Chapter Text
The silence was deafening.
Sandor had forgotten how quiet by yourself could be. After so long with Sansa and Rickon, he was used to noise. Them chattering together, Sansa telling Rickon a story, or singing a song to him. Them laughing together at some inside family joke that he didn’t understand, but made him smile anyway.
He was about ready to put the radio on to hear the annoying message of the Safe Zone again, just to have another voice around. But that would make him think of Sansa and Rickon, and he didn’t want that. He needed to put them behind him, physically and mentally.
So he sat in the extremely loud silence and tried not to think of how depressing it was.
This would be the rest of his life. Just him and the open road. He would use a vehicle when he could find one and when it was safe, and otherwise he’d be walking, always keeping an eye out for zombies or raiders, sleeping outside (he woke at the slightest noise so he’d be fine if he didn’t have to worry about someone else) or finding houses to stay at when the weather was bad. An endless stretch of open road, with no end in sight, a trip that would never end because it had no destination.
Freedom had never felt so meaningless.
Sandor had never thought he would be the type of person to get lonely. Being on his own felt like his natural state, the default. Apparently it only took a few weeks of living with a gorgeous woman and a sweet little kid to make their absence feel like loneliness. He had JUST left them, and there he was, already speeding back to Jorah and Dany’s place, because he knew they needed his help, and they were friends, and being alone and not needed by anyone felt horrible now.
He was never more aware than at this moment that his existence meant nothing. No one would notice or care if he wrecked this truck right now, turned into a zombie, or fell down a cliff and slowly died from exposure.
Get it together, he ordered himself. You’ve done without them for all of your life, you’ve only known them a few weeks, you can do without them again!
He knew he was doing what was best for Sansa and Rickon. Sansa would find a much better suited for her partner to help her raise Rickon. Someone who was more like her, had a healthy normal upbringing, and wasn’t a walking open wound. They would live in peace on that island with other families, and it would almost be like the zombie apocalypse never happened. They’d probably go on to have five kids in six years and she would forget all about him.
He couldn’t pretend that he didn’t wince in pain thinking about her forgetting him. Her with another man. Her trying to stifle her moans with her own hand over her mouth…
He cut that thought off immediately. He couldn’t forget their night together, and yet, he didn’t want to remember it either. It was like having one forbidden glance of heaven, having it taken away again, and then having to remember that ecstasy.
If his sudden loneliness didn’t end up killing him, the knowledge of being with her and knowing he could never have her again would.
He kept his eyes on the road, and tried to keep his thoughts on the future. Perhaps going to help Jorah and Dany kill some zombies was what he needed to get his mind right.
The sun was starting to go down by the time he made it back into town. Sandor hoped that the mob hadn’t made its way again by the apartment complex as he didn’t want to run into a huge group like that, near dark.
He decided to just park in the parking garage again - no other raiders had seemed to follow him or notice or care that two of their number disappeared - but he didn’t want to leave it on the street near the apartments just in case. And when he was done helping Dany and Jorah, he could siphon some gas from some of the other cars left before taking off again. On his endless journey to nowhere. All alone.
He cut that thought off along with the motor. Making his way back to the building, he ran afoul of one zombie, a small child one that must have gotten left behind by the mob. For a heartbreaking moment, he thought it was Rickon - the little zombie had dark hair like him and was wearing a dinosaur shirt and shorts with blood all down the front of it. The thought of putting it down turned his stomach, and he tried to outrun it instead. The zombie growled and ran after him, its little feet pounding on the pavement in blood-soaked sneakers.
Sandor made it to the barricaded door and started pounding on it. He hoped someone was manning the door, he knew very well how people now tended to sleep and awaken with the sun and not by any previous concept of time. He banged louder, hoping the quiet would make the noise louder for those inside, and not louder for any lingering zombies nearby.
The little zombie was almost upon him, and Sandor knew he was going to have to do it. With a sigh, he got out his gun, taking aim and shooting.
The bullet caught the thing right between its eyes and its run was cut off. It fell onto its back and lay there.
Sandor turned quickly, trying not to look at the tiny body. He felt sick to his stomach.
He went back to the door and started pounding on it again. Finally, he heard movement on the other side of the door, and the wooden barricade slid away to reveal a glass door being unlocked, and then Jorah was standing there, holding a flashlight. “Sandor? You’re back?” Even in the gloaming, Sandor could see that the other man’s face was one of disappointment.
“Yeah, you said you needed help with the neighbors, so before I moved on from this area, I thought I’d stop by.”
“Come in,” Jorah said, and Sandor moved quickly to help the man lock the glass door and then slide the wooden barricade into place. The room was in total darkness except for the flashlight. “You’re lucky that Mrs. Lin needed someone to make sure she took her evening dosage before bed, otherwise I wouldn’t have been this close to the door and able to hear anything.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think about that,” Sandor said. He had been way too distracted by his thoughts of Sansa. That was going to get him killed if he wasn’t careful.
If he even cared about living anymore.
“Well, you can have your room for the night, and tomorrow we can all tackle the next floor,” Jorah said. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the help, or that we don’t welcome you back, but I had really hoped you would come to your senses and stay with Sansa and Rickon.”
