Fic: When We Were Young 3/?
Title: When We Were Young 3/?
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire
Pairing: Sansa/Sandor
Word Count: 2523
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to GRRM
A/N: Modern AU set post ADWD. Special thanks to Kimberlite8 for her help with this!
Chapter Two
She directs him to her apartment, two minutes away by bike. He imagines it might take her 10 to walk it. They climb up a rickety set of stairs to the room that's hers in the tenement. Some might call it a studio apartment. He calls it a one room hovel with an attached bathroom.
The only piece of furniture she seems to own is a double mattress on the floor, apart from that there's a backpack in the corner with some clothes folded neatly and stacked on top of it. There’s nothing in this place that gives off even the slightest hint of it being considered home. The kitchen off to one side consists of one bench with a sink and a gas burner. He glimpses pots and plastic plates, utensils and sparse groceries.
"Learned to cook?" he rasps out mockingly.
"Learned a lot of things." Is her cryptic reply.
He sits awkwardly on the side of her mattress while she makes them both a cup of tea.
"Did you really kill Joff?" he asks her, for want of anything better to say.
She laughs self deprecatingly, "You think I would've had enough courage to kill him? I doubt even Tyrion had a hand in it. No, that was the Tyrells’ work most likely. Managed to gain control over the Lannister empire without sacrificing their precious Margaery."
He shrugs, it hardly matters now who killed Joffrey. Tyrion’s is the official name in the report and he fled long ago to a non-extraditable country.
"Never imagined you in a place like this,” he comments as she pours the boiling water into the cups. “Always thought you'd go North, if you got the chance to get away."
She smiles a bit sadly, pauses in her work. "Haven't you ever heard that little birds fly south for the winter?"
Sansa brings the cups over and perches beside him on the mattress, closer than he would have expected. Takes a sip and regards him over the rim of her mug.
"How'd you find me?" She finally asks.
"A spider told me." Is all he needs to reply and she instantly understands, shakes her head as if in amusement.
"You're just in time," she tells him, "I was due to leave next week."
"And go where?"
"Mexico at first, maybe somewhere even further south. I figured I could teach English, there's always a market for it. It was time to move on, in case…"
He nods, it's as good a plan as any.
She tilts her head to the side, peers at him as if trying to work something out. Her gaze is uncomfortable and he fights the urge to look away. It was never like this before, it was always her who flinched and faltered.
"Why have you come here now?" Sansa finally asks, her eyes fixed firmly on his.
He wonders how she possibly couldn't know. Hadn't he come for her all those years ago? As garbled as his words were that night, as much as he had fucked it up, has she truly never realized why he came for her that night?
He could tell her that he's come here now to save her, but he's too late for that.
He could tell her that even three years later he still wants her, still dreams of her, would still kill anyone who sought to harm her.
He could tell her that when he’s not dreaming of her he’s usually having terrible fucking nightmares about what the Lannisters might have done to her or where she might have ended up.
"Thought I'd take you away somewhere and keep you safe." He tells her instead, and bugger her for looking at him in that way as if she had expected him to say more.
She accepts it, doesn't press him for a different answer. Looks away and takes a long sip of her tea. At least she hasn't refused to go with him this time. Yet.
"Then where do we go now?" She asks him finally, and he's surprised by her calm acceptance. Maybe she's realised that he's her best bet at survival, maybe she just no longer cares. Maybe if he hadn’t been stinking drunk and held a gun to her head last time she would’ve asked him the same thing.
She's no longer the frightened little bird in need of saving that she once was, and he can't help but wonder just how late he really is. She doesn’t need him to protect her anymore, not in the way she once did. He left at the wrong time, left her unprotected, and she had to learn to guard herself.
"Follow your original plan and head south, I’ve heard your sister is down that way." He announces calmly and Sansa freezes. She reaches out suddenly to clutch his hand, so tightly that her nails dig into the flesh of it.
"She’s alive? Where is she?" she asks him, a tinge of desperation creeping into her voice. It's the first time since he’s arrived that she's completely let the mask of nonchalance slip and allowed some true emotion to freely show.
"The Spider says Colombia." Sandor tells her, "I found her three years ago, running with a gang in Los Angeles. The Brotherhood they called themselves, said they were there to give the little people justice. Biggest crock of shit I ever heard."
“I’m not the last one.” She whispers, as if to herself. For a moment she is still, unable to move, lost in her own thoughts. He reaches out a hand to touch her and she startles, turning to face him. If there is one emotion that is most clear on her face at that moment it is not joy, but relief.
