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The One With The Fake Relationship

Summary:

When Sansa Stark, who has no interest in dating due to horrible and thankfully jailed past boyfriend, is invited to the wedding of the year, she desperately needs a plus one to accompany her. After all, Cat Stark is determined to get her set up with an eligible boy, so weddings and babies happen to the Starks rather than anyone else. The best way to stop that? Pretend that Detective Inspector Sandor Clegane, her dependable (if angry and foul-mouthed) lemon-cake providing work colleague is her boyfriend. Simple, right? Apart from the obvious; Sandor's been in love with her for a year, in like with her for longer, and knows that this might really really hurt. But, bloody hell, it's only a wedding, right?

It's all fluffy, and a bit angsty, and a lot sweary, and a whole load of gay marriage-y. And kilt-y. Of course.

Notes:

I love tropes. I polled people on Tumblr to ask which ones they'd be interested in reading, and this one was suggested by the lovely @majorlykira. This one, therefore, is for her.

This is what happens when I'm awake for thirty-six hours. SanSan happens. Fluffy fluffy SanSan.

PSA: Tiny mentions of abuse towards Sansa from Joffrey, but just a mention and no going into anything. Thought I best say, in case.

Chapter 1: The Beginning

Chapter Text


 

 

Detective Inspector Clegane is a simple man, of simple tastes and needs.

He is of a rank in the King’s Landing Metropolitan Police - lovingly nicknamed KLaMP by the people the Force pays to think this shit up, and the bastard pigfuckers by most of the ne’er-do-wells in Flea Bottom - that uniform isn’t a problem. He wears casual trousers, and shirts with the sleeves rolled to his elbow, and usually no tie unless DCI Selmy gets on his arse about presenting a smart front to the public. Police issue boots, though. Always them. He’s found that spending more than half his life as a copper means his feet like being tortured by the cardboard-style leather, the meanly thin soles. They feel...like home.

Sometimes  Detective Inspector Clegane goes out for a post work drink with his detective colleagues; Selmy, Dondarrion, and Snow. He drinks pints of black stout with a whisky chaser, and walks home in the rain.

He works too hard, and doesn’t play at all. Clegane is the type of policeman that never switches off, is always ready and alert and wanting to trudge through mountains of circumstantial evidence, or re-read cold case files in case he discovers an angle never before seen. They call him, on the streets and in Red Keep Yard, Selmy’s Dog. He comes to work at seven in the morning, and usually leaves after a thirteen hour stint, grim and gritty-eyed, red-raw around the edges; he goes home, eats shit takeaway food, and passes out. This repeats daily.

He does not take holidays.

There are reasons for this.

Sandor, the man and not the policeman, lives alone. He is approaching forty, and he definitely looks it because policing is never a healthy career for anyone. Good strong boys join aged eighteen, fit and bright-eyed. Five years later they are as battered and cynical as the rest of the poor fuckers who wear the badge of Red Keep Yard and try and keep this teeming city of over two hundred thousand in some semblance of order. Sandor is estranged from his family, and has few friends. He listens to very loud, very angry music that sounds like someone strangling a passel of screaming guitars, and attributes slight hearing loss to going to gigs in his youth. Sometimes he reads the newspaper and attempts to fill in crosswords, but Dondarrion usually gets to them first. He drinks too much black coffee, and is overly-angry and honest at the entire fucking world, because the world has never given a shit about him.

He is the same as any middling aged man of his rank and profession, in a hundred police stations across Westeros. He is, above all, his job.

Which makes interacting with someone who is a) not a criminal, b) female, and c) not a member of the police force but is employed as administrative staff for Selmy’s band of warrior detectives, really fucking difficult.

Especially if d) she is beautiful e) she smells like lemons and f) her voice is like the song of a linnet over the ruin of Fang Tower on a warm and dreaming summer’s day.

 


 

Sansa Stark is an enigma, and he enjoys that about her.

