Double Lives
Renly
"Does it ever bother you," Loras asks as they lean up against their idling cab, "That your date to these functions always ends up leaving with another woman?"
Renly cracks a small smile, nudging at Loras' shoulder with his own. They're looking up at the illuminated windows of Sansa Stark's apartment, waiting for Margaery to come back down from escorting Sansa to her door. "Not particularly," he says at length. The arrangement he has with Margaery suits both of their purposes nicely, and Margaery has kept their secret without complaint. She like to tell them that they're good for each other, and Renly wishes that Robert would get out of politics so they could be themselves and not have to hide like this all the time. "Goodness knows she's getting nothing from this arrangement save a chance to schmooze all the governmental big-wigs whose jobs she's got designs on."
Loras laughs, fiddling with his phone. He pulls a face, half a second later, and drags his thumb down over the screen. "I thought you saidBattlefield got updated."
Renly blinks, thinking of Margaery's excited whisper about how the conclusion had been fantastic in his ear as they'd danced at the exhibit opening earlier. He'd been more intrigued by Loras leading Sansa Stark of all people out of a side corridor on his arm like some knight of old than what Margaery had said at the time, but Margaery had shown him the update, he'd pulled it up on his phone... "It did," he says quickly, pulling out his own phone. It's still on his browser and Renly is very careful not to do anything to refresh the page.
There's a tapping sound and Brienne, who's sitting in the passenger seat next to their irritable cabbie, rolls down the window. "The driver wants to know how much longer you think you'll be?"
"Depends on Marg," Loras says, glancing towards the building's door and rather intimidating-looking doorman. "She seemed quite taken, didn't she?"
Brienne makes a noise that sounds like something between irritation and amusement. "They were flirting quite a bit, especially once she got over her shock about you two."
Renly looks up from his phone. He still has Love is a Battlefield pulled up in his browser, so he passes his phone to Loras who makes an excited noise and goes to start reading. "I think Margaery secretly enjoys telling people and watching their reactions." He doesn’t mind that secret being told, it's the other one that can't be told. Margaery has her own, after all.
Loras lets out a quiet guffaw of laughter, "It didn't help that you decided to make sure she knew by giving yourself finger antlers when she asked you point blank if Margaery was having her on." He shakes his head, "We could have passed ourselves off at really good at covering Wolfgirl. Like, really good." His eyes flick over Renly's phone screen as he reads. "This is so tragically beautiful," He turns to Brienne. "Have you read theBattlefield update?"
Shaking her head, Brienne makes a sound to the negative. "I still think it's really weird that you read it at all. It's about you, it's bizarre, whoever wrote that has a deranged mind."
"I think you mean a wonderful mind for history. It isn't about us, Bri, it's about the stag and the rose - Ryan and Tyler. They're not us; they're totally original, just borrowing our imagery. Trust me when I say that there's some really gross stuff out there about us, this isn't that. It's just..." he runs a hand through his hair and Renly rolls his eyes. Loras is a hopeless romantic at times, "It's beautiful."
"Well," Brienne says, throwing up her hands, "If you say so Loras."
Renly smiles at her, arms folded over his chest. His tux jacket is discarded with Loras' in the backseat. It's a warm night, after all, and he'd rather wait outside than in the odd-smelling cab with Brienne judging him and Loras for being into a fan work about their band. At least Margaery gets it, but she's off probably kissing Sansa Stark goodnight and it's all so impossibly awkward.
Brienne is Renly's bodyguard at Stannis' insistence. He'd said something along the lines of; 'one of your deranged fangirls could attempt to murder you and that would cause a huge PR nightmare for the prime minister.' Renly had told him he was completely paranoid and no less than a week later Brienne had been assigned to babysit him and Loras both.
It had, probably, been a miscalculation on Stannis' part, because Brienne is excellent. He and Loras both enjoy her company, Loras' grandmother likes her and Margaery simply adores her. She's also fantastic on the drums, which had Stannis in fits for weeks when he'd first found out. Loras has taught her how to play the bass guitar too, since Renly's absolutely terrible at teaching people to play any instrument that isn't the banjo, apparently.
Renly makes a point of regularly telling Stannis about how great it is to have a third member of their band on the government's dime, just to rankle him when he calls Renly to check on him and complain about how Renly's niece, Shireen, is now obsessed with rosenstag.
"Oh," Loras says a few minutes later, lips twisting downwards into a frown. "I lost an eyeball."
