Learning to Fly (2/2)
Title: Learning to Fly
Rating: MA
Warnings: Allusions to non-con, graphic sex
Word Count: 5,900
Characters and Pairings: Sansan, Sansa Stark, Sandor Clegane, Jaime Lannister, Jon Snow, Brienne of Tarth, Samwell Tarly, Dany Targareyn, Bran Stark, Littlefinger, OC: Hynnah Snow, OC: Catelyn Stark II
Summary: Sansa has survived Littlefinger, but not without cost. Sandor is paying for his sins and has no where to go. They both wind up at the Wall, and learn about breaking down some walls of their own.
---
Jon Snow-Aeron Targaryen-is not shocked when Sansa informs him that she will not be accompanying him South.
And that Sandor Clegane will not be swearing the oath of the Black Brothers, but instead swearing his sword to her.
:::
It somehow becomes habit for him to sleep beside her during the night, now that Jon and Hynnah are gone. Like nights when he would come and rouse her from her dreams, these moments do not exist beyond the sunrise. They die when there is sun on their faces.
He follows her in the days, as she tends to the running of a Keep, as she was raised to handle, as she tends to the men’s minor injuries. Samwell Tarly is released from the Queen’s grasp, and returns back to the Wall.
“They don’t get along very well, Jon and her Grace,” Sam tells her as he opens the daily letters, between reading them. “He says that she is keeping him busy, introducing him to lady after lady, but won’t tell him what she wants him to do-to leave the Night’s Watch or not. And when he asks, she simply gets angry. And then sad. Beautiful, he calls her. But sad.”
Sansa hums, tracing the rim of her cup.
“What?” Sam asks. “What does she want from him?”
Sansa thinks that she has finally figured out Jon and Daenerys, but tells Sam nothing. “Don’t fret about it,” she answers. “I’m sure Jon will figure everything out in time.”
Either that, or the Red Keep will combust into flames. Again.
She supervises the inventory, restocking Castle Black in preparation of every eventuality. Winter is Coming, she thinks, even though summer has not yet touched this far North. She wonders if it ever truly will.
She does not remember how to be summer child. All she knows is that she was one, once, before the winter winds came a stole away everything that she held dear; the same icy winds that still visit her at night.
She shivers under her furs that night, and reaches out for him. He grumbles in his sleep, weight shifting on the mattress. He is huge. It is one thing to see him and another to feel him, strong and just simply there under her hand, as she traces it up the curve of his chest, to his shoulder.
He makes her feel safe.
“Whadya want, little bird,” he mutters. She can feel him turning over. One of his hands grazes her waist before pulling away. She opens her mouth to speak, watching his bloom into the most beautiful red. She feels like she’s intruding, a flush of embarrassment coming over her.
“Bad dream,” she manages to squeak, turning her face into her pillow to hide herself from the deep, warm red that just seems to live in him and how it affects her.
He groans edging himself closer to her, rubbing her back through her thick chemise. “It’s fine, little bird. It’s all over…”
The next morning, like every one preceding it, she wakes up and he is gone.
:::
Two turns of the moon pass since her brother’s and her maid’s departure.
He enters her bower after afternoon of sparring in the yard, sweaty and cold. “My lady.”
She is sitting at her window, letting the afternoon breeze comb through her long, loose hair. Her eyes are closed, and it hits him almost like a literal punch in the gut.
The little bird has grown up. He knows that. Sandor Clegane is not stupid man-he’s seen her hips and her teats and the way her plain, simply-cut gowns showcase them now that she’s left to lace them up with only his help.
(They are in a castle full of purportedly celibate men; still he is her sworn shield and in the absence of a maid he feels that fixing her stays and making sure her laces are tied is his duty.)
But her face, lit by the golden light, hair pushed back and made even more red by the sun-she is a woman, with a long, angular face and nobly-shaped nose. A womanly jaw and sharp, womanly cheekbones. He does not remember enough of Lady Catelyn Stark to know whether or not Sansa takes after her mother. And with her eyes closed-they had been Tully blue, that he remembers, because how could he not-it’s almost like you cannot tell. The sunlight obscures the puckering of the dry, twisted skin surrounding her eyes. What would have Sansa Stark’s fate had been, had she kept her sight?
And how much time has passed finally hits him.
They met in summer, first. And they meet in summer, now. Nearly ten years.
She smiles wistfully, but does not turn. There is a letter in her hand, and she puts it out in front of her, lifting it up to what she must approximate to be at height with his grasp. “The boy who brought it to me could not read it to tell me who it’s from.”
His eyes flicker downwards. “The maid of yours.”
“Oh.” She gives him a brief, tense smile. “Sam is-would you mind terribly reading it to me? It has been so long since Hynnah has written me.”
He clears his throat, uncertain. He hesitates breaking the plain, unornamented seal at the lip of the parchment.
She ducks her head. “You do not have to. I just do not wish to bother the maester at the moment.”
He sits in the chair across from her, and wipes sweat from his brow.
“You cannot mock me, girl,” he warns her. “It’s been many a year since I’ve read anything aloud, certainly not some teenage chit’s handwriting.”
She giggles, and his grey eyes widen at her in surprise.
That soon becomes habit, too-the letter-reading and the giggling.
:::
She falls ill on the first true warm day. It is not a sudden thing-she has complained to him for days of head pain and he has taken to awkwardly rubbing her neck and shoulders and summoning the Maester for her at all hours.
That morning, she walks the battlements; leaning heavily on his arm instead of her stick, face flushed and hair tied back haphazardly-she wonders if the brothers can tell if it was her attempt or his (his), for when she pats it down it is lumpy and uneven, but she appreciates what he tries to do for her nevertheless.
It was only the night before that he lifted her out of the copper bathtub and placed her on her bed, dried her the best he could before wrapping her in her dressing gown because she was too tired and too much in pain to move.
He nearly gives a shout when her legs give out from under her, but calms himself quickly, slipping his arms under her legs and lifting her to him. Almost like falling asleep, she thinks. Bit by bit, and then all at-
:::
“What’s wrong with her?” he growls, breathing down Sam’s neck as the rotund Maester pokes and prods his highborn charge. “You said she’d be fine for a walk and she fucking fainted like a fucking-”
“Fever,” Sam interrupts, not certain he wants to hear the end of the man formerly known as the Hound’s sentence. He is flustered, but not put off. “She had only been experiencing her… usual pains, in relation to her head, until today.”
He growls, and Samwell flinches, hand mid-motion of stirring honey and coriander with hot water in the small cauldron he had set up over Sansa’s fire. “It is normal, my lord, for those who have experienced the sort of abrasions to the eyes-especially the prolonged exposure to the poison which Lady Sansa experienced-to have these sorts of pains. The fever, however, is it not to be expected. She is ill of other means. Infection. There is a fever of sort going about the men. It is worse in Lady Sansa because she was already weakened by her eyes.”
:::
The red nightmares do not haunt her, but her dreams do not stay away. She dreams in shades of green, every shade of green a shade of blue and as she walks farther, red and Jon’s grey and white. She can see, but that does not strike her as odd. Her slumbering mind has never been so cruel as to render her blind in this land as well as the one of the awake. Cruel enough to make her relive Petyr’s touches, and Petyr’s hand, but never lose her sight.
