Her hand lingers on the door handle, the cold metal chilling her fingers. A shiver runs involuntarily down her spine, nothing to do with the winter winds echoing the halls.

She scolds herself mentally. She's faced Ramsey, and Joffrey, and Queen Cersei herself.

How hard can this be?

Squaring her shoulders, Sansa pushes open the door and steps into the room, unsure of what she'll find - or even what she hopes is inside.

The bed is empty, the furs undisturbed and still tucked into the straw mattress beneath, and for a moment Sansa's heart falters in fear. What if what she saw was just wishful thinking? What if the girl who collapsed outside the gates, a crumpled heap of limbs and rags, isn't who she hopes- needs- her to be?

There's a creak, a slight shift in the wind, and Sansa's eyes are drawn to the source.

A dark figure stands at the window, cutting a stark contrast to the snow backdrop outside. She's turned away, but what Sansa can see makes her heart ache. Despite the freezing wind curling in from outside, the girl stands unshivering, bare of furs or covers. Her limbs are thin - starved - and the borrowed nightdress hangs limply off her shoulders.

Even so, all it takes is one look for Sansa's hopes to be affirmed.

The other girl doesn't appear to have heard the door open. Her fingers drum a nervous rhythm against the wooden window frame; her gaze is captivated by something distant on the horizon - maybe the snowfall, or the arrival of white ravens, or perhaps unseeing of any of this winter beauty. Perhaps she's elsewhere, somewhere with flames, and blood, and the screams of a thousand dying souls.

"Margaery?"

At the sound of her voice Margaery flinches, fingers freezing, turning on her heels faster than a bolting deer. Her eyes are wide, frantically searching Sansa's face without a flicker of recognition.

She looks even worse than Sansa imagined. Her hair hasn't seen a comb in weeks, snarled with knots and matted with something that could be mud or blood; the right side is nothing more than a mess of charred ends. Someone has attempted to wash her, but it does little to change the shadows under her eyes, or the bruises blooming on her ashen skin.

It doesn't hide the angry black-red burns crawling all the way up her right arm and neck, curling across her skin like some furious dragon of old.

"Margaery?" She speaks softer this time, arms held out in front of her in what she hopes is a peaceful gesture. "It's me. It's Sansa."

Something flickers behind Margaery's eyes, and a little of that terrifying vacancy drains away from her face. "Sansa."

Her voice breaks, rough and ragged as if from screaming, and something in Sansa breaks with it.

The woman before her is simply that: broken. Gone is the sharp wit, the ambitious ruthlessness - the kind softness she saved just for Sansa, in lingered glances and touches, in full red roses a thousand times more beautiful than anything Loras could give her, left on window sills in the wake of intimate nights. The woman who taught her so much, who Sansa admired more than any man-

There is no trace of the things which made Sansa fall in love. The carefully guarded facade of girlish innocence is absent, yet there is no hint of that calculating sharpness Sansa always knew lay hidden beneath. This is not the woman she met so many years ago in the deceptive warmth of the south, just as she is not the naive summer child who delighted in lemon cakes and the attention of pretty boys. Both of them have been torn apart, destroyed by fire and ice.

Only- Sansa was reforged stronger in the flames.

Margaery seems frozen, unsure, so Sansa closes the distance between them. It feels so natural - more so than breathing - to fall into these arms again. Before, Sansa clung to her like a lifeline, the single, truthful anchor in a storm of deceit and betrayal; now Margaery clings to her with similar desperation, a frosted rose reaching for warmth.

After what seems like a lifetime, Sansa forces herself to pull away, moving to lace her fingers with Margaery's. They feel like ice, rough and raw with burns which pain Sansa just to touch.

"You must be freezing," she whispers - with nothing but the sound of the wind echoing in the room, the air is strangely intimate, quiet. She slips her outer fur off her shoulders, draping it around Margaery's frame. Underneath the dark material she seems even smaller, but she curls her fingers around it and draws it closer to her heart.

"Thank you," she nods hesitantly.

Sansa wants nothing more than to throw her arms around Margaery and never let go. To ask her what really happened - how did she escape the Sept? How did she come to Winterfell? Questions buzz on the tip of her tongue, but she swallows them down.