"Gross." Renly wrinkles his nose. He thinks it's realistic, frankly, and wolfgirl23 has done a good job with her research. Frankly, he's a little surprised no one's died, because that would have been the most true-to-life outcome of such a relationship in that historical period. He puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs. "Well, eye patches are rather dashing."
Loras makes a humming noise and leans against Renly's shoulder. "I wonder why they took it down," he muses, thumbing over the chapter and highlighting the whole thing. He copies it with a swipe of his thumb and pastes it into a notepad document so that they'll have a copy. "I wish I could comment on it," he says, passing Renly's phone back to him. Renly pockets it and stands there, nose half-buried in Loras' hair, thinking about the story and how grateful he is that he wasn't born into that time. He'd never have Loras then, and he loves him so.
He hums a few bars of Wolfgirl into Loras's hair, Loras mumbling the words along with Renly's humming. "Oh wolfgirl I hope that you'll still be true," He pauses then, turning to look at Renly. "D'you know, technically, Sansa is a wolf girl. Isn't the old symbol of House Stark a direwolf?"
Renly scratches at his beard, history lessons blurring together in his mind. "I suppose you're right," he says. "An actual wolf girl, how odd."
"Explains why Margaery was so smitten," Loras steps away from Renly and peers up at Sasna's apartment building. "And why she's taking forever."
"They've had more to drink that we have," Renly points out. "It could just be taking a while, you know how girls are."
Loras wrinkles his nose, "Not really my thing."
"I know, I know."
Margaery emerges some five minutes later, her eyes a little too bright and her lips a little too red. She's fiddling with her hair as she sidles up to them, a smug, cat-like smile dancing on her lips. Loras raised an eyebrow at her as he opens the door for her. "Did you kiss her?"
"Once," Margaery says breezily. "She's lovely, I must see her again."
-
Sansa
Received 3:45 AM: "Why did you take down LiaB? Come on dude, don't hold out on us!!!"
Received 5:46 AM: "I got the notification that you'd updated, but imagine my disappointment to find that the entire story is fucking GONE. You don't get to do that, you don't get to take a story from your readers like that, fuck you wolfgirl23, fuck you."
Received 7:43 AM: "PUT IT BACK UP."
Received 8:03 AM: "I am greatly saddened that you've chosen to take down Ryan and Tyler's story. I understand that your reasons are entirely your own, but please know that there are a great many people who are invested in this story, some even in places you really wouldn't expect ;), and would love to read its conclusion. I hope whatever's troubled you passes soon and that you're able to make the story publicly available."
Received 8:45 AM: "I HOPE YOU REALIZE THAT IT ISN'T THAT HARD TO FIGURE OUT WHO YOU ARE. I WILL DOXX YOU AND FIND YOU AND MAKE YOU GIVE ME THE REST OF THIS STORY."
Received 9:02 AM: "What the actual fuck are some of these comments? Anyway, WG, you know we love you, take your time and sort your stuff out. The Internet will still be around when you get back."
-
Sansa clicks listlessly through her email notifications, deleting the more alarming of the messages and knowing, just knowing, that she has to say something or else wild speculation is going to continue. She's already ventured onto the message board that's been sent up for fanfic on the main rosenstag message board. There's an entire thread dedicated to discussing Love is a Battlefield and it's positively exploded overnight.
As it is, Sansa's nursing a hangover and replaying the pleasant memory of Margaery Tyrell rising up on her tiptoes and kissing her goodnight, over and over in her head. It may have happened more than once. There might have been some tongue. Sansa feels her ears burn and she buries her head in her hands, groaning long and loud. She is so beyond screwed.
There is no way that she can tell Renly Baratheon that she's written close to ninety-thousand words of utterly self-indulgent fanfiction about his and Loras' band. She has no idea how in any of the seven hells she can begin to explain this to the fandom either. They won't understand such a delicate position, or how utterly conflicted Sansa had felt, letting Margaery kiss her.
It isn't that it isn't welcome; it's just that Sansa isn't sure that she's ready for that plunge yet. Kissing a girl when she's a little drunk and certainly attracted is one thing. Kissing a girl when she's stone cold sober and her worlds are colliding in the worst way is something else entirely. The last time she'd been with a girl had ended so badly that Sansa finds herself pushing the memory of her running from the offer of an actual relationship away before she can truly examine it. It's been two years now, and Sansa's more comfortable in her own skin then she'd been at the time, but oh god, she'd let Margaery Tyrell kiss her and she'd kissed her back. She's so screwed.
At the corner of her desk, her phone starts to buzz, and the chorus of Wolfgirl echoes through her bedroom.
"I see you now wolfgirl,
I see you I do…
And I can see now what I already knew
Though the northlands run deep,
they were never enough to contain you."