She is, above all, a very good looking woman. Far too bloody young, sure, and she’s related to Snow - cousin or something like that - and she has an annoying/sweet habit of humming to herself when she’s typing, but she is possibly the most beautiful girl DI Clegane has ever seen in his long, tiresome, rather dog-eared and moth-eaten life.

The rest of them, the four of them, are just blokes. Snow’s a pretty bugger, and one of the northern sergeants says the Detective Sergeant is better looking than both his daughters. How he gets away with his tumbling curls, and propensity for all black clothing all the damned time, no one knows. Dondarrion, his fellow DI, is knackered in the sort of way that women describe as ruggedly craggy. He has a prescription eyepatch, surprisingly exuberant red-gold hair, and talks in the sort of hippy shit way that all R’hllor worshippers do these days. Selmy is a good man. Geriatric, sure, but sharp as a razorblade and incredibly fair-minded. Yes, he’s punched a few suspects in the past, because, hell, the ‘70s was a different era of policing, but considering he caught several high-profile murderers and brought them to justice, people tend to hero worship him a bit.

Clegane is quite sure that their section of the force is where everyone else sends the weird people who don’t quite fit in.

Sometimes they have hanger’s on, when they go for a drink. Tarly the medic, and Bolton the creepy fuck who enjoys cutting open dead bodies. Sometimes even Lannister and Tarth from the fraud squad, who are definitely fucking, but pretend they loathe each other to try and deny they’ve been at it for years. Dayne, who enjoys his firearms job just that little bit too much.

Sansa Stark.

She is pretty. No. More than that. Beautiful. She has a lovely smile that tends towards the wistful. When she was twenty one, and he remembers this because it was a complete fuck-up on several sides by members of the force who turned out to be in the pay of the creepy cunt that she had the restraining order against, Sansa turned up with a black eye and strangulation marks. Walked straight into the station, head held high, back straight, and reported her ex-boyfriend for domestic violence, various grades of assault, and grievous bodily harm.

The cunt filmed every little bit of what he did to her, and the prick made copies on his computer because there are some fucked up shits in this world. It took the jury twenty minutes to lock him up for seven years; then the murders got linked in, of the hookers down in the west and the docks, and his DNA was all over the evidence, and Joffrey Baratheon is in Harrenhal for life.

Clegane wonders, idly sometimes because this is personal in a way since he got to know Sansa, if Gregor is making the little blond cunt his prison bitch. Hopes. He should feel guilty, sure, because wishing that on anyone is really shitty, but Baratheon deserves everything he gets.

Sansa is pretty. She’s clever. Diplomatic. Charming. Sometimes it seems a little bit of a facade with her, as if she glazes just a tad when she talks politely and eloquently to others in the force, with outside agencies. Clegane knows her, and he’s looked out for her for the last two years, since she walked back into the station not as a victim but a survivor, and, even more impressively, a survivor working for the very police who freed her from the shackles of fear.

Pretty. Clever. Charming. Innocent, in a way, and still, even now, quite private of herself. Everyone else mentions wives or girlfriends. Sometimes boyfriends. Often pets. She speaks of her part-husky who lives with her parents in the north, and a little of her family, and nothing about lovers because she doesn’t want one. Snow teases her as if they are brother and sister, and apparently they did grow up together, but there is a gentle care to what he says and does. As if there is a line that can never be crossed. They are quite close, he and Sansa.

It is from Snow he gets a lot of the information about Sansa - not that he pries. Just, if Snow wants to talk about his family, and Sandor’s lurking about, then he does listen. He hears of how her parents think she should start dating again, and how sometimes Cat, and Jon makes a face when he says that name, rolling his grey eyes, tries to set her up with eligible bachelors. How everyone else in the family has a partner - even her little brother who is shacked up with Commissioner Baratheon’s daughter, and they’re only, what, fifteen and underage or something? Fuck, kids grow up too quick these days.

