Title: The Stranger Waits
Author:
firedew1Summary: Sansa becomes deathly ill while still a prisoner of the Lannisters. Despairing and with nothing left, she sees it as her way out. But can she still find a reason to live? Set during ACOK.
Rating: T
Warnings: STRONG LANGUAGE. Again.
Pairing: Sansa/Sandor
Length: ~3800 words
Link:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9974451/3/The-Stranger-WaitsDisclaimer: All Game of Thrones characters belong to G.R.R. Martin. Not for profit, just fun.
The following days bled into one another, each one having less meaning than the one before. Seconds lasted hours, the hours minutes, minutes took days. Sansa was unconscious much of the time, and when she wasn’t, she was half out of her mind. Moments when she was coherent were few and fleeting, but they were enough for her to recall the shrill sound of her own voice screaming for her father, her mother, her brothers, even her little sister. She remembered servants holding her down as she shouted madly, cursing the shadow no one could see but her. “Why do you wait? I’m here. I am ready! All you have to do is take me! Why do you keep me here? What more do you want of me?”
Once, maybe twice, the faceless shadow became solid. She only remembered his eyes, smoldering, the color of flint and harder than steel. He towered over her, too massive to be real, too intimidating to ever confide in, but to this face, to him, Sansa could only whisper tearfully, helplessly, “Please … please … I’ll do anything. Just please … make it stop.” Then those same eyes narrowed in undisguised rancor and disappeared as surely as if he had never been there at all.
Swallowed up in the furnace, Sansa remembered the faces of her handmaidens, ripe with knowing and dread, fearful she had finally and permanently cracked. Maybe she had. Maybe he hadn’t been there. Maybe Bethy, the chambermaid, hadn’t been humming the melody of Florian and Jonquil under her breath all day. Maybe Lady hadn’t been curled up at the foot of her bed last night.
Her body met frigid water several times more after that first time. They gave her milk of the poppy for pain and to help her sleep, coriander and another foul tasting concoction to further dampen the fever. Biscuits and the like had quickly turned to boulders in her stomach. She was unable to hold them down, so broth was poured down her throat along with tea fortified with honey, and as the days trudged along, it became glaringly apparent it wouldn’t be enough to sustain her. Sansa grew thinner and thinner.
“What are her chances?” Lord Tyrion had asked one day as Shae alone hovered over her.
The dark-haired woman had looked boldly toward the King’s Hand, more familiar than a servant should dare. “Where there is no will, there is none. She does not fight it. She welcomes it.”
He made a noise of disbelief. “There are any number of windows and balconies in the Red Keep she could have thrown herself off of and saved us all a lot of time. Why wait if she’s so keen to die?”
“Do not presume to know what is in a woman’s heart, my lord. You never know what you may find.”
The dwarf’s shrewd expression echoed her own. “Sound advice.”
Exhausted, Sansa didn’t hear another word, but as the attempts to keep her alive remained as vigorous and unrelenting as ever, it was obvious Lord Tyrion was wagering her despair would be eclipsed by the basic instinct to keep breathing. That alone wasn’t enough for Sansa anymore. She had no fight left, no reason to keep going. The desire had been stripped, cut, whipped, and beaten out of her over time. After all, what was her life worth in a hostile world where she wasn’t wanted?
Eventually, she stopped taking food altogether. Food was brought at every mealtime without fail, and each time Shae, Pycelle, and the others tried to cajole and manipulate her into eating. It was a fruitless exercise. She was typically far beyond hearing them, and even when she did, the deadly heat had left her so frail and often times confused she no longer possessed the wherewithal to respond. She couldn’t speak, so from then on, each bout of fever was endured in unsettling quietude. Her handmaidens fluttered about her while her gaze stayed eerily fixed on her eternal visitor, her body trembling under the strain.
