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Chapter Text

The city was behind her, casting it’s pale green light up in to the darkening sky like thin, dying fingers. The snow had taken on a strange, ghostlike pallor under the glow, throwing angular shadows across the cold landscape in bruised, dark colours. A few feet from the wall, a stock of thin trees and the last remaining evergreens stood, marking the boundaries of safe ground. Beyond, there lay nothing but the vast waste and its scarred earth.

The moon was rising slowly in the distance, hanging low and fat, and the wind was picking up now she was out of the shelter of the wall. It tasted of ashes still, even though the burning had long since finished. The stain of it was in the air now. It came out of the ground, it coloured the water, it was in her veins. Arya gave the city one last cursory glance, checked the gun at her hip and started to walk out. Snow and ice lay thick across the earth, and broke crisply under foot. In a few short strides, she was in amongst the trees and then it was the only sound she could hear.

Out in the cold and the quiet, she felt a familiar stillness creeping back in to her bones. Soon, the ghost light from the city had all by died away and only the moon illuminated her way. Shadows became deeper here, cut sharp in to the rocks and under the falls of snow. The feeling of calm travelled upwards, until the chill had slipped up her neck and over her head, like falling in to cold water. She felt her breathing become even and slow, and her senses sharpen with every exhale. Even in the half light, she could close her eyes and know instantly what was around her just by the sound of the wind hitting her ear and the smell of the snow as it broke under foot. Nothing was alive out here anymore, save for herself and the skeletal trees like bone shards. But it was not the living she had come for.

The crack came from her left, somewhere beyond the slope that disappeared in to the darkness. In an instant, she was pressed against a slender trunk, belly flat against the pale bark. Her fingers curled downwards, finding the cold metal at her hip while her eyes darted across the black. Her mind worked through the steps slowly, deliberately, following a well worn path towards a singular purpose. Something glinted, like moonlight across frost, and she saw her target.

Blue eyes, unnaturally blue, like the true colour of ice, roamed the landscape. It was hungry, she could tell. It’s face was sunken and thin, so that the pallid flesh was forced to cling to the bone and its mouth opened and closed listlessly. It had no energy to be ravenous, although she did not doubt for a second that if it saw her, that would change. In the dark maw of its mouth, she could make out the blackened and broken teeth that still remained, now just jagged ruins. She had seen how they could rip and tear. Slowly, slowly, her breath steady and her eyes fixed, she squeezed the trigger. The sound rang out across the open space between them and then the thing fell with a thud in to the earth, a spray of black exploding in the place where it’s head had once been. As she watched it fall, her sense of satisfaction became a physical thing, tight and warm across her chest.

Something breathed behind her.

All at once, her senses began to scream their mistake, clawing at her mind to turn and see and shoot. She spun, but stumbled on the snow, falling backwards away from the tree and out in the dark. Blue eyes found the exposed skin of her neck, and the wide, bleeding gash of a mouth opened up with an eager hunger. Black hands, bloated with blood and decay, came forward from the darkness. The smell of rot burned her throat, forcing the air from her lungs as she tried to take a breath.

But she did not fall. Cold, clear focus took control of her body and found her footing. The gun came up in a sharp, upward swing, it’s barrel slamming in to the soft, rotten flesh under the creatures chin like a dagger. The mouth hung open in one last desperate, grasping lunge but the gun was already lodged deep in to its skull. Arya kept her eyes open until the last second, closing them at the moment she pulled the trigger. The blast knocked her back, hitting the snow hard. For a few dazed, motionless seconds, she could only lay there and stare up in the starless sky while her heart thundered in her chest.

There was a ringing in her head, like a distant siren, and the throb of it travelled down her spine to where she had hit the ground. Her face was wet and sticky, and something was running down her check and behind her ear. The stench of it was still in her mouth, like sour milk.

But she had no time to think on that.  

With a kick, she was up and running. The wind whipped her face like knives, cutting at the wet skin and leaving its sting all across her. She ran fast, effortless even in the dark; her eyes had been trained for it and her urgency made them better. As she crashed through the last of the trees, the city wall loomed large and silent up in front of her and she skidded the last of the way on the icy ground, searching for her escape. The archway was cut in to the stone a few feet to the left; a pair of heavy iron doors, scared with bullet holes and the scratches of long dead fingers. She hammered her fist against it until the little hatch slid open and pair of dark eyes looked down at her through the grate.

‘Back so soon?’

Arya was in no mood for his games.

‘Let me in. Now.’

The eyes rolled and the hatch closed. The sound of metal scraping metal came from somewhere behind the door, and then slowly one of them slid open. Arya darted in as soon as the gap was wide enough, staring back out in to the darkness until it was shut again behind her. Only then did she become aware of the man staring at her.

‘Fuck, what happened to you?’

She looked down at herself. Her clothes were sodden, and ice had crusted in the folds of her jeans and jacket. Her boots were scuffed too, and dark, wet stains had splattered across her in thick, stringy lines. Her face felt hot and tight, and her breathes escaped her in ragged, shallow bursts. But when she raised her hands, there was no tremor there. She wiped her face with her sleeve.

‘Your sister won’t like it’ said the man, whose name was Emmon.  Arya had been told that she had known him when she was younger, but she couldn’t remember. She had forgotten a lot, it seemed. Most of it was never coming back.

‘Then don’t tell her’ she said sullenly. Sansa had forbidden anyone from leaving the city at night, especially to go and kill walkers.  Emmon gave her a slow smile, but she knew he wouldn’t spill her secrets; he would be in just as much trouble for letting her out. He tossed her a rag and with a little spit and scrubbing, she managed to wipe most of the stickiness away. When she was done, he offered her a slightly battered looking cigarette.

‘So how many you get?’

Arya took a long drag, eager to replace the bitter taste still in her mouth with something – anything – else. In the shadow of the archway, the man’s’ features were only half in light and the dark pits of his eyes glinted eagerly. She thought about that gaping, jagged mouth and the way the gun had punctured the skin so easily.

‘Two’ she answered coolly, taking another long drag. Emmon chuckled.

‘You’re slipping. Used to be you’d come back with five or six under your belt.’

Arya licked her lips and slouched back against the wall, not breaking his gaze.

‘Maybe there’s not many left’ she said simply.

Emmon laughed again and shook his head.

‘Maybe… maybe….’

He looked away then, back in to the city. The night had fully fallen now, and the streets were largely silent. The distant hum of the power station sung from over the other side of the compound, and the low, insistent buzz of electricity crackled in the power lines overhead. Only half of the streetlights were kept on, to try and conserve power, as all residents were meant to be inside now anyway. Sansa had enforced a curfew a month ago, to try and stop the street fights that were breaking out in the alleyways after dark.

‘Better hurry back, or they’ll miss you’ he said absently, finishing his cigarette with one last, long draw. Arya followed his gaze, shifting against the wall. The dampness had seeped in to the woollen jumper and the shirt she wore under her jacket, and the cold, clammy material was starting to feel uncomfortable. The cigarette was burning down between her fingers, turning to ash before her eyes. She didn’t really like to smoke. She’d had enough of the smell of burning to last her a life time.

‘No’ she said, stubbing it out against the wall. ‘No, they really won’t.’ 

Chapter Text

Sansa knew about her sisters’ adventures beyond the wall by breakfast the next day. She ate her meal alone in the small dining room by the kitchen, in the seat she had occupied as a girl next to her mother. The air was cold and still here, escaping most of the drafts that ran through the rest of the house, and she could light a fire in the old grate if needed without most of the heat bleeding away. As she picked at her bread, gritty and dry with a taste of something bitter laced in to the flour, a boy with ghost-like eyes handed her the news from the night before. Sansa had learnt some time ago that she needed more eyes and ears than nature had chosen to afford her if she was to keep a firm hold on what her city was doing; one of many tricks she had learnt from her time in the south, to cultivate her own collection of little birds. She thanked the boy and sent him away with the last of her bread and a handful of the boiled eggs, and then read the pages he had left quietly and carefully as she absently sucked her fingers clean. When she came to the report concerning Arya, she sighed and leant forward, rested her elbows on the table, closed her eyes and tried to think about how best to tackle it.

If her own sister could break laws with impunity, then others would follow suit. Already, there was too much discontent in her streets. Food was scarce - the hard, ash-thick ground giving them little no matter how much they toiled at it. Animals died bleeding, from diseases they couldn’t name, that had not existed before the doom had come to Westeros. Not to mention the hell that clawed at her walls nightly, and stalked her people with dead, cruel eyes. Whose howls she heard in the creeping darkness. And winter had not yet shown them its real teeth.

The power station was running on less than half capacity, and black outs were becoming more and more common. Jon had told her that they would need to shut it down soon, although she balked at the prospect. It would be a step back to have her people huddled by fires and candle light, like some mud scratch of a village. Winterfell had once been a great city; thousands of people living within its walls in comfort and security, despite the harsh weather. But things changed.

Done with her meal, she folded up the papers and tossed them in to fire, to crackle and burn and disappear in to dust. Arya could wait. No one but her birds and the gateman knew of her escape, and it would stay that way if she could help it. She would talk to Jon later about Emmon, and see what he wanted to do about that particular loose end. For now, she needed to walk. It helped her to think.

The house was still imposing. Most of it had remained intact, despite the horrors it had seen. Its old stone walls were scarred but unbroken, even though most of the windows were still boarded up and the once lush gardens had all been dug up for farming land. Inside, it was always vaguely cold. The wind would howl around the large, empty rooms with nothing to bounce off except the walls. Most of the old furniture was long gone, broken when the Greyjoys’ took the house, then sold when they were trying to keep it. What survived had been smashed when the Bolton’s rooted them out, and later thrown from the windows when they in turn were dragged out by the scruff of their necks. Anything that was left had been looted or burned for firewood. Even the coving had been pried out, leaving ugly scars across most of the walls.

Now, a collection of mismatched pieces had been collected to fill the spaces which looked woefully inadequate when placed in these once grand rooms. They meant nothing to Sansa, just broken pieces of wood and stone that she would eat at or sleep on. Her memories were in the walls, in the number of steps she knew it took from the doorway to the window, the unique configuration of space and her place within it. Her comfort was in the dent in the door frame where Robb had taken a swing at Bran and missed, just big enough for her thumb to fit. It was in the faint outline of the stars she had drawn under the alcove in the library, pencil lines still visible from where she had sat and read about fairies and wizards. It was in the pattern in the wood of the kitchen door, which looped and swirled like the map on someone’s’ finger tips. The house was her treasure chest, and even stripped and broken it still held her memories tight within it.

Lost in her wanderings, she did not see the boy until he was nearly upon her. A lighting streak of a man, thin and jagged with hair shaved close to his head so that all the ridges of his skull were visible. His features had been carved in deep and brutal, as though done with a rusty blade. He was younger than her by quite some years, but he had taken after their father in height and loomed above her even now. It took Sansa a moment or two to realise he was there, and by then he was already passed her. She caught his arm though, just before it swung out of reach, making him stop and turn. He looked tired, and there was dried blood in the corner of his mouth where his lip had split.

‘What happened?’ she asked coolly, but Rickon could only shrug.

‘Your face?’ she said in the same clipped tone, unwilling to let him see her annoyance. ‘You’ve been fighting again. Who with?’

There was a sigh.

‘No one. It doesn’t matter. It’s finished.’

Sansa pursed her lips, and looked for his eyes underneath all those shadows. He, sensing her intent, turned away.

‘I can’t clean up after you as well’ she said, trying to be warm, trying to be firm, trying to be like their mother. ‘You can’t keep getting in to fights.’

Rickon regarded her blankly, with the same grim stare he always had. He shrugged again.

‘It’s finished’ he repeated simply.

Sansa stared at him for a moment or two, as if her sheer force of will might break down that hard exterior. But of course it couldn’t. Instead she reached up and touched him gently on the side of his face. His expression did not change, even as her fingers fell gently across the rough skin of his jaw.

‘You had such lovely hair’ she said wistfully, to herself really although she was looking at him. ‘Red and golden and all in curls. We looked the most alike, you and I. Everyone said so. We both looked more like her than we did dad.’

He moved at that, turning his face away from her touch, and she saw the flex of the tendons in his throat. He looked back at her with dark, dark eyes and a mouth drawn tight and stiff and she knew she had said the wrong thing.

‘It doesn’t matter’ he said again, twisting his arm out of her grasp. Sansa tried to reach for him again but he was already too far away. She opened her mouth to call to him but his name died on her tongue. Let him go said the voice in her head. Let him wash and sleep, and talk to him later. One sibling at a time today. The voice was not hers though. Petyr had been many things, and she had come to hate nearly all of them by the end, but something had clearly stuck and she seemed to hear him more frequently of late.

‘Want me to talk to him?’

His voice made her jump, startled. She had been watching the door Rickon had disappeared though, paying no attention to his footsteps from behind her. Now he was stood beside her, she could not imagine how she could ever overlook him. Sandor was wearing his leather jacket, busted up at the elbow and cuffs, and his jeans had oil smears across his thighs, most likely from that motorbike he insisted on keeping. He must have been working on it this morning; there was dirt and grease under his short fingernails and in the creases of his hands.

‘No, I will’ she said, with a sigh. ‘He just needs a bit of space.’

Sandor snorted and his mouth became a smile.

‘Boy doesn’t need space’ he answered gruffly and Sansa felt herself smiling too, despite her frustration.

‘Care to elaborate?’ Her tone was sarcastic, but her smile remained. Sandor glanced at her and then back to the doorway. He clicked his tongue thoughtfully.

‘Beats me’ he said, less than helpfully. ‘But he’s had nothing but space most of his life, hasn’t he?’

Her lips kept the smile but it had gone from her eyes. She felt him looking at her but she didn’t turn. She blinked quickly, killing the sting in her eyes.

‘Hey… I didn’t mean….’

She pressed her lips together and turned, the smile back in place by the time she saw him.

‘It’s ok’ she said quietly, although she could see the unease in him already, creeping in at the corners of his mouth, and she knew he didn’t believe her. Did he still think she was so fragile that she would break under the weight of the truth? After all this time?

She put her hand on his arm, in the same manner she had touched her brother moments before, but the urge was different here and he could sense it. Her fingers curled around his thick wrist gently, with soft insistence. The tatty jumper he wore was too loose around him now, the fibres stretched from too many washes, and she touched skin. Under her finger tips, she could feel the far off beat of his pulse, flickering steadily. Her mouth flooded, and a word half formed came to her tongue, but she did not speak it. When she looked up, she saw his panic flicker and suddenly flare like a flame caught in the breeze and she felt guilty then, for being so cruel. Her hand fell away.

‘I’m going to see Jon’ she said calmly, giving him the blessed relief of her averted gaze. ‘Then I’ll need you to take me in town. I need to see my sister.’

Chapter Text

Arya didn’t used to dream. For a very long time, there had been nothing but silence when she closed her eyes, and she missed that sometimes. But for the last two years or so, ever since she had returned to Winterfell, the dreams had crept back. Or rather, the one dream. She had come to know that it was always the same dream really, even though certain features would change from time to time.

She could never remember it fully, but she would wake with the smell of blood in her nostrils, and the echo of a hundred voices ringing in the back of her head; all the names she had had, all the faces she had worn. Sometimes she would be running, and she would come to with muscles aching and the hot, claustrophobic feel of bodies all around her, choking and twisting around her throat. There were scratch marks around her bed that she never remembered making, and her hands would be sore and bruised every morning.

Today had been no different. She was still tired, but her bed held no comfort for her anymore and so she got up, flinging the covers from her as if they burned. For a moment, she stood half dazed and silent by the bed, adjusting to her surroundings. Frost covered the corners of her window and already the bite was in her skin, prickling her flesh. She had a feeling that they would never see a summer again here, certainly not like the ones she remembered before her father had died.

She shivered suddenly, unprepared for that particular memory. It was a silly indulgence, to think of him like that without preparing herself, and she scolded herself for it. A cold shower would help her regain her mind-  which was just as well, she discovered when she turned it on, seeing as the building didn’t have any hot water today. She dried herself quickly, rubbing as much of the freezing water as she could from her short, dark hair before dressing. Making a concession to the weather, she chose jeans and the same thin jumper from yesterday. The finishing touch was strapped around her waist; a leather belt with the holster on it, where her gun lived. Once it was sitting at her hip again, she felt much more balanced.

Her building was situated in what was once downtown, in a busy block that contained a raggedy mix of apartments that had once been beautiful but were now largely abandoned and fallen in to ruin. Bright little corners had sprung up here and there, in the nooks and crannies of the buildings and in the alleyways alongside them. People selling hot tea and little food carts serving meat on a skewers and fresh baked bread, and stalls where people sold vegetables dug that morning. Underneath this scavenged existence, the traces of the old world were still visible. The streets were wide and lined with lights that, while were no longer used, still had a touch of gilt on them. The broken or moss covered signs on the front of the derelict shops told that they once sold fine wines, diamonds and handcrafted shoes to clients of a distinctly higher class that those who walked passed by now. Arya couldn’t remember how it had been back then. As a girl, her mother never let the younger children out of the house or its grounds, but she knew Jon had been here. He and Robb would have come here as boys, when their father had owned all of this place. Once, she had wanted to know where they’d gone, as if somehow standing in the places where the dead had once stood would allow them life again. But she knew that was foolish and so she never asked.

A few blocks down, there used to be a park. A few trees still lined the boarders, but the grass had all dried up and died and the lake had long been filled in after the water turned bad. Instead, the space was now home to a mix of workshops and open fronted stalls, built up around fire pits dug in to the ground that kept the cold at bay. Rusty scrap metal and bare wires lay in pieces around the ground, salvaged from the still-wrecked parts of the city. An eclectic array of busted up cars, circuit boards and old pipe work, all ready to be reworked in to something useful again as labourers and tradesmen tried to put Winterfell back together.  Somewhere in the mess, Gendry had a small blacksmiths that Arya had not visited for a few days now. She knew he’d be pissed at that, but she couldn’t avoid him forever. The city was not that big, and the argument she had had with Sansa yesterday had put her in a foul mood. She needed a distraction.   

Arya crept up behind him, lost in the noise of the forge, and pinched him hard on the arm before nimbly dodging away when he turned to look. Perching just out of his reach on a nearby workbench, she picked up one of the apples that sat there and took a large bite, grinning.

Gendry’s face was dirty with soot, and the sweat had carved thin little rivulets down his check. He regarded her solemnly. 

 ‘That’s my lunch’ he said gruffly, trying to kick at her legs but she was too quick for him.

‘And my breakfast too, come to think of it.’

Arya shrugged nonchalantly and carried on eating.

‘Bite me’ she said with a raised eyebrow. Gendry shook his head and groaned, but she could see the slow smile at the corner of his mouth and it made her grin all the harder.

‘I’ll buy you a drink’ she said, by way of an apology. ‘Come on, walk with me.’

‘I can’t’ he said, still with his attention on his work. ‘I’ve got too much to do here yet. Maybe later.’

Arya began to swing her legs over the edge of the bench impatiently.

‘What’s the point of being your own boss if you can’t skip work every now and then’ she asked sullenly. ‘You’ll only be a little while.’

Gendry looked up and gave her another smile, broader this time. The cold outside had not touched the workshop, held at bay by the fierce heat of the fire pit. Just sitting there, Arya could feel the sweat beading under her clothes. Gendry’s bare arms were slick with it, making the curve of his muscles more defined in the harsh glow of the fire. He had not grown much in the years she had been gone; he had always been tall and broad for his age, and time had taken nothing from him in that regard. The change was in his face, in the faint shadow under his eyes. She remembered the rough skin on his hands and the scars he had on his forearms from his work. Now though, they were matched with thicker, fresher looking scars that had only just begun to heal. Scars made from a blade or a bullet. There was one on his chest that stretched out across his shoulder like a red spider web.

‘Hang round here then’ he said. ‘Let me finish this, and then you can go and get me another apple.’

Arya jumped down from the bench, still with her stolen fruit in hand.

‘You’ve got enough apples’ she said impishly. ‘I’ll get you something better.’

‘Oh really?’

Gendry grinned but did not stop his work. The look in his eye was invitation enough for Arya though, and she slid up towards him. Closer now, she could catch the scent of him mixed with the burning and the iron and the smoke; something solid and warm and alive under all the dead things. Her fingers danced along the bottom of his shirt, in the place it rode up slightly against his hips.

‘I promise’ she said quietly, forcing him to lean in closer to hear her. As he did, she could feel his breath touch her, all along the exposed skin of her neck and collar bone and a low, needing moan escaped her. He was watching her intently now, his hands still and his expression that dark, hungry look that she so much enjoyed. She smiled and allowed her fingers to slide slowly down his side, edging towards the bare skin near his waistband.

‘Arya…’

She still wasn’t used to him calling her that. It didn’t sound natural yet. She’d had so many names. He lent forward a little, just a slight dip of his head, and she knew that he wanted to kiss her. She wanted to let him. Her hand spread out against his skin, her fingers pressing down persistently, and she titled her head upwards to find his mouth. Their faces were close now, so that their noses touched.

But instead of the kiss she wanted, he pulled away a little and placed his lips against her forehead instead.

‘Where’ve you been? I was worried.’

She sighed, and let her hand fall heavily from his waist, feeling her frustration begin to snap.

‘Don’t start’ she said tersely, resenting suddenly his arm around her back and his face still so close to her. ‘I’ve been busy.’