So what happens is sort of a shock, and it isn’t in some respects, but in others really, it is.

 


 

“Sandor?”

Sansa is the only person allowed to call the lads by their first names, outside of their close-knit group. Selmy treats her as a beloved granddaughter, and dotes on their redheaded admin assistant. They all bring her little treats, though only Clegane knows where to get what she once described as the ‘perfect lemon cake.’ No one else knows that he makes them himself, sweating and sweating at the fuckers to rise, before stabbing them viciously with a skewer and pouring drizzle into the light fluffy sponge.

Clegane never baked before Sansa. Now he can bake nothing but lemon cakes. All sorts. Drizzle, upside down, sponge, cupcakes with poppy seeds and sweet yellow icing, and others. He puts them in cardboard boxes he buys from the internet, pretends they are bakery items, and lives to see her freckled face glow with pleasure as she bites into the offering he brings.

He’s a fucking sap.

“Yeah?” Looking up from paperwork. When he first joined, way back aged eighteen, Clegane never had to bother about all this paper shit. Now, almost twenty years later, they are buried in red tape and bureaucracy. Hence Selmy holding out for an office assistant, for Sansa. She makes their lives infinitely easier, and even more bright.

“Can I ask you something?” She hovers, hopefully, at his side, and Sandor reaches out, snags Dondarrion’s extra padded super comfortable computer chair for her. Apart from his fellow DI, Sansa is the only one allowed to park herself in the insanely expensive proto-throne.

It has in-built massaging systems, and when Dondarrion is out of office, they all have a secret vibrate.

“Go ahead.”

She holds something in her long fingers; her nails are painted pale peach, with white tips. Neat and short and not showy like a lot of the women working in the Yard. Sansa is never gaudy, or over the top, because she has no need to be. She is classy, and pretty, and wearing a yellow halter neck sundress with a little crocheted cardi thing over the top. Her collarbones swoop, and he wonders if he kissed them she’d taste of lemon.

“This is a bit out of left field,” she explains. “And I understand completely if you don’t want to, and that’s fine, just...I didn’t know who else to ask.”

“Go on.”

“I’ve been invited to a wedding-”

“I’ll cover the paperwork, yeah.” Of course he will. Anything for her.

Sansa’s smiles are like sunshine sometimes, and Sandor pretends to himself that those ones are kept especially for him. “That’s very sweet of you, but I was going to ask something else.”

For a moment she looks at his large hands, resting lightly over the scrawl of an autopsy report written by that mad bastard Bolton from his lair in the depths of the Keep. Ramsay writes exclusively in blood red pen, and is the sort of man who, if he came across someone still alive on the slab, would bump them off just so he can cut them open and play with their innards. For some reason he and Dondarrion get on quite well, but Dondarrion spends fifty percent of his life concussed and has technically died six times, and that probably explains it.

“I’ve been invited to a wedding.”

“You said that, little bird.” The nickname makes a dimple dance in her left cheek. It is an indicator of where kisses should be placed, over and over.

“Sorry, Sandor. But. This is quite difficult,” she says, before launching onward. “I was wondering if you would like to accompany me?”

Time stands still as Clegane tries to process, but his inner CPU stutters to a halt, whines, and explodes behind his eyeballs.

“You want me to go to a fucking wedding with you?” Rougher than he’d like to sound, all scratchy and rumbly-deepness, and the pink across Sansa’s cheeks makes him realise he might have fucked up, just a bit. “Uh. Right.”

“They say I can take a plus one, and i-if I don’t, my mother will be on at me about getting a boyfriend again.”

Cloudiness drifts across her face, and Sandor hates frigging Cat Stark. Can’t she see that Sansa still hurts over what happened with the cunt Baratheon? Sure, it was what, five years ago now, but shit. That takes time. He’s still screwed up about Gregor and his face, and he was a kid when that happened. Five years is nothing, considering what that bastard did to her. It’s like the fucking Stark bitch wants her daughter knocked-up, married off, producing ugly fat grandchildren with some chinless cretin from Riverrun or some shit like that.