It is what keeps her from fearing that she will one day forget what was like to see, forget faces, and places. Jon’s dark eyes and Snow’s fur, and the blood-red of the weirwood leaves. Even remembering Petyr’s face, harsh and twisted with rage as it was, is a blessing. Perhaps, she thinks, losing his face would mean the most of all.
She thinks it strange, and shakes the notion from her head, but wears the brand of a cripple on her sleeve-and hypocrisy and cowardice and strength and boldness and wisdom and all these unspeakable and terrible things that happen to those who have fallen.
No. Petyr was something that happened to her. He is not all of her. She is still Sansa Stark, the blood of Winterfell. She still stands while he does not. For when she fell, when Petyr pushed her, she got back up.
Sansa Stark was once a girl who specialized in surfaces, and now she follows lingering shadows.
Green erupts before her-her dreaming self, a woman whole and pure with clean hands and open eyes and steady gaze-and she stops. And sees, and watches, before the ground under her crumbles and she falls and falls and she falls, tumbling in and over herself. And then lands.
She is in a godswood, not the one of Winterfell and childhood, but one much older, crafted not from human hands and therefore darker, much more sinister. This is not a place she looked upon when her eyes could still preform their task. Her feet pull her towards the heart tree, and she glides forward, feeling herself lessen step by step, until she is a pair of blue eyes in the green-tinted night, and she passes through the bark of the monstrous trunk like water.
It is the fact that she is dreaming that she does not scream at the image of her broken brother seated upon a throne of roots like a lord, the prince of Winterfell. He is twisted now and not just broken, eyes gouged out by fine, twisting tendrils of root and branch, boyish cheeks pulsing as the tree manipulates itself under his skin, down his arms. Like a grotesque puppet, he allows himself to be manipulated by the heart tree; the writhing roots sink into his body and pull him up, forward, to stand before her.
“Bran,” she whispers, dread settling over her like a fine dusting of snow, as she clambered out of the Gates of the Moon, clawing at her eyes as they bled and bled and bled.
(She fell and she fell and she fell, in and over herself. How did she not die there, in the Vale?)
(Stop, she thinks. And does.)
Even his skin has been wrought strange; it is no longer skin, Sansa thinks-it is as dull and as thin as parchment. The tree moves his legs, walks him to her, holds his hand out to her.
“Bran?”
The Bran creature takes her fingers, not her palms, and roots through them.
“Sansa,” he says, a queer smile inching across his face. “You’ve come home.”
The muscles of her cheeks tense, crinkling her eyes and forehead. “No, I haven’t.”
“You have. Will. Were.” The roots slink back into his skin, a faint rustling disturbing the disquieting peace of the heart tree. “No matter.”
“Bran,” she answers. “I do believe it matters.”
He drifts away from her, the tree walking him backwards, to the side. Up, down, up again; all smooth and all rhythmic, a pulsing sort of movement. Sansa follows, less gracefully, even with her sight.
“Time once.” His voice is hollow, or like the rustling of leaves, or like the sound of scraping bark. “Time again.”
Dread spreads, like a patina of grit. No longer like snow, no longer light or cold. She tenses, feet freezing beneath her. She will root here too. “Bran?” she asks hesitantly.
He climbs back into the wall of the tree. It swallows him, his parchment-skin melding back into wood, a root bursting out of his mouth, roping around throat and wrists and legs, pushing and molding him and-
“Brandon Stark!” Sansa cries, terrified. “You listen to me!”
With a gust of cold wind, the heart tree bursts into snow, and Sansa tumbles not to the floor, but to the sky.
:::
He is a hale and healthy boy of ten, a wooden sword in hand and she a maid of three and ten in summer silks. They walk through this land, a blooming garden cast in ice and snow, wind whipping against their skin. Ice finds them like shadows, diamond bright collecting on their skin, the radiant sheen of youth. Bran bends to pick a bloom and tuck it into her hair, crystalline petals in her hair.
Hearing the sound of blue and red, Sansa turns, and sees a little bird dance for a moment on the muzzle of a hound, before flapping her wings and taking flight, the hound nipping and chasing after her, her song.
“He’ll follow her. He won’t stop.”
She nervously licks her lips. “I know.” She does, truly.
Bran, so boyish and innocent, appraises her, and nods.
And in a flash of green-wildfire, Sansa thinks briefly, the reflection of a dagger casting down against her breast-they are gone again with only the company of roaring flames and a lone wolf’s howl.
:::
“Where’s Summer?” she asks, turning to see Bran seated again on his throne, skin more like skin and less like paper. (The wolf continues to howl in the distance, it’s old song sad and true. Did she really ever think that birds were the animals to make music of such sadness?) “Bran, where is your wolf?”
“Lost,” he replies, younger now. And sadder. Like her. He turns his head, moving his hand-on his own, no slithering roots, and no puppetry. He is her Bran again, her little brother-to the side, and through the column of the tree she sees Summer padding through Wolfswood. The vision glazes over, fogged glass, before clearing again. Horrified, Sansa turns back to Bran, a small smile on his face. She turns back.
Robb, seated upon a broken throne, Grey Wind’s head upon his body. His form, decayed and mottled, sprayed with brown flakes of dried blood, riddled with arrows. A scene from a city Sansa has never known, the pace of a plain-looking beggar girl. A grassy forest, Nymeria drinking from the stream. Ghost, locked up in the Red Keep. Lady, her restless bones in the Winterfell lichyard. Rickon, staggering through a muddy field, the whipped-and-slashed skull of a canine worn as a helmet-the worst, perhaps, of all.
“Lost. Like all of us.”
Flashes of color; the restless song of the wolf.
“But you, least of all of us. Even though you lost your wolf first.”
Green.
“It makes you first to come home.”
:::
The fat bugger pats at her forehead with a cloth, mopping her brow. The girl-woman, girl, Seven Hells-twists in her bed, linen chemise sticking to her sweat-slicked body. There’s nothing that he wants to do more than pull her coverings back up to her chin, keep her from-that is to say, her breast push against her nightclothes in a way that would make her blush, blinded or not, with men present. Even him.
Blood boiling, Sandor wishes to do nothing more than toss the Maester from the room and tend to the woman himself. No one should see her like this, fever-delirious, murmuring crazed nothings.
What kind of buggering sworn shield am I? he thinks sourly, gripping the arms of the chair that has been his host these hours passed. Her head shakes from side to side, shoulders jerking violently. She reaches out, fingers grasping at nothing at all. He grips the chair tighter, tempted to make the wood splinter under his palms.
“Can’t you do anything for her?”
The boy pales, eyes wide. “I-I could-but it’s not.” He stops himself, and takes a steadying breath. “There’s some literature supporting that an ice bath, with a fever this high, could help.”
“Ice bath?” Sandor growls.
To his credit, the Maester doesn’t flinch. “Yes.”
:::
Green still, even after the light fades from her eyes. She is alone, now, in a green-laced world, vision darker. Her footsteps echo on wooden planks; she edges her way carefully along, eyes pinned to the moving waters below. She looks up, and steps into a nursery.
A child’s laugh, a flash of curly brown hair, and bright blue eyes.
Sansa is lost.