She doesn’t recognize the number flashing on the screen, and she debates not answering it. Someone had threatened to doxx her, after all. It doesn’t seem right to leave it unanswered, after all. She picks up her phone and tugs the charger's cord from it. "Hello?"
"Oh good, you're awake." A warm, friendly-sounding voice comes over the line and Sansa's cheeks, already red at the memory, flush even redder.
"Margaery?" she asks and she's greeted with an affirmative sound deep in the back of Margaery's throat. Sansa frowns, surely she hadn't so drunk that she'd forgotten that she'd given Margaery her phone number. She closes her eyes and tries to recall the entire night, knowing that there are no blanks in her memory. Every wonderful, horribly embarrassing moment had truly happened. "How'd you get my number?" she asks, feeling stupid for needing to in the first place.
She's answered with a laugh. "Your father's secretary was exceptionally accommodating when she heard my grandmother's name," Margaery says breezily. "I wanted to make sure we didn’t leave you too hung over last night." There's a pause, and Sansa can almost see Margaery's face in her mind's eye, looking a little worried and apprehensive as she adds, "And that you're okay with what happened."
Sansa leans back, staring up at her ceiling and the glow-in-the-dark stars that Arya had helped her to put up when she'd first moved in here, some two years ago now. "I..." she starts, finding herself grateful that she's alone. Arya'd left hours ago for her tournament and Sansa's going to be heading there in short order. Her father had sent a text a few minutes ago say that Arya had advanced into the semifinals. She can't think about Arya right now, or what she might say if she'd seen. No one can know.
Sansa keeps secrets like it's her job, even ones that she knows she shouldn't have to keep. She swallows, sucking in a deep breath. Her voice sounds braver than she feels when she speaks. "I don't usually go about kissing near-strangers."
She really doesn't go about kissing anyone these days. She's been so busy with school and finishing Love is a Battlefield that she hasn't had much time for much else. If she's honest, she's felt so conflicted about who, exactly, she wishes she could be kissing, that Margaery's charming smile and self-assured manner had swept her right off her feet.
Making a thoughtful sound, a low humming at the back of her throat, Margaery asks, "How about kissing girls?"
It's a question that she hadn't anticipated. She'd assumed that Margaery saw though the smokescreen of disinterest that Sansa has tried so hard to perpetuate. Maybe Sansa's poker face is better than Jon or Arya tell her it is. She shifts forward, deleting another angry message about her story. There's no harm in admitting it, that it'd been wonderful, the parts that hadn't been disastrous. "I have..." she says, adding a clarifying, "Before," when she realizes how vaguely evasive it sounds.
"And boys?"
"Joffrey answered that question for me, but please, no one knows." She can’t talk about it to anyone because she’ll have put a label on herself then, and none of them really fit. They wouldn’t understand her hesitancy, nor her unwillingness to box herself in.
There's a smile in Margaery's voice when she speaks, and Sansa can see it clearly in her mind. "I shan't breathe a word."
"Thank you..." Sansa knows that she shouldn't ask, but she feels like they're sharing a secret now, and the words just sort of tumble from her mouth without bidding. "Does your brother know about you?"
Margaery laughs. "Loras? The only reason I spend any time with them at all these days is because they can't go to functions together, Stannis Baratheon won't allow it and goodness knows we're all impossibly busy these days."
Everything freezes, and Sansa thinks she can hear a ringing in her ears. She'd been right, holy shit, she'd been right. She hadn't been reading into subtext like Arya kept insisting that she had been for years now. The realization is enough to make her start to talk, quickly, rapidly, not quite following the line of her thinking until she realizes that she's saying. "Renly is... oh my god."
"What?"
"I guess I would have never thought," Sansa hedges, wishing she hadn't said anything at all. She leans back in her uncomfortable desk chair. "My sister's in the national fencing tournament finals," she adds, pulling a string of something distracting and certainly not Renly Baratheon's sex life (which, as it happens, she's coming to realize she has spent entirely too long thinking about as it is). "The matches start at one..." she bites her lip, wondering if maybe this is too much. Her dad is there, after all, and probably Jon and his weirdo girlfriend. She doesn't think Bran or Rickon are well enough to make the trip, if her mother's email (the only one she's bothered to respond to all morning) is anything to go by. She's under instruction to take video of Arya's matches.
"Why Sansa, are you asking me to be your date?"
It isn't that, really, it's just that Sansa wants to see her again. When she's sober, because she wants to know if it was all just a stupid, drunken thing, or if this is something that she actually wants. The anxiety of knowing that even debating it is just making it more and more obvious that it is exactly what she was is almost overpowering. She's not exactly good at lying to herself.