“Someone should fucking clout your mother.”

“She means well.”

“...right.” She’s a bitch who doesn’t deserve a daughter like Sansa. Especially if she’s so obsessed about getting her paired off. Sansa’s what? Twenty four? Something like that. She’s got years ahead of her. And what’s so great about having a partner? Sandor doesn’t, and he’s fucking alright, isn’t he? Women. So desperate for their babies to have babies, and since Sansa’s sister ran off to fucking Braavos with some artisan blacksmith and a chubby computer tech with weird eyebrows - yeah, that must have blown Mummy Stark’s tiny little brain, Arya having two boyfriends for the price of one - she’s projecting all her own desires onto her good, normal, sensible daughter rather than her two-cock owning harlot tomboy loudmouthed one.

“Just, I know you’d not take advantage.” Sansa’s voice is so small, and so soft, and Clegane is just thankful she doesn’t realise he goes home and wanks occasionally over the scent of her citrus shampoo and the glimpse of her freckled thigh.

“So. This a ‘be your plus one’ thing as a friend, or a ‘pretend to be your boyfriend thing to get your mother off your back’?”

“You’d do that for me, Sandor?” Eyes the colour of the warm seas off Myr widen, all soft and hopeful. “Really? You’d pretend to be my boyfriend so my mother doesn’t nag me?”

Shit. What’s he got into this time?

“If you want.” Clegane shrugs. “This a suit thing?”

“It’s quite posh.” Handing over the invitation.

The card is very heavy and glossily expensive, the wording not even inked but embossed and carved with gold. It is the poshest wedding invite he has ever seen.

Mostly because this isn’t just a little wedding in a country church somewhere. No.

“Fuck’s sake, little bird. This is-”

“Can you see why I need you? There will be all these boys there, rich ones, with titles, and Mother will be trying to matchmake, and she just doesn’t understand, Sandor. Not like you do.”

Society wedding of the decade, let alone year. Clegane wonders what the hell he’s going to have to wear, dread dripping like bile into his belly with every passing thought. He looks shit in a tuxedo, like a half-dead dog dressed up like a penguin. Morning suits are a bit better, but no top hat.

The dress code is not stated.

“What the fuck do I have to wear?”

“Formal.”

Why is he doing this? Clegane knows, of course he does. Because Sansa is beautiful, and kind, and doesn’t flinch at his scars, personal habits, horrific workaholic tendencies, strange tempers, and filthy mouth. She seems to like him, as a friend, and for a man who has very few of those things in his life, that is precious. He wants to protect the girl, make sure the world doesn’t damage her even more than it already has; wrap her in a blanket and tell life to piss off and leave Sansa well alone.

Because DI Clegane has been in love with Sansa Stark for a year now, in like with her for eighteen months, and wanted to shag her the very moment he first set his eyes on her two years previously.

“Kilt? I got a kilt.” Wilding blood runs in his veins, and Sandor has worn the damned thing to every one of Gregor’s several marriages. How his bastard of a brother gets women to wed him, he has no frigging clue. Intimidation and threats, probably.

Her lips pop open with an audible noise - she looks misty for a moment, cheeks redder - before softening into a smile. “I think that would be suitable, yes.”

 


 

As befitting their ruse, they travel south together. Clegane, ashamed of the shit heap he usually drives, and knowing that it won’t be him judged by the Stark clan but Sansa if they turn up in his own car, shows up outside her tiny but well-situated block of Targaryen-era townhouse flats in something that isn’t stuck together with duct tape, rust, and bloody-mindedness. The rental company took one look at the menacing form of Sandor and tried to make him pay an excess before even looking at a hire car, but a quick flash of his police ID allowed him to choose something tasteful, comfortable, sporty, and reassuringly like an Essosi Mafia staff car.