:::
He doesn’t like this. They didn’t undress her, but rather submerged her in the freezing water in her chemise and smallclothes. Her skin turns blue quickly, but she does not shiver. Her lips purple, hanging open loosely. The linen shift floats away from her slender frame, red hair bloodening in the copper tub. Sandor has to look away-it is this form of her, frozen and blue and deadened, that has haunted his nightmares and daytime fears for so many years, when he, like so many others, thought her gone from the world.
His world has been righted; he cannot bear, not now, to think her gone again.
When Samwell fucking Tarly moves to busy himself with the fire, Sandor takes her hands between his and rubs warmth into them.
“I do not love you,” she tells him. “I thought I did.” Her voice enters his head, clear as day, and he is frozen too. Fearful, his eyes look into the tub, but her mouth does not move. The words shatter like ice in his head. “I convinced Hynnah, my maid, that I did. I was a foolish girl.”
He stares at her like she’s fucking crazy. Because he’s certain that she is. That whatever poison Baelish used on her eyes seeped into her pretty little head, as well. And then spread to his. She rests in her tub, corpse-like.
Her voice smiles. “I think I could love you, though. I do not know you well enough again.”
His hand itches to reach over to his wineskin, on her dressing table, and gulp it all down. Too much time without sleep, he thinks. He should rest, once she is dry and warm again, with blood in her face. Make this whole thing go away-the coldness settling in his gut when he looks upon her still form, the sweet, red, feelings that slink through his veins when he sees her fingers against his.
No.
He buries the feelings he left behind when he died on the banks of the Trident.
(He didn’t die, and neither did the notion.)
He thought he knew who Sandor Clegane was, the man who went to serve at the Wall. He does not know anymore. He does not know who Sansa Stark is, either.
He thinks he might want to find out.
(A new and strange sensation.)
:::
A thousand leagues away, Jon Snow-Aeron Targaryen-sits in his aunt’s solar in the Red Keep, watching her scratch her quill against the paper.
“You’ll consent, then?” she asks.
He sighs. It is overdramatic, but the woman cannot read him well enough, and he has learned enough from Sansa to keep Dany from being able to read him well enough. He does not worry about Shireen, his bride. Shireen, his friend, his bride-their children will have even claim to the throne through both lines.
“If you agree to my conditions.”
Dany raises an eyebrow. “I will annull your late cousin’s marriage to Tyrion Lannister, as you wish. And he will make reparations to House Stark… to Winterfell, in her memory, as you wish.”
Jon smiles, not entirely without affection, for both his aunt and future wife. Maybe, just maybe, there is a chance that it could work out like one of little Sansa’s songs. Dany thinks he intends to name one of his sons the head of House Stark, make his children the heads of three different great houses. He will continue to let her think that. “And I will marry Lady Baratheon, as you wish. And reside in Dragonstone, also as you wish.” He smiles tighter. “And I will cage my wolf.”
:::
“Sansa?”
The green flash dies, and only darkness remains. Darkness, and crushing sadness, and the crush of hands upon her body.
Out of fight or flight, she has always chosen flight.
She fumbles through the darkness, until a flint appears in her hand. Her fingers reach out, scrabbling for support, finding the wall made of rock. Panting heavily, she brings the flint down heavily against the wall, again and again. Sparks spray down onto the hem of her gown and her slippers, brighter as she keeps going, keening in pain as her arms protest the movement. She needs the light. She needs to get to the light. She needs to be able to see.
“Sweetling.” The mint-breathed voice falls into her ear like the sweet, waiting dagger.
She shrieks, the sparks taking life and engulfing the room in fire, bursting with color.
Green, red, blue, white, grey, yellow, red, fire, home, hearth, green, green, green.
Fight or flight?
Her fists bunch into his doublet, nails ripping into the fine fabric. His lips descend to kiss hers, eyes expectant and cruel.
Sansa growls, and the fire dances, green like the wildfire that broke the startled sky. No one would hurt you again. The wolf rises, and leaps, and Sansa pushes Petyr back, into the flames. Forward she must go now-If I look back, I am lost, a blood-red voice tells her, faintly-and fly.
Her vision begins to fade, first at the edges, and then the light goes. But the wildfire green, the blood red, the white and snow grey, they all stay with her, pulsing with life at the edges of all things. They vibrate with the certainty of rain and harvest. This is what they cannot break from her.
Petyr took her vision, but he did not take her life. Cersei took her wolf, but she did not take her fight. The game of thrones took her freedom, but they did not take her flight.
She turns her back to him, to Cersei, to the players and the pawns. She has fingers to break-she will tear herself down to get out of here; her fingers scrabble into the wall, pulling it down, making it crumble. Her nails tear from their beds like children taken in the night (the Stark children, all summer babes, made hard and wrong, made true by winter, alive by winter, saved by winter.) She cries out, the memory of pain far. She pushes through, her hands finding the thick roots of the tree that has taken Bran to root. (She is not the last Stark.) Red. Beautiful, home and hearth and red.
The color of the godswood, the blood of Winterfell-
And Sandor Clegane.
(He is home he is home he is home he can take her home.)
Their story is a circle; time once, time again. Summer once, summer again. Home once, home again.
Sansa kicks her slippers from her feet, and begins to climb. The twisting roots close in around her, but do not fight her ascent. She can feel the ghosts of her bones, the dead who live in her marrow. Her toes fight for purchase; she will not fall. Father, smiling, his statue in the crypt next to mother’s-it was Jon who brought their bones home to rest. Lyanna, so young and so brave and so (Sansa Stark was not the first of her house to be lost to the Red Keep) impossibly young (you were Alayne, Sansa remembers, she cannot forget) and Jon’s mother in truth, winter roses in her lap. Brandon Stark, the elder, and her grandfather, Uncle Benjen, and blue. Mother, her gentle hands guiding her up, a heart of broken stone on a chain around her untouched neck. Arya, and no one, the color of the promise of snow. Robb, the color of stone. Jeyne, the sand upon the shore.
Keep going, they whisper.
Bran, the green of spring and summer, Rickon, the yellow of the bright autumn sun. Catelyn, pure white, the last gasp of winter. The whispers grow into bodies, and faces. Sandor, the road home.
Dirt cakes itself on her arms and legs. The branches of the tree of life thread through the hem of her gown, tear it from her, until she is as naked as a babe, auburn hair falling over her breasts, feet burned by the stinging bark, fingers and wrists aflame. She is Sansa Stark, the color of ice, the color of the Wall; she fell, and was rebuilt only to be stronger. The color of the heart of winter, where the snows will always fall. She is the North and the North is she.
Their faces circle her, and in one last star-busting moment, she has sight.
Then her hands break through the ground, and takes wing.
:::
He had carried her back to her bed, irritable, having sent Tarly from the room. Say what they like about him, Sandor didn’t think the blighter was enough for Sansa, her pale, shaking form. He undressed her, detached, almost, as numb as her unfeeling fingers.
Uncertain how to proceed, he tucks her naked form in under her swaths of blankets, not before rubbing her feet and arms between his hands. He thinks, for a moment, that her fingers tense into his palms. He freezes, and thinks that he hears a low whine from her throat.
He shakes his head, muttering curses as he wraps the hot, dry wool around her, before allowing, at last, his hardline common sense take over. Clad only in his shirt and breeches, he slides into the sheets with her like he has done for so many nights before.