"I um... maybe?" She hesitates, and then adds, "If you're not busy?"
"I'll come get you, if that's okay?"
"That'd be wonderful."
And Sansa Stark certainly does not sigh happily when she hangs up her phone and shuts down her computer.
-
Margaery appears at her door at twelve-fifteen bearing an obnoxiously large umbrella. Her sandals are absolutely soaked as she leans the umbrella against the wall outside Sansa's apartment door and she squelches into the apartment when Sansa opens door.
"I take it's still raining?" Sansa asks with a raised eyebrow.
"No, It’s definitely progressed passed a simple rain and into a monsoon," Margaery laughs, squelching a little bit as she stands on Sansa’s doormat and squeezes water from her hair. "I haven't seen rains like this outside of the Reach in years."
Sansa shrugs, rain is something that she’s used to, after all. Most northerners are. When it isn’t snowing on the moors, it’s raining and raining steadily. "I'm more used to snow, honestly." There’s a moment when she wonders if maybe she’s being too… she doesn’t even know, snotty maybe? She knows who the Tyrells are, naturally, their matriarch is a truly terrifying woman that Sansa’s met once before. She knows that people here, in King’s Landing, and places like the Reach are not used to snow at all and she’s always found southorner’s reactions to the snow to be absolutely hilarious.
Margaery leans in, all toothy smile and shining eyes and catches Sansa’s hand within her own. "It's no wonder Wolfgirl is your favorite song, is it?" she rocks back on squelchy heels. "It could be about you."
In that moment, Sansa says something that she regrets as soon as she says it, but it just sort of comes out. Margaery puts her at ease in some ways, but makes Sansa impossibly nervous and just a little giggly in many others. "I've been using ‘Wolfgirl’ as a username online for years now - Starks, you know?"
"I do," Margaery nods. She looks pensive for a moment, tapping her chin. Her feet squelch on the floor and she takes half a step toward Sansa. "Sansa, when you mentioned that rosenstag was your favorite band, do you do any um... Internet stuff?"
"Of course not." She says it a little too quickly, and she looks down when she says it. It is obvious then, to anyone with eyes, that she's lying through her teeth. She can tell by the way that Margaery's eyes narrow that she's probably put the Wolfgirl comment together with a non-admission about her online activities.
Why can't she just go to watch Arya fight with swords with Margaery? Why does her stupid story have to make this all so complicated? All she wants to do is see if whatever had transpired between them could happen again, and if she wanted it to. She wants to know Margaery; she wants to understand how she works.
"Would it matter if I did?" she asks, wincing when she looks up to meet Margaery's gaze.
Margaery shrugs. "Not really," she looks a little guilty when she adds. "I keep an eye on the message boards, make sure that no one's getting to close to the truth, you know? There's this story that's been coming out and I did a stupid thing and linked it to Loras."
Sansa closes her eyes and wishes for a quiet, painless death. "Please tell me that they never actually read it," she breathes. "Please."
“Oh…” Margaery says. “Oh my… You wrote it.”
Raising a hand up to rub at the back of her neck, Sansa flushes. Her cheeks are almost as red as her hair, she’s sure. “Maybe,” she says, looking away, her hand still caught up on the nape of her neck. It is not that she wants to deny it, but more that she wants to delay the inevitable. Margaery is clearly up on the bandom, to some extent, she’d figure it out eventually. It was like taking a bandaid off, best do it all at once and not prolong the pain. Or the embarrassment, in this case.
Margaery marches up to Sansa and pokes her in the shoulder. “Put it back up!” she demands. She looks a bit sheepish, and Sansa is struck by how completely and utterly taken she is with Margaery. This isn’t like before, when it had felt like too much, a kiss at a party turned into several and the expectation of a relationship that Sansa hadn’t wanted. No, this feels good, it feels organic and it warms Sansa’s heart in a way that she had never expected. “It’s brilliant.”
And Sansa’s cheeks burn red for a reason entirely different from her own embarrassment over what she’d written about Margaery’s brother and her father’s best friend’s youngest brother. She looks down at Margaery’s expectant face and her demanding finger. “Do you really think so?”
A nod. “I do,” she says.
There’s something about that the way that Margaery’s looking at her that makes Sansa feel at ease enough to confirm that she had. She tells Margaery about her writing process and how she’d gotten the idea for Love is a Battlefield in the first place (Arya had been on a Seven Kingdoms kick and had spent entirely too much time telling Sansa about the historical figures and the war and how their family fit into the whole thing).
