Chapter Text
Sansa stared at her schedule in dismay. Math was her worst subject, and she had been hoping that she’d get Baelish again. Baelish was never too hard on her when it came to grading her assignments, and even though it made her skin crawl, she knew that all she had to do to nudge her grade point average up a little higher, was unbutton an extra button on the shirt of her school uniform, lean forward, and giggle at his terrible attempts at humour.
Maybe I can get myself transferred to his class? she wondered in desperation, staring at the initials on her time table as if the power of her mind could somehow change the little ‘SB’ into a ‘PB’.
SB. Stannis Baratheon. The Robot.
Stannis Baratheon was the vice principal of King’s Landing Academy, and probably the strictest teacher in the entire school. Robb had suffered through one of his math classes a couple of years ago, and Sansa remembered how he’d told Jon that Stannis routinely made students cry during exam season, and took pride in never giving the top grade unless it was thoroughly earned. Only the most dedicated nerds ever got the coveted 100% grade in one of Mr. Baratheon’s exams.
It really was so odd that he was so strict. His brother, Joffrey’s dad, was the principal, and he was not like Stannis at all. When she had been with Joffrey, Robert had always been so nice, and he was still nice to her whenever they ran into each other at school. Stannis, however, had never acted any differently towards her whether they were at dinner parties together or at school. He had never really seemed to notice her at all, in fact. It was therefore highly unlikely that he would give her any special treatment.
Sansa sighed and turned her time table over so that she wouldn’t have to look at the initials anymore. They weren’t going to change, and though she was definitely going to try, she doubted she would be able to get herself transferred.
I’m doomed.
***
“I love the smell of freshmen in the morning,” Baelish said, inhaling deeply as he walked into the teacher’s lounge, heading straight for the coffee machine. “What a delicious crop of fresh young roses.”
“You’re disgusting,” Stannis muttered, feeling as if he should answer the man since they were the only two people in the lounge. Stannis was sitting in the best armchair, solving the crossword before one of the English teachers got a hold of the paper. It was a ritual Stannis enjoyed at the start of the day. It helped put him in a sharp frame of mind.
“Why be a teacher if you can’t enjoy the perks?” Baelish said unrepentantly as he poured himself coffee. “I mean, let’s be honest, it’s not like we’re in it for the money.”
“We’re ‘in it’ to teach the coming generations important skills and prepare them for the struggles of academia and the job market,” Stannis said, pressing his lips together tightly and glaring at Baelish. And from what I’ve heard, you don’t need the salary we pay you, he added silently, thinking about the rumours about a secret nightclub that had reached his ears.
Baelish waved his coffee cup at him and rolled his eyes. “You need to lighten up. Seriously, when you go to your first class, try looking at the girls instead of the white board or your computer screen.” He took a sip, frowned, and added more milk. “You like redheads, don’t you? Well, you’ve got Sansa Stark this year, and she is just -” Baelish closed his eyes and made moaned like he’d just tasted some gastronomic delight.
Stannis clenched his jaw tightly and glared more viciously at his colleague, hoping that the ferocity of his expression would disguise the fact that heat was creeping up from his neck to his cheeks. How on earth had Baelish managed to mention the name of the one student that had ever made Stannis look twice?
But the glare did not seem to deter Baelish.
“I lived next door to her mother when we were kids, you know, and I never thought I’d meet a prettier girl than Cat Tully. Honestly, you would not have believed the tits on her. And between you and me, she was rather delicious between the sheets.” Baelish waggled his eyebrows obscenely. “But Sansa has her beat. She even turned eighteen last May - I checked - so you don’t have to feel guilty about appreciating her pretty red hair.”
Stannis grimaced and hid behind his newspaper. He did not want to listen to Baelish brag about his past sexual conquests. Nor did he want to think about Sansa’s hair. It wasn’t the red colour that had made him look twice at her. After the debacle with Melisandre, Stannis really should have been turned off the colour rather than attracted to it.
No, the reason he had noticed Sansa Stark was far more embarrassing.
She had dated his nephew two years ago, and attended several family dinners Robert had thrown. At the very first one she had worn a very pretty dress, but Stannis was used to pretty women in pretty dresses. The dress had not been what had caught Stannis’ attention.
He had gone for a walk in the garden after dinner so that he wouldn’t get stuck listening to Cersei and Robert snipe at each other, and he had seen her. She had been crying very quietly, shaking with the effort of keeping herself silent. He had never seen anything more heart-breaking, and for a second he had considered going to her. Comforting her.
He had felt like a young boy again, faced with an injured goshawk.