Then, one day, something changed. There was less fussing. No one spoke above a whisper. Her bed was outfitted with softer blankets and extra pillows strategically placed to support her hips and back. Drapes covered the windows. The fire in the hearth and candlelight alone lit her chamber. Early that evening, voices once more slithered in from outside her door to rouse her.
“What do you mean she won’t eat?” Joffrey demanded. The King, flanked by Ser Meryn Trant and the Hound, his Hand, the queen, the Grand Maester-they buzzed around her like flies over a corpse. Why couldn’t they simply leave her be?
“There are a great many other factors to consider, your Highness, but the fact remains: the Lady Sansa’s time draws near,” Pycelle said, his aged countenance almost as pale and drawn as Sansa’s had become.
Upon hearing the maester’s declaration, the Hound’s intense gaze wandered toward her. Then, unnoticed by anyone else, his face fell. As Sansa’s lungs worked exhaustively to simply move up and down, his brow furrowed, and for an instant all his scorn and pent up malice seemed to drain out of him.
I must be a sorry sight indeed, she thought, feeling separate and withdrawn from it all, not at all the preening peacock Arya had often accused her of being. Arya … little Arya Underfoot. That was lifetimes ago. Hers and mine.
The storm clouds returned quickly, however, and the King’s Hound had better things to do than gawk.
“I don’t know how much longer she will last like this. It could be a matter of days or possibly …”
“She will eat or I will make her,” Joffrey said. “I imagine she’ll eat quite willingly if Ser Meryn takes over the task of feeding her.”
Poor Joffrey. About to lose his favorite toy. A macabre sense of delight tiptoed within Sansa’s breast, almost jostling her voice free for a moment, even as visions of Ser Meryn’s grimy fingers prying her jaws open morphed into one of him strangling her. He could do it. Joffrey would command him to do it, if only so he could boast that it was his decision to get rid of her and not have Sansa’s death become generally viewed as a lucky escape. But, for whatever reason, the notion didn’t bother her. The black figure remained in the entry, watching her, a shadow devoid of flesh but somehow comforting in its constancy. All men must die, and someday, Joffrey would too. Sansa was almost sad she wouldn’t be there to see it.
Somewhere within her, a feeling stirred as if to say the choice was still hers.
No, she replied. She was finished. Joffrey would have to find himself a new plaything.
Perhaps due to the somber circumstances, for once the queen seemed as put off by Joffrey’s petulance as everyone else. “I am sure Grand Maester Pycelle will see to it, my dear. Now, why don’t you take Ser Meryn and get in some target practice with that beautiful new crossbow of yours? You will need to hone your skills for when Stannis arrives, and attending sickbeds isn’t a duty fit for a king.”
Joffrey’s wormy lips scrunched into a thoughtful frown. “Of course. She’s just a stupid cow, anyhow. Hardly worth my time.”
“Indeed not,” his mother said, gaze narrowed, with a smile that seemed equal parts artisan’s plaster and contempt. “Why don’t you leave her to us, my love? There’s a good boy. I’ll join you shortly.” With Joffrey gone, she peered into Sansa’s room wearing a scowl. Addressing Tyrion, Cersei’s tone became cutting. “Has there been word from your men? Have they managed to reach Jaime?”
“Not as yet,” he said.
"What do you intend to do, Imp? Leave him to the wolves?”
“Of course not, but the northern army is encamped weeks from here and short of teaching grown men to fly, I have no way of …”
“I might have known not to trust you with this. If it had been left up to me, Jaime would be halfway back to King’s Landing by now.”
“Well, if you’re feeling restless, sweet sister, I am sure there any number of men who can accommodate you in my brother’s absence.”
The hallway filled with the resounding crack of a hand contacting skin. Hard. “Get out of my sight,” the queen seethed. “Both of you.”
There was a long pause where Lord Tyrion tested his jaw, which was rapidly turning bright red. “Come, Pycelle. It is obvious my sister is distraught. Perhaps it’s best we leave her to her grief. Never let it be said that I am not an understanding man.”