“So you wrote it for your little sister?” Margaery clarifies as they slip into the stands next to Jon and his weird red-headed girlfriend some forty-five minutes later. Her expression is serious, her eyes fixed on Sansa’s face.
Jon is apparently trying to grow a beard and it looks hideous. Barely suppressing a giggle at his half-assed mustache, Sansa smiles politely at him and then turns her full attention back to Margaery. It isn’t like Arya’s even up right now, she can get away with being a little rude. “Sort of,” she confesses. “I had actually written a paper on historical queer relationships for my Sexual History of Westeros class and it sort of… took on a life of its own.”
Margaery tilts her head towards Sansa. “That was a fun class, wasn’t it? Professor Lannister was excellent.”
“He really was,” Sansa agrees, not wanting to go into the fact that he’d always been an absolute gentleman to her when she’d gone to see him with questions about her research, despite coming off as a total letch to the rest of the class. She’d never explicitly told him what she was writing, but she got a sense that a guy who boasted that he’d made the ‘historical eight’ one day at the beginning of class before launching into a lecture about women’s rights and the development of early feminist movements in King’s Landing and in other larger cities throughout Westeros wasn’t really in any position to judge her for her inspiration.
Smiling at Margaery, Sansa turns her attention back to the arena floor. She’s halfway to cursing herself forgetting that Margaery was still at university, just a year ahead of her. They’d discussed it the previous evening at length, listening to Renly and Loras sing and then demanding that they buy them drinks afterward. Margaery just seems so much more worldly.
Glancing past Margaery’s smiling face, she can see Jon and his odd girlfriend looking at them oddly. “Oh!” Sansa covers, pretending like she hadn’t been very pointedly ignoring Jon and his terrible mustache. “Jon, Ygritte, this is Margaery Tyrell, Margaery, this is my cousin Jon and his girlfriend.”
They exchange pleasantries and soon Margaery’s fingers are curled around Sansa’s as Arya sizes up her truly gigantic opponent. There are stories written about such battles, stories that Sansa has read many times over to Arya when she was little and Sansa was just learning how to read. Arya fights like a demon, and the whoop of joy that escapes Sansa’s lips when Arya’s foil hits home and scores her the winning point is enough to drive all the panic from her mind over the story and Margaery and how the in the seven hells she’s ever going to explain it to fans of the story.
That comes later, with Arya flipped on her bed, beer on one hand and championship cup in the other. Sansa’s curled in her uncomfortable desk chair, staring at the author’s note that she’s written out and is contemplating putting up with the story.
“I still think that you should just tell them that you met the band and you feel super weirded out to have your story up there,” Arya says, rolling into her side and regarding Sansa with a critical gaze. “Renly Baratheon… who would have thought…”
“I can’t just say that,” Sansa replies, correcting a typo and moving her cursor over. “They’re obviously under instructions to keep their identities secret because of why Renly’s brother is.”
“The way dad talks, he’ll be out of a job soon enough,” Arya mumbles, drinking her beer. “Still don’t see why you can’t just tell them.”
“Because then they’d want to know more! And I can’t tell them more! I can’t say oh yes, my father is Eddard Stark and he’s the PM’s leading advisor and this one night he asked me to some hoity-toity to do and somehow I managed to run into my horrible little shit of an ex-boyfriend and befriend Loras Tyrell. Who, it turns out, is the rose in rosenstag.” She’s getting increasingly more and more hysterical and Arya’s just laughing.
Arya might also be a little shit.
“You know,” Arya says, rolling over. “I just got that joke.”
“What joke?”
“The rosenstag one. The old symbol for house Baratheon is a stag, right? And the Tyrells are flower people in every sense of the word if your new friend Margaery is anything to go by.” She frowns. “I think it said in my history text that the Tyrells were roses.”
“They were,” Sansa replies. That had hit her as soon as she’d seen Renly and Loras sing Wolfgirl. She’d asked Margaery, who’d shrugged and leaned in closer, smiling prettily and asking Sansa questions about school and what she’s studying. Margaery is studying politics and women’s studies, and Sansa’s a little jealous that she gets to take more than one class with Professor Lannister.
“And they’re like, actually gay?”
“I guess so.”
“That is so weird. You might have the best gaydar ever, San.”
-
Love is a Battlefield – Author’s note: So sorry for taking this down guys, something’s come up in real life that made me want to have this story not be searchable for a while. I’m putting it up now at the behest of some super excellent people (you know who you are) but be advised that I'll be putting on private again in about a week. --WG23
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