She edges closer to him then, reaches out a hand to grasp his arm. "Then what happened to her?"
"I took her away from there, forced her to come with me. Was going to ransom her back to your mother and brother until they got themselves killed at that fucking wedding. After that I thought maybe I'd try taking her to your aunt’s, or get her out of the country. Then we ran into a few of my brother's men in New Mexico on our way east and after the fight she left me for dead."
Sansa nods, takes her time to process it, and then thanks him in the sincerest tone he’s ever heard.
"What for?" he asks her, not wanting her thanks for what he’d failed so badly. "I was going to ransom the little bitch, I was hardly doing it from the goodness of my heart."
"Maybe," she says, "But you didn't leave her once there was nobody left to ransom her to."
He can't argue with her on that as much as he wishes he could. Can't tell her that her sister only got away from him and that he almost died because he'd drunk himself into a stupor after he heard about her marriage to Tyrion Lannister.
"Why now?" she asks him, "Why now after all this time?"
“Who knows? Varys has always played his own fucking game. Tides are turning against the Lannisters and maybe he’s choosing a new side.”
“But you still came for me, even though it’s been years since we’ve seen each other. You still came after all this time.” She presses, and there is something urgent in her eyes that makes him slightly uncomfortable.
“Never knew where you were before.” He replies, attempting to avoid her unspoken question.
"Would you have come for me if you did?"
She looks him straight in the face, never flinching. There was a time when she couldn't stand to look at him. Maybe she's seen her share of killers by now. Maybe she's seen so much ugliness in the world that she's grown immune to it.
"Yes." He tells her without any preamble, he owes her that much honesty. "Maybe I wouldn't have given you a choice when I did."
"Maybe I wish you hadn't last time." She murmurs, looks away from him. Curls her toes up and scuffs them along the floor.
He doesn’t know what to say to that. She was right not to go with him that night when he was out of his mind with fear and drink. He would have fucked it all up badly somehow or other, would have gotten them both killed. What can possibly have happened to her in the interim that she regrets her choices of that night as much as he does?
"I'll help you find your sister," he promises her. "After that you can decide what happens next. Teach English in South America for the rest of your life if you want or head home and fight for what's yours. We need to get you out of the country as soon as possible though, before anyone else finds you."
"But you won't let them take me again, will you?" she asks, almost rhetorically. Turns and fixes him with her gaze, considering now. "You’ve come for me, even after all this time. You'd do anything to protect me, wouldn't you?" She shifts her hand so her fingers are touching the edge of his thigh.
He grabs her hand, moves it away from him roughly. "Don't play with me, girl." He growls at her.
She is quiet for a moment, staring down at the hand that he’s moved aside.
"Did the Spider tell you where I was these past couple of years after I disappeared?" She asks, still not looking at him, though she seems to see him shake his head. "Peter Baelish helped me to escape the Lannisters. Helped me escape and took me to my aunt in South Carolina where I was his illegitimate daughter, Alayne, product of a one night stand and ignorant of my father's identity until my mother died." she laughs bitterly. "A bastard girl, his bastard girl, but he wouldn't hesitate to try and caress me when we were alone. Take a kiss and claim it was fatherly." Her eyes are burning with anger and betrayal and it takes all the strength that Sandor has just to listen rather than swearing, or sending his fist through the wall.
Sansa still isn't looking at him, her eyes focus on a stain on the opposite wall, her hand traces patterns on her bedsheet. "And me? I knew what he wanted, knew but couldn't do a damn thing. Where could I go? Who could I run to? If the Lannisters found out where I was then I was dead, they blamed me for Joff's murder. My aunt was the only family I had left, until… well, until she was gone too. So I waited and I endured and sidestepped and I bided my time and let him teach me a few tricks along the way. Pretended that there was no Sansa Stark, that there never had been one but I remembered, oh I remembered. When I found out..."
She stops herself abruptly, shakes her head angrily as if to rid herself of a memory. "I trusted him, no matter what else he did, I trusted him. When I found out that he was the one who betrayed my father, who let him down..."
Sandor sucks in a breath, remembering that day and his own part in it. She is right, though he had never thought of it that way before. Petyr Baelish’s betrayal is as much responsible for her father’s death and her family’s downfall as anything else was.
“But you don’t know the whole story,” Sansa continues, looking at him now, straight in the face. “You couldn’t, nobody could. He thought he was so clever, so very clever.”