:::
Waking up is almost like falling asleep. She returns at first bit by bit, and then all at once, eyes blinking open for the first time in years, expectantly.
She is not disappointed.
Like in her dream, the room is cast in beating colors, everything alive with its own energy, the living and the dead. The waking world settles upon her again, and her mind begins to tug at this new thing, question it. Sansa remembers Old Nan’s stories of wargs and skinchangers. She has not changed skin, but perhaps she now knows how to see the energies of these other things, other forms. Magic must take more than one form.
Sansa flexes her stiff fingers, palpates the tense muscles above her eyes, before coming to the sudden and unnerving realization that she is without clothes, and that she is not in bed alone.
But she does not fear, or shrink.
She laughs.
Sandor shifts in bed beside her, grumbling into his appropriated pillow. Her laugh dimming to a girlish giggle, she sits up, baring herself from the hips up. She combs her fingers through her damp hair, taking appraisal of the world for the first time in years, of what she has learned to do. What she has learned to do, separate of any man or any game.
“Fucking hells-Sansa!”
How close Sandor Clegane’s voice sounds to a yelp only makes her giggle harder.
Lifting her hand to his cheek-scarred, for scars are truth, the biggest truth a human can wear, like hearts upon skin-she draws him up. And though much has been returned to her (much she taken for herself) she still cannot see the features on his face, and must imagine his startled, unmanned expression for herself.
A smile blooms across her face (winter roses) and just like how every shade of blue is a shade of green, she says, “I’m ready to go home.”
“Woman, you’re-no, buggering, you’re-you’re bloody naked! Cover up.” He infuses his voice with a harshness she has learned to look though. Even after dressing her for weeks, he has not seen her without, at least, the most basic of coverings.
Instead, she takes his hand and places it on her breast, and places her mouth on his.
(She dreamed of this once, when she was a girl. The woman’s truth of it is much, much, better.)
This much she knows more than he; she traces his half-ruined mouth with her tongue, cleaves it open to her. She laughs into his mouth, giddy, when he places his other hand onto her waist. This is the half that he knows, the taking of pleasure, when all she knows is how to give it.
Teach me, she thinks, rising up onto her knees before straddling his sitting form.
:::
A raven arrives from King’s Landing, making her laugh harder and feel happier. (How strange, how the days of black sadness end. The brothers call her Lady Stark, and she believes herself to no longer be the widow on the wall. Petyr Baelish does not haunt her dreams.)
She sends one back to the Red Keep, congratulating her cousin on his blessed event, wishing him many fat babies and years to come. The next she sends to Meera, requesting that Catelyn’s household be sent to Winterfell. The next, to Lord Umber, informing him that his leverage will not be needed to end her marriage to Tyrion Lannister, and to expect her arrival within the next fortnight. The last, she sends to a seamstress’ apprentice in Winter Town, asking the young maid of fortunate circumstance for a summer gown the color of a wall she once called home.
And one remains unsent, to be laid under the heart tree of home.
:::
“Wench,” he growls, nipping at the skin at the curve of her waist, before licking his way down the delectable skin of her stomach, the line where her thigh met hip. The woman tries to squirm away from him, fucking perfect skin writhing under his calloused fingers. Sandor bites down harder in retaliation, teeth marking the petal-soft flesh of her inner thigh. “Don’t move.”
Seven hells, he thinks, losing his mind at the sight of her swollen, red cunt. Dripping just for him. He licks his thumb and rubs it down her slit, before circling back and pushing it against the nub she had showed him.
Her hips jerk into his hand, a whimper escaping her instead of a giggle.
(Jaime fucking Lannister smirks constantly and the Beauty reddens and turns away, but they’re both coming along to buggering Winterfell as members of Sansa’s guard only at his say-so, so they’d better bleeding behave. He makes a note to beat Goldenhand into mash tomorrow during sparring.)
“One more day,” Sandor says, lips resting against the mound of her hip. “One more fucking day of keeping you to myself, little bird. Then we’re on the road, going back home. Well, your home.” He fucks two fingers into her, and shifts against the mattress as he grows harder at the feeling of her, wet and wanting, clenching down on him. “I’ve grown used to your ways of waking a man.”
She moans unintelligibly-fucking merciful gods, this was all seven heavens and seven hells-and tries to push her hips into his face. He snorts.
“Not yet.”
She mewls, when his fingers move against some part deep inside of her. He tries to find it again, that strange patch of skin, but can’t, and instead settles on working his thumb over her slippery little nub.
“Come here,” she pleads, pounding her hands onto his shoulders. “Dog.”
“I thought you said the Hound was dead?” Sandor replies irreverently, allowing her to tug him up, his face level with her face. “Make up your damned mind.”
“Never,” she breathes, tightening her thighs around his waist, pulling his groin tightly against hers. He doesn’t question this change in her. Or in himself. He’s learned that loving (not that he would give voice to the word, or give the word to the feeling) someone doesn’t mean learning all their secrets. He takes what Sansa Stark is willing to give.
And at the moment, she’s quite willingly-and warmly, and wet, and delicious and so fucking perfectly-offering up her cunt.
:::
Nigh on a week later, the party from Castle Black meets with the party from Greywater Watch on the Kingsroad.
Catelyn… he does not know what he expected Sansa’s little niece to look like. The child is not more than five, or six (he is too tired and too touch-starved to do the sum) and is a mite tall for her age. She quickly breaks down a ladylike façade at the sight of her aunt, and runs towards her, screams with delight when Sansa collects her in her arms, tears streaming down her face.
“My girl,” he hears her whisper. “My darling girl.”
He wonders what the girl’s color is, and if Sansa will tell him.
Catelyn (Cat, Sansa calls her. Cat. Little Cat. My beloved Cat. In anyone else’s voice it would be so buggering obnoxious. Fucking hells, what has the little bird done to him?) has long hair, with childish curls, and large blue eyes-much like her aunt’s. Sandor thinks he sees a resemblance in the child’s fat face, mostly around the eyes and in the chin. Too young to tell who she’ll look like, but she’ll have to make due for a Stark.
Sansa will make her make due.
:::
The first one finds them days from Winterfell.
The men do not sleep at night, trembling in their tents as the pack grows in number during the day. Hynnah will ride out with her mistress to meet them on the morrow with her new gown, and Catelyn’s. Hynnah, so talented (and a bit hard-headed and independent, like the women who raised her), had left Lady Umber’s service at the prospect of industry. Of breaking out of a cage. Sansa hopes that she still remembers how to fix her hair.
But Sansa can see them, stroking Catelyn’s hair in front of the fire, the child’s face buried in her lap. She can sleep through the wolfsong, or maybe can hear it for what it is, or maybe just feels safe in her aunt’s hold. Whatever it may be, Sansa takes it and sets it free, her bird of hope. It no longer sits, a pale and fragile thing, quivering in its cage. It flies.
She looks deep through the trees, and sees Summer and Nymeria, sees the pack and its strength. This is the banner she will ride in under, the song she will sing. She has a battle to fight, but a man who will stand with her and a child to fight for.
And it is once again the time of wolves.
:::
our walls | watch how they crumble
---
I wanted to thank everyone who left comments on part one--I promise I'm going to finally answer and thank you all for them tomorrow. Erm, later today. And thanks to everyone who encouraged me when I rewrote this for the seventh time, and didn't pressure me to do it quicker. Love you guys!
