Chapter Text
Jaime Lannister was going to die of boredom.
Not the dramatic, sword-falling, last-stand kind of death. The slow, suffocating kind that came from sitting on a white leather bench watching models strut past in outfits that looked like a peacock had been murdered by a geometry professor. The music was too loud. The room smelled like expensive perfume and desperation. And somewhere to his left, a woman with a clipboard was having a quiet meltdown about a missing heel.
He pulled out his phone.
[@jaime.lannister posted to his story: a video panning across the runway, lingering on a model wearing what appeared to be a feathered headdress the size of a small planet.
The caption read: when you have a 9am board meeting but need to look like an angry ostrich 🦢]
He posted it without a second thought. His followers—all 2.3 million of them—would eat it up. They always did. Billionaire tech founder with a smart mouth and no filter: it was a brand, at this point.
"You're not even watching," Tyrion said from beside him, not looking up from his own phone.
"I'm watching. I'm watching a woman in a bird costume walk past a bunch of people who are pretending this is art."
"It is art."
"It's a bird costume."
"It's fashion."
Jaime snorted and refreshed his Instagram. The story already had forty thousand views. Comments were rolling in: lmaooo he's so real for this and jaime lannister fashion critic era and who let him in the front row. He smirked and pocketed his phone.
"Father wants the merger wrapped up by end of quarter," Tyrion said, shifting seamlessly from fashion to business the way he always did. "Which means you need to stop posting bird slander and start reviewing the due diligence."
"I reviewed it."
"You skimmed it."
"Skimming is reviewing."
"Skimming is how we get sued." Tyrion finally looked up, his mismatched eyes sharp. "Cersei's already sniffing around the acquisition. She thinks LionGate should be moving into biotech, not logistics."
"Cersei can suck my—"
"Gentlemen." A voice cut through the thumping bass, smooth and amused. "This is a fashion show, not a boardroom."
Jaime looked up.
She was standing in the aisle, one hand on her hip, her dark hair falling in waves over bare shoulders. Her dress was emerald green, backless, and fit her like it had been painted on. Her eyes—sharp, knowing, the color of good whiskey—flicked between him and Tyrion with the easy confidence of someone who was used to being the most interesting person in any room.
Margaery Tyrell.
Jaime had seen her before. Everyone had seen her before. She was the face of The Rose House, the granddaughter of the legendary Olenna Tyrell, and according to the gossip blogs, she'd just been named head of social media for the entire fashion empire. Her Instagram—@margaery.tyrell—was a masterclass in curated perfection: rooftop parties, designer fittings, the occasional strategic bikini shot that broke the internet.
"You look like you'd rather be anywhere else," she said, her gaze settling on Jaime.
"I would rather be waterboarded."
Tyrion sighed. "My brother. Ever the charmer."
Margaery laughed—a real laugh, not the polite tinkle that most socialites deployed. "I'm Margaery Tyrell."
"I know who you are."
"And you're Jaime Lannister. The tech billionaire who hates fashion week."
"I don't hate fashion week. I hate this particular fashion show."
"The headdress?"
"The headdress."
"It's a statement piece."
"It's a statement that the designer hates women."
She laughed again, and something in her expression shifted—curiosity, maybe, or calculation. "Buy me a drink?"
"You're at a fashion show. There's free champagne everywhere."
"I didn't ask for champagne. I asked for a drink." She tilted her head, her dark hair sliding over one shoulder. "There's a bar around the corner. Terrible lighting, worse music, but the whiskey is decent."
Jaime looked at her for a long moment. She was beautiful. She was clearly trouble. And she was looking at him like she'd already decided how the night was going to end.
He stood up.
"Tyrion, I'm leaving."
"I noticed."
"Review the due diligence."
"I already did. You're welcome."
Jaime ignored him and offered Margaery his arm. She took it, her fingers light on his sleeve, and they walked out of the fashion show together. The cameras caught them—they always caught him—and he knew the photos would be on every gossip blog by morning. Billionaire Playboy Jaime Lannister Steps Out with Fashion Heiress Margaery Tyrell.
Let them talk. He didn't care.
The bar was exactly as she'd described: dim, cramped, smelling of old wood and something that might have been regret. The whiskey was decent. Margaery ordered a double, no ice, and knocked it back like a professional.
"So," she said, setting down her glass. "Tell me something true."
"Something true?"
"Everyone lies at fashion week. It's practically a requirement. Tell me something true about yourself, Jaime Lannister."
He considered the question. Most women asked about his money, his company, his famous family. They didn't ask for truth.