His tried to kiss her again in that awkward, chaste manner but she twisted her head away, denying him. A moment ago, all she could want was his hands on her and now, it just felt tense and crowded.

‘Arya.’

That name again. She stiffened and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the smell of him again, but the moment had passed and her anger was hot.

‘Don’t tell me it’s nothing, because we know that’s a lie. Don’t tell me I have nothing to worry about.’

She shoved him then, a hard little push right in the chest and he, not expecting it, stumbled back.

‘I know what I’m doing.’

Her voice was a low rumble, her hands in tight fists. If she had wanted grief, she would have gone to see Sansa again. He was ruining it all.

Gendry dragged his hands up his face with a groan, smearing dirt and sweat in thin, black lines.

‘I didn’t mean it that way’ he said tersely, but she could see the way he had taken a step back, widening the gap between them. His hands came to rest behind his neck and he arched, looking down at her with eyes half closed. She met them with her own wide open stare, daring him to say more. They regarded one another solemnly.

‘It’s a stupid rule’ she answered eventually, although her words seemed to have lost their edge by the time she said them. She had never been able to follow a rule she didn’t respect, and Sansa’s laws only really seemed to apply to other people. Arya knew by now that she was not like other people. She thought he understood, but this pattern was becoming monotonous. He might hang on for a little longer yet, get mad at her some more, even send her away if he was feeling particularly hard done by. Then maybe this evening or tomorrow he’d come find her, hold her, tell her he was only worried. And then she’d let him in to her bed, and try to lose herself in the dip and curve of his shoulders, the thin, warm skin stretched tight over the hollow of his throat, and the way his mouth tasted after he had kissed his way upwards from her thighs. She had no time for this today.

‘Look, I’m sorry. I just…’

She fumbled for words, hindered in her apology by the fact she didn’t mean it.

‘I just need to be out there. I need to. Every one of them I kill, it’s one less around to kill us. Don’t you get that?’

It was harsher than she wanted it to be. Frustration was tripping her up, and she could tell he was not softening. He remained removed, his hands still high and away from her. He chewed his lip slowly.

‘Of course I get that.’ His voice was cold, and far too steady. ‘Of course. You think I don’t know what they can do? You think all the time you were gone, we just sat around waiting to get picked off and eaten?’

Her thoughts went to the scars across his arms and the red spider web that stretched out over his chest and something in her closed its eyes up tight and wanted her to look away too.

‘What did you think we were all doing Arya? What did you think all of us did, while you were busy being a goddamm ghost? We were fighting, and we were bleeding, and we dying. So don’t try telling me you’re the only one with a monopoly on a need for vengeance, ok? I’d be out there every night until I had every last one of them…’

He trailed off, his hands falling back down to his sides, and she thought for a moment about stepping back in to that circle. But he shook his head and there was something in his face that stopped her. He was too angry, and it made her want to scream.

‘There’s too much at stake now’ he said quietly, and if she had not been so conflicted right then she would have asked him to explain what he meant. But instead she just pursed her lips and turned away. He would find her tonight or maybe tomorrow, and hold her, and tell her he was only worried.

Chapter Text

The evening was coming on in fits and starts, making its way slowly across the mountains, bringing with it dark and brooding clouds and the threat of more rain. Jon had made an office for himself in the room he had once slept in as a boy. It was not the largest or warmest in the house, and the old fireplace echoed with the rush of strange winds, but it did have a spectacular view. Besides, it was still the only room that he could claim without feeling slightly uncomfortable. The rooms where Robb and Ned had slept where not for him. Even Theon, who had managed to redeem himself before the end, would not be done that disservice. Those rooms belonged to the dead and he would not cross over those sacred boundaries, no matter how much Sansa insisted it would be ok. The study where Ned had sat and worked late in to the night was similarly off limits, as was the sitting room where Catelyn had read to her children.

It was not just in those obviously hallowed places he felt that out of place. Sometimes, the uneasiness would creep up on him when he was not expecting it, in rooms he had once passed through with ease, where he had sat and played and eaten. Ghosts still hung unseen even in those corners, it seemed.

He was beginning to feel tired, and soon the words would stop making any sense. He didn’t know if anything more productive could be achieved tonight, and so he reluctantly shut the book and arched in the chair, yawning. The old wound in his back ached as he stretched, the taunt skin tugging painfully, and he winced a little. It was a soft kind of pain though, one that was becoming easier to bare with every passing day. He welcomed it really; a reminder of what he had done and who he had been.

Hunger drove him to find some food, and the sound of music and the clink of cutlery led him to the dining hall. Cavernous in the half-light, it had not always seemed so large. But then again, it had been designed to host many more. Ned had always kept an open house, inviting families from the city to eat with him and his family at regular intervals. The room was usually full of noise and laughter, the mix of the great and good all breaking bread with their good host. But tonight, Sansa ate alone. A few lonely candles haloed her with bright light, as the rest of the shadows were swallowed up in the vastness of the ceiling above her. The stereo was playing something classical, heavy on the piano and the violin. Jon could hear her humming lightly as she ate, a sweet little melody that matched the tune perfectly.  

She looked up at the sound of his footsteps, and smiled radiantly. She was particularly beautiful in this light, swathed in gold and amber, with her hair all alight. She was wearing it loose, and had dispensed with the smartly pressed dress that was her usual day’s attire. Instead, as the evening was upon them, she was in her sweatpants and a t-shirt. It made her look younger than she was; a fact that was somewhat disconcerting to Jon now. Looking at her was like looking at two people, the faint trace of the other laying just across its mirror image below. On one hand, she was the girl he had grown up with, who had taught him about fine things and shouted when they messed up her hair. Here, like this, she looked like that girl again. But then Jon remembered Petyr Baelish.

His was the first life she had ever asked him to take, and he had been defiant to the last; cocky and sure of himself even as Jon loaded the gun and asked for his last words. Perhaps there had been something approaching panic in his eyes in the last few seconds, as he realised she was not bluffing, but Jon could not be sure. He had kept his eyes fixed on Sansa until the end, and she, unblinking, had not looked away. Jon remembered vividly the expression on her face when it was done; a high colour in her cheeks and her lips pressed tight together, with eyes wide and stormy. It lasted only a moment though, before she relaxed and serenity returned to her.

She patted the chair next to her and beckoned him close. As he took the seat, she glanced around in the gloom for someone to fetch him a plate and thanked them wholeheartedly when they obliged. Sansa had a way of collecting people, of binding them to her with nothing more than kindness and goodwill. Girls from the city came to the house to clean and cook and mend her clothes for nothing more than the privilege of knowing her. Jon was constantly amazed by it.

‘You look tired’ she said as she watched him eat. Jon nodded.

‘I never liked balancing books’ he conceded. ‘All those numbers…. Ugh. I’d rather be doing something a little more exciting.’

That made her laugh.

‘I’ll look over them later’ she said, returning to her meal. ‘And tomorrow, we’ll find something more exciting for you to do, I promise.’

Jon prodded at his food; a collection of limp vegetables and a side of beef, a little tough but perfectly edible. Balancing the mathematics of running a city was the least enjoyable of all his jobs, but he knew she would not trust it to anyone else. And to be fair, it took up only a small portion of his time. Tomorrow, he would be back on the streets, doing what he loved. Organising the city’s defences, training up more men, putting down the beginnings of a riot; there were other balances that needed to be checked that couldn’t be worked out in the margin of a ledger.

‘Where is everyone?’

They were eating late, admittedly, but even for this hour the room seemed unusually quiet. The whole house in fact seemed hollower. Sansa’s music echoed gently in to the void but could not even begin to fill it.

‘Rickon is out’ she said, not expanding on that subject any further, and so Jon did not press her. ‘And Arya wouldn’t come, again.’

Her sigh was soft, and the little twist of her mouth gave away her sadness. Jon reached across to her hand, and she let him lace his fingers with hers. He didn’t give her any empty promises; he respected her too much to lie. Instead he rubbed his thumb along the side of her hand and looked down at her hand. She still wore her wedding ring; a thin band of burnished gold around her finger than was too plain for her, even in sweatpants. She had been a widow for two years, but Jon doubted she would take it off any time soon. Harry had been a decent man, who had helped her take back her home from the vermin that had filled it. And more than that, she had loved him. Not at first, and not for a while, but six years together had given them all the time they needed to truly find each other, and to like what they found. Sansa had been there when he died, covered in his blood like the red of her hair, breath ragged like nails clawing for the surface. Ever since, Jon had left her loneliness like the wound at his back; dull and distant but always there, something never spoken of.

He found himself chuckling softly. When they were children the idea of them sitting here like this, in the intimacy of candlelight, would have been unthinkable. Back when the threads of cordial politeness were wrapped around them all so tightly, and their futures had seemed so set and certain.

‘What’s so funny?’

Her eyes were bright and clear and earnest. Everyone said she looked like her mother but to Jon, she reminded him of Ned more and more every day.

‘Nothing’ he said, grinning. ‘I was just thinking about when we were young.’

She tilted her head thoughtfully.

‘We were happy then, weren’t we? When we were all together.’

He nodded.

‘Sometimes, I think I just need reminding’ she said, pensively.

She leant across and kissed him lightly on the cheek, a custom that had been born from rigid courtesy but was now something soft and familiar. As she leant in, Jon found himself recalling another red haired girl who had kissed him, although in quite a different manner.

The sound from the doorway made them both turn. Sandor took up most of the space, his shape dark and angular with no features visible in the ruin of his face. Nevertheless, Jon could tell exactly where his eyes had fallen.

 Sansa spoke first, rising to her feet.

‘Are you hungry? I think there’s still some meat left if you are.’

She began to pick up her empty plate and cutlery, sweeping up the crumbs from the table while the music echoed on.

‘I was just doing the last checks’ came Sandors’ voice, low and strangely flat. ‘I thought you were already in bed.’

Jon knew it was not him he was talking to; there was only one persons’ whereabouts Sandor cared about. He smiled wirily and returned to his food, but still very much aware of the presence looming just beyond him. Sansa tutted.

‘What kind of bodyguard are you?’ she said, softly mocking. ‘I thought you’re meant to know where I am at all times.’

The shadow shifted from one foot to another, a little awkwardly. He always held himself strangely now, Jon noticed. The old wound in his leg caused him pain – how could it not? As if in sympathy, his back wound throbbed slowly in time with his heart beat.

‘I thought you’d gone to bed’ Sandor repeated, a little redundantly. Sansa laughed, but not unkindly, and moved towards the stereo still playing on the mantelpiece.  Jon said she could leave it on. He didn’t particularly like this kind of music, but the thought of eating alone in silence was less than appealing.

She stretched, yawning, and kissed him again as she bid him goodnight, but Jon did not feel as comfortable with it this time, while the faceless shadow watched. Sandor didn’t move as even as Sansa slipped passed him, but Jon did see the way her hand briefly touched his chest and the light that caught in the flick of her eyes, an expression too quick for Jon to read. But the shadow turned its head and seemed to understand, and soon enough Jon was left alone. 

Chapter Text

Sandor woke suddenly, eyes so wide the cold air made them sting. One sharp breath brought the chill to his lungs and so he didn’t take another. His tongue felt thick, threating to choke him. His hands, like claws, grasped at the damp bed sheets and drew them in to tight knots under his fingers. The half light brought old images forth, like vicious demons cut from the darkness; fire that burned an unearthly green, a man with no face dripping black blood and a boy with blonde hair, screaming.  Panic welled in the thickness of his throat, a familiar taste like iron and grit, but it went no further. He closed his eyes, concentrated instead on the beating of his heart echoing in his ears, and began to fold each image away, corner to corner, like old pieces of cloth. Slowly, slowly, each one became small and neat and insignificant.

In its place, he started to construct a new image, as familiar as the ones that came before it but with no cold, cloying fear. Over the years, this image had changed somewhat from the one the old man had first suggested. Despite the many other wise things he had said, Sandor had always found that particular piece of advice to have been somewhat clichéd.  The image of his father’s home held no comfort for him. He could not remember what his mother looked like. A field of gently swaying corn under the sunlight made him feel nothing but foolish. A gentle river, nothing but needing a piss. So he had found his own, dug out from the wreckage of his memories, and built on it until it served the same purpose. Carefully, carefully, he focused with his mind’s eye until every little detail was rendered in perfect clarity.

When he breathed again, it was slow and deep and steady.

His room had once been two, but the dividing wall had been knocked down years before, leaving dust and rubble still in the corners that he had never got around to clearing. One half was all chipped cream plaster with filigree patterns in the ceiling and the other, pale green wallpaper that was peeling in most places. It had once been home to a pair of stable boys, back when the Starks still kept horses, although Sandor suspected they had not chosen the décor. Before this, when he first came to Winterfell, he had made his bed in one of the old outhouses that dotted the grounds. It had been warmer, but had proved too far away when raiders had tried their luck and had nearly taken an axe to Sansa’s bedroom door in a desperate search for long disappeared jewels and riches. Hunger could drive men to do strange things, or so they tried to plead when Sandor caught them later. It had brought them no leniency.

He might have been more comfortable in one of the servant’s rooms in the main house, kept warm by being clustered together near the kitchen and the boiler room where the fire was lit every day. He might have been more comfortable still in one of the spare bedrooms on the upper floor, just a few long strides away from where she slept, but he could not have stood anything so fine. Sansa had offered him both, but he had chosen instead to stay in the stable block in the courtyard. Close enough to be of use, but not so close as to feel out of place.

He was just about dressed when the knock came to his door, and he opened it still buckling his jeans. The woman regarded him slowly with cool dispassion, her blue eyes giving away nothing. Sandor was used to this treatment. Brienne always seemed to be silently judging him. He was yet to determine her conclusions.

She was dressed in fatigues and boots, her toned arms bare in defiance of the cold, and her short blonde hair was tucked neatly behind her ears. Under the clarity of her eyes, the ruinous scar across her cheek looked particularly nasty in contrast. You could still see the imprint of teeth marks in the twisted flesh. It made Sandor’s mouth dry whenever he looked at it.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked shortly, a tone just bordering on rude. Again, Sandor was as used to that tone as he was to her way of looking at him. She didn’t trust him, and it gave all their exchanges a slight razors edge. Sandor tried not to hold it against her.  

‘For what?’ It was not unusual for him to be up this early, but normally he would not be needed for a few hours. He would spend his time checking the perimeter and cleaning the guns in the weapon store, quietly and alone.

‘Rickon didn’t come home’ Brienne continued, tucking a stray hair behind her ear.  ‘Sansa’s worried. They fought last night, and he went away angry. He might have done something stupid. He might be hurt.’

Not likely  thought Sandor ruefully. That boy was the type that did the hurting. Unguarded, his mind flashed back to one of the images from earlier, the blonde haired boy with the screaming mouth and cold, cruel eyes. He sniffed and shook it away.

‘Ok’ he agreed, to the question she hadn’t asked. Collecting the wayward boy was one of his many tasks, although Sansa didn’t usually ask unless she was particularly concerned. He imagined her then sitting alone in her vast bedroom, hair all loose and tousled from sleep, thinking over all the things she had said last night and wishing she hadn’t. She had a habit of twisting something between her fingers when she was worried; the bed sheet, a lock of hair, the hem of her dress. He thought of her pale skin pulled taught over her knuckles.

He followed Brienne out in to the courtyard, in to the chill of the open air.  The sun was making a slow, half-hearted attempt to break the horizon by throwing fingers of pale gold and amber across the grey, and somewhere above them, a crow called listlessly. The sound of the generators gave a low thrum in the distance, but otherwise the world was quiet. Sandor liked it like this; before all the people began to stir up the dirt and grime. He watched with a sly smile as Brienne checked her gun carefully, looking over the chamber and the barrel a little too intently. It was a beautiful looking piece though; gold and red with a lion’s head on the handle. Sandor had never really been drawn to anything so frivolous – after all, a gun only needed to shoot true to be useful, and all the guilt edging in the world could not ensure that – but he could see why she loved it so much. When she was done, they got in the jeep. It was a beat up looking thing; dented sheet metal had been wielded on to the body work to give it armour and all the windows had been replaced with wire mesh, but it still ran just fine. Brienne drove, as usual, and soon enough they were bumping down the main road towards the rest of the city.

The frostiness continued to hang between them as they drove, but neither seemed willing to break it. Sandor could remember it no other way. Brienne had already been in Winterfell when he arrived, and had been one of the strongest opponents to his staying. He couldn’t blame her really; her reasons had been truthful after all, and her loyalty to Sansa had been fiercer than he had expected. The Hound had been a killer, who had left everyone who had had the misfortune to rely on him. But The Hound was dead, and Brienne still didn’t seem able to let her guard down. Was that really a fault though, in this world? When walkers could appear from anywhere and rip out the still-beating heart of the person in front of you. When every bite of food might kill you and the water might be a slow poison. He was glad Sansa had had her. Despite her strange little ways and her cold demeanour, she was still more honourable that he would ever be.

The city was as quiet as the house had been. A few people had begun to stir, early risers looking to get a head start on their work, but most had no need to up yet. The jeep turned the corner and emerged slowly out on to the main street, bouncing along the uneven road and catching the attention of a small group of parentless children playing in the dust. Drawn by the sound of the low, guttural engine, they began to run along beside it, calling and waving. When neither Sandor nor Brienne turned to look, the chase quickly became boring and they returned to their games. Brienne watched them in the rear view mirror.

‘Too young’ she said softly, so quietly he wasn’t sure she had even spoken. He looked back over his shoulder, to where the kids had begun to chase each other with sticks. They were filthy from head to toe, thin as rakes but laughing. Sansa had never turned anyone away from her city; not the motherless, the lost, the abandoned or the broken. It made for more mouths to feed, but more hands to do the work she always said.

‘They look happy enough to me’ he said, his eyes returning to scanning the roads. The sound of the children had faded and the eerie stillness was returning. The apartment blocks glinted like broken teeth as they passed.

Brienne shook her head.

‘They should be inside. The street’s no place for children to play.’

Sandor could not help but laugh, knowing full well the look he would receive.

‘Look around you’ he said wirily. ‘Does any of this look like a place for children to play? We’re living in a war zone. The dirt’s as good a place as any.’

Brienne’s eyes returned to the road but her disapproval continued to radiate from her in waves.

‘I’m just saying’ she said, curtly. ‘They should be with their families. Inside, safe, loved. It’s all wrong...’

Sandor laughed again, louder this time and without any care for the glare he received.

‘I wish we could all live in your perfect little world’ he said, the bite in his voice getting stronger. ‘But we don’t. So we make do. Don’t be so naïve.’

She didn’t answer, and the silence came down thick and heavy between them as they both kept their eyes ahead. He had not meant to be so harsh. As soon as the words tripped off his tongue, he recognised the old familiar feelings building like a wave of bitterness from the very pit of his belly. His instinct had been to snap and tear, to pull apart her innocent wish as though it’s very existence was painful to him. The old man had warned him about doing that. He cracked his knuckles slowly, feeling suddenly bad and knowing no way to remedy it. He decided his penance was to just bare his discomfort, wearing it silently like a martyr.

Another block came and went past the window. They drove to all of Rickon’s usual places; the bank of the river where the remains of the old bridge still stood, the garages at the back of the market place, the edge of the city where rubbish was dumped and the little shed where he liked to smoke stolen cigarettes.  None of them proved fruitful. Sandor began to worry that he’d ventured further afield, taking after his wayward sister and her passion for zombie hunts. Rickon was tough but his fury was so raw, so untamed, he didn’t have the disciple to keep himself safe, like Arya did. He’d go down fighting but he’d go down all the same.

Brienne’s shout woke him from his thoughts. The jeep skidded to a sudden halt, gravel scraping along the tyres. At first, he couldn’t see what she’d seen. He scanned the road but could see nothing but the dark alleys and cracked brickwork. But she was opening the door and running, and as he followed he saw it. The body was laying just out of sight, half in shadow and almost hidden from the main road. He recognised the boots; scuffed all along the side with bright red laces. As he got closer, the rest of the shape appeared slowly. Limp hands had fallen spread across the concrete, pale and torn. His face was turned away, looking in to the shadows, haloed in an expanding pool of dark. The smell of blood hit them full in the face, all metal and salt, and immediately his hand was at his gun but no one else was there. Brienne was on her knees, calling to him, but the boy didn’t move. Couldn’t move. His chest didn’t seem to rise or fall. Standing over him now, Sandor could see the wreck they’d made of his face.

And all he could think of was Sansa, with her hair all a mess.  

Chapter Text

Her head was resting against his shoulder, one cheek against his skin and her lips just bafely parted, breathing out warmth with every slow, deep exhale. Her dark hair had fallen across her closed eyes and he had to fight the urge not to push it away, afraid of waking her. Like this, asleep and dreaming, it was almost possible to believe she was peaceful. He could watch her face and study all the inkstained colours that hid there; the ghost of a purple bruise that still hung around her eye, all the shades of blue that existed in the shadows under her nose and bottom lip. Gendry smiled quietly to himself and leant his head against hers. It was still early, and if he was lucky, she would stay asleep against him for a few minutes more. It was rare for Arya to allow him to stay all night. Their usual pattern was for him to wake to her hard little elbow digging in his ribs, just as he was drifting along the edge of sleep, insisting he get up and leave before he got too comfortable. She preferred to sleep alone, she said, and no amount of soft little kisses trailing up the back of her neck would make her change her mind. So as much as he wanted to wake her, and slip his hand down under the thin vest top she wore, he couldn’t risk it. While she was asleep, he could stay.