"I thought you were dead," she settles on eventually, brushing her fingers over Margaery's scarred knuckles - whether to comfort the other woman or reassure herself that she really is there, she isn't sure.

Margaery's eyes are fixated on their interlaced hands, as if she needs visual confirmation of their contact - as if, any second now, she could vanish like smoke on the wind.

"Two months..." Sansa breathes, reaching up to brush a stray hair away. The burnt, uneven ends fall across Margaery's face, obscuring the scars. She flinches, but Sansa continues the movment, tucking the strands behind Margaery's ear. The girl in front of her is beautiful, scars or no scars, and Sansa can feel every fluttering feeling she learnt to ignore and suppress rising to the surface.

"I'm...sorry, Sansa."

Sansa blinks, sure she hasn't heard correctly. "You're sorry? Why?"

Margaery shrugs helplessly, her eyes reverting to the floor. "For this. For everything. For not defending you from Cersei-"

"No one can stand up to Cersei, Margaery."

She remembers the last time she saw her lover, distant snatches of her during the ceremony in which she would promise herself to another for eternity. She remembers the fleeting moment of euphoric satisfaction at watching Joffrey suffer an excruciating death, less than half of what he deserved. She remembers the ensuing panic and chaos, being tugged away from the crowd-

And across the entire writhing courtyard, lit by the midday sun and bedecked in her wedding finery, was Margaery, more like a goddess than ever; and for a moment Sansa's feet had faltered, a voice in her head screaming stay, stay for her.

As if she had known exactly what Sansa was thinking, Margaery had mouthed to her: Run.

And that was what she had done. With Cersei's cries for her head following, she had fled for the Vale with Littlefinger without looking back, and finally back to the home she left so long ago, forging a path as best she could without the one person she envisioned doing so with - because she was a traitor to the crown, and Margaery wore that crown upon her head.

"If anything, I should be sorry- for leaving you behind. I left you to burn."

"That is a gross exaggeration," Margaery scoffs, and for a moment she almost sounds like herself, full of authority and underhanded scorn at the world. "You know that's not what happened."

"It still feels like it. Don't you remember what we used to dream?"

Curled under the covers, limbs entwined and fingers laced much like they are now - Sansa recalls their fantasisies of the future, their future, with crystal clarity, despite locking them behind steadfast gates in her mind so long ago.

"Where would we live?" Margaery had asked once, voice a mix between giggle and conspiratorial whisper.

"You always promised I would enjoy Highgarden," Sansa replied, tracing a finger along Margaery's collarbone.

"You would. On summer evenings, you can stand on the tops of the towers and see for miles - and when the sunset hits the flower gardens just right, the horizon seems to blaze."

Sansa always loved when Margaery talked of her home - the way her voice grew soft and reverent, like tale of the joys of Highgarden were a lovingly told secret.

"It sounds beautiful."

"Not as much as you."

Sansa giggled, blushing brighter than the rose resting on her dressing table.

"Or maybe we could journey North," Margaery suggested, and the almost serious, wistful tone in her voice made Sansa's heart flutter. "I've never seen snow, and I imagine the forests are a thing of beauty."

She wonders what Margaery thinks of the North, now that she's here. Did she come here to find Sansa, or simply because it was the furthest place from Cersei's influence?

Does she wish she burned in the flames like her family, or does she see that tiny glimmering hope for the future that suddenly blazes before Sansa's vision?

She imagines it now, and for once the future doesn't seem as unrealistic or out of reach as a dream. She is the lady of Winterfell, her brother is King in the North - and Northerners have always been more accepting than the politically-minded Southerners. Love is love, and any source of light and warmth should be cherished to weather the ice and dark.

Jon would certainly understand; she doesn't doubt that in a society devoid of female companionship, many of the men turn to each other.

Standing with Margaery's familiar warmth in her arms, she allows herself to envision it. Walking through the courtyard, hand entwined with Margaery's. Long winter nights spent talking by the fire, intimate moments snatched by candle light. She imagines a silver rose wrapped around her finger; Margaery draped in furs, the symbol of a wolf hand-stitched and emblazoned upon her dress.

Margaery looks up from her hands, eyes shattered and hopeless but still so achingly beautiful, and Sansa can't help the small smile which pulls at her mouth as she presses her lips to Margaery's forehead.

"Everything's going to be okay. I promise."