"I hate my job," he said.
"Everyone hates their job."
"I hate it specifically. I'm good at it—I'm very good at it—but I hate it. I hate the meetings and the mergers and the way my father calls me at six in the morning to ask about profit margins."
"Then why do it?"
"Because I'm a Lannister. And Lannisters don't get to do what they want."
She looked at him, her whiskey-colored eyes unreadable. "That's the truest thing anyone's said to me all week."
"What about you? Tell me something true."
She swirled her glass, the amber liquid catching the dim light. "I'm tired of being underestimated. Everyone thinks I'm just a pretty face who got her job because of her grandmother. No one sees the work."
"I see it."
"Do you?"
"Your Instagram. It's strategic. Every post, every story, every brand partnership. You're building something."
Margaery's smile flickered—surprise, maybe, or satisfaction. "You've been looking at my Instagram?"
"Everyone's been looking at your Instagram."
"But you've been paying attention."
He didn't deny it. She leaned closer, her knee brushing his under the bar, and Jaime felt the familiar pull of attraction. It had been a while. The last few months had been nothing but work and more work and the occasional grim dinner with his father. He'd almost forgotten what this felt like—the spark, the possibility, the moment before everything got complicated.
"I'm not looking for anything serious," she said.
"Neither am I."
"I don't do relationships."
"I don't do feelings."
"Good." She smiled, slow and knowing. "Then we understand each other."
They left the bar together. Her Tribeca penthouse was all white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, the Manhattan skyline glittering beyond the glass. She didn't offer him a tour. She just pulled him into her bedroom and pushed him onto the bed and climbed on top of him like she'd been planning it all night.
The sex was good. It was very good. It was the kind of sex that didn't mean anything, which was exactly what he wanted.
Afterward, she lay beside him, her dark hair spread across the pillow, and scrolled through her phone. "You're trending," she said.
"Am I?"
"Your ostrich post. Two hundred thousand views." She turned the screen toward him. "You're a menace."
"So I've been told."
She set down her phone and rolled toward him, her hand tracing down his chest. "Same time next week?"
"I'll check my calendar."
"Don't check your calendar. Just say yes."
He looked at her—beautiful, ambitious, utterly uninterested in anything serious—and felt something loosen in his chest. This was easy. This was simple. This was exactly what he needed.
"Yes," he said.
She smiled and kissed him, and the night stretched on.
The pub was called The Drunken Wolf, and Sansa Stark had chosen it for exactly three reasons: it was three blocks from her shitty Brooklyn sublet, it served a decent pint of cider, and absolutely no one from the fashion world would be caught dead here.
She was on her second pint now, the condensation beading on the glass, her phone propped against a napkin dispenser. The pub was quiet—a few regulars at the bar, a couple arguing in the corner booth, a dog sleeping under a stool. The kind of place that didn't care who you were or what you were wearing.
Sansa was wearing jeans and a jumper she'd knitted herself, the wool slightly frayed at the cuffs. Not exactly the look she'd worn to her meetings that morning—the sleek black dress, the heels that made her feet ache, the portfolio tucked under her arm like a shield. The meetings had gone well. Better than well. Olenna Tyrell herself had nodded at Sansa's designs and said, "You'll do."
You'll do. From Olenna Tyrell, that was practically a love letter.
So Sansa was celebrating. Alone. Because her brother Robb was stuck in London for another week, and her best friend Jeyne was backpacking through Southeast Asia, and everyone else she knew was either still in London or scattered across the globe. She didn't mind. She'd learned to be alone at Central Saint Martins, where the competition was brutal and the friendships were strategic and the only person you could really count on was yourself.
She scrolled through Instagram, half-watching the stories flicker across her screen. A classmate's graduation photos. A model's behind-the-scenes from Paris Fashion Week. An ad for something called "metabolic coffee" that she scrolled past so fast her thumb cramped.
And then—
[@jaime.lannister posted a photo.]
Sansa sat up straighter, her cider forgotten. She'd followed Jaime Lannister for years—since she was nineteen and procrastinating on a draping project and stumbled across his profile through a suggested follow. He was a tech billionaire, the founder of LionGate Industries, and according to every gossip blog on the internet, he was also a spectacular mess. The drinking. The women. The tabloid photos of him stumbling out of clubs at 4am with models on each arm.
But his Instagram was different. It was funny. Self-deprecating. He posted screenshots of his father's emails with the subject lines blurred out and captions like "urgent" means "i'm bored and want to yell at someone." He posted videos of himself trying to cook and setting off the smoke alarm. He posted stories from fashion shows with commentary so dry it could desiccate a cactus.