She had never told him how she had gotten the small crescent shaped scar on the bridge of her nose. There was another, like razor wire, along her ribs and a third that curved like a snake up the length of her inner thigh. That one had been deep; you could tell by the way it had healed all twisted and pulled the flesh in around it. It would have bled a lot, maybe enough to nearly kill her. He’d asked her once, but she’d shot him a look so heavy with venom he hadn’t dared ask again, or about any of the others. Still, when she was quiet like this and he had time to really look at her without interference, he often found his mind wandering back to them. Distracted, his fingers gently brushed the little moon-shaped mark on her nose… 

Her fist hit him hard, right in the side of the mouth. Pain shot across his face, hot fire in his skin, and he tasted blood.  Too late, he saw he jump up and away.  The gun was already in her hand, pointing right at his head.

‘Jesus Christ Arya! It’s me! It’s just me!’

It hurt to speak, his jaw already feeling tender, but her finger was on the trigger. He scrambled to try and sit, sliding on the loose bed sheets.

‘Put the fucking gun down! Arya!’

She didn’t move. He held his breath. Had she even heard him? The gun stayed raised.

‘Arya….’

There was a flicker, and her arm relaxed. The gun fell away, but her eyes still seemed blank. Tentatively, he crawled across the bed towards her. As he neared the edge, he raised his hand upwards with fingers out-stretched. Slowly this time, so she could see him.

‘Hey, it’s ok. It’s ok…. It’s only me.’

When he touched her, she was like ice. Like marble. Like stone. Her body was tight and cold, not like flesh. The girl who had been asleep at his shoulder was gone. Still, he kept moving, kept his hand in contact with her the whole time, even as her eyes stayed dark and unmoved. When he reached her arm he travelled down to where her hand still gripped the gun and closed his fingers around her fist.

‘It’s only me….’

She blinked, and finally seemed to understand him. He felt the change under his hand almost instantly. The warmth came back to her.

‘You scared me’ was all she said, in a strange, flat tone. The wash of relief made him laugh.

‘I scared you? Arya, you nearly broke my bloody jaw!’

He stood, careful to move slowly unless he broke whatever fragile sanity had fallen over her. Gently, he pressed his hands against her arms, stepping in closer and even daring a smile. She looked up at him and returned it with a small one of her own.

‘I’m sorry…’ she murmured softly. ‘I just… you shouldn’t have….’

‘ARYA!’

The shout came from the hallway, along with a booming crash and the splintering of wood. There were footsteps too, running up the corridor. He saw the flicker and then at once she was that woman again; tensed and ready, her gun up and her eyes black ice, bounding towards the danger. He had no choice but to follow, even though he was unarmed and half naked, and had no idea what had just come crashing in to her apartment. Beyond them the shouting continued, thick with panic.

As they came round the corner, the reek of blood hit him hard. The living room, already small, was made smaller by the mess of people standing there. For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. At one end, the front door hung on to its hinges by splinters. In front of them, a man whose head nearly touched the ceiling was laying a pile of red, sodden rags on to the floor. A woman, nearly as tall and covered in blood, was throwing open cabinets and drawers. She turned as they entered, her face pale white under the red smear across her cheek.

‘Bandages’ she said shortly. ‘And dressings. I need to stop the bleeding.’

Arya immediately came alive, bounding to the cabinet where she kept her medical supplies. Gendry, feeling suddenly useless, could only stand and try and understand what was going on. He’d only just realised that the pile of rags was a person; a thin, angular boy with his hair shaved close to his head and bruises on his knuckles. He’d met Rickon only a handful of times, and when he had, nothing that passed between them could be termed conversation. Arya must have seen who it was too, but nothing in the way she acted suggested that. She moved mechanically with Brienne, applying bandages to the open wounds and putting pressure on the ones still bleeding. Sandor was still holding the boy, moving him carefully as they worked so they could get to all of the places they needed to.

‘What can I do?’

He thought he had to ask. He had to at least try. This was her brother….

Arya answered him without looking up from her work.

‘Ice, towels and the vodka.’

He fetched them quickly and then stood back, once again unsure. Sandor had stepped away by now too. They both regarded the scene solemnly.

‘What happened?’

Sandor shook his head, eyes still on the boy. The wounds that looked the worse were around his face and two nasty looking cuts to his arm and back of the head that were still seeping blood. His breath escaped in low, laboured streaks.

‘Dunno. Found him an alley, all beat up. Looks fresh though. Can’t have been there all that long I don’t think.’

‘Will he be ok?’

‘He’s been bleeding pretty bad. And there’s broken bones there too, definitely. Just depends on whether they’ve punctured anything vital.’

Gendry looked at the red stains across the floor and on Brienne and Arya. Sandor’s hands were sticky as well, and the smell of it was all iron and rust. It looked bad, but the wounds were not gushing and as he listened, the boys’ breath didn’t seem wet or too shallow. He’d seen people die before; he knew what to look for. But Rickon was still unconscious, and Sandor was right- there was no way for them to tell how much damage had been done on the inside.

‘Why did you bring him here? The house has better supplies…’

‘Too far.’ Sandor cut him off, absently rubbing his palms down his thighs. ‘The girl always has things here. We didn’t know how bad he was, and we had nothing in the car.’

Sandor never referred to Arya by her name, Gendry noticed. It was a mutual thing. The names she called him were far worse. Gendry would have agreed with her not that long ago, but he’d learnt that there were better things to be angry at.

‘What happened to your face?’

Gendry realised that his jaw was still throbbing. He touched it gently and flinched.

‘She hit me’ he said simply, too dazed to lie. Brienne was applying ice to the swelling on Rickons’ face now, and Arya was using the vodka to clean out the last of the cuts. Sandor stifled a smile.

‘Did she now? And what had you done to deserve that?’

Gendry thought back to that barrel pointed directly to his forehead. It was almost inhuman, the way she had looked at him. She’d slipped in to that other skin she wore sometimes.

‘She made me come here, you know’ he said, to himself really although he looked at Sandor as he spoke. ‘I was going to stay down south, make a living for myself working in Kings Landing. I know it there, know the city, know the people. Plus, you know, family ties… But then she found me and convinced me to come north. I followed her because she was the only real person I still knew. The only one left. I think I followed her just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.’

It wasn’t an answer to the question, but rather for the one that might have come afterwards. Sandor’s expression seemed odd and faraway. He blinked once and turned back to where Rickon still lay, bleeding less now but still not conscious. The men stood quietly, one stained in blood and the other in other his boxers, while the woman sighed and sat back, having done all they could. They had placed him on the sofa, all covered in blankets.

‘We shouldn’t move him any more until he’s awake’ said Brienne. ‘We might do more damage if we do. Will he be ok here?’

Arya shot her a fierce little look.

‘Of course. I’ll be here.’

Brienne nodded, cowed.

‘Ok then. We’ll go back to the house, get more things. Hopefully he’ll wake up soon.’

Arya bit her lip. She was kneeling by her brothers’ head, now wrapped with strips of towels and gauze. There was swelling all across his eye and mouth, and the bruise was coming in quick across the distended skin. She touched his throat lightly, feeling his pulse at first but then just lingering, finger tips caressing the skin. Gendry could see her coming back in to herself, the way she had done in the bedroom when he’d held her hand. She was fighting it though, that icy part threatening to keep its grip on her.

‘Tell Sansa he’s going to be alright’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t let her worry.’

It was an odd thing to say, Gendry thought. Sansa would be here as quickly as she could, no matter what they told her. After the others had gone, and they had washed up as much as they could, and both had a chance to shower and change, she came and sat very close to him.

‘I really am sorry about your face’ she said earnestly. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Ow! Yes, it does. Please don’t poke it.’

She leant in and kissed him softly on the corner of his lip, and this time the hurt didn’t seem as bad. He turned and tried to catch her mouth, but she had moved away.

‘Come over later?’

Time to leave then. He wasn’t too surprised. He nodded.

‘Find me if you need anything.’

She said she would, but he knew her well enough to know that wasn’t entirely true. 

Chapter Text

In the end, Rickon did not take all that long to recover. He’d lost a lot of blood but seemed to have sustained nothing more serious than a concussion, and as soon as he was awake Sansa had had him moved back to the house and his own bed. Arya had argued that he would have been better to leave him as he was, but Sansa had insisted. Something in her baulked at the idea of him sleeping for another night outside of her walls, and her protection. She and her sister had exchanged some fierce words over it, and on the drive home amid the icy silence and Rickon’s deathless stare, she had regretted some of them. But she knew where he belonged. The first night he was back, she woke late and without the immediate dull ache that started down in the base of her spine. It came later – it always came – but at least she had a few minutes of calm, blissful peace stretched out in her bed before the world came crashing back to her.

Rickon had not been softened by his brush with death. He remained as dark and angry as he had ever been, and refused to tell Sansa who had left him bleeding in an alleyway. They fought about it often, although Sansa never meant for it to turn in to an argument. If anything, it seemed to have hardened his resolve more, his anger crystallising across his skin like the scars that had formed across his body. He went out every night, slipping though the broken windows to come home smelling of alcohol, blood or vomit. Her little birds could tell her nothing, save what she already knew. When the dark came, he seemed to slip away in to the underbelly of the city; a secret world that existed out from her sight and seemed to be growing all the time. She heard whispers about the places some of the younger kids would meet, to smoke and drink their home brewed vodka and fight and touch each other. She was beginning to think she needed to get better little birds.

But there was never much time to think about that. There were things she needed to do, and she couldn’t be Sansa-the-concerned-sister for them. She had to be Sansa Stark of Winterfell, and that meant thinking differently, dressing accordingly. She didn’t exactly have an extensive wardrobe anymore, and most of what was left was not particularly practical for her current arrangement. For a long time she had felt self-conscious, feeling out of place in her heels and skirts while the rest of her city scraped around in jack boots and fleece jackets.

‘You are a daughter of greatness, Sansa. The men and women who came before you were leaders, and your city needs a leader again. Give them what they want. Be a myth, be a legend, be anything but normal. They don’t need any more of that.’

Why was it was always Petyrs’ voice that still came to her when she felt unsure? The advice he had given her was no better or worse than any other she had received. Why couldn’t her head be filled with Harry, and the soft little words he would whisper in to the hollow of her throat in the dusky evening? Gentle sounds that bounced off her skin and tumbled down her side to flare between her legs as his lips touched her ear. Just thinking about it made her press her thighs together and bite her bottom lip delicately. Or even Tyrion, whose words had been kind if not quite as soft and arousing. Not that those voices didn’t still come to her sometimes; Tyrion when she thought of something funny that he might like, Harry when she was alone in her bed or in the shower. But it was always Petyr when she felt doubt, and it annoyed her just as much as it seemed to help.

As night spread itself over the sky in trails of violet and jade, she watched from the window as Rickon’s sharp dark shadow slipped out of the yard. She rested her forehead against the glass and watched him until her breath had fogged up the pane and she couldn’t see anything anymore. Jon said he would try and trail him tonight, make sure he was ok, but Sansa held out little hope of him being successful. Jon was a good tracker but he was too well known to slip around as unseen as Rickon could. He had quite the little following amongst some to the younger girls, and Sansa had noticed the way they looked at him, and the shy little giggles he left in his wake. It was strange for her to think of Jon that way. He had been her brother for so long - even when he wasn’t - and always close. It reminded her of a time years ago, when a boy with chestnut hair had given her a rose. When she was older, that memory had made her feel silly and so she had shut it away. But now she was older still, and it just made her smile.

She wanted a shower, but the water would be cold by now. She wanted a hot meal, but the kitchen was all the way down stairs and she couldn’t stand to waste the electricity. So she compromised, and decided instead to have a drink; one thing she could at least accomplish without much hassle.  The bottle of whiskey had been her fathers, found hidden away in the back of a drawer and covered in dust. He had not been a drinker at all, but occasionally, when they were celebrating for some reason, he would allow himself an indulgence.  When he kissed her goodnight sometimes she could smell it on his breathe. She didn’t really have a taste for it but she liked what it reminded her of.

She had just poured herself a fairly modest glass when Sandor knocked her door. He came in at the sound of her voice, only his head visible around the door. His grey eyes glanced at her once, saw her on her bed, and looked away again. She raised her glass to him and took a sip.

‘Your brother…’

He didn’t finish his sentence, and glanced at her again. She sighed and sat back against the head board.

‘I know. Jon said he’d follow him.’

Sandor lingered in the doorway, neither in nor out. He seemed more uncomfortable than usual. She regarded him from the rim of her glass, and remembered her courtesy.

‘But thank you. For everything.’

He might have smiled then, but she couldn’t see for the shadows that seemed to always hang around his face. He shrugged.

‘Would you like a drink?’

She swung her legs off the bed and held up the bottle for him to see. He looked at it for what seemed like a strangely long moment.

‘No, that’s ok. I shouldn’t.’

‘Just the one, to round off the day. I insist.’

He laughed in that low rattle of his.

‘That’s the way it starts. Just the one.’

She feigned horror, standing and throwing her hand up dramatically.

‘Are you accusing me of having a secret drinking problem Clegane?’

Again that rattling laugh.

‘No, not a secret one….’

She tried to continue with her mock surprise, setting the glass down and facing him with her hands on her hips. But his laughter made her break, and she couldn’t help but grin.

‘Fine. Then the least you can do is come join me, and make sure I only have the one. Consider it part of your duties.’

She turned and picked up her drink again, but he remained in the doorway. She sat cross-legged on her pillow, cradling the glass between her hands, looking at him. The echo of their laughter still hung around them, slowly disappearing in to the silence.

‘Seriously, come in. I’d like the company. Please.’

He hung back for a moment or two more before taking a tentative step forward. Sansa could count on one hand all the times he had stood in her bedroom, and never when her husband was alive. She indicated to the bottle again but he shook his head.

‘You’ve really given up then? I’m sorry, is that rude to ask? I wouldn’t have made a joke if I knew.’

Sandor had taken a seat in the arm chair near the window, next to her bed. He shook his head.

‘No, I just cut back a lot. Besides, it’s not exactly easy to come by any more.’

She conceded his point, and took another small sip.

‘You’ve never told me what you did, back in the monastery. You know everything about my life, and I still hardly know anything about yours before you came here.’

His mouth twitched and smiled but he kept his eyes down. He was wearing that old leather jacket again, with its smell of grease and oil.

‘You really that interested? It’s not much of a story.’

She arched her eyebrow again in that way she had perfected; soft but with that sharp little edge.

‘You rose from the dead. How much more interesting can it get?’

She thought he might laugh at that but he kept his gaze down, his fingers spread out on his thighs.

‘It wasn’t that dramatic’ he said simply.

She reflected on him for a moment, unwilling to allow him his familiar retreat in to silence. When he’d turned up on her doorstep four years ago, she hadn’t pressed him too hard for any details of his time in the wilderness, shocked as she was to see him again. The traces of his past still clung to the corners of him like spider webs, and the ash of a thousand hot, angry fires that had once burned in the core of him. But the heat of them still lingered, and she being the cautious woman circumstance had made of her, had no initial desire to fight through all that mess and trauma for such an uncertain a reward.  She had been too busy securing her city, making a home for herself in the ruins, to focus on just one man and his wounded feelings; a lingering reminder of a past she would rather forget. And later, when she had grown more accustomed to his presence, and he had proven himself changed, she had found it strangely difficult to fit him in to any particular category. Four years in one another’s company and the coding of their relationship was still no clearer to her.

‘Tell me something I don’t know about you. Something from the monastery.’

Sandor thought for a little while, inspecting his outstretched hands - not as if we were trying to come up with something, but rather choose between a great many.

Eventually he laughed.

‘I found out I like cauliflower.’

She must have been looking at him blankly because when he saw her face, he chuckled all the harder.

‘I couldn’t stand it when I was a boy. Bland, white, boring vegetable. But they grew all their own food there, up in the monastery. No outside trade, save maybe the odd bit of spice or something exotic that got donated to the monks. And they had this vegetable patch. Massive thing, full of these plants that I couldn’t even give a name to for the most part. Only certain brothers could work on it, and I never understood why. It was some kind of privilege to tend the crops. I dug graves, fixed the walls, swept the floors, but they never asked me to go in to that field. Kind of bugged me eventually. Then one day, they served up some of the cauliflower. Don’t get me wrong, it was still the same bland, white vegetable. I didn’t have some kind religious experience over this thing. But I actually liked it. I could eat more of it. It didn’t seem so bad. And I suppose it was strange to think of this simple, stupid vegetable being so important. But I kind of understood, I think.’

He laughed suddenly, the kind of embarrassed laugh that punched the air in sharp bursts. He shrugged.

‘Two years later and I would have happily chewed off my own arm for a piece of that goddamn cauliflower. It got tough up there, when all this shit started….’

Sansa smiled and swung around to face him, her legs over the edge of the bed. She set the whisky down on the bedside table.

‘I never liked cauliflower either’ she conceded. ‘But they tell me there’s a fair crop of them starting to grow down in the garden now. Apparently it needs decent soil, so we must be doing something right.’

He raised his head to look at her, but couldn’t hold her gaze for longer than a second. He wore his hair back sometimes, like now, so that all the scars were visible. Once, he had taken great pleasure in making her look at them and she hadn’t understood why. Now, she could stare all she liked and it was him who turned away.

‘Who knows Clegane. Cauliflower might save us all.’

They both chuckled, and she realised their legs were touching at the knee; the thin cotton of her pyjamas against the roughness of his jeans. She thought perhaps he hadn’t noticed yet, because he hadn’t moved away, but then she felt it. The slight pressure, pushing back.

In the years they had lived together, she had become more aware of this odd little undercurrent; the splinter on which their relationship always caught whenever she thought she had him pinned. She had learnt not to be afraid of it.   

‘Perhaps’ he was saying, seemingly unaware of what was happening. ‘But I think I’d still prefer something a bit less… boring.’

They both continued to chuckle, and she continued to edge forward, testing his resistance. She moved in fractions; tiny little movements back and forth across the hardness of his thigh, and searched his eyes for a flicker of recognition. But he kept his gaze fixed on the floor beneath them, even as the laughter began to die in his throat.

It might have been the whiskey, although she’d only had a few sips. It might have been Rickon, lost in the dark and moving ever away from her. It might just have been the lateness of the hour and the strangeness of having him here, where he had hardly ever been. Either way, something in her felt bold, and the pressure of his him against the inside of her thigh was beginning to feel too slight. Her heartbeat had become a throb, centred entirely at the juncture of her open legs. She slid again, to bring him closer still, and her movements became more deliberate, more sure. His mouth had parted slightly, his eyes still cast downwards. But his gaze now seemed fixed on the place their bodies touched. If he looked up now, she didn’t know what she’d do.

The siren scream was like a blow to her head. The sound of it filled seemed to fill the room, pushing all other sound aside. So loud, it seemed to be in her room. For one panicked moment, everything blurred and shook as she scrambled to her feet. The glass, knocked from the table, shattered loudly at her feet and only then did she realise that the siren was not in her room, not even in the grounds of the house.

It was coming from the city, and it meant the wall had been breached.  

Chapter Text

Arya felt the noise in her gut before she heard it in her head. The sound was a physical thing, clutching her hard under her ribs in a tight little fist, pulling her forwards with a jerk. The adrenaline came over her like plunging in to icy water, leaving gooseflesh all across her skin. The siren was a calling, a cry in the dark, an excuse. Her tongue flicked across her bared teeth, relishing the taste, and she felt the core of her harden as she ran towards the screams and the chaos. Tonight, they had come in to her world. Her fingers curled like talons at the thought and even as she ran, her heart fell in to the slow, steady rhythm that had once been the focus of her training. The sounds of screams and panic drew her like a wolf to the kill, and her lips parted hungrily. A few more strides and she would be on them. 

The breach was in the west, near to where the river entered and the skeleton of the mining factory still stood. In the moonlight, the water moved like oil around the broken debris and the smell of rot was thick. The ground was uneven, all loose stone and muddy silt where the water was trying to reclaim the land. Arya followed the old train tracks down towards the husk of the factory, admit the sparse and flickering lights and the bones of dead fish that cracked under foot. The wall loomed up ahead of her, slicing the sky in half abruptly and plunging the world there in to shadows. But as she came closer, she began to see the mess writhing in the gloom, black shapes in the black shade, and the shouts of men and women above the siren’s piercing call. The flare of panicked gunfire caught in the pits of undead eyes, throwing lightning flashes across ice-thick limbs, and underneath the noise Arya could hear that familiar rasp. It made her skin crawl.

There seemed to be no order, no one taking control. Before her, a desperate scream was cut short and a body fell heavily at her feet, to gasp and gurgle and claw at his open throat. She raised her gun and squeezed off three rounds in to the blackness, heard the whizz and thunk of a bullet hitting flesh, knew instinctively that she had hit her target. When she looked back down, the man was dead. Pausing, she tried to focus. Her mind was like a dagger, razor sharp and thin, cutting away all the things she didn’t need, the things that she couldn’t use. The dark blood pooling at her feet, the scrape of fingers across stone, the icy starlight above her; all these were emotion, and they were useless here. She needed to know numbers, direction, and purpose, the mathematics of her kill. She needed to know how many bullets were in her gun and the angle to fire it to bring the most of them down. All this she did in the blink of an eye. Turning to her right, she fired again. Another two in front of her, a third to her left. Every time, the comforting groan and the rasping became less. The adrenaline rushed across her like fire in her skin, prickling her fingers and making them tingle. Her breathing stayed the same though, deep and balanced. In her ears, the beat of her heart was the solitary bang of a drum, keeping her in time.