It is black, and very shiny, and has the number plate canted off to one side. He tries not to speed, but it’s really hard.

For Sansa’s sanity and hearing, Clegane lays off the death metal and puts on some low-level inoffensive classic rock. He’s made an effort, considering they are ‘meeting the parents;’ black dress shirt unbuttoned at his throat and sleeves rolled to his elbows, his best pair of black jeans. Hair clean, pulled back into a ponytail, but pieces still escape, falling annoyingly over his forehead and temples. Sometimes he just wants it buzzed but would look like a right thug with his face. The expensive watch, the only thing his Dad left him in the will. They need to change into their wedding gear when they get there, but it is a good idea to look presentable in case Cat Stark pounces the moment they park.

Clegane almost puts cologne on, but tells himself he isn’t that much of a ponce.

Boots, yes, but ones that aren’t handed out by the Met. They make him an inch taller, and this is always an advantage when dealing with people he is supposed to impress but in all reality wants to intimidate into respecting him.

Of course, that usually works.

He scrubs up as much as any man with a massive facial scar can do. There’s nothing he can do about his cheek, so he ignores it as much as he can.

Sansa puts him to shame; dark green flare-y dress, her hair long and loose apart from a plait across the crown of her head - how girls do that, Clegane has no idea. She looks incredible, as always, but even more so. As if being out of the office and in the actual world gives her a lightness of being, an inner glow that makes her skin more porcelain, and her hair fire, and her eyes so very very blue.

“You look nice.” The inadequacy of the words is really quite shit. Lemon cakes look nice. A pint of stout at the end of a long frustrating day looks like. Sansa is exquisite, perfect, wonderful, gorgeous, divine, a million other words that are infinitely better than describing someone like her as looking nice.

“So do you.” She climbs in, elegant, like a film starlet, arranging her skirts. “I like your shirt.”

“Got everything?” He’d put Sansa’s bag in the boot. Compared to her smart red leather pully case, Clegane’s old battered hiking rucksack and suit hanger looks meagre and student-y.

“I think so. This isn’t your car, is it?”

“Thought it best we turned up looking less like a fucking pile of rust held together with tape. So your Mum can’t bitch about that.”

There is a curious softness to Sansa’s expression. She reaches out, almost shyly, and touches his bare forearm. Under her fingers, he cannot help the muscle rolling, the groove deep and carved.

Clegane was in the pub once when a drunk woman weaved over, slapped him on the arse, and told him he was a male butterface. Snow explained because Selmy and Dondarrion delegated the task by dint of being senior. Gorgeous body, Jon said it meant, but the face-

Of the three women he’s had sex with, he never screwed any of them with the light on.

“Thank you, Sandor.”

“S’alright.”

Getting out of King’s Landing proves an ordeal, and Clegane, embarrassed when he comes out of his road rage at idiotic drivers and pootling old women in hybrid cars, realises he’s been swearing non-stop for the last forty-five minutes.

“Shit, didn’t mean for you to-”

“It’s been quite educational,” Sansa offers, a hand across her mouth. Her eyes are bright, amused, and watch him rather too much. It makes Clegane squirm and sweat a little, trickles of moisture tickling his spine. In retaliation, he whacks the air conditioning on, directs it at his face and neck. “I’ve never heard such a range of cursing, really, even from you.”

“Least I can teach you something, eh?” When Clegane smiles, which is rarely, the side of his face destroyed by fire isn’t mobile. His lips tend towards limp, a certain slackness of muscle at the right side next to his eye. Crooked. He has, however, realised that his warmer expressions are mostly directed at Sansa.

Because, shit. It’s Sansa.

“We need to talk about how we’re going to do this relationship.”

“You say, I’ll do what you want.”

“You have to agree. I mean, I don’t want you being uncomfortable.” Gods, she is the sweetest frigging thing he’s ever met. “I don’t want to put you in a compromising position.”