He led Sandor back through the dark floors to the stairwell, so that they could climb it to the second floor of apartments. Even at night, he could hear the growling shrieks of the zombies on the floors above. Did they ever stop?
“We all knew I wasn’t staying,” Sandor said as they shut the stairwell behind them, and the relative quiet resumed, though he could still hear the echoes off the walls in there. “I did what was best for Sansa and Rickon.”
Jorah frowned. “I think you and I both know you’ve made a terrible mistake. But this sounds like a conversation that could use a drink. Let me find where Dany hid the good stuff, and I’ll be right back.” He motioned for Sandor to go on into his old room.
The room felt strange without anyone else in it. Sandor turned on his lantern, letting the glow fill up the living room area, where he had once sat on the floor and did a puzzle with Rickon and where he had slept after Sansa had kissed him, a real kiss. Even this place was haunted by their memories together and they had barely stopped there.
Jorah came in a few moments later, holding a bottle of whiskey. “The benefits of sleeping with the scavenger,” he said. “Besides the obvious one. She knows I like whiskey.” He took a drink from the bottle and then passed it to Sandor. “So talk. Why did you think leaving your family behind was the best for them?”
Sandor savored the burn of the whiskey. “We talked a bit about my past.”
Jorah nodded. “Talked a bit about mine too. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world that cared about that past is gone for good. No one cares anymore about any of the unsavory activities you or I might have done back when things were a bit more civilized.”
“Like I said before, I’m not exactly the family type. I’m better off alone.”
“And yet you showed up here with one.” Jorah held up a hand. “You can deny it all you want, that they aren’t yours, but what I’m pointing out is if you were not the family type, you would have steered clear of them in the first place. So they needed help getting to where they wanted to go, so what? Why did you even care in the first place? They were nothing to you.”
“I ran into them when Sansa was almost getting raped by two raiders. I couldn’t walk away from that…”
“Sure, so you help a woman escape two monsters, I get that,” Jorah said. “And that right there says you’re not whatever criminal activities you did in your past, but continue to explain. Why didn’t you just walk away after that?”
“I don’t know, it was…nice to be needed for something I guess.”
“So you, a man who wants nothing to do with a family and believes he’s better off alone, randomly throws in with a young woman and her brother because it was nice to be needed by someone? Do you even realize how that sounds? One statement contradicts the other.”
Sandor took another drink. “Well, she made me an offer to get me to help get them to where they were going.”
“And that was…”
He was going to have to say it. “She said she’d have sex with me once I got them to the drop-off point.”
Jorah stared at him for a long moment, then took another long drink.
“But I was never going to make her do that!” Sandor said as the man drank. “I told her that the night we were here. It was never my intention to make her go through with it.”
Jorah eyed him again and then said, “I believe you.”
“And I couldn’t let her go off and make that offer to the next guy who came along,” Sandor said. “They’ll make her do it! I don’t know why she ever thought of that in the first place.”
Jorah shrugged. “You know how it is now, a lot of people do a lot of crazy things they never would have done in normal situations to survive. I’m not going to judge.”
“She’d never even been with a man and she’s offering that…”
“Wait.” Jorah cut him off. “Why do you know that, and why did you word it in the past tense?”
Sandor took a long pull off the bottle.
“I thought you said you weren’t going through with this deal.”
“I wasn’t! Your girl put the idea in her head, handed her a bunch of condoms and this sheer black slip thing…”
Jorah burst out laughing, startling Sandor. “I know that bit of lingerie well. And showing up with condoms in hand. It worked well on me too.”
“I was too stupid and weak to resist her coming to me like that on her own.”
“Well, if you’re too stupid and weak to resist, so was I when Dany pulled the same trick,” Jorah said, toasting him with the bottle. “Except I wasn’t stupid enough to leave her the next day, that’s all you.”
“Maybe I was saving her from future heartache,” Sandor said. “I had a dad that beat me and my brother and my mother. My brother was no better and killed our parents in a fire that almost killed me. I’m not risking Sansa or Rickon’s welfare on me being able to hold back my shit genetics and my equally shit upbringing. I might be too stupid and too weak to resist fucking her when she offers it up on a silver platter, but I’m going to at least resist fucking her over by saddling her with a time bomb like that. I’m shit and she’s not. She’s better off without me. End of story.” He snatched the bottle out of Jorah’s hand and took a long drink.
Jorah shook his head. “I like you, Sandor. I like you too much to not give it to you straight. You’ve made a really bad decision and what’s more, you know it. You shouldn’t have left them. You used to steal things, you’ve had what sounds like a really bad childhood, and now you’re terrified of becoming your father. You’ve used that to convince yourself that you’re a bad person or that you’re going to become one, and I’ve got news for you, you’re not. The world fucking ended. THAT was the time for you to become bad if you were going to, but you didn’t. I think you’ve also convinced yourself that you don’t deserve anything good and you don’t deserve to be happy. You threw away something really good. So I don’t know, maybe you’re right. Maybe you don’t deserve to be happy if you’re going to trash it like that. Because this world is shit now, and you have got to value every bit of good you can find, and hold on tight to it.” He stood up. “Speaking of, I’ve got a blonde in my room who is crazy enough to want me, and I’ve kept her waiting long enough. Get some rest. We’re killing zombies tomorrow.”
He took his bottle back and left Sandor alone with his thoughts.