More people were coming now, drawn by the siren wail, and the panic that had risen like a wave was starting to break. In the dusk, Arya could see the strewn bodies littering the street; cold white flesh bloated with black blood, grotesque parodies of something human. But still more were coming, a steady flow from up ahead, open mouths gurgling spit and rot, fingers sharp for tearing. She hated every single one of them. Her bullets would not be enough, and soon she would need to take them in her hands and rip their unnatural life from them. The thrill of it made her smile, a wide and bitter grin. To see them die in her hands….to smash those open mouths down on to the rocks and have them shatter in to a thousand wet, cold pieces….

But that was hate, and hate was an emotion. For a split second, lost in thoughts of bloody revenge, she let the razors edge of her mind slip. In to the gap, a walker took its chance. Arya heard the rasp a moment too late, just as cold fingers closed around her throat. The thing had no breath yet something wet and ripe bloomed near her ear and all she could smell was decay. Yellow teeth, sharp like needles, stretched out wide to sink in to her shoulder. She spun to catch it but the thing had a hold of her tight. She could hear the gargle from its open throat, hungry and vicious, and screamed one long and desperate scream in to the dark, tying to summon the strength to wretch herself free.

She felt the rush of air past her cheek as the fist took its swing. The crunch it made as it hit the walker’s skull was like meat hitting marble, thick and wet and heavy. It exploded, leaving a spray of stringy blood across her horrified face and a sudden, deafening silence where the rasping had once been. The walker fell to the floor, the side of its face a hollow, pulpy mess. Her hands went to her throat as she watched it fall, covering the place where its cold fingers had gripped her with her own, warm and alive. She could feel nothing worse than a bruise.

Her saviour stood over the walker, breathing slowly. He flexed his hand carefully, unfurling the thick fingers, and wiped the blood off on to his thigh. Even in the shadows, Arya knew who it was. The height alone was enough of a clue. She opened her mouth to speak but the words she had thought to say could not be spoken. Something in that face just made her stop. But there was no time for that now anyway. She nodded her curt thanks – the best her body would allow- and turned back towards the wall. Sandor nodded in response and followed her gaze.

‘The door’s open. That’s where they’re getting in.’

Arya had only just spotted the crack of sky and snow in the deep darkness, a shard of light where the moon and the dead were pooling. They would keep coming while it stayed ajar.

‘Gotta close it’ said Sandor brusquely. ‘Stay here.’

Arya took another shot, landing a bullet right between another walkers’ eyes three feet away. 

‘Fuck that. I’m coming with you.’

Sandor sighed but didn’t argue. He set his mouth to a firm line and put his head down, moving forward through the bodies with Arya nimbly at his side. The pair of them cut a path through the dead with bullets and fists until they were at the wall. Turning, Arya thought she could hear Jon shouting in the racket and her heart jumped, but she fought it back down where it couldn’t do her any damage. Her focus had to be here, on her task. She couldn’t afford another lapse.  

The door was heavy and cold, and they needed to put their shoulders to it to start it moving. Arya’s hand slipped across wet steel and smell of it told her it was blood, but in the shadows she couldn’t tell if was from the living or the dead. In the blank white space beyond, the wind was whipping up the snow in to frenzied flurries, blurring the lines of the trees. A gust caught Arya full in the face and hit her with the scent of the wilderness; dead bark and earth, the tinge of iron and salt, wet decay. There were more of them out there. More of them stalking in the dark and white, coming for them. Some untrained part of her flashed back to the man who had fallen at her feet, with his neck gushing red. She thought about Gendry and the red spiderweb scar that crossed his chest. And she thought about the time she had wasted, thinking that she was the only one left. Believing with her whole heart that her family was dead, and that she was so alone. To have been left, abandoned, to fill that void with hate and death and clinical skill.  And her mother….her mother…..

And them…..

She was through the door before she had even finished the thought. The wind howled at her, biting at exposed skin, whipping all sound away. If Sandor called out after her, it was lost in the gale. She needed only her gun and her wits. If they were out there, she would find them. She would stain the snow with their blood and brains, make the grey white waste a hell of broken bone and teeth. Adrenaline kept her from the cold, driving her on. The tang in her mouth was tart and strong, and as the trees came closer, she bared her teeth and roared.

In the snow, they were harder to see.

Rage had made her sloppy, stealing her focus. She took a step and fumbled, losing her footing in a deep drift. She took another and nearly fell, scraping her arm on a branch. Within the howling, she heard that rasp as clear day. It was all around her, echoing in the snow. She turned and fired, but the bullet just whizzed through the air. She turned again, fired another, but the rasping just came closer. The snow was falling thick now, raining like ash. Her whole world was grey and white. She screamed in to the nothingness, a long and bitter howl for her own frustration, and fired again, and again, and again…..

His arm encircled her, thicker than her body, lifting her like she was weightless. She kicked and bit and screamed some more but his hand just closed over her open mouth and bore her rage in silence, even as she tasted his blood between her teeth. He had her under his arm, keeping her own tight to her sides, and every time she pushed, she got nothing but ridged muscle. It was only when she felt him start to run that she felt her first sliver of panic. She could hear the fear in his breathing, like a rattle in his lungs. Helpless, she could only close her eyes to the snow and allow herself to be carried, blind, in to the unknown. The rasping began to sound like laughter, cruel and taunting, and she tensed herself in preparation of the first strike. They were everywhere now, their filthy mouths snapping at her as they ran, and she could do nothing but wait.

Suddenly, there was a boom like the sky had cracked open. Gunfire began to punch the air relentlessly, over and over. Quicker than any pistol, louder than any rifle, Arya recognised the angry bursts of a machine gun and, for a moment, thought that the walkers had a secret weapon. But there were engines too, and the sound of tyres scraping across ice, and she knew they definitely didn’t drive. Startled, Sandor had skidded to a halt at the edge of the wall. Still in his arms, Arya looked wide-eyed out in to the waste to see the blaze of head lights cutting through the horde. The trucks were massive, covered in scared metal plate with chains around their tyres. The machine gun had been mounted on the roof of the largest, making quick work of any walkers left standing. And then it stopped. The rasping laughter was suddenly no more, replaced now by only the howling of the wind, the low roar of the engines, and the stuttering of her heart hard in her chest.

Arya slipped from Sandor’s now limp grasp, her eyes still not quite believing what she was seeing. The trucks had left a deep trail of carnage in their wake; trees and dirt and walkers churned up in an ugly scar across the snow. On their doors, painted on the dented plate metal, was a crudely rendered dragon in red. All, Arya noted, except the largest which had on its bonnet a circle of yellow and green, somewhat obscured in bloody snow and mud. But when she looked closer, she could see a yellow rose.

Its door opened and a woman emerged, dressed in thick winter clothes with a fur collar pulled up around her throat. Even under all the layers, her slender figure was quite discernible and as she moved, a cascade of thick brown hair fell around her shoulders. Arya had never met her, yet she knew exactly who she was. Margaery smiled as if she were greeting an old friend across a dinner table.  No dirt or sign of struggle seemed to have touched her, from the cleanliness of her hair to the leather boots only just kissed by snow. To Arya’s overwrought mind, still soaked in old fear and new relief, she didn’t seem entirely real.

‘So, this is WInterfell’ she said, looking past them to the wall and the city beyond.

‘I think we got here at the right moment. Or is it always this chaotic?’

Chapter Text

A good few things were different the next morning. Sandor had been told to join them for breakfast in the dining hall for a start, which in itself was rather unusual. Not that he minded when he saw the spread; the better cuts of bacon and a whole batch of eggs, that bread that Wylla made which he had a particular fondness for, and even a few cooked tomatoes swimming in their own juices. The hall was warm too – no mean feat when you considered that most of its windows were boarded up. He suspected they would all be going without hot water for a day just so that Margaery could remove her furs while they ate.  

The table arrangements were another odd thing, in so far as there actually was one. When he came in, a little late and still bleary eyed, he had gone to take a seat on the left hand side; the chair nearest the door, where he could see all the exits and all the faces. But he’d caught Brienne staring and the sharp little shake of her head told him that he was wrong. He tried another two, and twice more received the stare, until she was forced to indicate the correct one with a rather fierce hand gesture. It seemed the majority of the house had been summoned, and he had to take a place in between Jon and Brienne along the right hand side with the rest of Sansa’s people.

Personally, he thought such a show was a little unwarranted, but he supposed he understood why Sansa had felt it necessary. He hadn’t met Margaery, having been living rough in the Riverlands by the time she and her family had come South, but Sansa had only ever said a few words about her and that told Sandor all he needed to about the little birds feelings. The rest he had picked out from traces of gossip and the gaps in between other peoples sentences.

Margaery and Sansa sat opposite each other, across a table that seemed strangely wide. They had spoken briefly last night but the morning seemed to have wiped all of that clear, and the room had the delicate tension of a first meeting. Margaery was still dressed in the clothes she had arrived in, although to Sandors’ eye they seemed to have been freshly pressed. Her companions were unfamiliar to him, except one of the older men who sat at her right. The beard was turning grey now and was looking a little less well kept than when Sandor had last seen him, but his striking resemblance to the girl was still unmistakable. Garlan, he had learnt, was the only one of Margaerys’ brothers still alive. That wasn’t surprising really, with his military training. Clearly his sister shared some of those survial skills.

Sansa however was left without the majority of her family to support her. Rickon had returned early in the morning, thankfully no worse for wear after his adventures the night before. It seemed he hadn’t been near the breach in the wall, and was unharmed, but had chosen to stay in his bed today nevertheless. Sandor thought perhaps it was for the best this time, given his temper. And Arya had chosen to stay in the city and lick her wounds. Sandor would have been angry at her where it not for the way she had acted last night. He’d seen a wild woman out in that snow, snarling at the wind and screaming in to the dark. In another life, he’d watched her stab a man over and over until his blood had coloured her red, watched her pick it from under her nails by the campfire with no trace of feeling for the life she had taken. He’d understood that kind of rage, and it’d been comforting in its simplicity. Her silent anger beside his own had been a relief almost, and he’d gained a certain kind of peace in it after the turmoil of the year before; the wretchedness of the blackwater and its evil fear, the stinking hypocrisy Beric’s righteous wrath. And, as he had admitted some time later to the old man, this child’s rage was sweet in comparison to the unnerving crack that Sansa’s pure calm had left in his foundations.

But she had been just a child, and this woman who had come back to them was changed. That rage in the snow last night was something he hadn’t understood. When he took hold of her, his heart had been in his mouth. It had only been the thought of her sister that had made him do it and if she had fought him - really fought him - he wasn’t entirely sure he would have won.

Margaery spoke the most, complementing them on the house and the food, about the ingenuity of their power station and the vegetable gardens in the front yard. Sandor watched her carefully between mouthfuls, trying to read the intentions amid her nice words, but she seemed to have hidden them too carefully. He was certain it was bullshit though; no one was that enthusiastic about a vegetable patch. For some reason, he suddenly thought about cauliflowers and nearly choked on his bacon. His stifled coughing managed to halt the conversation for a moment before Margaery continued.

‘We passed the Eyrie on the way here. So sad to see it like that, it was such a beautiful place. Just a tomb now of course.’

Sandor watched Sansa carefully from the corner of his eye. If the woman had meant to throw her with mention of that place – and he wasn’t entirely sure that she hadn’t – it didn’t seem to have worked. Sansa’s gentle features remained calm, her blue eyes sweeping downwards only for a moment before returning Margaery’s gaze. A perfectly proportioned smile came to her lips.

‘A shame, yes’ she answered. ‘Luckily Harry and I took a lot of our favourite things with us when we left.’

She took a sip of water and paused.

‘There’s not much there now I should imagine.’

Garlan, who had been a picture of brooding silence up until then, took the opportunity to speak next.

‘We were sorry to hear about your husband Sansa. I didn’t know him, but I gather Harry was a decent man.’

Sansa allowed herself a sad smile but Sandor could see the way she twisted the hem of her dress under the table, and the flush that came to her neck.

‘Thank you. He was. And I’m sorry for Willas and Loras too, and your parents, and grandmother. Everyone’s lost someone. This war… everything after…. It’s been hard for us all.’

A silence fell across the table, everyone concentrating on their plates. Sandor was beginning to feel on edge. He’d already spent more time than he was comfortable with in the company of all these people. And he was growing increasingly wary of these visitors and their false sympathies. They didn’t care about Sansa or her feelings. If they had, they wouldn’t have tried to use her like a chess piece to win their stupid games back in Kingslanding. They wouldn’t have abandoned her when she needed a friend the most. It was why she kept them at arm’s length across this table. It was why she had dressed in that dark blue dress; the smartest she had. And it was why, when he had watched her bedroom window early in to the morning, the light had always been on. He wanted to be angrier at them for that but it would mean being angry at the same fault in herself. They had all left her really, even him. The memory of that night, hazy as it was, still made him feel sick. He remembered flashes only. Green fire. The shake in her high voice. He tried to concentrate on something else.

‘You’ve come a long way’ Sansa was saying, breaking their little silence. ‘And I can’t imagine it was easy. Why make the trip?’

It was the question that Sandor sensed everyone was now eager to ask. Gratitude for their intervention last night had already begun to wear thin, made worse by the frostiness that seemed to have settled across the room since they had all sat down. He saw Brienne and Jon shift in their seats, no doubt uncomfortable with her forthrightness towards people who had arrived with automatic weapons and no clear purpose. But Sansa remained composed, with nothing but a soft expression on her face. Margaery met it with only a slightly arched eyebrow, and didn’t miss a beat.

‘Greyscale’ she said simply. ‘Daenerys wanted to know how far the plague had spread. It’s all but gone now in the south but we heard reports of it still around the Reach and further afield.’

‘The plague never made it past the Neck’ said Jon tersely, speaking up at last. ‘It’s too cold for it here.’

Margaery turned her large eyes towards him with faint surprise, as if she had only just noticed he was there. She seemed to be inspecting him.

‘Jon Snow’ she said softly, playing with the name as she spoke it. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’

Jon looked down quickly, his face flushing under his black hair, and Sandor had to stifle a chuckle. The Dragon Queen had no doubt talked a lot about Jon; the family she didn’t know she had, the lover she almost took, the man who rejected her to come back North and be with the Starks again. Yes, he thought roguishly, I’m sure she talks a great deal about you, and none of it good.

Margaery turned her attention back to Sansa, having apparently grown tired already with Jon’s embarrassment.

‘We gathered as much the further we came. But by then we were closer to Winterfell than we were to home and we hoped, perhaps, that we could stop here to refuel before heading back. Your city is famous Sansa. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see it. And to see you.’

Her smile was softer this time, broader and less practiced. It spread to her eyes. Sandor watched the exchange carefully, and saw the same expression mirrored in Sansa. For the first time since they had sat down, the two young women looked at one another with something touching genuine warmth. Sandor felt himself relax a little; he wasn’t aware that he’d been so tense.

As they cleared away the breakfast things, he felt her presence at his side. Her hand wrapped around his arm and pulled his attention down to her, to find her face there open and full of meaning. He followed her from the room silently, leaving Jon and Brienne to see the Tyrells out with a promise to meet for dinner after they’d gotten restocked.

She led him in to the old conservatory near the back of the house, where the sound of Margaery’s laughter could no longer reach them. It was overgrown and drafty; the glass that was left was cracked and green with dry moss, and the pot plants had all returned to their natural state. Wild brambles had taken most of the corner, and the doorway that had once led in to the garden was lost amongst the thorns. But nearer to the house, there was still space to walk and a stone bench. Sansa took a seat and beckoned him over, forcing him to perch awkwardly on the edge of it. It creaked ominously. For a little while, she simply looked down at her feet, her lips pursed and eyes faraway. He wondered what exactly he was meant to be doing, but couldn’t work it out so just sat there in her silence.

‘What should I do?’ she asked suddenly, her eyes right on him with a strange intensity. He looked back at her blankly.

‘Should we trust them?’

Still with that same look. She had always asked for his opinion, he wasn’t surprised that she would ask it now. But it was usually after she had talked to Jon or Brienne or her sister. She always had an idea in her mind by the time she came to him. But her expression was so earnest now, so blank and waiting, that he was completely thrown by the vulnerability he found there. He took a moment to weigh his options carefully, painfully aware of the pressure to be useful to her.

‘It seems plausible enough’ he conceded. ‘The Targaryen woman may well have sent her. Would you, if you were in her place?’

Sansa returned to gazing at her feet, a moment’s thought furrowing her brow. She nodded.

‘I suppose I would. It would make sense to check how far the plague went, to know how to plan. We used have scouting parties to check for walkers, after all.  But I would have sent someone who knew the north.’

‘She knows you though.’

Sansa fell silent again, gently sucking her lip.

‘When I heard it was her…. I was happy at first. Does that make me an idiot? She wasn’t ever a friend, not really.’

Watching her, so unsure and doubtful, Sandor’s heart began to fall. Her face was not made for sadness or the snow. It deserved joy and the all the warmth of the sun.

‘Not stupid, no. She was…. It was a different time back then.’

Sansa sniffed and looked back up again, her face a still troubled. 

‘It made me feel like I was a girl again. When I was young and stupid, and in that place….. with them…..’

She closed her eyes and he felt the slight tremble in her limbs, like blossom in the wind, and his heart was truly sunk then. Because he knew exactly what she had gone through, and what images her mind had conjured at sight of the Tyrell woman, because he had been there too and witnessed her suffering. She had seen no one from that time in life since she had returned to Winterfell. And then he realised why she had chosen him for this talk, and why it could only have been him. His stomach lurched violently.

‘I can’t pretend I like the woman’ he began dryly, trying hard to form his words. ‘But I believe she isn’t here to hurt us. She and her lot saved your sister, and me too I suppose.’

He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

‘But she seemed happy to see you too’ he conceded. ‘You’ve changed. She probably has too.’

When he turned to her, she was looking back at him and her mouth was forming a smile again. She sighed, deep and heavy, and sank against him gently so that her head was on his shoulder.

‘Thank you.’

Her voice seemed small and far away, despite being closer to him now. Responsively, he cocked his head towards her, so that her hair brushed against his unshaven cheek.

‘What for?’

She sighed again, shorter this time and with a higher, happier tone.

‘For this. And for everything else. For going after Arya, and for Rickon. I never really feel that I thank you enough.’

He gave a throaty laugh, feeling her hair brush against him again as he shook. She still had such funny ideas.

‘No need little bird’ he said, still chuckling.

She moved then, and he felt her slip from under his cheek. Glancing down, he found her face was turned towards him, her chin resting lightly on his arm.

‘You still call me that don’t you?’

He couldn’t hold her gaze, it seemed too intimate. He looked back out in to the overgrown room, acutely aware of her breath hitting the side of his face.

‘Yeah, I do sometimes. Sorry.’

‘It’s ok.’

He stole a furtive glance back in her direction. She was still against him, still looking in his eyes. Her own were so blue and clear, as pretty as the day he had first seen them. He looked away again.

‘It’s just funny I suppose’ she was saying. ‘That you still call me that. It was all such a long time ago.’

They stayed like that for a little while, her against his arm and him just looking ahead, and both not speaking. Her breath continued to touch his jaw and neck, slow and warm, and his heartbeat rose steadily in his ears. When she moved a little, bringing her body closer still against his arm, he swallowed hard. He wanted to move, but the sound of her breathing brought with it the faintest of sighs and he was caught, ridged, in his place. He turned again, not meaning to at all but unable to stop. He watched her wet her lips and part them slightly. It would be no effort at all, to lean forward. No effort at all. That little sigh again as her breath touched his mouth and her eyes fluttered closed. He groaned, and felt his cock stiffen almost instantly.

But she was not for him. She would never be for him. And if he leant in now he would be lost, completely and forever, and she would hate him for it in time. He had run this scenario too many times to be doubtful of the result. So he pulled away from her mouth and her gentle sigh and the sweet, unrelenting pressure of her body against his own, and broke their silence.

‘I better go check that they don’t take all our fuel’ he said coarsely, speaking to the wind and standing stiffly, awkwardly adjusting his jeans. He didn’t turn to see her face. No expression he could find there would make him feel any better. He heard her voice though, steady and composed as though nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had. Maybe not for her.  

‘Ok, I’ll see you later then.’

He nodded at nothing, still refusing to look at her, and walked away. 

Chapter Text

The morning was bitter and grey and cold. Wisps of gun smoke still seemed to hang in the air, trails of dust and ash in the early sunlight that hid the world beneath a murky veil. Arya had been walking all night and had watched the sky turn from ink stained indigo, to icy blue, to despondent white while the sun made it’s slow attempt to reach the horizon. People moved around her like water around a stone, hurried and scared with their eyes open wide, shaken by news of last night’s breach and the dramatic arrival it had brought. She had not stayed to see how the Tyrell woman and her entourage had been received, slipping in to the dark and the chaos of the streets almost as soon as she could. Adrenaline had turned stale in her veins, and a creeping tiredness had begun to take her over. She felt empty, scooped out from the inside until she was just a hollow shell of a girl. If they looked in to her eyes now, all they would see was black. 