“Halfman, you mean,” she spat.
Sansa was doused in heavy silence as Tyrion glared daggers at his sister, and then closed her eyes for a second as footfalls retreated down the hallway.
She was so tired … so tired …
The mesmeric pull of sleep was snatched away at the tap tap tap of shoes against the stone floor. Sansa’s eyelids again jolted apart.
“Be grateful, Sansa dear. You will never know the burden of carrying your family or having to suffer fools.”
The queen. Yes, of course. How could she have forgotten?
Sansa had grown used to the people around her carrying on conversations as if she wasn’t there. She actually found some small enjoyment in the chatter of the maids when they swapped gossip for the day while changing and airing out her sheets. She had often been lulled to sleep by the sing-song rhythm of their voices, though their candor might have made her blush once. It was fascinating the things people confessed when they believed the listener insensible. It just happened to be mostly true in Sansa’s case.
Just as common, though, were those that spoke to her directly although they knew she could not answer back; Shae, most of all, telling her stories of places she’d been, places Sansa had always dreamed of seeing. The Titan of Braavos. The great Rhoyne river, so large the people of Essos called it the Mother. The tales brought her comfort, though she would never get to travel to those places now. Her imagination took her there well enough.
But Sansa had no desire to listen to the queen. Her toxic mood already pervaded the muted atmosphere of Sansa’s chamber. If Cersei Lannister grieved, it was for her twin. For Sansa she could have nothing but poison on her lips.
It was too hot … always too hot. And Sansa was too tired.
There was an armchair at her bedside. It used to be next to the window where Sansa would sit and sew or read in the afternoons, but it was used almost exclusively by her caretakers now. Her eyelids weighing heavily and craters beneath her eyes, Sansa succombed to her body’s need to rest for a blessed moment before a creak of wood and the soft swish of skirts called her back again.
“You poor little thing. It’s always such a sad thing to lose one so young.” The sickly sweet tone could only belong to the queen, but when she looked, Sansa saw red where there was meant to be gold. Long auburn tresses she hadn’t seen since she, Arya, and her father departed from Winterfell. Catelyn Stark smiled at her daughter, her eyes wet. “You’ve hardly had a chance at life, have you?”
Sansa’s intuition told her this was wrong. Her mother couldn’t possibly be here. But she so wanted her to be.
“You’ve not known love or the joys of marriage.” Sansa couldn’t hear the cynical inflection, only the words, and what came next touched her as being absolutely genuine. “And you’ll never know the feeling of holding your brand new babe in your arms. Oh, the love your children could have brought you, Sansa. Celebrating their namedays, running a brush through your daughter’s hair, watching your sons grow old enough to swing their first sword. Such a pity. Those are the things that make life in this world worthwhile.”
Sansa knew. Those were all the things she had dreamed of for as long as she could remember. A husband she loved just as much as her mother had loved her father. Children, a happy, comfortable home tinkling with laughter. Gone.
Oh, Mother …
“They tell me you cannot speak. That it is doubtful you can even understand me. Is that true, little dove? Has your mind gone as well?” Catelyn tilted to her head to one side. Sansa saw motherly concern, not needling curiosity from an ice cold stare.
Sansa held Catelyn’s gaze for a long moment, her soft, Tully blue eyes the mirror image of her mother’s. Glazed over and weary, they couldn’t communicate anything. How ashamed she was to have come to this ignoble end. She was unable to even tell her mother how sorry she was for what she’d done. Without the slightest sound, Sansa’s eyes lifted toward the dusky gloom of the ceiling and got lost in it, a sheen of sweat already spreading over her brow.
“Well, then,” the woman said, “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.”
Catelyn stood up from the armchair and aimlessly walked the room, her lips puckered in a tight-lipped frown, her fingers curling as if searching for a glass of wine. Sansa peeled her eyes downward to follow her and caught the elegant sway of her hips, the way her gown flowed perfectly along her figure. It was wrong. All of it. But she didn’t know how to see past it.