Joffrey had appeared before Stannis had been able to do anything. She had flinched away from the boy’s touch, but eventually she had gone inside with him. It had been very clear to Stannis that Joffrey was the reason she had been crying.
Stannis had started to pay close attention to Sansa after that, needing to make sure that Joffrey was not mistreating her. However, the more he’d paid attention, the more he’d started to feel embarrassingly aware of her. Aware of things that a man in his position had no business being aware of. Like how gracefully she moved, the scent of her perfume, the precise shade of her favourite lipstick.
He had also noticed that she was uncommonly kind, though in many ways she was a typical spoiled teenage girl. He remembered one dinner when she had gone from worrying about a drop of red wine ruining her dress to cleverly distracting Joffrey when he had been about to start bullying Tommen.
That was yet another thing he’d noticed: her cleverness. There was a spark of intellect in her vivid blue eyes that she always tried to hide around Joffrey, but she could not hide it from Stannis.
The more Stannis had noticed her, the more he had been forced to hide his growing contempt for Joffrey.
It hadn’t been jealousy. Stannis would never sink that low. Joffrey was just a horrible excuse for a human being. A horrible excuse for a human being with a girlfriend he did not deserve or appreciate. That was all.
She could do so much better.
The day Sansa and Joffrey had broken up had been a very good day. Stannis had told himself that now that she was safe he’d be able to stop thinking up increasingly outlandish ways to get rid of his nephew, and move on with his life.
Dinner at Robert’s became again the slow torment they had always been without Sansa there to distract him. Robert and Cersei raced each other to the bottom of one bottle of wine after another, Tywin shot barbs about professions that suited ‘real men’ at him, Jaime did little but smirk in that smug way of his, and Tyrion’s ‘wit’ never failed to make Stannis want to grind his teeth. To top it all off, Renly could always be counted upon to make unnecessarily cruel comments about their various acquaintances.
All these things had been more bearable when Sansa had been around.
“All right there, VP?” Baelish asked, sipping his coffee and raising a brow.
Stannis rustled his newspaper and scowled. “Must you speak?”
Baelish didn’t answer. The other teachers had started to file into the lounge, yawning and making a beeline for the coffee machine just as Baelish had.
***
The silence in Stannis’ classroom was absolute. Sansa could hear the boy in front of her breathing, and every time someone turned a page, it sounded like a bomb was going off. But mostly Sansa heard people’s pencils scratching away. Her own pencil was silent.
She looked up at the teacher’s desk, feeling wretched. Stannis Baratheon sat there, his back rigid, his eyes sweeping over the students as they struggled with the fiendishly difficult pop quiz he had sprung on them as soon as they had walked through the door.
Who sets an exam in the first period of the first day of school? Sansa wondered, her palms sweating uncomfortably as she tried to make sense of the first problem. She didn’t understand it at all. I’m going to be the worst in the class. I’m going to have to get a tutor. Dad is going to give me his disappointed speech, and Arya’s going to be so obnoxious…
She looked at the next problem. There was something familiar about it, and Sansa tried her best, but halfway through she started to doubt herself, and she gave up. Whenever she wasn’t completely sure she could get it right, it just didn’t seem worth it to keep trying.
The third problem was a total mystery to her.
She looked at Stannis again, wanting to vent some of her frustration by giving him the evil eye, but nearly stopped breathing when she saw that he was staring right at her. His dark blue eyes were intense and a little scary, so she hurriedly looked back down at her exam paper, her heart racing.
Problem four was actually something she could do, but the rest of the problems were all completely impossible. She tried to start solving a few of them, but she always ran into trouble and stopped halfway through.
When the bell rang, she felt like the stupidest girl in the world. She handed the exam paper in without looking at Stannis, and practically ran to join the stampede of students that were leaving the classroom.
***
Grading Sansa Stark’s exam was incredibly frustrating. She left nearly half the problems completely untouched, and never finished the problems she did attempt to solve, even though she was usually on precisely the right track, and often only a step or two away from the right result. There was only a single problem in the entire exam that she solved to completion.
If this had been her final exam, he would have been forced to fail her.
It just didn’t make any sense. He had set challenging problems, yes, but they were from last year’s syllabus. He had just wanted to see how much attention his students had paid last year, and how much they had forgotten over the summer. It would help him estimate how much time he would need to waste reminding them of things they were already supposed to know.
Apparently, Sansa had forgotten very much over the summer. Either that, or she should never have passed her last final exam with a 78% grade. Baelish’s exams were easier than Stannis’, but surely not by this large a margin.
With a sigh, Stannis got up from the desk in his study. He stretched and walked over to the window, feeling restless and irritated.
She can do better, he thought, frowning at his ocean view. I know she can.