It pours out of her, words tumbling out as if they’ve been suppressed for far too long. Of how Petyr Baelish convinced Lysa Arryn to murder her husband, then to send the letter to Sansa’s mother implicating the Lannisters so that Ned Stark would feel compelled to investigate his friend’s death. About the trickery with the gun the hitman tried to kill Bran with, about every insidious move the man ever made as he worked towards an end nobody could predict.
In that moment, Sandor hates Petyr Baelish. Hates him with a fury which before has only ever been reserved for Gregor. All the rage that he had believed was gone from him is suddenly back, threatening to overwhelm him until he forces himself to quiet it, as he has learned.
Then the moment passes and Sandor realizes that Sansa is looking at him, looking at him with an expression that he knows only too well because it is one that he has seen in the mirror more times than he can count.
"I want Petyr Baelish dead," she tells him, and the hatred in her face makes her almost unrecognisable. "I want him to die knowing that it's me who's responsible for his death." Sansa presses herself against him, her bare thigh against his leg and grasps his hand, ensures that he looks into her eyes as her breasts press against his arm. "Do this for me." She tells him, calmer now as if reasoning with him. "Do this for me and I'll give you whatever you want."
Her meaning is unmistakable and even as he feels himself harden at the implication he freezes, internally recoils because this... This is never what he truly wanted. Not like this. What has the world done to her that she feels the need to bargain herself away for his protection?
He lifts up his other hand to cup her cheek, brings his face close to hers. She is breathing heavily but there is no fear in her eyes when he brings his lips near hers. "What did they do to you, little bird?" he asks her, his voice breaking. He thinks he knows the truth of it all too well.
At his question she lets go of him and turns her face away, unable to look him in the eye. "Will you do it for me or not?" She asks him, her eyes fixed on the floor. Her fingers tremble where she clutches the hem of her t-shirt.
He knows then, that she is not so truly dead to emotion as she pretends to be. That somewhere deep inside, the Sansa Stark he once knew is only hidden, not quite yet gone.
He wonders if by doing this one thing for her he can help to bring that girl back, a type of salvation, years and years too late
"I'll do it for you." he promises, as he reaches out to touch her chin. "I'll see the bastard dead, bring you his head on a platter if that’s what it takes to help you sleep at night." He'll see Littlefinger die for what he's done to Sansa Stark, give him a death that's probably better than he deserves.
Sansa turns to him, eyes shining with an almost manic happiness. "I knew you would," she whispers, reaching out to clutch his hand. "I knew you would."
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire
Pairing: Sansa/Sandor
Word Count: 2523
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to GRRM
A/N: Modern AU set post ADWD. Special thanks to Kimberlite8 for her help with this!
Chapter Two
She directs him to her apartment, two minutes away by bike. He imagines it might take her 10 to walk it. They climb up a rickety set of stairs to the room that's hers in the tenement. Some might call it a studio apartment. He calls it a one room hovel with an attached bathroom.
The only piece of furniture she seems to own is a double mattress on the floor, apart from that there's a backpack in the corner with some clothes folded neatly and stacked on top of it. There’s nothing in this place that gives off even the slightest hint of it being considered home. The kitchen off to one side consists of one bench with a sink and a gas burner. He glimpses pots and plastic plates, utensils and sparse groceries.
"Learned to cook?" he rasps out mockingly.
"Learned a lot of things." Is her cryptic reply.
He sits awkwardly on the side of her mattress while she makes them both a cup of tea.
"Did you really kill Joff?" he asks her, for want of anything better to say.
She laughs self deprecatingly, "You think I would've had enough courage to kill him? I doubt even Tyrion had a hand in it. No, that was the Tyrells’ work most likely. Managed to gain control over the Lannister empire without sacrificing their precious Margaery."
He shrugs, it hardly matters now who killed Joffrey. Tyrion’s is the official name in the report and he fled long ago to a non-extraditable country.
"Never imagined you in a place like this,” he comments as she pours the boiling water into the cups. “Always thought you'd go North, if you got the chance to get away."
She smiles a bit sadly, pauses in her work. "Haven't you ever heard that little birds fly south for the winter?"
Sansa brings the cups over and perches beside him on the mattress, closer than he would have expected. Takes a sip and regards him over the rim of her mug.
"How'd you find me?" She finally asks.
"A spider told me." Is all he needs to reply and she instantly understands, shakes her head as if in amusement.
"You're just in time," she tells him, "I was due to leave next week."
"And go where?"
"Mexico at first, maybe somewhere even further south. I figured I could teach English, there's always a market for it. It was time to move on, in case…"
He nods, it's as good a plan as any.
She tilts her head to the side, peers at him as if trying to work something out. Her gaze is uncomfortable and he fights the urge to look away. It was never like this before, it was always her who flinched and faltered.
