. “I’ll walk you to your car.” He grabbed his own coat and tugged it on.
“You don’t have to,” Sansa said, standing up, too. “You’re on a deadline.”
Jon smiled. “All of my stories are dead, Sansa. They’ll keep for a little longer.”
…