Chapter Text
Sansa stirs before a gloved hand ever shakes her shoulder, the heavy steel toed footsteps of the soldiers echoing on the old gym’s pine floor loudly enough to bring her out of her uneasy slumber. There’s never true quiet in the Vale Elementary gym, where she’s been sleeping on a cot within arm’s reach of her neighbor for the past two weeks, but tonight’s disturbance is beyond the normal sounds of two hundred women restlessly tossing on creaking cots.
Blinking in the darkness–they won’t spare even one candle for the refugees gathered here–she can make out the silhouettes of the women, whose cots sit closest to the exit, being herded out the door single file. Before he was called away on assignment to the capital, Jon secured her a spot closer to the middle of the room. It’s a desirable location. The wind doesn’t blow so sharp here from the cracked windows along the northern cinder block wall, where the basketball hoops hang suspended, never to be lowered again to the accompanying sounds of children’s squeals. It was a parting kindness, and she’s thanked him for it every night after she said her prayers, praying for her lost parents and siblings.
Arya might be alive.
No. They’re all dead. It’s better that way.
She sits up, pulling the wool blanket full of moth holes around her shoulders, as she watches the soldiers move row by row, shaking awake the women who sleep more soundly than the rest. The men point gloved fingers and shiny batons towards the exit, they pull blankets from the thin arms of women, and they shove, when feet are slow to respond.
We’re being moved, she realizes, as they finish emptying out the third row. Panic courses through her. Hands shaking, her blanket slips free of her grip, falling from one shoulder, as a tall, blond haired soldier pushes past a huddled group of women and makes for her row.
The process of moving them out isn’t taking long, as there are no belongings to gather up. Anything brought into the shelter by the refugees was stripped from the women by the soldiers conducting registration to feather their own nests. Any moment and she’ll be taken to some unknown destination.
Or they’re taking them outside to shoot them. It’s entirely possible. Less mouths to feed with winter closing in on them.
The thought is strangely comforting, and she’s on her feet, ready to face her fate by the time the heavily muscled soldier stands at the corner of her cot and jerks his thumb towards the door.
Stay put. I’ll come back for you.
His last words to her whispered against her ear come back to her and urge her to speak up, though her voice is little more than a raspy whisper. “I’m supposed to wait here.”
“Plans change,” the soldier says with a stiff push that turns her towards the exit.
She would fight back, but they all carry guns, and while she doesn’t think he’d kill her without a direct order from a superior officer, she knows they think nothing of cracking you in the head with their weapons. She can’t risk a concussion. An injury in this world can mean the difference between life and death.
“He’ll find me,” she says under her breath over and over until the words run together in an unintelligible rush, as she’s pushed into line and follows, shuffling along behind the girl that slept at her back for the past five days.
When they stop short before the exit, some hesitation in the group in front of them halting their movement, Sansa stumbles, nearly knocking the slight framed girl right to the ground. Sansa never asked, but she can’t imagine she’s more than fifteen. The swelling under her sundress shows that her age didn’t mean anything to some soldier.
It had to be a soldier. All male citizens of age and able bodied were drafted, and though they live in warehouses turned into military housing, they’re the only ones with access to women. The government sent all remaining civilian men to their own refugee shelters months ago, breaking up families and leaving women young and old unprotected. There are rumors that there are no male shelters, just forced labor camps, and Sansa wonders if that’s where they’re headed.
It wasn’t so long ago that Sansa thought the girls who caught the eye of some soldier didn’t have it so bad. Sometimes the soldiers pooled their resources and put their girls in a trailer together, which kept them out of the shelters. It wasn’t an option Sansa ever entertained, because she still had the broken down Coachman RV unintentionally left to her by Aunt Lysa. Most people didn’t have it so good once the government took over the banks and terminated all mortgages and suspended loans. The banking amendment forced most people into the newly formed government refugee shelters, but Sansa owned her little home outright.
Sansa joined them a couple of weeks ago, when the government outlawed private civilian abodes. It would be easier to care for the people once they were all collected together. They promised them a safer world. One without the burden of freedom.
The new legislation made Sansa reconsider those cramped trailers. It wasn’t ideal, living with four or five girls, but there would still be some measure of independence, some camaraderie, and no men with guns standing guard at the door. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. She had a soldier. She had Jon.
When he first showed up outside her RV, wearing black, she’d been afraid. She didn’t trust soldiers, didn’t trust men, and she hadn’t seen him in almost a decade, but it was Robb’s childhood friend and she let him inside, hoping he was as harmless as she remembered him being.
Those places are no better than brothels, Sansa. They pass the girls around.
If the girls get pregnant, they toss them out, shunting them off to a refugee shelter. That’s what happened to Sansa’s frail neighbor. Before, Sansa had been too busy trying to survive to fully realize the extent of the misery of others, but now her eyes are fully open. She’s too close to it not to see.
They don’t miss how the girl’s shoulders, bare to the cold air, shiver, as they walk out under the night’s field of stars towards several beat up looking school buses with numbers spray painted in red on the side. A pregnant girl shouldn’t be out in this weather in an old cotton dress, but whoever dumped her here must not have cared enough to dress her for winter.
Jon gave Sansa what he could, when he left. He gave her the clothes right off his back.
“Here,” Sansa says, pulling the black men’s sweater over her head before a soldier spots what she’s doing and puts a stop to it. Kindnesses are not encouraged. It’s easier to control people, when everyone is more likely to turn in their neighbors for some minor infraction rather than lend them a hand. “Hurry. Put it on,” she says, pushing the wadded up sweater into the girl’s ruddy, cracked hands.
Whatever becomes of her, Sansa doesn’t know. They separate them out according to some unknown system, two to the left, three to the right, and Sansa finds herself directed into bus seven, her pregnant neighbor into number three. The soldier standing before bus seven’s door squints down at her, as she steps forward. It’s the first man to meet her eye, since she was forced from her cot. Most of the soldiers treat them as if they’re not quite human, not worth a second glance. This might be her last shot to convince someone that she shouldn’t be moved.
“I’m not supposed to leave this shelter. I’m Officer Snow’s.”
Jon is well known in this quadrant and his name draws a frown from the man, who probably fears he’ll earn a demerit for incorrectly handling an officer’s girl if she speaks the truth. Uncrossing his arms, he grabs for Sansa’s right wrist. He snatches at the heavy knit of her shirt and pushes her sleeve up. He’s looking for a tattoo on the tender skin on the underside of her arm, a small string of numbers, Snow’s military service number inked in black to identify her as his. Some of the girls have rows of numbers up their arms, old ones marked through and fresh inked above.
Her arm is blank. She used to be proud of that fact. She used to think she was better than the others.
The back of his hand cracks her across the face. Sharp, too quick to dodge, and she feels the sting of blood in her lower lip split by his ring. They’re married to the job. Married to the military. Marked by hard, stainless rings worn on the same finger that in another time might have boasted a wedding band of platinum or gold.
“Nice try, sweetheart.”