"Why have you come here now?" Sansa finally asks, her eyes fixed firmly on his.
He wonders how she possibly couldn't know. Hadn't he come for her all those years ago? As garbled as his words were that night, as much as he had fucked it up, has she truly never realized why he came for her that night?
He could tell her that he's come here now to save her, but he's too late for that.
He could tell her that even three years later he still wants her, still dreams of her, would still kill anyone who sought to harm her.
He could tell her that when he’s not dreaming of her he’s usually having terrible fucking nightmares about what the Lannisters might have done to her or where she might have ended up.
"Thought I'd take you away somewhere and keep you safe." He tells her instead, and bugger her for looking at him in that way as if she had expected him to say more.
She accepts it, doesn't press him for a different answer. Looks away and takes a long sip of her tea. At least she hasn't refused to go with him this time. Yet.
"Then where do we go now?" She asks him finally, and he's surprised by her calm acceptance. Maybe she's realised that he's her best bet at survival, maybe she just no longer cares. Maybe if he hadn’t been stinking drunk and held a gun to her head last time she would’ve asked him the same thing.
She's no longer the frightened little bird in need of saving that she once was, and he can't help but wonder just how late he really is. She doesn’t need him to protect her anymore, not in the way she once did. He left at the wrong time, left her unprotected, and she had to learn to guard herself.
"Follow your original plan and head south, I’ve heard your sister is down that way." He announces calmly and Sansa freezes. She reaches out suddenly to clutch his hand, so tightly that her nails dig into the flesh of it.
"She’s alive? Where is she?" she asks him, a tinge of desperation creeping into her voice. It's the first time since he’s arrived that she's completely let the mask of nonchalance slip and allowed some true emotion to freely show.
"The Spider says Colombia." Sandor tells her, "I found her three years ago, running with a gang in Los Angeles. The Brotherhood they called themselves, said they were there to give the little people justice. Biggest crock of shit I ever heard."
“I’m not the last one.” She whispers, as if to herself. For a moment she is still, unable to move, lost in her own thoughts. He reaches out a hand to touch her and she startles, turning to face him. If there is one emotion that is most clear on her face at that moment it is not joy, but relief.
She edges closer to him then, reaches out a hand to grasp his arm. "Then what happened to her?"
"I took her away from there, forced her to come with me. Was going to ransom her back to your mother and brother until they got themselves killed at that fucking wedding. After that I thought maybe I'd try taking her to your aunt’s, or get her out of the country. Then we ran into a few of my brother's men in New Mexico on our way east and after the fight she left me for dead."
Sansa nods, takes her time to process it, and then thanks him in the sincerest tone he’s ever heard.
"What for?" he asks her, not wanting her thanks for what he’d failed so badly. "I was going to ransom the little bitch, I was hardly doing it from the goodness of my heart."
"Maybe," she says, "But you didn't leave her once there was nobody left to ransom her to."
He can't argue with her on that as much as he wishes he could. Can't tell her that her sister only got away from him and that he almost died because he'd drunk himself into a stupor after he heard about her marriage to Tyrion Lannister.
"Why now?" she asks him, "Why now after all this time?"
“Who knows? Varys has always played his own fucking game. Tides are turning against the Lannisters and maybe he’s choosing a new side.”
“But you still came for me, even though it’s been years since we’ve seen each other. You still came after all this time.” She presses, and there is something urgent in her eyes that makes him slightly uncomfortable.
“Never knew where you were before.” He replies, attempting to avoid her unspoken question.
"Would you have come for me if you did?"
She looks him straight in the face, never flinching. There was a time when she couldn't stand to look at him. Maybe she's seen her share of killers by now. Maybe she's seen so much ugliness in the world that she's grown immune to it.
"Yes." He tells her without any preamble, he owes her that much honesty. "Maybe I wouldn't have given you a choice when I did."
"Maybe I wish you hadn't last time." She murmurs, looks away from him. Curls her toes up and scuffs them along the floor.
He doesn’t know what to say to that. She was right not to go with him that night when he was out of his mind with fear and drink. He would have fucked it all up badly somehow or other, would have gotten them both killed. What can possibly have happened to her in the interim that she regrets her choices of that night as much as he does?
"I'll help you find your sister," he promises her. "After that you can decide what happens next. Teach English in South America for the rest of your life if you want or head home and fight for what's yours. We need to get you out of the country as soon as possible though, before anyone else finds you."