The video was from New York Fashion Week. Sansa recognized the venue—she'd been there that morning, sitting in the back row, taking notes on the construction of a bias-cut gown that had made her want to weep with envy. Jaime was in the front row, his camera panning across the runway, lingering on a model in a feathered headdress that looked like a taxidermied ostrich had been glued to a headband.
[The caption read: when you have a 9am board meeting but need to look like an angry ostrich 🦢]
Sansa laughed out loud.
The man at the bar glanced over. She ignored him, clapping a hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking. It wasn't even that funny. It was mildly amusing at best. But she'd been running on adrenaline and anxiety for three days straight, and the laugh burst out of her like a sneeze.
She liked the story. Tapped the heart icon without thinking.
Then froze.
Fuck.
Her thumb hovered over the screen. She could unlike it. She could unlike it right now, and he'd never see it, because he had two million followers and got thousands of likes per story and there was no way he'd notice one random notification from—
She unliked it.
Then locked her phone and dropped it face-down on the sticky wooden table.
"Fuck," she said out loud.
The dog under the stool lifted its head and gave her a look.
"Not you," she told it. "Sorry."
The dog went back to sleep.
Sansa stared at her phone like it had personally betrayed her. She'd been following Jaime Lannister for five years. Five years of lurking, of watching his stories, of occasionally screenshotting his posts and sending them to Jeyne with captions like why is he like this and i hate that he's funny. She'd never interacted. Not once. No likes, no comments, no DMs. She was a ghost, a specter, a silent observer of his chaotic digital life.
And now she'd liked his story.
And unliked it.
Which was somehow worse. A like was casual. A like was nothing. A like-then-unlike was a statement. It was I saw this and I reacted and then I panicked and now I'm overthinking it and please pretend you didn't notice.
She picked up her phone. Unlocked it. Opened Instagram.
The story was still there. The like was gone. No notification. No message. No sign that he'd seen anything.
She exhaled.
"Get a grip," she muttered. "He's a stranger. He's a stranger who posts ostrich memes. You're a grown woman with a fashion degree and a job at The Rose House. Act like it."
She finished her cider. Ordered another. The bartender, a tired-looking man with a beard that had seen better days, brought it over without comment.
"Thanks," she said.
He nodded and retreated.
Sansa opened Instagram again. Not to check Jaime's story—she'd already seen it, already embarrassed herself, already vowed to never interact with his content again. She opened it to check her own profile. @sansa.stark. Three thousand followers. Mostly classmates, a few industry people, some random accounts that had found her through her designs. She posted sparingly: photos of her work, the occasional skyline shot, a video of her knitting that had inexplicably gone semi-viral last year.
She had nothing to be embarrassed about. She was a designer. A good one. She'd just been hired by Olenna Tyrell, the most terrifying woman in fashion. She was allowed to like a stupid Instagram story.
Except she hadn't liked it. She'd liked it and then unliked it. Like a coward.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Robb: how'd the meetings go?
She typed back: got the job. celebrating alone at a pub in brooklyn like a normal person.
Robb: proud of you. don't get too drunk.
Sansa: no promises.
Robb: that's my sister.
She smiled and set down her phone. The pub was getting busier—a group of students had claimed a table near the window, their laughter loud and unselfconscious. Sansa watched them for a moment, feeling a pang of something that might have been loneliness or might have been nostalgia. She'd been one of them once. Before Central Saint Martins. Before the pressure and the competition and the slow realization that talent wasn't enough—you needed connections, you needed luck, you needed a kind of ruthless determination that didn't come naturally to a girl from Winterfell.
But she'd made it. She was here. She had a job at The Rose House, and she was going to be brilliant, and she was not going to think about Jaime Lannister or his stupid ostrich post or the way her heart had skipped when she'd accidentally liked his story.
She finished her cider and paid her tab and walked home through the cold Brooklyn night, her hands shoved in her pockets, her breath fogging in the air.
In her sublet—a tiny studio with a leaky radiator and a view of a brick wall—she changed into pajamas and checked her phone one last time.
[@jaime.lannister had posted another story. A photo of a whiskey glass, the amber liquid catching the light. The caption: better than champagne.]
She didn't like it. She didn't unlike it. She just stared at it for a long moment, her thumb hovering over the screen, and then she closed the app and plugged in her phone and went to sleep.
Tomorrow, she'd be a junior designer at The Rose House. Tomorrow, she'd be professional and polished and completely unbothered by billionaires with Instagram accounts.
Tonight, she dreamed of ostriches.