Rating: MA
Warnings: Allusions to non-con, graphic sex
Word Count: 5,900
Characters and Pairings: Sansan, Sansa Stark, Sandor Clegane, Jaime Lannister, Jon Snow, Brienne of Tarth, Samwell Tarly, Dany Targareyn, Bran Stark, Littlefinger, OC: Hynnah Snow, OC: Catelyn Stark II
Summary: Sansa has survived Littlefinger, but not without cost. Sandor is paying for his sins and has no where to go. They both wind up at the Wall, and learn about breaking down some walls of their own.
---
Jon Snow-Aeron Targaryen-is not shocked when Sansa informs him that she will not be accompanying him South.
And that Sandor Clegane will not be swearing the oath of the Black Brothers, but instead swearing his sword to her.
:::
It somehow becomes habit for him to sleep beside her during the night, now that Jon and Hynnah are gone. Like nights when he would come and rouse her from her dreams, these moments do not exist beyond the sunrise. They die when there is sun on their faces.
He follows her in the days, as she tends to the running of a Keep, as she was raised to handle, as she tends to the men’s minor injuries. Samwell Tarly is released from the Queen’s grasp, and returns back to the Wall.
“They don’t get along very well, Jon and her Grace,” Sam tells her as he opens the daily letters, between reading them. “He says that she is keeping him busy, introducing him to lady after lady, but won’t tell him what she wants him to do-to leave the Night’s Watch or not. And when he asks, she simply gets angry. And then sad. Beautiful, he calls her. But sad.”
Sansa hums, tracing the rim of her cup.
“What?” Sam asks. “What does she want from him?”
Sansa thinks that she has finally figured out Jon and Daenerys, but tells Sam nothing. “Don’t fret about it,” she answers. “I’m sure Jon will figure everything out in time.”
Either that, or the Red Keep will combust into flames. Again.
She supervises the inventory, restocking Castle Black in preparation of every eventuality. Winter is Coming, she thinks, even though summer has not yet touched this far North. She wonders if it ever truly will.
She does not remember how to be summer child. All she knows is that she was one, once, before the winter winds came a stole away everything that she held dear; the same icy winds that still visit her at night.
She shivers under her furs that night, and reaches out for him. He grumbles in his sleep, weight shifting on the mattress. He is huge. It is one thing to see him and another to feel him, strong and just simply there under her hand, as she traces it up the curve of his chest, to his shoulder.
He makes her feel safe.
“Whadya want, little bird,” he mutters. She can feel him turning over. One of his hands grazes her waist before pulling away. She opens her mouth to speak, watching his bloom into the most beautiful red. She feels like she’s intruding, a flush of embarrassment coming over her.
“Bad dream,” she manages to squeak, turning her face into her pillow to hide herself from the deep, warm red that just seems to live in him and how it affects her.
He groans edging himself closer to her, rubbing her back through her thick chemise. “It’s fine, little bird. It’s all over…”
The next morning, like every one preceding it, she wakes up and he is gone.
:::
Two turns of the moon pass since her brother’s and her maid’s departure.
He enters her bower after afternoon of sparring in the yard, sweaty and cold. “My lady.”
She is sitting at her window, letting the afternoon breeze comb through her long, loose hair. Her eyes are closed, and it hits him almost like a literal punch in the gut.
The little bird has grown up. He knows that. Sandor Clegane is not stupid man-he’s seen her hips and her teats and the way her plain, simply-cut gowns showcase them now that she’s left to lace them up with only his help.
(They are in a castle full of purportedly celibate men; still he is her sworn shield and in the absence of a maid he feels that fixing her stays and making sure her laces are tied is his duty.)
But her face, lit by the golden light, hair pushed back and made even more red by the sun-she is a woman, with a long, angular face and nobly-shaped nose. A womanly jaw and sharp, womanly cheekbones. He does not remember enough of Lady Catelyn Stark to know whether or not Sansa takes after her mother. And with her eyes closed-they had been Tully blue, that he remembers, because how could he not-it’s almost like you cannot tell. The sunlight obscures the puckering of the dry, twisted skin surrounding her eyes. What would have Sansa Stark’s fate had been, had she kept her sight?
And how much time has passed finally hits him.
They met in summer, first. And they meet in summer, now. Nearly ten years.
She smiles wistfully, but does not turn. There is a letter in her hand, and she puts it out in front of her, lifting it up to what she must approximate to be at height with his grasp. “The boy who brought it to me could not read it to tell me who it’s from.”
His eyes flicker downwards. “The maid of yours.”
“Oh.” She gives him a brief, tense smile. “Sam is-would you mind terribly reading it to me? It has been so long since Hynnah has written me.”
He clears his throat, uncertain. He hesitates breaking the plain, unornamented seal at the lip of the parchment.
She ducks her head. “You do not have to. I just do not wish to bother the maester at the moment.”
He sits in the chair across from her, and wipes sweat from his brow.
“You cannot mock me, girl,” he warns her. “It’s been many a year since I’ve read anything aloud, certainly not some teenage chit’s handwriting.”
She giggles, and his grey eyes widen at her in surprise.
That soon becomes habit, too-the letter-reading and the giggling.
:::
She falls ill on the first true warm day. It is not a sudden thing-she has complained to him for days of head pain and he has taken to awkwardly rubbing her neck and shoulders and summoning the Maester for her at all hours.
That morning, she walks the battlements; leaning heavily on his arm instead of her stick, face flushed and hair tied back haphazardly-she wonders if the brothers can tell if it was her attempt or his (his), for when she pats it down it is lumpy and uneven, but she appreciates what he tries to do for her nevertheless.
It was only the night before that he lifted her out of the copper bathtub and placed her on her bed, dried her the best he could before wrapping her in her dressing gown because she was too tired and too much in pain to move.
He nearly gives a shout when her legs give out from under her, but calms himself quickly, slipping his arms under her legs and lifting her to him. Almost like falling asleep, she thinks. Bit by bit, and then all at-
:::
“What’s wrong with her?” he growls, breathing down Sam’s neck as the rotund Maester pokes and prods his highborn charge. “You said she’d be fine for a walk and she fucking fainted like a fucking-”
“Fever,” Sam interrupts, not certain he wants to hear the end of the man formerly known as the Hound’s sentence. He is flustered, but not put off. “She had only been experiencing her… usual pains, in relation to her head, until today.”
He growls, and Samwell flinches, hand mid-motion of stirring honey and coriander with hot water in the small cauldron he had set up over Sansa’s fire. “It is normal, my lord, for those who have experienced the sort of abrasions to the eyes-especially the prolonged exposure to the poison which Lady Sansa experienced-to have these sorts of pains. The fever, however, is it not to be expected. She is ill of other means. Infection. There is a fever of sort going about the men. It is worse in Lady Sansa because she was already weakened by her eyes.”
:::
The red nightmares do not haunt her, but her dreams do not stay away. She dreams in shades of green, every shade of green a shade of blue and as she walks farther, red and Jon’s grey and white. She can see, but that does not strike her as odd. Her slumbering mind has never been so cruel as to render her blind in this land as well as the one of the awake. Cruel enough to make her relive Petyr’s touches, and Petyr’s hand, but never lose her sight.