“No, little bird. You say, I do. It’s what dogs do, right?”

“You’re not a dog. You’re Sandor.” Sansa still hasn’t taken her hand from his arm, fingers splayed over corded muscle and tattoos of stylised ancient art taken from the carvings of the First Men. The black/blue ink swirls from wrist to shoulder, onto his chest and back, almost onto his neck. It is as large a canvas as can be painted without showing past the edges of his old uniform; Clegane had the piece done when he was still a normal police constable, before the promotions. He loves it. It’s him, more than the face, height, and personality.

“I-I think we should be as if we are a couple. A proper couple,” she ventures, warily. “I said in the RSVP that we were, so now I’m your girlfriend.”

Clegane reminds himself that she doesn’t mean it like that, she’s just getting into character. Fuck.

“How long we been together?”

“About eight months?”

“Fucking precise. What about Snow, won’t he tell on us?”

Sansa takes her hand away, and Clegane almost swears at the lack of contact, lacing her fingers into her lap. “Jon knows what we’re doing. It’s fine, he’s fine. He understands. He knows what happened, and read the files. He’s never really seen eye-to-eye with Mother.”

“Only sane one in your bloody family, and he’s just your cousin. Tell me what you’ve come up with then. You’ve obviously been thinking.” His mouth dry, Clegane wets his lips with a slightly sandpapery tongue. He reins in eagerness, wanting to hear her little fantasy. Maybe it’ll become his, as well, when he has time for the occasional daydream.

“Okay. We met at work, obviously, and you were always so nice to me. You brought me lemon cakes - where do you get them, anyway? Nowhere sells cakes like those, so you must have a secret bakery - and stayed behind to help me if I was horribly busy. You were nice, and kind, and protective, and I felt safe with you. You weren’t like other men, who always wanted one thing. You were just nice because you are a nice person. Even if you scared me at first, because you’re so big. Intimidating.”

“Fucked up in the face.”

“I didn’t say that,” she admonishes. “But you were just always there, and a good person, possibly the best person I’d ever met. Finally, something happened; we had a case, and you were in the office late as we tried to get evidence processed, and you just asked out of the blue if I wanted to go and get something to eat at the local pub. That was our first date, though neither of us knew it then. It became a weekly tradition, on a Tuesday. We worked a little late, we had something to eat, then you walked me home, like the gentleman you are. You always look after me.”

Clegane, fascinated, manages not to scoff at that. He is no gentleman. She weaves in little pieces of fact to make the entire deal sound more plausible. The meals at the pub are usually takeaway cartons from local restaurants crowded around his messy desk. He does help Sansa when needed, because he is a methodical worker and the act assists his own lines of enquiry. Cakes, and walking her home a few times after a rough day, or when the buses aren’t running due to lateness, strike, or because they leave work after the last one? Just stuff he does. It’s not like it means anything, is it? Sansa isn’t saying these things for real, however much Clegane wants her to.

It is both dizzying and galling in equal measure how much he wants this to be the real story of how they got together. Get together. Whatever.

“We got to my door, you bade me good night, and I kissed you. Not properly, just a little kiss to your cheek, or at least I attempted to, but you moved and I caught your mouth. A-and you kissed me back. And it’s gone from there, very slowly, very carefully, because we are colleagues and don’t want to make everything awkward. What do you think?”

Her voice is honey, and hypnotic, and Sandor can only nod and mourn that this has not happened.

Fucking hell. It never will, either.

 


 

They are greeted by a spectacularly handsome man in a spectacularly well-fitting suit, who swoops in and kisses Sansa on both cheeks. Clegane manages to not punch the bastard in his gorgeous face. The man accompanying him, who has clever merry eyes and a dark beard, nods a greeting in his general direction.

“Oh my Gods, Willas might have to reconsider who he’s marrying. You look insane, Sansa. Wow!” The bastard with the breakable face twirls her around, and she laughs, as bright as silver. She’s got a great laugh, all warm and without her usual shyness. “And who is this? Is this him? Tell me this is him?”