Catelyn’s tongue licked behind her teeth like a snake deciding when to strike. “I gave you everything, Sansa. I took you into my home, offered you a place in my family, gave you the chance to be a queen and the envy of all the Seven Kingdoms, and this … this is how you repay me.” She spun and, for an instant, it was Cersei. “Is it not enough that you have forsaken yourself? Must you take my brother with you?
“I told Robert it was a mistake choosing you for Joffrey,” she continued. “You Starks think so much of yourselves. Nobles of the North. Blood of the First Men. Yet they come to King’s Landing and they die, one by one. Your father had his honor, but he was blind. Your grandfather and uncle were fools, and Lyanna … poor, poor Lyanna. So weak. All of you.”
With salty tears encroaching around Sansa’s eyes, her legs and hips slowly began to shift beneath the sheets, floundering in a futile attempt to get away from the heat. Her stomach turned. With a feeble effort, she searched the room as her mother’s face looked back at her.
Bethy had gone. Shae, too. There was only the shadow and … the Hound. Outside in the corridor, he stood guard over his mistress. Though his features were inscrutable, he was a pillar of harsh truth in her life and the sudden sight of his severe bearing jarred her senses. Her lips tried and failed to form words, but it didn’t matter. Meaning was there, if only for a few important moments. Cersei, not Mother. Cersei, not Mother.
“I promise you, little dove, the day my brother breathes his last will be the day House Stark crumbles. After all, a Lannister always pays her debts,” the queen went on, spewing vengeance with a velvet tongue. “The so-called King in the North, that fool boy, and your mother have already signed their own death warrants. They have started a war they have no hope of winning. Do not worry, though, Sansa. I will see your mother and brother are properly placed beside your father where they belong.”
Shooting, horrible images of a decomposing head on a pike screamed through Sansa’s mind. The queen meant for her family to adorn the walls of King’s Landing. Her heart began to race, her breaths coming in flustered, short-winded heaves.
“Let me see, now. Who does that leave?” Cersei asked in false contemplation. “There’s the bastard boy, but your parents already did the deed there. Life on the Wall is hardly a life at all. Freezing cold, guarding the realm from barbarians and make believe monsters from children’s fairy tales. I’m sure the boy will be grateful to receive my regard when it comes.”
Jon.
The queen made a reproachful clucking sound behind her teeth. “And the little ones. It’s shameful, really, how your mother could leave her two youngest alone, one a cripple and the other scarcely more than a babe.”
No!
“The poor little dears. Young children are so prone to getting into trouble. Accidents are so common.”
Bran … Rickon … A shuddering cry built somewhere deep inside her, but it had no way to get out. Dammed up, the surge of emotions encompassed Sansa’s body and took on an essence all its own. Her face, spine, arms, legs, every part of her shook as if she was freezing, though her skin roasted.
In front of her eyes, the picture changed. Catelyn Stark saw her daughter’s distress and let out a malevolent smile. “Winter is coming, Sansa. For House Stark sooner than the rest of us. On my word, not one of you shall live to see it.”
A tear welled up and streaked rapidly down Sansa’s cheek to soak into her pillow.
“One by one the dominoes will fall, and then Winterfell will …”
“My Queen,” the Hound’s voice suddenly boomed.
Cersei-for she was Cersei Lannister again-hissed at the interruption. “Yes? What is it, Clegane?”
The Hound glanced toward Sansa as more tears joined the first on her pillow. Though it lasted only a second, Sansa latched onto his gaze and tried to hang onto it. Her reality spun. Her heart was broken and bleeding. And what did she want from him? Did she want him to yank her up by the hand and tell her everything was going to be alright? To throw her over his shoulder and carry her away from here like he had from the mob? He wasn’t her protector. He wasn’t her sworn shield. It was Lannister gold in his pockets, the Lannisters that provided him his home, his place on the Kingsguard, and it was them he took his orders from. Why was that so easy to forget?