It is what keeps her from fearing that she will one day forget what was like to see, forget faces, and places. Jon’s dark eyes and Snow’s fur, and the blood-red of the weirwood leaves. Even remembering Petyr’s face, harsh and twisted with rage as it was, is a blessing. Perhaps, she thinks, losing his face would mean the most of all.
She thinks it strange, and shakes the notion from her head, but wears the brand of a cripple on her sleeve-and hypocrisy and cowardice and strength and boldness and wisdom and all these unspeakable and terrible things that happen to those who have fallen.
No. Petyr was something that happened to her. He is not all of her. She is still Sansa Stark, the blood of Winterfell. She still stands while he does not. For when she fell, when Petyr pushed her, she got back up.
Sansa Stark was once a girl who specialized in surfaces, and now she follows lingering shadows.
Green erupts before her-her dreaming self, a woman whole and pure with clean hands and open eyes and steady gaze-and she stops. And sees, and watches, before the ground under her crumbles and she falls and falls and she falls, tumbling in and over herself. And then lands.
She is in a godswood, not the one of Winterfell and childhood, but one much older, crafted not from human hands and therefore darker, much more sinister. This is not a place she looked upon when her eyes could still preform their task. Her feet pull her towards the heart tree, and she glides forward, feeling herself lessen step by step, until she is a pair of blue eyes in the green-tinted night, and she passes through the bark of the monstrous trunk like water.
It is the fact that she is dreaming that she does not scream at the image of her broken brother seated upon a throne of roots like a lord, the prince of Winterfell. He is twisted now and not just broken, eyes gouged out by fine, twisting tendrils of root and branch, boyish cheeks pulsing as the tree manipulates itself under his skin, down his arms. Like a grotesque puppet, he allows himself to be manipulated by the heart tree; the writhing roots sink into his body and pull him up, forward, to stand before her.
“Bran,” she whispers, dread settling over her like a fine dusting of snow, as she clambered out of the Gates of the Moon, clawing at her eyes as they bled and bled and bled.
(She fell and she fell and she fell, in and over herself. How did she not die there, in the Vale?)
(Stop, she thinks. And does.)
Even his skin has been wrought strange; it is no longer skin, Sansa thinks-it is as dull and as thin as parchment. The tree moves his legs, walks him to her, holds his hand out to her.
“Bran?”
The Bran creature takes her fingers, not her palms, and roots through them.
“Sansa,” he says, a queer smile inching across his face. “You’ve come home.”
The muscles of her cheeks tense, crinkling her eyes and forehead. “No, I haven’t.”
“You have. Will. Were.” The roots slink back into his skin, a faint rustling disturbing the disquieting peace of the heart tree. “No matter.”
“Bran,” she answers. “I do believe it matters.”
He drifts away from her, the tree walking him backwards, to the side. Up, down, up again; all smooth and all rhythmic, a pulsing sort of movement. Sansa follows, less gracefully, even with her sight.
“Time once.” His voice is hollow, or like the rustling of leaves, or like the sound of scraping bark. “Time again.”
Dread spreads, like a patina of grit. No longer like snow, no longer light or cold. She tenses, feet freezing beneath her. She will root here too. “Bran?” she asks hesitantly.
He climbs back into the wall of the tree. It swallows him, his parchment-skin melding back into wood, a root bursting out of his mouth, roping around throat and wrists and legs, pushing and molding him and-
“Brandon Stark!” Sansa cries, terrified. “You listen to me!”
With a gust of cold wind, the heart tree bursts into snow, and Sansa tumbles not to the floor, but to the sky.
:::
He is a hale and healthy boy of ten, a wooden sword in hand and she a maid of three and ten in summer silks. They walk through this land, a blooming garden cast in ice and snow, wind whipping against their skin. Ice finds them like shadows, diamond bright collecting on their skin, the radiant sheen of youth. Bran bends to pick a bloom and tuck it into her hair, crystalline petals in her hair.
Hearing the sound of blue and red, Sansa turns, and sees a little bird dance for a moment on the muzzle of a hound, before flapping her wings and taking flight, the hound nipping and chasing after her, her song.
“He’ll follow her. He won’t stop.”
She nervously licks her lips. “I know.” She does, truly.
Bran, so boyish and innocent, appraises her, and nods.
And in a flash of green-wildfire, Sansa thinks briefly, the reflection of a dagger casting down against her breast-they are gone again with only the company of roaring flames and a lone wolf’s howl.
:::
“Where’s Summer?” she asks, turning to see Bran seated again on his throne, skin more like skin and less like paper. (The wolf continues to howl in the distance, it’s old song sad and true. Did she really ever think that birds were the animals to make music of such sadness?) “Bran, where is your wolf?”
“Lost,” he replies, younger now. And sadder. Like her. He turns his head, moving his hand-on his own, no slithering roots, and no puppetry. He is her Bran again, her little brother-to the side, and through the column of the tree she sees Summer padding through Wolfswood. The vision glazes over, fogged glass, before clearing again. Horrified, Sansa turns back to Bran, a small smile on his face. She turns back.
Robb, seated upon a broken throne, Grey Wind’s head upon his body. His form, decayed and mottled, sprayed with brown flakes of dried blood, riddled with arrows. A scene from a city Sansa has never known, the pace of a plain-looking beggar girl. A grassy forest, Nymeria drinking from the stream. Ghost, locked up in the Red Keep. Lady, her restless bones in the Winterfell lichyard. Rickon, staggering through a muddy field, the whipped-and-slashed skull of a canine worn as a helmet-the worst, perhaps, of all.
“Lost. Like all of us.”
Flashes of color; the restless song of the wolf.
“But you, least of all of us. Even though you lost your wolf first.”
Green.
“It makes you first to come home.”
:::
The fat bugger pats at her forehead with a cloth, mopping her brow. The girl-woman, girl, Seven Hells-twists in her bed, linen chemise sticking to her sweat-slicked body. There’s nothing that he wants to do more than pull her coverings back up to her chin, keep her from-that is to say, her breast push against her nightclothes in a way that would make her blush, blinded or not, with men present. Even him.
Blood boiling, Sandor wishes to do nothing more than toss the Maester from the room and tend to the woman himself. No one should see her like this, fever-delirious, murmuring crazed nothings.
What kind of buggering sworn shield am I? he thinks sourly, gripping the arms of the chair that has been his host these hours passed. Her head shakes from side to side, shoulders jerking violently. She reaches out, fingers grasping at nothing at all. He grips the chair tighter, tempted to make the wood splinter under his palms.
“Can’t you do anything for her?”
The boy pales, eyes wide. “I-I could-but it’s not.” He stops himself, and takes a steadying breath. “There’s some literature supporting that an ice bath, with a fever this high, could help.”
“Ice bath?” Sandor growls.
To his credit, the Maester doesn’t flinch. “Yes.”
:::
Green still, even after the light fades from her eyes. She is alone, now, in a green-laced world, vision darker. Her footsteps echo on wooden planks; she edges her way carefully along, eyes pinned to the moving waters below. She looks up, and steps into a nursery.
A child’s laugh, a flash of curly brown hair, and bright blue eyes.
Sansa is lost.