She had walked until feeling came back in to her bones. She had walked until she felt blisters begin to form on her heels and her muscles had started to cramp. And then she walked until the cramps had started to fade away. She had wandered down streets she had never known where there, through archways and corridors and stairwells that took her in to the far, forgotten reaches of Winterfell. Unexpected treasures had been hers for the taking. A toy shop, desolate and overgrown, was still in possession of most of its stock. A hundred glass eyes watched her pass by, the faces of dolls that had never been played with. Around a corner, she found an old square where four alleyways intersected in amongst some abandoned tower blocks. In the centre, a stone fountain still stood, rusty with age and disuse. A wolfs head had been carved in the base, with its eyes picked out in glass. In the doorways, the letterboxes still bore the faint names of their old owners. Had it had been a different day she would have stopped and explored the little rabbit warren she had stumbled upon. But she moved through this twilight world mechanically, seeing nothing but obstacles to navigate, a path to find.

Nevertheless, it seemed to prick at something in the sinking void that was at her core, little pin pricks in the darkness. From the time Sandor had pulled her from the white waste, her mind had been as stale and as frozen as the water in that broken fountain, and she had felt nothing but the dull throbbing in her limbs. Numbness had been her defence, her form of control. When she had been on the brink of madness, it had brought her relief.  But there were shards of her old life everywhere, and they were beginning to cut as she walked across them. Here, in places she was unfamiliar with, where her routine was less practiced, each wound felt raw and new and it was the pain that was bringing her back to herself. Here, where the city was touched by nothing but time, she felt her memories coming back to her.

She stopped still, her feet coming to rest for the first time in hours. She hadn’t been paying attention to where she had been walking, and now suddenly, she was back in the real world again. Blinking, she took it all in and realised that she knew exactly where she was. She took a seat on the steps of the apartment building, pulled her knees up to her chest, and waited.

Gendry came back around 10, sweating slightly and with dirt in his hair. He was carrying his shotgun over his shoulder, head down in that way that he had, like a bull charging; he almost fell over her on his way up the steps. There was fresh earth under his fingernails and the smell was ripe and wet. There had been a lot of bodies up at the wall; some to bury and some to burn.

Before he could speak, she kissed him. It was not tender. He pulled away sharply, and she could see the red flush to his mouth, but she didn’t let him slip away. Her hand was at the nape of his neck, fingers wrapped in his hair, pulling his head towards her. She felt his resistance but her need was greater, and he relented. When their lips met again, it was still an attack, still rough, but now her mouth was open and wet. When her tongue found his, she felt the jolt in her stomach but still she could sense his reluctance. His neck was stiff under her fingers, and his hands were still frustratingly far away. A low growl came from her throat and she found his lip between her teeth, biting gently on the flesh. It took all her self control not to draw blood, but the groan under her mouth told her it had done the trick.

They stumbled, still kissing, backwards over the threshold of the apartment. Fumbling fingers found the door and elbows scraped the wall, but she didn’t break her hold on him. She couldn’t wait to reach his room. Here, now, she needed to feel the heat of him against her skin, the length of him filling her up, the pressure in her core. His touch was still too light, barely on her. She needed more, and better. He was being too slow.

She shoved him hard up against the hallway. He was strong but she was all wiry muscle and vicious desire, and he didn’t stand a chance. With something now to press against, she could wrap her fingers deep in to his hair and pull herself up against him, pressing her body against his. Their kiss had not yet broken, and she could taste this breath in her mouth, hot and quick. Finally, achingly fucking finally, his hands seemed to remember their purpose. Fingers clawed up her back and neck, closing around her throat. Perfect pressure, his thumb at the line of her jaw, forcing her face upwards toward his own. Enough to make her gasp. Enough to make her fight for a breath. She smiled between their kisses, licking at his teeth, his tongue, his bottom lip. And still, it was not enough.

She broke away, to focus on his belt. As her eager fingers sought out the buckle, his mouth trailed down the side of her neck, nipping the skin as he went. She undid it as his mouth closed around her shoulder, as teeth pushed down around her collar bone. His mouth was by her ear as her fingers slipped downwards, and she could hear that satisfying groan as she found his cock, already brilliantly hard.

‘Not here’ he whispered, breathless, as she stroked him. ‘Upstairs…. Come on…’

But she ignored him, and the painful little sigh he gave as she flicked her thumb across the wet tip. Instead she kissed him again, catching his lip between her teeth and biting again. This time she tasted blood, and she didn’t care. It ran around her tongue, all salt and life.

‘Here’ she said, between ragged breaths. ‘Here, now. Fuck me.’

His growl was guttural, and he pushed her back so hard it knocked the wind from her. They hit the other wall with a crash, his hands all across her now, all care abandoned. His fingers caught in her clothes, pulling them up, twisting them around, finger tips finally finding flesh. His mouth was on her neck again, and she closed her eyes to better feel it. His hands now were the hurried ones, fumbling at the zip that held her jeans up. A moment more and they had fallen away. Lifted up against the wall, she wrapped her bare legs around his waist, locking him in place. Now, with only the cotton of her underwear to separate them, her need became even more acute. The throb seemed to flow all over her, although it was centred thick and wet at the open juncture of her thighs, bringing with it a fresh new sharpness to every sensation. His hands on her ribs were hot and rough, every ridge and callous felt against her flesh. The dirt on his fingertips left stains on her skin, and the smell of it mixed with the blood in her mouth and the taste of his breath was like some dark magic, masking her to everything but him and her need. Nothing else mattered. Not the world outside, nor the horrors in the dark, or the death that stalked her every footstep. Alive - that's what she was. Alive, and here and so fucking angry....

She squeezed a hand between the two of them, snaking down to where she wanted him most, to where they were still maddeningly separate. A few seconds more and she had pulled aside the wet fabric of her underwear. The head of his cock pressed hard against her, not quite there, and she moaned sharply, trying to move herself around him. But before she could find her satisfaction, his hand found her chin again, and made her look up. His voice was breathless and warm across her face.

‘You sure?’

She answered him with another rough kiss, mad at his hesitation, but there was a tenderness there that took her aback and for a moment, they were both still. But only until his thumb brushed her bottom lip, and the pulse came thundering back in to her ears; only until she felt the head of his cock slide up across her clit and the moan was torn from her throat. She closed her eyes as he slammed in to her, every nerve focused on the place they now joined, the feeling of him moving in and out of her; the sweet sting as she took him all in, and the thick, wet heat inside her as he filled her up. Her hips rolled up against him, pushing back to meet each thrust he gave her. She hissed her encouragement to every stroke, pressing her mouth against his ear and begging for more, harder, faster, deeper. 

And when he was done, and sank against her damp and gasping, she didn’t unwrap herself from around his body – unwilling to become seperate quite just yet. Instead they sank, still entwined, towards the floor until they lay across one another in one messy heap. And when he tried to find her face to kiss her, as he always did when they were finished, she didn’t shy away or pull back – unwilling to let the numbness back in to her bones for a few moments more.

And when he said that he loved her, mumbling it in to her throat like he was already half asleep, she very nearly said it back. 

Chapter Text

Wylla had made them tea. It was a strange brew, made from the various herbs and flowers that she had carefully been cultivating on the kitchen windowsill. Sansa found the taste earthy and little tart, but with a touch of honey it was much more palatable. There was a tiny glass pot of it on the table in front of her, glistening like a shard of amber. Flushed with impetuousness, Sansa had taken a whole teaspoon for her first cup, which had overdone the flavour somewhat. There was just one jar of honey in her pantry, and to Sansa’s knowledge, it was one of the only jars left in Winterfell so it was something of a treat to have it on the table. She had asked Wylla for it specially, although now, looking at it shining conspicuously on the table between her and Margaery, it seemed too much. She took another sweet sip of tea and silently chastised herself. It was just a little jar of honey, and it held no more significance than that.

There was just the two of them in the intimacy of her sitting room, and Sansa felt somehow that she was at last able to study her old friend up close. Unsurprisingly, Margaery looked just as she remembered her. Older, yes, but only in the way that a rose that’s bloomed is older than a bud. She was wearing jeans today but had kept her furs on, soft grey rabbit pelt wrapped around her neck. When she saw Sansa looking, she unwrapped them and handed them over.

‘We caught them on the road’ she said as Sansa cautiously ran her fingers across the hair. ‘Garlan skinned them and we ate them with some wild onions. They were just so soft, I had to keep them. It’s been years since I owned anything fine, and the weather was getting colder. They’ve kept me very warm.’

Up close, Sansa could see the unfinished quality of the work. It had been tanned quickly, done on the road, and the skin did not have the fine, buttery touch of good leather. It had been stitched by hand, uneven in places, and had buckled along the join. But the fur itself was still beautifully soft and dense. Wild rabbits rarely came this far north anymore, although she remembered seeing one a few years ago. It seemed they were healthy, wherever they were. She didn’t know why that made her feel uneasy.

‘Is it still warm then, in the capitol?’

She had heard that Kingslanding had borne the brunt of the Silver Queen’s wrath, that electrical storms ripped through the sky and acidic rain had left pockmarked scars cross the face of the once grand city. She had heard the Sept had been ripped from the face of the earth, and the Red Keep had been torn down with claws and teeth. But she had heard a lot of things, and knew not to trust rumours.  

‘It is. Not like the summer of our youth, but still. It’s pleasant enough.’

It made her feel strange when she referred to things as ‘ours’. She smiled again and handed her back the furs and they sat silently for a few minutes more. They had already recycled all the same small talk from dinner the previous night, and were in danger of returning to it a third time. Now they were talking about the weather. Sansa had asked Margaery to join her that afternoon, alone, because she was knew there was more she wanted to ask her. Yet now they were here, with tea and the furs and that damned honey, and she couldn’t quite form the words. She, who had sat at the head of an army, given battle-side speeches to bloodied men on the edge of defeat, pulled victories from death, worn the wolfs skin and ripped her home back from the cold dead that had claimed it. She, who had married and buried a husband, mourned a mother, a father and two brothers. She was forged in grief and triumph, and they were on her territory now. She found Margeary’s eye, held it, and she remembered herself.

‘It was difficult trying to survive back then. I could have done with some friends.’

Margaery met her gaze for moment, but her lips pursed and then she looked down, carefully arranging the rabbit pelts across her lap and smoothing them down delicately.

‘I was your friend Sansa. I know that might sound hollow now, but I cared about you. I wanted you in my family.’

Sansa watched her carefully, but her expression was hidden under her lashes and the way her hair had fallen. Nevertheless, there was something in the way she held herself that might suggest real regret; a slump in the shoulders, a tone in her voice. Sansa had learnt that the unspoken language people wrote across themselves was just as important as the words they used. Still, however regretful Margaery may feel, it didn’t dispel her own anger or unease.

‘Forgive me, but it seemed you only wanted me when I was useful to you.’

Margaery looked up at that, her furs slipping from her lap.

‘No, that wasn’t true. Not for me. But you have to understand Sansa, it was difficult for us too. My family were just as vulnerable. Once you were married, our hands were tied.’

Sansa had thought she was prepared for this, but she felt her eyes suddenly sting. Her memory of that day was hazy now, but there were a few things that had stuck. Odd things really, when you thought about it. She could recall the weight of the dress on her bones, but not the pattern of the fabric. She knew the smell of the candles in the Sept, but not the faces in the crowd. The remembered the feel of the bed sheets on the marital bed, but not the way her new husband had looked, naked in front of her. She sniffed and blinked hard until the sting died, but the bitterness lingered on her tongue.

‘Once I was no longer useful’ she repeated carefully. There was a strained silence. Margaery picked up the furs and put them back on her lap. Sansa poured herself another cup of tea. The clink of the teaspoon against the china seemed oddly loud in the quiet.

Eventually, Margaery spoke.

‘I’m sorry you felt abandoned. I never wanted that.’

She lent across the table then, her hair away from her face and her amber eyes wide and searching. Her hands hovered at the edge of the table, hesitant to come closer, trembling almost. Reflexively, Sansa sat back in her chair.

‘I asked my grandmother what more we could do. I told my father that it wasn’t fair. But they both said we couldn’t risk it, not while thing were so unsteady. I never wanted things to turn the way they did…’

Watching her struggle, Sansa felt a twist of something pull in her chest. But whether it was something approaching sympathy, or just the strangeness of seeing Margeary falter, she wasn’t sure. She steeled herself against it either way. She was not done yet.

‘Did you know?’

Margaery blinked emptily, but her fingers clawed back across the surface of the table as if she had been stung.

‘What do you mean?’

Fine, if that was the angle she chose to play it. Sansa licked her lips slowly.

‘Did you know I would be blamed? Was I part of the plan? When you and your family murdered Joffery, was it always me that was going to be your scapegoat, or was I just a handy late addition?’

Margaery withdrew, curling back in to her chair with all the wounded grace of some lethal jungle cat. She regarded Sansa coolly, tucking a lock of hazelnut hair behind her ear.

‘That was unfortunate’ she said carefully. ‘But no. I didn’t know that.’

Something about the sudden change in her demeanour, about the slow, deliberate way she spoke, was oddly reassuring. The girl Sansa remembered – had aspired to be – had never struggled for the right phrase, never seemed afraid or out of place. That woman with trembling hands who had tried playing dumb was a stranger, and Sansa had not been sure how to tackle her. But this woman, curled vulpine in her seat with eyes unblinking, was well remembered. Sansa found herself sitting forward again, vigour renewed.

‘You expect me to believe that? I was a child, and your family threw me to the lions. What choice did you leave me? Stay and be killed, or run in to the unknown. A good choice, for someone you claimed to care about.’

‘They never said they planned to pin it on anyone. No one would know how he died, and the room was filled with people who hated him. Are you saying you didn’t want him dead?’

Sansa felt her teeth sharp in her mouth, the way she had done when she discovered Petyr’s betrayal, and when she had watched him die. Once, she had felt powerless to that feeling; it had been scary and unbound. But Harry had helped her understand it, mould it, wield it to her will.

‘No. I would have killed him myself if you gave me the chance. But I would have looked in to his eyes when I did it, so that he’d know me.’

She remembered an old phrase her father used to say, something she thought of from time to time.

‘The man that passes the sentence should swing the sword’.

There was a flicker across Margaery’s expression, but she didn’t lower her head. Slowly, she uncurled her limbs and sat forward again, although her hands remained composed and still in her lap.

‘I regret a lot of things’ she said, in a voice neither sad nor wistful. ‘More than I care to think about, really. They tend to ride on the back of war. And one of my biggest is how things ended between us. But I don’t regret standing by my family. I hope you can understand that. But if you can’t, then I’ll understand that too, and we’ll be on the road by tonight.’

But Sansa could understand. It was not a hard. And the indignation that had seemed so bright and vicious moments ago seemed to quell and die in her belly.

‘Is she a good person? Daenerys.’

Margaery shifted in her seat, thrown by the question. For a second, her eyes flicked around the room, her gaze landing like a butterfly across the windows, the table, the tea pot and the little china cups with the hairline cracks. But in a beat, she had recovered herself.

‘She is. I know a lot of people still don’t think so, but she has a good heart. I never said I agreed with her methods, but she’s doing good work now, and she believes in it.’

She took a sip of tea, set down the cup, and sighed gently.

‘There was something rotten in Kingslanding, Sansa. We both saw it. And maybe further afield too. And maybe the best way to get rid of it was to burn it out. It was messy but it worked.’

She spoke like she had given that speech before, and to a less sympathetic audience than she had now. Sansa sucked her lip and considered everything she had heard.

‘I’m glad you’re still alive’ she said gently.

Margaery smiled and chuckled softly.

‘Me too, as it happens.’

They poured themselves another drink, continuing to smile politely at each other over the rim of their cups. As Margaery set hers back down, a mischievous sparkle had come to her eye.

‘When he heard where I was going, Tyrion wanted to come with me.’

Sansa smiled wirily, although she could feel the flush in her cheeks and took an especially long sip in an attempt to mask it.

‘It would have been nice to see him again’ she said, magnanimously. It wasn’t a complete lie. She’d had a moment of passing sadness when she thought him dead, and had been undoubtedly relieved to learn he wasn’t. Her first marriage had been a wretched and bitter affair, laced with fear and with all the romance of a kidnapping. But her first husband had not been an entirely terrible man, and she thought about him fondly whenever he crossed her mind. She would have made him welcome.

Margaery laughed again, a sweet sound against all the tension that had passed. Sansa even joined in, until she looked up and saw the seriousness that had fallen back across the other woman’s face.

‘I had another reason to see you’ she said quietly, her words tumbling out quickly as though they might disappear before she spoke them.

‘It was just an idea in the South, but now that I’m here it makes so much sense.’

She looked around the room again, as if searching for someone listening in the shadows.

‘It was Tyrion’s idea really. I mean, he was the one who first said it out loud, and I suppose I just ran with it. This place is dead Sansa. Dead and cold and empty. In the South you could have a proper home, with heat and life and trees! Trees Sansa! Not those bone shards you have out there. We could make Kingslanding better – like it should be.’

She reached across the table, suddenly taking Sansas hand in her own. Her fingers pressed around her hard, matching the intensity in her eyes.

‘I mean it. You’re too young to waste your life locked up here fighting shadows. What are you even fighting for anyway? Come back a help us build a real city, not one built on a graveyard. ’

Sansa could only stare blankly, drifting from their tightly bound hands to Margaery’s eager face and back again, utterly stunned.

‘Bring whoever you want. Your sister, your brother, that battle-axe Brienne. I don’t care. Just come. Leave this place to the wind, and come back Sansa. Come back to life.’ 

Chapter Text

The spirit was warm and left his mouth tasting sour, but it was cheap and that’s really all that mattered. The man who had sold it to him had said it would get him drunk, and had made no more of a promise than that, so really any semblance of taste was a bonus at this point. It was the type of homebrew that people had begun to make in basements and sheds, the kind of thing that still carried traces of rust from the barrel it was made in. Sandor had sat with it in his hands for about three hours before he took his first swig, just watching the flakes of red and copper drift across the bottle like one of those children’s snow globes. Through the glass, all the loops and whorls of his palm were magnified, like a map of his life. Ultimately, they all ran to nowhere.

Her voice had been so steady, the same tone that she had used on Rickon countless times before. Had he been deserving of it? He was no longer sure.

‘Don’t look at me like that, you don’t know what I’m thinking. I never said I’d go.’

He hadn’t meant to sound so angry, but he could feel her doubt even if she didn’t speak it and it wriggled in his chest like a grave worm. 

There was a garage near the old park, a quiet place nestled in the shadows just off the main road. The door was gone, leaving just a dark hollow in the side of the building that would catch the wind and dust. He had often sat at its mouth and watched the world pass at a safe distance, learning the odd heartbeat of the city and its ragged inhabitants. He had no other place to be. But he had not been there much the last few years, ever since she had given him her trust again and allowed her in to her life. He gave a dry laugh at that. Again? He was fooling himself if he thought he had ever had her trust. As a girl, she had given him fear. As a woman, she gave him pity.

The night the siren sounded, he had sat in her bedroom on the edge of something strange and wonderful. He remembered the way her leg had pressed against his, bolder than she had ever been before. The expression in her eyes had been all fire and challenge and he had been reminded, for the briefest of moments, of another woman he had once served. Cersei had taken what she wanted without apology; a trait that he had once thought admirable. It had thrown him to see it on Sansa, and in to his hesitation had poured all his old guilt and shame. He should have moved away, but he had been frozen.

He took another mouthful and swallowed it with his eyes squeezed shut. He had not drunk much these last few years, and it seemed he was out of practice. It wasn’t through choice (although the old man had certainly tried to get him to make such a promise, back on the Quiet Isle) but rather necessity that had made it so. Alcohol was a rare commodity these days, which was why he had parted with one of his favourite guns in order to get a hold of this bottle. He had hoped oblivion would follow quickly, but his old skill seemed to have abandoned him and he was left with only a slightly heavy head. He wondered just how strong it was meant to be, and began to harbour thoughts of revenge against the man who had sold it to him.

He should have kicked the Tyrell bitch out before she ever got a chance to spill her poison. He knew in his heart that she couldn’t have brought anything good. What good came from the South now anyway? Plague and desperation, drought and famine. He wondered briefly what had become of his father’s house, now surely a ruin, and he was reminded of the choice the old man had given him before he left. Go South, and find your revenge. Go North, and find your peace. Was it the same for Sansa? Was there an unfinished story waiting for her in Kingslanding? Did she have the same pull in her bones that he’d had, to find herself an ending? He doubted hers was as blood soaked as his own, although he recalled that fire her eyes held and thought again. Either way, if his was true then he could never be angry at her for it. And if the South was the place now that Margaery described then maybe she would be happy there….

He drowned the thought in another sharp swig that made his eyes burn, and looked out bleary-eyed in to the half dark. Shapes drifted in and out of his view, barely formed and fluid, identifiable through the gloom and his increasing drunkenness. They could be friends or foes and he wouldn’t know the difference. His death could be in the shadows right now and he wouldn’t know it. Part of him didn’t care. Part of him urged another drink. He curled his lip in disgust at his own frailty and threw the bottle out in to the street. It exploded as it hit the ground, filling the air with its acrid smell and leaving diamonds all across the concrete. He looked at it hazily, swaying slightly, feeling slightly numb. Part of him glowered sullenly and sank back, defeated.