With lumbering steps, he entered the room fully and halted several paces in. “The King will be expecting you,” he rasped, his iron jaw tense.
“Of course.” Cersei sighed and turned her simpering attention back to Sansa. “You’ll understand if I say goodnight to you now, Sansa. My son has need of me. But before I go …” She sat herself gracefully down in the armchair and leaned forward to capture Sansa’s hand in a seemingly tender embrace. “I want you to know one more thing, child.”
The queen’s fingers stroked the inside of Sansa’s palm in a soothing, hypnotic rhythm, a move that she had no doubt practiced on her own children when they were upset. Muddled and dizzy, Sansa blinked heavily, trying desperately to retain her focus. “I want to know before you go to your final rest that no one will ever remember you were here. Your name will die with your family. The world will continue on and your memory will turn to dust.”
The queen’s voice lowered to a peaceful hum. “I was once a prisoner to a memory. Love does terrible things to a man, you know? No, I suppose you don’t. As … fond … as he is of you,
Joffrey does not love you. And once you’re gone, you won’t even be a name on his lips.”
“Tragic, isn’t it?” Catelyn Stark said. Sansa broke down into voiceless sobs. “Having a life and no one to remember it? You might as well have never been.” Then, she said with a victorious smile, “How perfectly terrible.”
Staring almost blindly ahead, Sansa quaked in unremitting anguish.
“Sleep well, my dear.” Her mother patted her hand and vanished.
Sansa spent untold minutes awash in silent torment, madness pushing at the boundaries of her vulnerable consciousness as fever assailed her and misery prevailed. In the entryway, the pitiless shadow changed faces so many times Sansa could never have counted them all. One instant, he was her father, then her uncle Benjen, Jory Cassel, Septa Mordane, and half a hundred others she had known since childhood in rapid succession, a whirlwind a painful flashes that rent old sorrows into pieces, creating thousands more.
What do you want?
She screamed, but she didn’t. She begged, but she didn’t. Threats rang in her ears. She cried out, but her voice didn’t reach the air. The fires burning her up, she was trapped inside a mind which was she was petrified was collapsing in on itself.
Then, Sansa honed in on his face. He hadn’t moved from the middle of her room. His burned and mangled features had taken on a quality she hadn’t seen from him before. Somehow murderous and worried beyond reason. Was she imagining it? Why would a man like the Hound look so troubled over a stupid little bird?
The question helped to quiet her thoughts. She couldn’t escape the abrasive heat, but for the moment, she didn’t care.
"Have you more pleases for me, little bird?” he asked, his rough, gravel-laden tones reaching out to her.
At first, Sansa didn’t know what he was talking about, then she remembered the innumerable feverish pleas for him to bring an end to her suffering. Not to anyone else. Just him. She hadn’t been certain any of it was real, but if he was asking her … Perhaps she wasn’t as far gone as she feared. If she was to depart this world, she wanted to go while still remembering who she was. Even if no one else will, she thought with another knifing pang of regret.
The Hound towered over her as he had done before, as if he were waiting for her to ask again, hoping that a stern glance would bring her voice back. Maybe she hadn’t slipped so far she couldn’t ask at least one more time.
She couldn’t.
“You’ve truly got too tired to sing,” he finally said. “Haven’t you?” He spat out the last as if the very thought was acid on his tongue. His ruinous, penetrating stare made her feel naked and exposed, as if he could see right through her. But for the first time since laying eyes on the fiendish Hound, Sansa felt like she could see him too.
“My lady!” Shae arrived in the entrance and, taking one look at the state she was in, ran inside. She brushed past the Hound with no more regard than she would a ghost, but Sansa knew he wasn’t.
As Shae hurriedly poured her a glass of water and positioned herself behind Sansa’s head to help her drink, he left her. His quiet shadow watched him go, and Sansa recited one more please for him.
Please. Don’t go.