:::
He doesn’t like this. They didn’t undress her, but rather submerged her in the freezing water in her chemise and smallclothes. Her skin turns blue quickly, but she does not shiver. Her lips purple, hanging open loosely. The linen shift floats away from her slender frame, red hair bloodening in the copper tub. Sandor has to look away-it is this form of her, frozen and blue and deadened, that has haunted his nightmares and daytime fears for so many years, when he, like so many others, thought her gone from the world.
His world has been righted; he cannot bear, not now, to think her gone again.
When Samwell fucking Tarly moves to busy himself with the fire, Sandor takes her hands between his and rubs warmth into them.
“I do not love you,” she tells him. “I thought I did.” Her voice enters his head, clear as day, and he is frozen too. Fearful, his eyes look into the tub, but her mouth does not move. The words shatter like ice in his head. “I convinced Hynnah, my maid, that I did. I was a foolish girl.”
He stares at her like she’s fucking crazy. Because he’s certain that she is. That whatever poison Baelish used on her eyes seeped into her pretty little head, as well. And then spread to his. She rests in her tub, corpse-like.
Her voice smiles. “I think I could love you, though. I do not know you well enough again.”
His hand itches to reach over to his wineskin, on her dressing table, and gulp it all down. Too much time without sleep, he thinks. He should rest, once she is dry and warm again, with blood in her face. Make this whole thing go away-the coldness settling in his gut when he looks upon her still form, the sweet, red, feelings that slink through his veins when he sees her fingers against his.
No.
He buries the feelings he left behind when he died on the banks of the Trident.
(He didn’t die, and neither did the notion.)
He thought he knew who Sandor Clegane was, the man who went to serve at the Wall. He does not know anymore. He does not know who Sansa Stark is, either.
He thinks he might want to find out.
(A new and strange sensation.)
:::
A thousand leagues away, Jon Snow-Aeron Targaryen-sits in his aunt’s solar in the Red Keep, watching her scratch her quill against the paper.
“You’ll consent, then?” she asks.
He sighs. It is overdramatic, but the woman cannot read him well enough, and he has learned enough from Sansa to keep Dany from being able to read him well enough. He does not worry about Shireen, his bride. Shireen, his friend, his bride-their children will have even claim to the throne through both lines.
“If you agree to my conditions.”
Dany raises an eyebrow. “I will annull your late cousin’s marriage to Tyrion Lannister, as you wish. And he will make reparations to House Stark… to Winterfell, in her memory, as you wish.”
Jon smiles, not entirely without affection, for both his aunt and future wife. Maybe, just maybe, there is a chance that it could work out like one of little Sansa’s songs. Dany thinks he intends to name one of his sons the head of House Stark, make his children the heads of three different great houses. He will continue to let her think that. “And I will marry Lady Baratheon, as you wish. And reside in Dragonstone, also as you wish.” He smiles tighter. “And I will cage my wolf.”
:::
“Sansa?”
The green flash dies, and only darkness remains. Darkness, and crushing sadness, and the crush of hands upon her body.
Out of fight or flight, she has always chosen flight.
She fumbles through the darkness, until a flint appears in her hand. Her fingers reach out, scrabbling for support, finding the wall made of rock. Panting heavily, she brings the flint down heavily against the wall, again and again. Sparks spray down onto the hem of her gown and her slippers, brighter as she keeps going, keening in pain as her arms protest the movement. She needs the light. She needs to get to the light. She needs to be able to see.
“Sweetling.” The mint-breathed voice falls into her ear like the sweet, waiting dagger.
She shrieks, the sparks taking life and engulfing the room in fire, bursting with color.
Green, red, blue, white, grey, yellow, red, fire, home, hearth, green, green, green.
Fight or flight?
Her fists bunch into his doublet, nails ripping into the fine fabric. His lips descend to kiss hers, eyes expectant and cruel.
Sansa growls, and the fire dances, green like the wildfire that broke the startled sky. No one would hurt you again. The wolf rises, and leaps, and Sansa pushes Petyr back, into the flames. Forward she must go now-If I look back, I am lost, a blood-red voice tells her, faintly-and fly.
Her vision begins to fade, first at the edges, and then the light goes. But the wildfire green, the blood red, the white and snow grey, they all stay with her, pulsing with life at the edges of all things. They vibrate with the certainty of rain and harvest. This is what they cannot break from her.
Petyr took her vision, but he did not take her life. Cersei took her wolf, but she did not take her fight. The game of thrones took her freedom, but they did not take her flight.
She turns her back to him, to Cersei, to the players and the pawns. She has fingers to break-she will tear herself down to get out of here; her fingers scrabble into the wall, pulling it down, making it crumble. Her nails tear from their beds like children taken in the night (the Stark children, all summer babes, made hard and wrong, made true by winter, alive by winter, saved by winter.) She cries out, the memory of pain far. She pushes through, her hands finding the thick roots of the tree that has taken Bran to root. (She is not the last Stark.) Red. Beautiful, home and hearth and red.
The color of the godswood, the blood of Winterfell-
And Sandor Clegane.
(He is home he is home he is home he can take her home.)
Their story is a circle; time once, time again. Summer once, summer again. Home once, home again.
Sansa kicks her slippers from her feet, and begins to climb. The twisting roots close in around her, but do not fight her ascent. She can feel the ghosts of her bones, the dead who live in her marrow. Her toes fight for purchase; she will not fall. Father, smiling, his statue in the crypt next to mother’s-it was Jon who brought their bones home to rest. Lyanna, so young and so brave and so (Sansa Stark was not the first of her house to be lost to the Red Keep) impossibly young (you were Alayne, Sansa remembers, she cannot forget) and Jon’s mother in truth, winter roses in her lap. Brandon Stark, the elder, and her grandfather, Uncle Benjen, and blue. Mother, her gentle hands guiding her up, a heart of broken stone on a chain around her untouched neck. Arya, and no one, the color of the promise of snow. Robb, the color of stone. Jeyne, the sand upon the shore.
Keep going, they whisper.
Bran, the green of spring and summer, Rickon, the yellow of the bright autumn sun. Catelyn, pure white, the last gasp of winter. The whispers grow into bodies, and faces. Sandor, the road home.
Dirt cakes itself on her arms and legs. The branches of the tree of life thread through the hem of her gown, tear it from her, until she is as naked as a babe, auburn hair falling over her breasts, feet burned by the stinging bark, fingers and wrists aflame. She is Sansa Stark, the color of ice, the color of the Wall; she fell, and was rebuilt only to be stronger. The color of the heart of winter, where the snows will always fall. She is the North and the North is she.
Their faces circle her, and in one last star-busting moment, she has sight.
Then her hands break through the ground, and takes wing.
:::
He had carried her back to her bed, irritable, having sent Tarly from the room. Say what they like about him, Sandor didn’t think the blighter was enough for Sansa, her pale, shaking form. He undressed her, detached, almost, as numb as her unfeeling fingers.
Uncertain how to proceed, he tucks her naked form in under her swaths of blankets, not before rubbing her feet and arms between his hands. He thinks, for a moment, that her fingers tense into his palms. He freezes, and thinks that he hears a low whine from her throat.
He shakes his head, muttering curses as he wraps the hot, dry wool around her, before allowing, at last, his hardline common sense take over. Clad only in his shirt and breeches, he slides into the sheets with her like he has done for so many nights before.
:::
Waking up is almost like falling asleep. She returns at first bit by bit, and then all at once, eyes blinking open for the first time in years, expectantly.