A shape was coming forward out of the darkness, becoming more real with each approaching step. His mind registered it slowly, and his body seemed to start to react, but it was a painfully thick process. By the time he had managed to focus on her, the girl was practically upon him. Her sharp eyes were narrowly set, and her thin lips drawn tight in annoyance. A low snort of derision came to his ear.

‘I might have known you’d get wasted. How very mature of you.’

Sandor rolled his eyes and turned away from her, wishing now that he had not thrown away the rest of the bottle. The she-wolf continued to stand over him, her disapproval washing over him in waves.

‘It’s lucky you’re so predictable. I wouldn’t have bothered to try and find you otherwise.’

He felt her take a seat on the stone floor, a few feet to his left. She sat there in silence for a little while, until annoyance forced him to acknowledge her.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why bother to find me?’

Arya shrugged.

‘Rickon told me you’d had a fight. I figured I’d find you before you did something stupid.’

Sandor rolled his eyes and bit at the loose skin around his thumb nail. He could feel her eyes on him, but he resisted the need to look.

‘She relies on you. Fuck knows why, but she does. And I didn’t want you to let her down by being an idiot.’

Sandor had to laugh coldly.

‘Oh come on! What the fuck do you care? You’ve never even been back to the house. You don’t know what she needs.’ His voice trailed off in to mumbling. ‘You don’t know her anymore…’

Arya did not rise to the bait, but he could hear the steal edge in her voice.

‘She’s upset, and she’s worried about you. I know that. So I thought I should help.’

More silence. The image of Sansa, red-eyed and white knuckled, made him swallow hard. Something clawed at the back of his eyes.

‘I know what the fight was about’ she said.

He had to look at her then, to judge her honesty. She was regarding him steadily, with her face set to a calm, cool expression.

‘Then you know all you need to’ he replied blankly.

They looked at each other, half in shadows, half in light. Her expression did not flicker under his gaze, and she remained, just waiting. He had no idea what she was trying to do.

‘She’s going to leave’ he said eventually, and he was shocked that his voice didn’t crack. The fracture was still there though, now he had said it out loud. He felt it in ribs, in the bones around his heart.

Arya wet her lips and looked back out across the park.

‘Maybe’ she said slowly. ‘Maybe not. She didn’t seem all that decided. But I can’t say I’d blame her if she does.’

Sandor cocked his head, narrowing his eyes towards the wiry girl at his side.

‘If it’s so shit up here, then why have you stayed?’

Her composure seemed to waver under that, although the way her head had turned made it hard to see for sure. The pause was thick and hesitant.

‘I have my reasons’ she answered eventually, elaborating no further. ‘Perhaps I’ll go with her, and leave you here to sulk. Seriously, fuck knows why she thinks she needs you.’

The silence fell across them again, punctuated with the splintered calls of birds in the distance and the ever-present thrum of the power station. He was happy to bare it, but she apparently could not and carried on her thought.

‘You’re an asshole, do you know that?’

Despite the words, her tone didn’t seem malicious. It was if she was just stating a fact. Well, he couldn’t argue.

‘Yeah I know. And you’re an annoying little bitch whose hell bent on getting herself killed, or worse.’

She laughed sadly, and he watched her tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. Her hand fell and twisted the hem of her sweater in a brief little tug, just like her sister did.

‘Do you know I nearly killed you? I had it planned and everything. I was going to shoot you one day when you were out on patrol, about two weeks after you arrived.’

The idea did not surprise him. He had always wondered about the thoughts behind those dark eyes, and knew fair well that that viciousness was still there. When she had left him to bleed out slowly at the side of the road, he hadn’t known whether it had been a final act of cruelty or a chance to live again. In the end, he had chosen the latter, but her behaviour towards him since his return suggested he had made the wrong choice – in her eyes at least.

‘Why didn’t you?’

She cocked her head, as if she had never thought about it before.

‘She stopped me. I never told her what I was planning, but somehow she guessed. She said you were the only person who had ever told her the truth, and that if I didn’t give you another chance, she’d throw me out.’

He must have been giving her a funny look because it caused her to laugh loudly. He swallowed hard, but could not change it. Her words hung around his head, out of reach and unreal.

‘I don’t think she would have actually turfed me out’ she continued. ‘But I knew she was serious. For some stupid reason that remains completely beyond me, she actually thinks you’re ok. Even if we both know you’re a murdering scum bag.’

Sandor’s head felt like lead, and he let it fall in to his hands. His fingertips brushed against charred flesh, and his mouth was dry.

‘She’s an idiot’ he conceded through his fingers, and he felt the hot scratching at the back of his skull again. ‘She needs to leave here, and go South, and forget us. She deserves more…’

…than a murdering coward, who can’t even touch her. The end of that sentence wasn’t spoken, but stung his tongue all the same.

‘Why are so sure she wouldn’t want you to go with her?’

He laughed again; a bitter, empty sound that rattled through the gaps in his hands. The notion was so absurd he couldn’t even answer her.  But then he realised the meaning behind her question, and what it implied, and his head shot up like a fox at the sound of hounds.

‘It’s not about that’ he said fiercely. ‘I want what’s best for her. I just... this was her home. She lost her husband to protect it. There are people who rely on her. It seems wrong to throw it all away. Wrong for them. They need her.’

Arya gave him a wry smile, looking at him from under heavy eyelids, but Sandor held her eye defiantly, with all the ferocious self-denial his raw drunkenness could muster.  It was all he had left.

She rolled her eyes and broke in to a sly grin.

‘Fine. Whatever. Do what you want. But maybe, maybe, think about it this way.’

She scooted a fraction closer to him, still out of reach but close enough to lower her voice a little when she spoke.

‘If you respect her as much as you say, why do you constantly dismiss the way she thinks about you? Why can’t you just believe her when she says she wants you around, and just fucking be there for her?’

In his haze, something in that seemed to make sense, but the thread of it ran far, far away from him and he did not have the energy to untangle it now. Instead, she left it unfinished and fixed her eye with his own, lowering his voice to match.

‘And perhaps, little she-wolf, you should take your own advice and stop hitting your boyfriend in the jaw just for daring to wake up next to you.’

She narrowed her eyes coldly.

‘He’s not my boyfriend.’

‘Fine. Whatever he is. Stop hitting him.’

They regarded each other in icy silence, neither willing to back down until he saw a change in her expression; the tiniest quiver across her mouth, a brightness coming back to her eyes.

‘Thanks by the way...for all the stuff, by the wall. I never said it at the time.’

Sandor smiled lopsidedly, withdrawing back away from her, nodding.

‘It doesn’t matter. Was nothing.’

‘It wasn’t, but ok.’

She stood, stretching her arms out and yawning. The night was coming on quickly now, and the green glow of the street lights had begun to flicker in to life.   

‘You coming then?’

He stood too, careful at first on shaky feet, numb with cold, and the two of them wandered slowly back towards the city - the thread of his unfinished thought trailing behind him like a banner, crimson and scarlet like the glow of her hair. 

Chapter Text

Margaery had laid her touch across the rest of the house too. Wylla had said that she was often in the kitchen, picking out things from the pantry and taking over the dinner preparations. The food that was brought forth was strange and wonderful in its creativity, making luxury from the ordinary in ways Sansa had thought were long behind her. Scrambled eggs with herbs and salt and a touch of cream, pan fried sausages and chutney made from tomatoes and vinegar, a seared pork loin with apple sauce that she made herself. Margaery even persuaded them to let Garlan slaughter one of the pigs, showing Sansa the exact way to get the most meat from the animal. Sansa had not eaten so well in years, although her enjoyment of it was marred when she thought of the hundreds in her city that would not be sharing it.

She did, however, allow herself a certain degree of escapism in Margaery’s presence. It was easy for her to be kept busy, between the lovely dinners that seemed to go on late in to the night, and Margaery’s insistence that she be shown every inch of the city during the day. So easy, in fact, that Sansa was able to largely ignore that fact that she hadn’t seen Sandor properly since their argument. When they passed one another in the corridor or in the courtyard, she found his gaze strangely absent, fixed with certainty on some far-off point beyond her. For her part, she would give him only the briefest of glances and kept her own chin high, in a manner which she hoped suggested that her anger was still fresh. It certainly still felt raw, and his dogged composure whenever they crossed paths was doing nothing to heal it.  She had thoughts to make him break; she knew well all the little ways in which he was vulnerable. It would be no great trouble to bring down that wall of indifference. But what would that achieve? Her anger at him redoubled and was turned against herself, making her feel silly. She couldn’t hurt him, even though he been childish and thick-headed and utterly ridiculous. It was best to leave him to his silence.

He wore silence well. Some men carried it like a burden, like a martyr, weighed down by the secrets they were dying to share but eager for you to know that they wouldn’t. Some wore it solemnly, with a reverence to something dark and intangible that had marked their souls. She had seen a lot of that type of silence other the years. But Sandor always seemed at home in silence, covering himself in it like a protective cloak against the world. A lot about him had changed, but that was still the same.

Well, that and his black moods and his habit of being sometimes painfully direct, and she had seen that streak of violence still in his spine, although it wasn’t nearly so red and so vivid. 

As a girl, it had frightened her. She had thought he would kill that night, with that knife up under her chin and his wits dulled with alcohol. But it hadn’t been a kind of fear she was used to; not like when she walked the tight rope of Joffery’s displeasure, or when she watched her father die, or when she saw the walkers for the first time. That was a cold, hard kind of feeling that had tightened in her like a frost-covered fist, slowly constricting until she had learnt to become quiet and still, and use it for her own ends.

No, the fear that he had inspired had been a hot, dry stab in the bottom of her belly, like a panic, edges blurred and thick with unknown meaning. And as she had grown, it had lingered and grown too until it had become something quite unnerving and she couldn’t even trust her own memory of it any more.

She hadn’t known what it meant – what those blurred edges had been bleeding out towards - until she met Harry. It was sometime in the third month of their knowing one another that they had first slept together. It was an awkward, brief encounter; all elbows and cold flesh, and the pressing of cautious fingers on to bone. But later, sometime in the night, they had tried again and when he lay on top of her to kiss her under her chin, it had felt changed between them. His lips had been softer, and more willing. Her hands suddenly knew their way. And when his fingers had slid downwards, dancing across wet and sensitive flesh, to open her up for him, she had felt that stab again. No fear this time, that was for certain, but the essence was just the same as before. She didn’t think of Sandor then, not while Harry was pushing in to her, and her hips had started to rock reflexively against his body, and not while his weight came crashing, like a wave across the most sensitive part of her entire body, slowly edging her towards deeper and more painful spikes of pleasure. But later, half asleep and still wet and giddy, she thought about the man with the scarred face, and she understood herself a little more.

But time passed, and things were forgotten, and some of those who were dead came back to life and some of those who died, stayed dead. And although Sandor never frightened her again, she would get that stab sometimes still, and smile knowingly at her own secret knowledge. But that morning, as she made her bed and smoothed the cool linen out with her fingertips, she found herself again questioning what she thought she knew.

She pulled at the edges of the sheet harshly. What did she have, truly? Only that ghost of something half remembered and the snatches of moments never taken. What did he really feel for her? He was so angry she would even consider leaving. A friend wouldn’t be so quick to judge. She gave the sheet another tug, although it refused to sit right. She huffed and pulled at it again. If Kingslanding was the place Margaery said it was, why shouldn’t she consider going? They don’t need me anymore; Arya doesn’t need anyone, and Rickon thinks he doesn’t. Jon might come with her, and that would be good, but otherwise leave them to it if they insisted on being alone. She attacked the pillows with the same vigour as the sheet, fluffing them up as much she could and trying to stack them nearly. It would be so good to sleep in bed without five layers of furs and blankets. It would be so good to walk with the sun on my bare arms again…

The pillows proved as uncooperative as the sheets and so she threw them, haughtily, at the head board and sat on the edge of the bed, arms stiff. They had lived in each other’s pockets for years now; she thought he knew her.

These rumbling thoughts had been causing her a head ache for a few days now, and finally, sitting there alone without any distractions to keep her from them, she knew she had had enough. It was nearly 9am. He would be in his room still, waiting until the morning could start properly. If he hurried, she would catch him before he left.

She was still hammering on his door as he opened it, nearly hitting him in the chest. He looked down at her blankly, almost as if he didn’t recognise her, which just infuriated her all the more. She didn’t wait to be asked inside and slipped passed him with her hands still held in to fists, acutely aware of how steady her voice had to be.

‘We need to talk’ she said sharply, turning to face him. He hadn’t closed the door yet, and was still standing at the opening, his hand on the handle. His expression remained blank, although some trace of understanding was coming in to his eyes. She had no patience to spare him though, and could not wait for him to catch up.

‘This is stupid, the two of us not speaking. I want to clear the air. If I do decide to go with Margaery, then I can’t leave things like this.’

He shut the door carefully, keeping his eyes on her.

‘You still want to go then.’

Sansa stiffened and raised her chin, her hands still tense.

‘I told you. I haven’t decided.’

This was not the conversation she wanted to have. This was old ground, and it was muddy from so many footsteps. She took one more forward.

‘You can’t just ignore me forever. Are you going to tell me why you’re so angry at me?’

He watched her silently, and just as she began to feel amazed at how well he was holding her eye, he looked away.

‘I’m not angry at you’ he lied solemnly. Sansa groaned.

‘So you’re just indifferent to me then? You don’t feel anything at all about me leaving?’

He stole a glance at her then, and his look was dark and stormy.

‘Of course not!’

He spoke the words like a bite. She felt them at her throat.

‘Then be angry!’ she shouted back. ‘Be angry, but tell me why. No one else has had a cross word to say to me since the idea was mentioned. But you! You make me feel like I’ve betrayed you somehow.’

He curled his lip in to a snarl, although he tried his best to stifle it. She saw the flash of teeth though, and watched the tension build in his neck even as he tried to control himself.

‘You’re being stupid’ he said in that low rumble, turning away from her. ‘Just leave it!’

He prowled away from the doorway, back towards his makeshift bed in the corner where he sat heavily amongst the messy and tangled sheets, sighing.

‘I will not leave it!’

Her voice had become unflatteringly sharp but she couldn’t contain it, and she didn’t really care. She dug her nails in to the palms of her hands to distract her from the need to scream.

And then, quietly.

‘I’m not angry at you’ he said softly in the dark.

The shift in his tone left her hanging. Sansa remained stood in the centre of the room, silent as her indignation bounced off the walls with no one to play against. She couldn’t really see his face, now he was in the shadow of the corner. The whole room was black and solemn, half in ruin. She walked forward tentatively in to the darkness.

‘But you are angry.’

She was standing a few feet from him. Even sitting, his head came up to her shoulders. He held it downwards, eyes at the floor.

‘I dunno’ came his half-hearted reply. The grit that she had felt in his words earlier seemed to have gone, although her fire still burned just as brightly and maybe even more so for lack of his.

‘This is so stupid’ she said, taking another step. ‘Just say it, for fucks sake!’

She hardly ever swore. It was a habit she’d picked up along the way somewhere, and whenever she did, it felt wrong in her mouth somehow. But it did the trick and made him look up again. Quick as a flash, she caught his chin with her hand and held his head up.

‘Look at me’ she said carefully, finding his eyes in the dark. ‘Look at me.’

She felt him try and pull away, but her hand held him firm just under the jaw. Under her fingers, she felt the quiver of his pulse as it jumped in his neck. It was getting tiring, playing these games. But she felt that stab in her belly, as hot and as sharp as it had ever been.

‘Just say it…’ she almost whispered. He flinched again, and she knew he wasn’t really trying to get away – because what grown man of his strength could not fight off the grip of one woman her size? Still, he held his face towards her.

‘Tell me, for the love of god, just tell me….’

The hand at her back didn’t feel like it should, because his touch was so strangely light. But she knew it at once and swallowed hard. His expression was partly obscured from her, hidden in the poor light and the shadows of the scars, but she could see the way his mouth had opened and the wetness across his lips. Curling fingers dug in to the fabric of her shirt, gently grasping, and her gasp was sharp, but she held his head still and at the sound of it, felt finger nails down her spine. Breath matching breath, each as shallow as the last, came to her ear in the dark. Was it her that was shaking or him? She couldn’t tell. But she could feel the tension in his grip, and she had the sudden urge to lean in and bite. His mouth hung just below her, inches from where her fingers rested, and the scarred lip that hid those white, sharp teeth. That breath came thunderous to her ears now, a wave crashing, a thunder clap, the only thing she could hear. It was him who was shaking. His thumb was at her open mouth, pulling down her bottom lip. Her head fell down to follow it, and catch it in her mouth. And suddenly his mouth was on hers.

It was not delicate, the way he kissed her. It was not kind or loving, nor anything soft. It was teeth and metal, desperate and wanting. Forceful now, he held her like she was some wild thing, ready to bite, and his hands became alive and searching, hungry, strong. It was an attack, and so she hit him right back. Hands in his hair, she pulled him closer, bit the lip that found its way between her teeth, left scratches along the back of his neck. In a moment she would be on top of him, the way he was pulling at her, and she wanted that so badly. The closeness of their bodies now was still too little. She could feel his cock pressing in to her leg and knew with perfect clarity, in the midst of their battle, how badly she wanted him inside of her.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. He pushed her away like she had burned him, and she almost fell as she stumbled backwards. Ineffable space now stretched out between them; two halves, wrenched unnaturally apart. In the aftermath, ragged and swollen and flushed with red, they looked at one another in breathless silence and she could see the horror on his face.

He opened his mouth but couldn’t seem to speak. She would have tried to help him if she could find her own tongue but it was still heavy and slow, and she could think of no words. All her attention was still focused entirely on the memory of his mouth on hers. She watched him stand, watched him walk to door, watched him open it, all without saying anything. He was almost away by the time she found her voice.

‘Sandor! Wait!’

He stopped, but didn’t turn around. The outline of him against the open door was black and frozen.

‘Please…. Just wait.’

Her words were soft and gentle, despite the thunder that was still raging in her head and the blood she could taste just under the suddenly tender skin of her lips. He still didn’t turn around though, and without his eyes on her she felt lost.

‘I’m sorry.’

His voice was faraway and strange, as if pulled taunt. It tugged at her.

‘I shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t right.’

Like a match in to gasoline, her anger was suddenly aflame again, like a bright, vicious flash down the back of her spine.

‘Stop right now. I swear to god Sandor Clegane, don’t you dare say that to me!’

Maybe it was because she used his whole name, or maybe it was the pure, forceful fury that propelled her words in to the back of his head. Either way, it was enough to make him turn. She expected shame or sadness. She saw neither.

‘You aren’t for me, little bird. You never have been.’

She put her chin up, shook the loose hair away from her face, and took a breath; a moment of calm to collect her thoughts. It was a trick she had learnt from her mother, although she was not thinking of Catelyn then. Steady now, but ever aware of the knot still in her stomach, she walked towards him. He didn’t flinch at her approach, nor when she came to stand close enough to him to see the flecks of ash and coal in the colour of his eyes as they fell to watch her open mouth.

‘I think it’s time you stopped calling me that, don’t you? I haven’t been anyone’s little bird since I was 15 years old. So if you want to go on treating me like a child, who doesn’t know her own mind, that’s fine. But I won’t be sticking around to see it.’

She was proud then, of that little speech, and of the way she was able to walk past him so casually, with not even a hint of a backwards glance.

But later, alone in her bed, the very memory of it was enough to almost stop her breathing.

Chapter Text

The road that led up to the old house had always been long and thin, strewn with stones and odd little dips that rattled the car whenever they passed over them. Arya remembered the way she would shake and jump on every journey, her little body rattling around in the back of her fathers’ jeep, giggling like a lunatic whenever he deliberately swerved to find another pothole.

Are you wearing your seatbelt? I don’t want you to fall out.

She would laugh all the harder at that and cling to door handle as another lurch bumped her upwards.

Walking it now, it was not quite the same. The potholes were worse – in some places, more like dark fractures that took up most of the path. She wondered how a car managed to make its way down here now. And without the cover of fur trees that used to sit along its length, it seemed much more barren and empty. Just the stumps remained now, turning a sandy coloured grey, like withered gravestones. Before, Arya remembered how she would catch just glimpses of the city between the trees as they bounced downwards, a little more with each passing moment as she passed from one world to another. But now, standing out on the exposed path with all of Winterfell stretched out underneath her, it seemed as if what once was very separate was now being forced unnaturally together. The old house was no longer a hideaway, huddled up in its nest of lush green and hard iron. Now, it sat bare and barren on the open hillside, like a raw nerve, no different to the world it looked down on.

She kicked a stone away with her boot, and watched it roll down the path back to the main road. This was the closest she had been to the house in years, and even with her back to it, she could feel its malevolent presence behind her, sucking her back. Just being on the path had stirred up a memory she had wanted forgotten. Who knew what would come clawing back if she actually turned around.

