Jon/Sansa - The Time Traveller’s Wife AU
Written/made for @mollyraesly for @jonsaexchange‘s most recent event - Inspired by film. I was definitely planning on making it much, much longer and might actually expand on this idea in the future - very sorry that I couldn’t do it in time, but some medical issues snuck up on me for long enough for me to not be able to do it. Hope you enjoy it still! ♡
Being sent back into the past – his own past or other people’s, it didn’t matter, it was a pain all the same – with no regulation and no clear intent on anyone’s part had always been confusing. Jon had learnt to leave with it for the lack of better options, but that didn’t make it any less painful when he looked into Sansa’s eyes and, for the first time in his life, realised that she had no idea who he was.
Everything else felt familiar, of course, as usual. This was the field that stretched in front of their childhood home and Sansa and Arya had been playing hide and seek – he could remember the time when Sansa had disappeared for a few hours that day and had talked about meeting a man that no one else had ever saw and suddenly it all made sense and Jon would have really rather liked this situation better if he’d been able to put it together sooner. As it were, “Hello, Sansa,” was all he could say, still too dizzy to remember that he wasn’t supposed to have this kind of knowledge.
The girl in front of him – no older than ten, if he remembered correctly (he always did), froze. “Hello. Are you lost?”
“No,” he said, but it made no difference – she was already calling for Robb to come over and this had all already happened, of course, and he knew that he would be gone by the time Robb actually arrived, but still, the realisation didn’t escape him – in a way, this was the first time Sansa had ever met him. A few days later, Ned Stark would come home with an orphan in need of a home and she would learn his name and it would be years before they’d both connect the dots, but now, as time and space warped around him again, the significance of it weighed down on him all the same.
“It was the field again, 1993 this time.”
Jon’s smile was just a tad apologetic. He always was when it came to this and while Sansa understood - if she were to ever describe it to someone, she doubted that anyone else would be used to their husband vanishing into the past on random intervals - she wished he wouldn’t bother. Not when it usually involved the creation of some of her most precious memories.
Living in stolen moments, Sansa had found, had its perks.
She remembered when she’d been a child, back in that farm in the middle of nowhere where she’d spent half her life so far; all the times she’d thought of everything waiting for her. She’d got it, eventually, even if it hadn’t gone exactly as expected, with her move to a city and the writing career that had followed having a much more turbulent beginning than the one she had hoped for, and she had not-so-vaguely thought of the love she could find there. Again, she had, just— it hadn’t been quite what she’d expected.
Sansa had never been fond of surprises and Jon Snow, whom she’d grown up with and who had simultaneously then proceeded to visit one way or another thorough her entire life had definitely been a surprise. It hadn’t been a welcome one at first – not with it being unexpected and messy and not something either of them knew how to control – and it had taken some getting used to, but eventually, Sansa had come to love it precisely because of that.
They’d done it all backwards, that was all, and the fact that they’d managed to meet halfway had made them both happier than she’d dared to imagine.