She is not disappointed.
Like in her dream, the room is cast in beating colors, everything alive with its own energy, the living and the dead. The waking world settles upon her again, and her mind begins to tug at this new thing, question it. Sansa remembers Old Nan’s stories of wargs and skinchangers. She has not changed skin, but perhaps she now knows how to see the energies of these other things, other forms. Magic must take more than one form.
Sansa flexes her stiff fingers, palpates the tense muscles above her eyes, before coming to the sudden and unnerving realization that she is without clothes, and that she is not in bed alone.
But she does not fear, or shrink.
She laughs.
Sandor shifts in bed beside her, grumbling into his appropriated pillow. Her laugh dimming to a girlish giggle, she sits up, baring herself from the hips up. She combs her fingers through her damp hair, taking appraisal of the world for the first time in years, of what she has learned to do. What she has learned to do, separate of any man or any game.
“Fucking hells-Sansa!”
How close Sandor Clegane’s voice sounds to a yelp only makes her giggle harder.
Lifting her hand to his cheek-scarred, for scars are truth, the biggest truth a human can wear, like hearts upon skin-she draws him up. And though much has been returned to her (much she taken for herself) she still cannot see the features on his face, and must imagine his startled, unmanned expression for herself.
A smile blooms across her face (winter roses) and just like how every shade of blue is a shade of green, she says, “I’m ready to go home.”
“Woman, you’re-no, buggering, you’re-you’re bloody naked! Cover up.” He infuses his voice with a harshness she has learned to look though. Even after dressing her for weeks, he has not seen her without, at least, the most basic of coverings.
Instead, she takes his hand and places it on her breast, and places her mouth on his.
(She dreamed of this once, when she was a girl. The woman’s truth of it is much, much, better.)
This much she knows more than he; she traces his half-ruined mouth with her tongue, cleaves it open to her. She laughs into his mouth, giddy, when he places his other hand onto her waist. This is the half that he knows, the taking of pleasure, when all she knows is how to give it.
Teach me, she thinks, rising up onto her knees before straddling his sitting form.
:::
A raven arrives from King’s Landing, making her laugh harder and feel happier. (How strange, how the days of black sadness end. The brothers call her Lady Stark, and she believes herself to no longer be the widow on the wall. Petyr Baelish does not haunt her dreams.)
She sends one back to the Red Keep, congratulating her cousin on his blessed event, wishing him many fat babies and years to come. The next she sends to Meera, requesting that Catelyn’s household be sent to Winterfell. The next, to Lord Umber, informing him that his leverage will not be needed to end her marriage to Tyrion Lannister, and to expect her arrival within the next fortnight. The last, she sends to a seamstress’ apprentice in Winter Town, asking the young maid of fortunate circumstance for a summer gown the color of a wall she once called home.
And one remains unsent, to be laid under the heart tree of home.
:::
“Wench,” he growls, nipping at the skin at the curve of her waist, before licking his way down the delectable skin of her stomach, the line where her thigh met hip. The woman tries to squirm away from him, fucking perfect skin writhing under his calloused fingers. Sandor bites down harder in retaliation, teeth marking the petal-soft flesh of her inner thigh. “Don’t move.”
Seven hells, he thinks, losing his mind at the sight of her swollen, red cunt. Dripping just for him. He licks his thumb and rubs it down her slit, before circling back and pushing it against the nub she had showed him.
Her hips jerk into his hand, a whimper escaping her instead of a giggle.
(Jaime fucking Lannister smirks constantly and the Beauty reddens and turns away, but they’re both coming along to buggering Winterfell as members of Sansa’s guard only at his say-so, so they’d better bleeding behave. He makes a note to beat Goldenhand into mash tomorrow during sparring.)
“One more day,” Sandor says, lips resting against the mound of her hip. “One more fucking day of keeping you to myself, little bird. Then we’re on the road, going back home. Well, your home.” He fucks two fingers into her, and shifts against the mattress as he grows harder at the feeling of her, wet and wanting, clenching down on him. “I’ve grown used to your ways of waking a man.”
She moans unintelligibly-fucking merciful gods, this was all seven heavens and seven hells-and tries to push her hips into his face. He snorts.
“Not yet.”
She mewls, when his fingers move against some part deep inside of her. He tries to find it again, that strange patch of skin, but can’t, and instead settles on working his thumb over her slippery little nub.
“Come here,” she pleads, pounding her hands onto his shoulders. “Dog.”
“I thought you said the Hound was dead?” Sandor replies irreverently, allowing her to tug him up, his face level with her face. “Make up your damned mind.”
“Never,” she breathes, tightening her thighs around his waist, pulling his groin tightly against hers. He doesn’t question this change in her. Or in himself. He’s learned that loving (not that he would give voice to the word, or give the word to the feeling) someone doesn’t mean learning all their secrets. He takes what Sansa Stark is willing to give.
And at the moment, she’s quite willingly-and warmly, and wet, and delicious and so fucking perfectly-offering up her cunt.
:::
Nigh on a week later, the party from Castle Black meets with the party from Greywater Watch on the Kingsroad.
Catelyn… he does not know what he expected Sansa’s little niece to look like. The child is not more than five, or six (he is too tired and too touch-starved to do the sum) and is a mite tall for her age. She quickly breaks down a ladylike façade at the sight of her aunt, and runs towards her, screams with delight when Sansa collects her in her arms, tears streaming down her face.
“My girl,” he hears her whisper. “My darling girl.”
He wonders what the girl’s color is, and if Sansa will tell him.
Catelyn (Cat, Sansa calls her. Cat. Little Cat. My beloved Cat. In anyone else’s voice it would be so buggering obnoxious. Fucking hells, what has the little bird done to him?) has long hair, with childish curls, and large blue eyes-much like her aunt’s. Sandor thinks he sees a resemblance in the child’s fat face, mostly around the eyes and in the chin. Too young to tell who she’ll look like, but she’ll have to make due for a Stark.
Sansa will make her make due.
:::
The first one finds them days from Winterfell.
The men do not sleep at night, trembling in their tents as the pack grows in number during the day. Hynnah will ride out with her mistress to meet them on the morrow with her new gown, and Catelyn’s. Hynnah, so talented (and a bit hard-headed and independent, like the women who raised her), had left Lady Umber’s service at the prospect of industry. Of breaking out of a cage. Sansa hopes that she still remembers how to fix her hair.
But Sansa can see them, stroking Catelyn’s hair in front of the fire, the child’s face buried in her lap. She can sleep through the wolfsong, or maybe can hear it for what it is, or maybe just feels safe in her aunt’s hold. Whatever it may be, Sansa takes it and sets it free, her bird of hope. It no longer sits, a pale and fragile thing, quivering in its cage. It flies.
She looks deep through the trees, and sees Summer and Nymeria, sees the pack and its strength. This is the banner she will ride in under, the song she will sing. She has a battle to fight, but a man who will stand with her and a child to fight for.
And it is once again the time of wolves.
:::
our walls | watch how they crumble
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I wanted to thank everyone who left comments on part one--I promise I'm going to finally answer and thank you all for them tomorrow. Erm, later today. And thanks to everyone who encouraged me when I rewrote this for the seventh time, and didn't pressure me to do it quicker. Love you guys!