Sansa draws herself up, glances shyly at Clegane which makes his chest clench. “This is Sandor, my boyfriend.” How she looks so proud, he doesn’t quite know, but the acting is impressive indeed.

“We’ve met him before your Mum has.” Sexy Fuckface grins, perfect teethed. “That’s a win for team Tyrell.”

“Loras, you’re an insufferable prick sometimes.” Bearded Fuckface wraps an arm around the this Loras’ waist. Fuckface is obviously their married name, and Clegane hates them for existing and daring to touch Sansa. “Nice to meet you, Sandor. Clegane, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Loras looks as if he might piss himself with excitement at his voice, for some weird reason. Gays are an enigma. Like women and how they get cream into the middle of profiteroles.

“I don’t know how King’s Landing is going to operate without all the sexy policemen there. Have you seen that Snow boy’s arse, Renly? And that man with the eyepatch?”

“You’re still in insufferable prick mode, babe.” Renly. Yeah. The youngest of the Baratheon brothers - he looks like Bobby though, and not the Commissioner, but lacks Robert’s raging alcoholism, beer-related obesity, and mad wife - pokes his lover good-naturedly. “Anyway, we’re here to direct you where to go. To your right is the Water Garden, to your left is the manor where your allocated room is.”

“You’d make such a good steward on an aeroplane. Exits are here, here and he-”

“Babe, your mouth is so pretty when you keep it shut. Where was I? Yes, Water Gardens, the manor. The wedding is slated to start at two, so you’ve got about an hour to go and change.” For some reason Renly stares at Sandor’s forearms.

“Sandor is wearing a kilt.”

Loras explodes. Or at least gets excited. It’s hard to tell. Renly just grins so wide it almost turns into a leer.

 


 

“This is your room,” the dark-skinned man with the perfectly unreadable face announces. “If there is anything you require, please make your need known to myself or the chamber maids.” Hotah is inscrutable, built like a brick shithouse, and Clegane thinks he could probably take down one of Oberyn Martell’s thoroughbred racehorses with a karate chop to the windpipe. “The guests shall be seated in approximately forty minutes, so when you are ready, please make your way to the Water Gardens where the ushers will show you to your seats.” He withdraws, neatly, closing the door behind them.

Lovely room. High ceilings, and pale duck egg walls, light oak dressing tables and wardrobes. A door leads to an en suite, which is really bloody handy considering Clegane hates tramping through uncertain darkness to have a piss, and the long double doors lead onto a balcony covered in sweet-smelling honeysuckle. Girly as shit, but romantic, in a way, which makes everything just that bit more painful.

It’s possibly the nicest bedroom he’s ever seen, and Clegane sits at the foot of the bed, eases his boots off, realises that Sansa seems to have turned to stone.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s only one bed.”

Shit. He checks, in case another is hiding somewhere sneakily, like in the wardrobe.

There really is only one bed.

It is vast, and plush, and has light drifting voile over the wooden four poster frame. It is the sort of bed where beautiful virgins are made love to by handsome muscular men in those frigging awful romance novels Tarth enjoys reading on her lunch break. It is the sort of bed he’d make love to Sansa in, all blue and gold, her hair trailing like forest fire over the pillows as he uses his mouth for her pleasure, like a great big human sex toy.

“I’ll sleep on the floor.” The chaise is too short for either of them, and he’s buggered in he’d make Sansa curl up on the wooden floorboards. 

“It’s a large bed. W-we could probably both fit in there?”

She has no idea what that does to his cock. The way Sansa suggests they just climb into bed together. Innocent suggestion, but really, that doesn’t matter when it comes to random hard ons. No, his body hears a beautiful girl saying ‘let’s go to bed together, Sandor.’ and he is half-erect in moments.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Yeah. Best ignore this for now.

Fuck.