Cold, she wrapped her arms around herself and took a seat on a tree stump. She didn’t wear a watch, but she knew instinctively that her brother was late. She knew it in the grey of the light that came across her face, and the smell of the wind. Morning was coming on quickly, and before long the sun would have properly risen and for some unknown reason, she felt very uncomfortable about still being sat where she was under the full light of day. Reluctantly, she stole another look up the path, stopping just short of giving the house her full attention. Luckily, it was enough to see the figure making his way down towards her, tall and dark against the storm-coloured sky. Rickon was wearing his usual t-shirt and jeans, with scuffed boots loosely laced. As he came closer, she could see the gooseflesh all across his tight, thin arms but he gave no indication that he felt the cold. Under the sharp shadows around his eyes, a bruise still lingered. The wound to his head was now a thin, red scar, healing slowly and leaving a ragged razor cut along his closely shaven skull. He was lighting a cigarette as he approached, and held another out to her by way of greeting. She took it wordlessly and they stood side by side, taking the first few breaths deep in to their lungs.

Arya had grown tall in her years away, although it was all leg and nothing of the elegant proportions her sister was blessed with. Still, next to Rickon she felt small again. A jagged streak of a person, he was as tall now as her father and Robb had been, although much more wiry.

‘You ok?’

He shrugged.

‘What about Sansa? Did she and Sandor talk after?’

He shrugged again but this time followed it with actual words.

‘Dunno. They’re just as weird around each other as they ever were. Worse maybe now. She keeps saying she’s going to leave.’

Arya rolled her eyes and began to walk slowly back down towards the main road. Rickon followed, his heavy footfalls kicking stones away as he did.

‘What the fuck’ she mumbled grumpily. ‘I told him to sort that out. Stupid cow will actually end up leaving at this rate.’

Rickon flicked away some ash and blew smoke over his shoulder.

‘Let her. It’s what she wants.’

Arya rounded on that with eyes bright.

‘No! It’s not what she wants. She just thinks she does cos that Tyrell woman is here, making it all seem fun and easy. That plague didn’t just disappear, I bet. And she won’t know anyone there.’

She kicked another errant stone, and mumbled sullenly.

‘She doesn’t want to go. She would have left by now if she did.’

They walked a little further down the road, slowly coming towards the main entrance to the city. The peaks and shards of the buildings jutted up in to the skyline like spears, black and ash against the threat of approaching thunder. Something was troubling her lately, and the slowly burning core of it had set itself up right in her chest. Since that day in the snow, out in the wild, nothing had felt the same. She was taking comfort in the few certainties she had left, and one of them was the cold, hard knowledge that Sansa would not abandon them now. It wasn’t something she had ever had to question before, but now that she did, she couldn’t see how it could be any other way.

‘You could say something nice to her for once you know’ she muttered darkly as they walked. ‘You’re always so harsh to her. Maybe that would make her want to stay.’

Rickon’s expression didn’t change, except for a sly sideways look in her direction.

‘Really? You’re going to give me a lecture?’

Arya took a particularly aggressive drag from her cigarette, and threw the still-burning end to the side of the road.

‘I’m just saying, you argue all the time.’

Rickon scratched his head, his fingers raking over the scar there, and laughed emptily.

‘Come off it Arya. She annoys you too. She’s always on our backs, pretending like she’s better than us. Floating round that house, like she’s our fucking mother…..’

His voice became oddly flat then, and stopped. There was anger etched on to every angle of his face. Arya watched carefully, finding herself measuring carefully all the ways she could put him down if he turned on her. She had no reason at all to think that he would, and yet it was a reflex she had developed whenever she was in the presence of anger. She could have told him that Sansa was not pretending at all; that she really was better than both of them. She didn’t wake up in the night, suffocated by dreams of death and blood, and she was too busy trying to feed and water a city to throw herself in to harm’s way every chance she got. But Rickon was not angry about that. The word that had stuck in his throat was mother. She understood. It stuck in hers too.

The fate of Catelyn Stark had been a conversation that needed to have happened between them much, much earlier and yet it had been given only the briefest of airings, right when she and Rickon were first reunited. From then on, it had sat untouched and ignored on a high up shelf, slowly going rotten. But so many things had shifted in the last few weeks, and so many feelings brought out from their dark and secret corners, and now the stench of things unsaid was beginning to catch in her throat.

‘You know she didn’t suffer. I made sure of it. But I couldn’t leave her like that.’

Rickon looked at her threateningly.

‘Don’t’ he said thickly, keeping her eye. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘Well maybe I need to say it’ she answered quietly, as an image of pale hands came in to her head; bone white fingers ceaselessly searching, forever spinning the wedding band around and around. After she was dead, Arya found the second one that she kept on a chain under her blouse. She had taken it, along with the ring from the finger, and carried them with her in a pocket next to her heart. They lived there still, twin wedding bands on a chain, remnants of two marriages that had both been ended by murder.

‘I just wanted you to know, that was all.’

‘Well I don’t care’ he said blackly, his words all bile. He had stopped walking now and was staring right at her with angry, colourless eyes. ‘I don’t want to know that shit. She’s dead, and that’s all there is. Like everyone else. So you can stop, ok? Just stop.’

Arya bit her lip and stared back at him, her own anger beginning to build. It wasn’t fair that only she should have these secrets. It wasn’t fair that only she should be haunted by those pale hands.

‘She was dead before I found her’ she continued, through teeth gritted with growing fierceness. ‘I mean she was walking and talking and breathing still, but she was dead inside. Just a hollow woman, clawing at her own face. She didn’t even know it was me.’

‘Fuck you!’

He screamed at her then. Screamed at her so hard the words were like a punch to the stomach.

‘I told you! Fucking leave it alone!’

‘No! I don’t want this in my head anymore. It isn’t fair.’

The sound he made next was like a roar, or a howl. Either way, it was savage and raw and in a second he was on her, his face looming over hers with a bristling intensity.

‘Fair?! Let’s talk about that shall we? Let’s talk about how fair my life has been! I can’t even remember their faces! I don’t have any memories of them. There’s nothing in head but what other people tell me. So fuck you! Fuck you and fuck them and fuck this!’

She knew he wanted to hit her. She could see it in the way he was breathing, all jagged and sharp, and how he fought to keep his hands down. But she didn’t stop.

‘None of this is fair!’ she screamed back at him. ‘You can’t remember them, so you’ve got nothing to miss! I saw them both die, remember? That’s my only memory now – it wiped out all the rest. Him on his knees and her with her clawed-out face. I’d take emptiness over that!’

He snarled, and jerked forward, stopping just short of bringing his skull down on to hers. Nose to nose, she felt all of her training straining in her muscles. If he made another move now, she knew she would hurt him. And right then, right there, she wanted to. He took a bite of the air, emptily moving his jaw like he was trying to find breath, trying to force words. They came out like a low hiss, spitting in her face.

‘You… fucking….. bitch….’

Something strange happened then. Instead of launching the attack she felt her body poised for, she simply stood and took it. All of the rage that he spat in to her face, all of the bitter resentment. It was overdue. And however much she wanted to smack that vicious little bastard right in the mouth, and protect herself, some part of just looked back at him and waited.

‘You don’t talk about her to me, you understand? You don’t talk about any of them. Bran, Robb, Dad. You don’t get to fucking win at who had the shittier life.’

She could practically hear his teeth grinding as he continued to growl. She could see the flex of his fingers at the edge of her vision, forming fists.

‘I don’t even remember this place’ he was saying, the weight of his head beginning to press in to hers, forcing her to stumble backwards.

‘They brought me back and told me this was my home, showed me you and Sansa and Jon and told me you were family. I don’t fucking know you! My family was Osha, and she died in Skagos. Stop trying to talk to me about shit I don’t remember!’

Arya kept walking backwards, the last of her nerves threatening to snap at any second, but she held on just a little longer.

‘….you don’t…. you don’t remember her at all?’

She thought for sure that he would hit her then; saw the way he rose his hand, suddenly and sharp, and the savage snarl that followed. And she prepared herself for the blow, desperately trying to remind herself that this was her brother, her brother, her brother….

But the blow didn’t come, and the pressure all flooded away from her in great waves as he slowly and darkly withdrew. His anger remained though, glaring at her from black, bruised eyes. When he spoke, it was still a hiss.

‘Sometimes. I dunno….. I think, maybe…. Sometimes.’

He seemed to shrink in front of her, shifting from one foot to another, his expression suddenly changed even as the anger lingered. And there, a little flicker of something soft hidden in that hardened face.

‘She had blue eyes.’

Arya felt herself smile, a grin so wide it hurt her. It felt weird, almost unnatural, but she couldn’t stop it. Unfurling, the grin became a sad laugh.

‘Yeah’ she said. ‘She did.’

And then, right in front of her, she watched the boy begin to crumble.

‘I’m sorry’ he said quietly, almost desperately. ‘I wasn’t…..’

She wouldn’t let him finish. Instead, she ran to close the gap that he had opened up between them and wrapped her arms around his lean frame until she was pressed right up against the bones of his chest. At first, he simply stood and let her hug him, until she felt his own cautious arms come up to encircle her too. Gently at first, she could hear his strained and awkward breathing above her, like he was fighting to keep control. So she clung to him even tighter, possessively, as if at any moment he might disappear. Because he was her family and she could not bare to have him slip away from her again. Because she could not bare to lose another one to grief and madness. Because the heart that she had left would break forever if he turned away and forgot her entirely. She needed them to remember her, because she couldn’t quite remember herself.

Eventually, she loosened her grip. In front of them, the sun was beginning to throw dark shadows out from the buildings and tower blocks, and sprinkle bright light in to the spaces in between. She felt adrift as she came apart from him, uncertain of exactly what had happened, but he had a begrudging half smile on his mouth and she felt comforted by it.

‘We can’t let her leave’ she said, thinking of Sansa and how, in the wake of these moments, her certainty about her intentions now seemed far less concrete. ‘We need her. Don’t ever tell her I said that, but it’s true.’

Rickon continued his odd little smile, and fished another cigarette from his packet. The softness was leaving him again, leaving the iron and the anger, but still the smile remained. There was work still to be done there, Arya knew, but she thought perhaps, when things were more settled, she would get him to take her to Skagos. She’d heard the stories, but she knew horror already and nothing that place held in its dark heart could be any worse. He could show her where he and Davos had buried Osha, and she could pay her respects to the woman who had raised her brother. He might like that. It might help.

‘I won’t’ he said ruefully. ‘But I still think she’s going to leave.’

Arya thought about her mother again, her fingers going reflexively to the pocket sewn in to her shirt where the wedding rings sat; the one her mother wore, and the one Robb had died for. Sometimes- most times – she would forget they were there and then she’d move in a certain way and the slight weight would remind her. They had been the only things she had never given up. Even when she’d given up her own name, she had kept them. And she was realising, slowly and with that fragile kind of clarity that comes from a truth slowly revealed, that she was capable of feeling something like happiness again; that it was her family who made it so. It surprised her to realise that Gendry’s face came in to her mind when she thought of that. Surprised and worried, but she would deal with that later. Instead, she thought about those words again, staying unsaid, going rotten in the dark.

‘Can we get breakfast another time?’ she said suddenly. Rickon shrugged and lit his new cigarette.

‘Sure, whatever.’

Arya bit her lip and cast her eyes backwards, up the hill to where the old house sat. Morning light had given it a brief golden glow, catching in the broken glass of the windows. Inside, it was still grim and solemn, but on the outside at least it was beautiful again, if only for a moment.

‘Better yet, let’s have breakfast up there’ she said firmly, as if giving herself an order. And she turned, and began to march backwards, with a painful knot in her belly and the weight of the wedding rings dancing next to her heart. 

Chapter Text

When Jon told her who was waiting for her in the hall, Sansa asked him to repeat it. She watched his lips carefully as he spoke, sure that she was missing something; a hidden vowel, some trick, a different name that only sounded like Arya’s. When she was sure she had heard him correctly, she did not miss a beat. Was there fresh bread in the pantry, could Wylla put on some tea? She told Jon to make sure the fire wasn’t put out just yet, to give the room heat a little longer, and she even considered changing in to something neater and more presentable than the jeans and jumper she wore today. She did everything she knew you had to do when you had a guest was in your home. And then she remembered that Arya was not a guest. Not here.

She took a little time to herself, to steady her nerves. She had not thought she would need to do that, but then again, she had kind of given up hope that her sister would ever come back to this place. In her youth she had hoped, ardently and incessantly, that that wouldn’t be the case. But time had worn down that fire to nothing more than a low ember, and she had put it away with all the other hopes she had returned with. She was not prepared for the sudden roar of flame that had suddenly engulfed her.

Her sister was sat at the far end of the table - a slim, dark figure with roaming eyes, unable to settle. Sansa could see the uncomfortable way she had positioned herself on the chairs edge, limbs stiff and brittle, lips slightly parted. Rickon was there too, tearing in to the bread that Wylla had given them along with some fried eggs and sausages, and paying no attention to Sansa’s entrance. Arya, on the other hand, made as if to stand but seemed to change her mind. Instead, they exchanged something like a nod and Sansa walked towards them, and then sat, in silence. It was only then that Rickon looked up, crumbs still falling from his mouth. Sansa however could not look at him. Her attention was pulled entirely towards the girl sat opposite her. This was not the first time she had seen her –far from it -  and yet something about this meeting was uncomfortably uncharted. Here, in her old home, she looked different. Sansa had always thought she looked more like their father than she did, and it was something that she had been sad about before, especially once he was dead. Everyone knew that Arya was Ned’s daughter; you could see it in their shared grey eyes, the dark, thick hair and the crooked smile set at the end of a long face. Sansa had never resented the fact that she had so obviously taken more after their mother, but there had been times she had gazed solemnly at her own face and wished fiercely that some more obvious trace of her father still lived there. Arya could see him every time she looked in a mirror. She wondered if that was a blessing or a curse.

‘You haven’t had anything.’

Not a question, just a statement. Arya looked down at her plate, still empty, and then looked back at her sister.

‘It’s a bit rich. I’m not used to eating this well.’

Sansa reached for a hunk of bread and picked at it with her fingers, pulling apart a soft little mouthful.

‘We give most of what we make away to the city’ she said dryly. ‘We still have decent soil up here. We can grow more than others can. And the pigs are breeding now.’

Arya arched her brow but still didn’t move to take a bite.

‘Yeah, Jon said.’

Of course. Arya spent more time with Jon than with anyone, if she spent time with people at all. She and him had slipped back in to each other’s lives as easily as when Jon had still been their brother, and not a cousin. Rickon too. Maybe it was because he was the youngest, and carried the most scars, but Sansa had tried her hardest with Rickon, even in the face of relentless anger and bile, and yet he had never shown her one fraction of the admittedly meagre warmth that he gave Arya. She tucked her hair behind her ear.

‘I could show you, if you like. You haven’t seen all the changes we’ve made.’

Arya looked around the hall, and Sansa watched her eyes for some trace of approval or horror, dread or fondness, but her sister was too guarded for that.

‘Maybe’ she answered. ‘I mean, I don’t know if I could stomach it.’

Dark lashes fell downwards, and her voice seemed hard and cold.

‘I don’t know how you can do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Live here, with all the memories.’

Arya shifted again, rearranging her limbs clumsily. She looked like a cat, slowly realising it was trapped. No panic yet, just the careful study of her surroundings and the tight tensing of muscle. The flexing of claws, just beneath the surface.

‘I like having memories. All the good ones are here.’

‘Then why are going to leave?’

Under the table, Sansa twisted the hem of her jumper around her finger. Arya was looking back up again, an oddly emotionless expression on her face, cold and direct.

‘I never said I was. Not for certain.’

Arya continued to regard her solemnly. Between them, Rickon had slowed his chewing was glancing back and forth from one sister to the other. Sansa sniffed and held Arya’s eye, confident that she was not being caught in a lie. She had never said she would go – at least not in words. She had played with words that sounded like it, left them hanging at the corners of the sentences she spoke, in the edges of all the things she did, like bread crumbs. Afraid, of course, that if she did ever actually say them then no one at all would care.

They had all said such nice things at first.   

‘Oh I’d love to meet Daenerys! You’re so lucky.’

‘I’ve heard the South is so pretty.’

‘We’ll miss you, but if they need you, you should go.’

And so on and so on. A hundred ways of saying we don’t mind if you leave. She hated how her mind worked sometimes, how it hunted for the dark and horrible corners of all the nice things they said. When had that changed? She laughed silently to herself. There were too many fractures to count. But then there had been Sandor, and that anger that was so refreshingly real it still made her shiver. He could never lie to her. She grinned.

‘What’s so funny?’

She realised Arya was still watching her. Arya, and her strange, serious face, like their father looking back at her.

‘Let me show you the house’ she said, standing. ‘Come on, please.’

Her sister followed her upwards with a snap, as if Sansa had just pulled a gun. Her mouth became a thin, white line but she didn’t spring. Instead, she took a breath and stood with her, slowly and carefully, nodding silently, leaving Rickon to his breakfast.

She took her to the garden, and showed her the vegetable patches that had been dug in the frosty ground, like claw marks rendered across the black earth. Arya seemed unmoved by the hopeful little sprouts that had begun to break the surface; peas and green beans that Margaery had brought up from the South as seeds and seedlings. To Sansa though they were tiny miracles, and she couldn’t help but touch them with gentle reverence.  She showed her generator they had made in one of the outhouses, with its slow and ponderous whirring. It was a miracle too, in its own rather less organic way, but one that Sansa didn’t understand as well. It was the same one that her father had had installed, in case of emergencies, but Jon had made some significant improvements. It was required to run much more frequently now, but then again emergencies happened all the more frequently now too. This way, she told Arya, they didn’t have to take power away from the city. The house was big, even with half of it closed and cold, and she didn’t want anyone to accuse her of leeching off those less fortunate. The power station was for the people now, as would the peas and green beans once she got the hang of growing them.

Arya however remained largely silent. Sansa took her back to the house, thinking perhaps to show her what she’d done with the bedrooms and the study, but on the way back she had a change of heart. The house had three main floors, the uppermost of which had been mainly extra bedrooms, storage and a once impressive library that extended across most of it.  But it was all gutted and empty now, the whole floor being too far away from the main heaters to be properly warm or comfortable. The staircases up to it were boarded up, to keep the drafts at bay, but Sansa had been there when the wood was put up and knew their secrets.

To the east of the house, not far from her room, the stairwell upwards looked just like all the others; planks of wood nailed across the archway in uniform lines, hidden under a heavy old curtain. But the planks here were easy to pull away, no more than resting against the frame, their nails not dug in deep. And behind it, set in to the wall, was a door of old wood and iron. Sansa smiled a conspiratorial smile at her sister as she fished out the key from a chain in her pocket. For the first time since she arrived, Arya’s face seemed to have found an emotion. Curiosity perhaps, Sansa thought. She would take that. It was better than indifference.  

‘Didn’t this used to be a servants passage?’

Arya was following her almost tentatively in to the dark, ascending the steps cautiously, eyes squinting to adjust to the change in light. Sansa had a torch in her pocket and was using it to see. She kind of enjoyed having the upper hand.

‘Yes. I’m the only one who has a key now.’

‘Why’s that?’

Sansa felt her mouth curl in to a slow smile and carried on walking up the stairs. At the top, it opened out in to a long, wide corridor that stretched out in to the misty dusk that enveloped this floor. She didn’t need the torch now. The windows here were all broken or uncovered. It wasn’t worth wasting good wood to cover them when the stairwells were all blocked, so the whole floor was embalmed in a low, pale, sunlight that seemed to slink across the air like a living creature. Across the landing, a double archway led in to the great open space of the old library. The landing itself was stripped of almost anything personal or decorative. There were old traces of wallpaper along the coving but the walls were mainly chipped plaster, with deep scars in places from where the furniture was all dragged out. The carpet was gone so that their footfalls were heavy on bare wood, and cobwebs hung along every edge, making them seem blurred and fuzzy. But Sansa didn’t pay any attention to the corridor. It was to the library that she walked, purposeful and driven. Arya followed behind, and as they crossed the threshold in to the old room, Sansa heard her stifle a gasp.

It was the reaction she had wanted – the reaction she needed if truth be told, and she didn’t turn around at first. Just stood there, eyes closed and smiling, imagining what Arya was seeing. Here in the library were her real treasures, ignored by the raiders that had ravaged her home and tried to destroy her family. Things that were useful to no one, but precious beyond words to her. There were the portraits of her family that had once lined the upper floor -  faces of Starks long gone and never known, but who still represented an unbroken line that she refused to sever. A chest full of dress up clothes that she had played with as a girl; whole universes hidden in one little box, characters she had grown and loved as dearly as her own siblings. With it, the dolls that she and Arya had been given as babies. They were a pair, made out of wool and beads, now sadly missing eyes and hair, but still the same old familiar shapes. Their mother had made them both, the first for Sansa when she was born and then another to match when Arya had come along. Arya had not taken to hers quite so passionately as Sansa and so it had never been blessed with a name. But Arya had gone through almost of year of not being able to sleep unless it was within reach of her tiny, infant hand. There was more too, increasingly more inconspicuous and obscure but still imbued with memories. A pen from their fathers’ desk. The bottle of that spice that their mother always put on her pancakes. The blanket Bran slept under. The stupid alarm clock that Robb had because he could never, ever get up on time. Sansa felt safest here, surrounded by the all the love that she had gathered around her. It was scared space, this dusty old room, and she knew when she heard that gasp that Arya had finally felt it too. She opened her eyes and turned, a smile already on her lips, ready to greet her sister again – her true sister -  after so many years apart.