"But you won't let them take me again, will you?" she asks, almost rhetorically. Turns and fixes him with her gaze, considering now. "You’ve come for me, even after all this time. You'd do anything to protect me, wouldn't you?" She shifts her hand so her fingers are touching the edge of his thigh.
He grabs her hand, moves it away from him roughly. "Don't play with me, girl." He growls at her.
She is quiet for a moment, staring down at the hand that he’s moved aside.
"Did the Spider tell you where I was these past couple of years after I disappeared?" She asks, still not looking at him, though she seems to see him shake his head. "Peter Baelish helped me to escape the Lannisters. Helped me escape and took me to my aunt in South Carolina where I was his illegitimate daughter, Alayne, product of a one night stand and ignorant of my father's identity until my mother died." she laughs bitterly. "A bastard girl, his bastard girl, but he wouldn't hesitate to try and caress me when we were alone. Take a kiss and claim it was fatherly." Her eyes are burning with anger and betrayal and it takes all the strength that Sandor has just to listen rather than swearing, or sending his fist through the wall.
Sansa still isn't looking at him, her eyes focus on a stain on the opposite wall, her hand traces patterns on her bedsheet. "And me? I knew what he wanted, knew but couldn't do a damn thing. Where could I go? Who could I run to? If the Lannisters found out where I was then I was dead, they blamed me for Joff's murder. My aunt was the only family I had left, until… well, until she was gone too. So I waited and I endured and sidestepped and I bided my time and let him teach me a few tricks along the way. Pretended that there was no Sansa Stark, that there never had been one but I remembered, oh I remembered. When I found out..."
She stops herself abruptly, shakes her head angrily as if to rid herself of a memory. "I trusted him, no matter what else he did, I trusted him. When I found out that he was the one who betrayed my father, who let him down..."
Sandor sucks in a breath, remembering that day and his own part in it. She is right, though he had never thought of it that way before. Petyr Baelish’s betrayal is as much responsible for her father’s death and her family’s downfall as anything else was.
“But you don’t know the whole story,” Sansa continues, looking at him now, straight in the face. “You couldn’t, nobody could. He thought he was so clever, so very clever.”
It pours out of her, words tumbling out as if they’ve been suppressed for far too long. Of how Petyr Baelish convinced Lysa Arryn to murder her husband, then to send the letter to Sansa’s mother implicating the Lannisters so that Ned Stark would feel compelled to investigate his friend’s death. About the trickery with the gun the hitman tried to kill Bran with, about every insidious move the man ever made as he worked towards an end nobody could predict.
In that moment, Sandor hates Petyr Baelish. Hates him with a fury which before has only ever been reserved for Gregor. All the rage that he had believed was gone from him is suddenly back, threatening to overwhelm him until he forces himself to quiet it, as he has learned.
Then the moment passes and Sandor realizes that Sansa is looking at him, looking at him with an expression that he knows only too well because it is one that he has seen in the mirror more times than he can count.
"I want Petyr Baelish dead," she tells him, and the hatred in her face makes her almost unrecognisable. "I want him to die knowing that it's me who's responsible for his death." Sansa presses herself against him, her bare thigh against his leg and grasps his hand, ensures that he looks into her eyes as her breasts press against his arm. "Do this for me." She tells him, calmer now as if reasoning with him. "Do this for me and I'll give you whatever you want."
Her meaning is unmistakable and even as he feels himself harden at the implication he freezes, internally recoils because this... This is never what he truly wanted. Not like this. What has the world done to her that she feels the need to bargain herself away for his protection?
He lifts up his other hand to cup her cheek, brings his face close to hers. She is breathing heavily but there is no fear in her eyes when he brings his lips near hers. "What did they do to you, little bird?" he asks her, his voice breaking. He thinks he knows the truth of it all too well.
At his question she lets go of him and turns her face away, unable to look him in the eye. "Will you do it for me or not?" She asks him, her eyes fixed on the floor. Her fingers tremble where she clutches the hem of her t-shirt.
He knows then, that she is not so truly dead to emotion as she pretends to be. That somewhere deep inside, the Sansa Stark he once knew is only hidden, not quite yet gone.
He wonders if by doing this one thing for her he can help to bring that girl back, a type of salvation, years and years too late
"I'll do it for you." he promises, as he reaches out to touch her chin. "I'll see the bastard dead, bring you his head on a platter if that’s what it takes to help you sleep at night." He'll see Littlefinger die for what he's done to Sansa Stark, give him a death that's probably better than he deserves.
Sansa turns to him, eyes shining with an almost manic happiness. "I knew you would," she whispers, reaching out to clutch his hand. "I knew you would."