But Arya was not smiling. In to the holy room had stepped a demon, a black hole, a void, sucking the life from the air and snarling back at Sansa with dead, black eyes. The thing was shaped like Arya, had her face and body, spoke with her voice, but held itself ridged and stiff, fingers curled like claws. It spat words at her like bullets.

‘What the hell….? What sick, twisted shit is this!?’

Sansa stepped back as the thing advanced on her, talon-like hands read to strangle and maim, teeth bared.

‘Arya! Stop! What are you doing?!’

The demon-girl did not stop coming.

‘This is wrong. All of this is wrong. You can’t…. you shouldn’t have….’

It twisted its head from side to side, as if trying to shake itself free of something; some thought, some memory, some feeling. It’s teeth began to grind, and she thought she heard a snarl.

‘Arya…’

She said the name again, even though she wasn’t even sure the thing knew who it was. But she had to say something.

‘Arya, please. Just stop.’

‘Don’t you understand! Don’t you know what it takes to survive?! It’s not fucking vegetable patches. I don’t… I don’t…. I can’t….’

The creature was still swinging its head, and every time Sansa caught those eyes she saw nothing but hate and death. It’s claws were reaching for it’s belt, where the gun sat.

‘Arya!’

She screamed it now. The name echoed in the hall and her frantic mind tried to will the sound further, down the stairs, through the walls, for someone to hear.

‘Arya! Stop! Help!’

She scrambled for a thread of hope, of something to cling to. Where was Sandor now? Could he hear her? Her desperate mind called out to him in a silent scream. Help me help me help me make her stop bring her back I don’t want this I don’t want her like this she isn’t my sister now help me help me stop  her.

The demon-girl had the gun in her hand, waving it around incoherently. It was whispering something over and over, a mantra under its breath.

‘I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care….’

There was no one coming. Sansa realised with a cold, cloying fear that they would all be out by now. The thing was still coming at her, stumbling forward, whispering its chant over and over. It moved robotically, jerking with each twist and curl. It’s head still swung, snapping emptily at the air.

‘Listen to me Arya. Listen to my voice.’

Sansa could move back no more. There was a pile of clothes and old furniture at her back and she had nowhere else to go. So she planted her feet firmly on the ground and tried to catch the things eyes. Arya was in there. She could see her fighting.

‘Darling please listen to me. I know it’s hard. I know you don’t want to remember anything but please just stop. Stop and look.’

The thing stopped but it didn’t look up. The gun still waved erratically around, and the muttering went on.

‘I know you had to protect yourself. I know, darling, I know. And you had to do some evil things to survive, and you hated it, but you’re safe here… I promise. I will never stop protecting you. I will never leave here, as long as you need me. No one will ever leave you again, I swear.’

Black eyes shot up, wet with tears. They streaked her face like shards of glass. The gun was up by her temple, shaking.

‘I don’t want this’ came the voice, hissing out between gritted teeth like the possessed. It was all Sansa could do not to knock the gun away, desperate for that barrel to be pointed anywhere but her sisters head. But she was petrified that she wouldn’t be fast enough….

‘I thought I could do this. I thought I could come here and be ok. But this place is evil…. ‘

‘No! It’s not. It’s just memories Arya. It’s just our past. That’s not evil.’

‘You should have warned me….’

The gun continued to shake, its metal beginning to dig in to the skin of her temple.

‘I don’t want them in here’ she whispered.

Sansa didn’t think. She lunged forward, aiming for Arya’s arm and shoving it hard, with a silent prayer laced across her lips. The girls arm jerked backwards and the gun flew, in a slow arch through the air, crashing down in the wood with a vague splintering sound. Sansa did not relax though. Before Arya could react, she had caught the arm that had flown, and had it hard by the wrist, pulling Arya closer to her. Raw and desperate energy demanded that she scream, but she wouldn’t. Instead, her words came out slow and shaking, fraught with all of her worst fears.

‘I promise you Arya! I promise! You don’t have to do this anymore.’

The eyes that looked back at her were still black, still torrid. But there was a tremor there, like shaking earth under an electric storm and Sansa could see all of the bleak and horrible existence that Arya had had to live stretched out in front of her in a long, thin, unbroken line, one more heartbreak after another, soaked in blood and sweat. And she realised that it had never been Rickon who had the most scars.

‘Darling I’m so sorry…. I'm so sorry….’

The creature watched blankly, let the hand stay around her wrist.

‘I won’t leave.’

The void blinked, and then blinked again. It was dying. Sansa could see the dark tendrils of it begin to recede back in to the corners of its host.

‘I swear. You don’t have to do this alone.’

And just like Rickon before, although Sansa would not know that until later, Arya finally crumpled under the weight of everything she had been holding. And as the girl sobbed bitterly in to her shoulder, Sansa felt the calm return and the holiness of this place begin to seep in to her again. In time, maybe Arya would feel it too. In time, maybe her memories wouldn’t try to kill her.

Some hours later, they both emerged from the stairwell red eyed and tired, but with the weary look of something well done. It was nearing mid-afternoon and there were people looking for her, but Sansa would not give them any of her time until Arya was safely put in a bed and tucked up under a layer of furs and blankets. She needed to sleep, and Sansa would not hear of her going back to that room she called a home. Only then did she let Jon and Brienne find her and tell her their news, although it all seemed rather insignificant today. Neither of them could quite understand her slightly manic smile. Later, she told herself, she would let them in on the secret, but for now it was hers. And after she had hugged Rickon for so long, and so tightly, that he almost had to forcibly remove her, she took herself for a walk amongst the gardens towards the old stable block and the man she knew she would find there. She was in the mood for making miracles. She would have him say those words.

Chapter Text

He had been restless for hours, unable to settle in to any one task. His fingers had felt too thick and heavy, unable to do what he wanted. He had tried to set himself to something physical – hard work to wear him out and keep his mind quiet – but even that had been a thin and unsatisfying chore. Even now, so many years after he had first taken up a shovel, there were always thickets to cut back or debris to be moved. The sprawling grounds were still only half reclaimed, and the wilderness had been attempting to wrestle its way back every day. It was a thankless task, and one that most people called pointless, but still Sandor usually liked the monotony and the aches that came with it. The old man had been forever extolling the virtues of physical work as a way to relax the mind and wake up the body. It was one of the only lessons Sandor had accepted without question. He had always known that there was a quiet heart in the middle of the storm; a kind of silence that he only found when he was swinging an axe or ripping a man from his feet, even in the midst of bloody chaos. So when the old man suggested he turn his body to something less messy, he had not argued. He had found that the ache in his muscles was the same whether it was from hauling a body or hauling logs, and people seemed to like him more when he was doing the latter.

And yet, even this straightforward job seemed beyond him today. He cut himself more than he cut the weeds, snaring himself on thorns, stabbing himself in all the awkward little places of his hands. As something sharp pieced him under the thumbnail for the 100^th time, he roared his anger out in to the bushes, hacking and slicing in to the wood with blunt, vicious stabs until he was faced with a ruined mess of leaves and bark and torn up roots. He threw the axe out across the field with one final growl and left without a backwards glance, all the while cursing the old man and his stupid, stupid advice. The smell of green was all over him and he wanted to wash and change and throw away the rest of this ridiculous day down the plug hole where it belonged.

Clean, or at least a little more so, he found himself still wandering. His room was not that large and yet it was surprising how many ways there were to walk around it. The silence he was searching for in the garden was still out of his grasp, and in the cavernous quiet of his room, the grumbling voices in his head were given even more space to roam and be heard. He found himself sitting at the battered old desk that for some reason as still in the corner, never once used for its intended purpose, usually no more than a place to keep clothes from the floor. As he sat with his head idly against his hand, looking at nothing in particular, he was struck by the new view from the window. It was both familiar and yet not so, the angle here showing him a side of the house he had not yet considered. He wondered what part he was looking at now, which room was behind those nailed up shutters. And, as always, how far away was it from her.  

He sighed. He really had to stop that. He had heard that the little sister had come to visit and whether or not it was true, the thought of it had been one of the more persistent voices that had dogged him today. Whether they had fought or ignored one another, whether Arya had been kind or mean or completely indifferent towards Sansa, had been the most consistent thread amongst the rest of the voices vying for his attention. He had heard nothing, and had not attempted to find out. He was not sure he could have maintained the mask of apathy if he had found out that the little she-wolf had made a mess of her sister’s kindness. And more than that, if it had not gone well (if it had gone anywhere at all) then it would be just another reason for Sansa to leave.

The thought of her pressed against his mouth came rushing in to his mind, full of the memory of her lips open against his and her tongue and her breath and her soft moan. He bit down on to nothing, snapping at the image. It was always there though, hanging at the back of his mind, and if he let it unfurl, it would take over. He had woken up to it, breathless and sore and aching, with the ghost of her fingers still in his hair and the outline of her firm body still pressed against him. He had brought himself to climax more times than he cared to admit, just thinking about the way she had held his head up to look at him. That look she had given him…. He felt his cock begin to stiffen again and he stood up suddenly, hungry for something else to do. If that look was the only thing he could ever remember, if that was all he could ever take from her, then he would be far luckier than he had any right to be.

When his door opened without a knock, and her voice called his name, he was, for a moment, completely frozen. He thought, clutching wildly at ideas half formed, that she was not real; she was a ghost called up from his own dark imagining, summoned by his selfish needs. But she was as substantial as the ground under his feet, however much it seemed to lurch, and as she walked towards him all haloed in red, he could see the intent flash across her eyes. It made him feel sick and dizzy all at once, and he took a step back away from her, as if he didn’t touch her she would go back to being a ghost. Sansa stopped as he moved away, and for a second, the determination in her expression seemed to momentarily crack.

‘I needed to speak to you’ she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth too fast. She swallowed, and she tried again, slower now.

‘I needed to see you.’

He looked blankly around the room. All of the voices had finally fallen silent; all accept one that kept whispering fervently just behind his eyes, half happy, half terrified. She’s here, she’s real, she’s not a dream. Fucking hell she’s actually here. Fuck, did she know what I was thinking? Fuck, she’s here, she’s here.

‘Here I am’ he said clumsily.

It was all he could think to say. He was painfully aware that his cock was still half erect, and showing no signs of becoming less so – not while she was standing there, breathless and slightly wild. Damn her.

She made to take a step forward, stopped, and then took it anyway. Faltering, her hand came up as if to reach out but fell back to her side. Again the dry swallow.

‘The other day…. I wanted you to know something…..’

She had fallen away from him, her eyes going to her own feet, and all the wildness seemed to be receding to her edges, existing only in the involuntarily flex of her fingers. She took another wavering step, as if stepping out on to ice. And then, as her foot found its way and was reassured by the solid ground, she looked back up him and it was like a flower blooming.

‘You don’t need to talk about it’ he said dryly, utterly rooted under her eye. He could no more move away than he could spread wings and fly. The wind had messed her hair up, pulling strands from the loose plait all around her face and painting her cheeks flushed. Red, red, red, wherever he looked. Her hair and face and parted lips and the fire in her eyes. Red, red and ripe and red.

Fingers reached again, impossibly pale as they came in to the light, and this time there was no waver. Maybe that’s why he expected them to be cold when they touched him, like marble, but when they curled around his own the warmth went deep.

‘Sansa….’

Was that a plea? It sounded weak, but his voice was just a scratch in his throat. All it did was make her smile; a look both soft and hungry that hit him in the centre of his chest.

‘Let’s skip this part’ she said, as her thumb began to trace a slow circle across the back of his hand. ‘Where you pretend not to see me and I feel guilty for making you look. Isn’t it getting a bit boring, after so long?’

He had no words for her so he could only shake his head stiffly. She smiled again, broader and more brazen. It was an expression he had seen only a few times, catching only the glimmer of it as he was left to dance around its edges. Keen, like a hunter that had fallen on its prey. Beautiful, like starlight across snow. Dangerous, like the dark deep water laying silent under ice. Everyone thought Arya was the more lethal, but Sandor had known the truth of it for some time. Arya was the storm, cold and violent. But Sansa was the sun in the height of summer. You would die warm but you’d be dead all the same, and she’d do it looking right at you. Ask Littlefinger, ask Roose Bolton. Look at the unmarked graves beyond the city walls where the last remnants of the Northern host lay rotting; everyone who had denied her. They had called her little bird, an angel, a dove. But she was a wolf all right, every inch of her. And now that look was for him and he had never felt so unworthy. Every nerve told him to run and yet nothing could compel him to move whilst her thumb made it’s agonising trail across his skin.

She lent in, bringing her face upwards so that her warm breath mixed with his, and the cold tip of her nose edged against his own. He closed his eyes – his last defence – and waited for the torment to be over. But in to his self-imposed darkness he felt the fainted pressure at the corner of his mouth, hot and wet. Her open lips rested against his, barely there and yet unimaginably close. In the silence he heard her whisper.

‘Tell me to leave, if that’s what you want.’

With every breath he could taste her filling his lungs. Uncontrolled, he moved his head down towards her, to catch her mouth and cover it with own. But she moved with him and kept him at bay, the softest touch just at the edge of where he needed her. Her breathing was quickening though, and her lips parted wider.

‘Tell me’ she murmured in to his mouth. ‘You need to tell me what you want.’

He could try again to steal a kiss, and keep those words from falling. It would be no great effort to take what he wanted, and had wanted since he was too stupid to know the real meaning of it. And she would have no choice but to yield under him, wet and quivering and in all the ways he had imagined. But she was right. It was getting boring. And he knew, without any doubt, that if he didn’t speak now she would be gone.

Her tongue lightly ran along the edge of his bottom lip.

‘You.’

The word was a gasp, all lost in the exhale and for a moment, she did nothing, said nothing, and he waited, suspended, under the threat of her mouth. And he wondered if somehow he had made a horrible mistake, and that any second she would pull away and leave him with a bloody nose. So, stupidly, he said it again. And then again and again, a hundred breathless words in to the sliver of space between them.

You, you, you, you, you, I want you, I have only ever wanted you, you, you……

He was still speaking as she finally kissed him, the words melting against her lips, lost in the soft, hungry searching of her tongue. It was not like before, angry and brutal; the first step had already been taken. This time she lingered, luxuriating in the act, little kisses along the edge of his mouth, a hint of teeth, sucking gently at the flesh of his lip. He opened for her, letting her take control, unable in all honesty to do much else and she took full advantage. Sweet, teasing kisses that were made all the worse for knowing what she could really do, for the tantalising reminder of their former violence just behind this gentle touch. His breath was fast and ragged, a little gasp as her tongue ran along his upper lip. It wasn’t until he felt her hand slip up to his face, and her fingers begin to press ever so insistently at the back of his skull, that he was brought back. The shot of heat licked down his spine like a whip, thin and sharp, making him jolt. And in it’s wake, his own bright hunger was now wide awake and ready, searching for its own satisfaction. He growled in to her parted lips, and caught her face with his hand, causing the gentle trail of kisses to suddenly stop. Her wide, blue eyes showed no fear, even though his hand was perilously close to her throat and his grip was hard. He saw that smile come over her like a wave, and then she kissed him again.

And now, there was no more room to pause. The hand in his hair felt like living flesh at last, not the half-rendered dream he first thought. The mouth on his was hot and wet and vital, and there was blood in those veins, thundering under the skin of her flushed cheeks. Her breathing, far from perfect, came ragged and raw in to his mouth and the taste was salt and honey. A real, living woman, pressed against him, wanting him, touching him. Unafraid of what she would find because there was nothing hidden from her. Before, it had been that thought that had stopped him. Before, in his same room, he had nearly lost himself imagining that she was just a fantasy, and remembering that she was not had been the cut that severed whatever magic had come over him. But now, suddenly he seemed not to care. It was the life in her that spurned him on. Because now he had said the words out loud, and very last fragile secret he had kept from her was shattered, and he had nothing to lose.

She was too far away. Hands around her waist, he pulled her abruptly to him and smiled at the surprised little gasp she gave. Her kiss became more bold, her tongue probing, her fingers slipping from his head to his face and all across his jaw. He met it just as fiercely, his own hands reaching down to cup her ass. As he did, she ground her hips in to his and it was his turn to gasp. His cock felt almost painful, constricted in his jeans, but he held her there, tight against him. It was not enough, her wet mouth alone, and he needed skin. Fingers found their way under her shirt, skimming hungrily across the arch of her ribs. In response, her own fingers had begun to pull at his jumper. Another moment and it was off completely. Another, and she had removed her shirt. He wanted to stop and look, to take a second just to see her, but she would not grant him that yet. Pressed against him, her flesh now on his, he felt a warmth sweeter than any the sun had given him. The quiver of her pulse was all through her; he could feel it in his chest right down to where his cock too was throbbing. She was pushing him now, taking tiny steps forward, and he could only stagger backwards. When they met the bed, and he began to fall, they tumbled in to the sheets. Quick as a cat, she had him straddled, and before he could catch her mouth again, she had arched away.

Now she let him look.

In the dusky light, she was illuminated. Skin pale, pink and peach, with a pleasing red bloom across her face and chest. Hair a wild mess, falling across her open eyes and damp, swollen lips. In silence, smiling, she took off her bra. In silence, still smiling, she took his hand and placed it gently on her stomach. He lingered, unsure of what to do, but her smile was all encouragement. As he touched the pink tip of her breast, she moaned and pressed herself in to his hand. He liked that, so he touched her some more, his fingers curling gently around her nipple, and again that beautiful moan. She arched her back, pressing her hips down in to his lap, beginning to grind slowly against the hardness of his cock. Every tiny movement, he could feel even through the denim. She began to ride him slowly, her eyes never leaving his, rolling her hips back and forth across him. Her smile was no longer soft and playful, as it had been moments ago. Now the hunter was back upon her, and she was watching every little gasp and shudder he made.

‘Bugger this.’

He couldn’t stand it much longer. He needed to see her lose control too. He began to fumble at her belt buckle and tug at her jeans, growling all the while. Laughing, she decided to help and with a little awkwardness, was finally naked. She stood up to take off the last of her clothing, a foot either side of his legs, standing over him as she wiggled free of her underwear. He would have said she looked perfect, but that would have done her a disservice. Because perfect wasn’t real, and she was the most alive as he had ever seen her. The little smirk and flick of her eyes told him what she wanted and he readily obliged. His jeans and pants were pulled half way down by the time she slunk slowly back towards him, coming to rest on his belly. He could feel the hotness of her pussy against him, slick and ready, but his cock was resting uselessly up against her ass, thick and twitching with every heartbeat. She wiggled a little, grinning, knowing exactly what she was doing and he wanted to pull her upwards, slam her back down, and thrust all the way in to her. But he let her work at her own pace, enjoying her play, watching her eyes sparkle as she edged backwards and then forwards again. He could feel his body start to betray him though, in the way his hips rocked to meet her movement, to try and rub his cock harder against her. He could feel it in the way he gasped whenever the tip brushed against her skin. And then, when she had had her fun, he watched her arch her back a little and shift herself upwards. He didn’t want to stop looking at her face, but he couldn’t help but tear his eyes away to where his cock sat just beneath her. His hand was shaking as he reached down to hold it up right, and as he did, the head brushed gently against her wetness.

‘Just fucking do it’ he says, his voice a low, guttural rasp. ‘For the love of god…’

It might have been a laugh that escaped her, but it was lost amongst her heavy breathing. With infinite cruelty, she began to edge her way down wards, her eyes steady but the tremble in her body obvious. He felt her begin to yield, opening up for him as his cock slid in. Inch by slow inch, stretching her out as his thick cock slowly disappeared. He held his breath, right until the moment she had taken him all, and only then did he allow himself a breath. She, shaking still on top of him, did the same. Neither one moved. Neither one dared. Not until she leant forward carefully to kiss him, and with her lips still pressed to his mouth, she began to rock again. Slow, rolling waves as she ground her hips in to him, as his cock slipped back and forth, in and out. His hands, useless moments ago, had to touch her, to feel the rhythm and guide it. On her thighs, her back, her sides, he gripped her, moving with her, each time pulling her a little farther forward so she could fall a little harder back. The feeling was like nothing he had known before; slick and hot, slow and deep. Her face was close to his, and he could feel every gasp and moan as it escaped her. Each time she rocked back, another soft sigh. Slowly, she found her pace and he felt her begin to become more forceful. His hands no longer guided her; she was working on her own. He tried to meet her with thrusts, lifting his hips to meet her rocking, and smiled as her sighs became louder. Their kisses became more ragged, more desperate, her teeth slipping over his lips and catching ripe skin. Hands went back to her hips, willing her onward. He needed to feel himself slamming in to her, needed to feel the entire length of his cock sliding out and then back in. Needed to see the look in her eyes every time he did. A hand escaped to her head, to tangle in her flame-red hair, holding her face close. He needed to hear every sound she made, to share everything she was feeling as it flashed across her eyes, to keep her real.

‘More. I need more’

She sounded so raw, so breathless. She kissed him again, gasping, and pulled herself away from his hand. Now, back arched, she was free to move even more. And he, spurred on by every deep cry she made, gave what she wanted.  Holding her hips, he watched her eyes flutter close, her mouth open, her chest rise and fall with every deep, shattering breath. But it wasn’t not enough; he wasn’t there, where he needed to be, and from down underneath her he couldn’t move the way he wanted. One effortless sweep was all it took, that wrapped her in to his arms and spun her, so that she was on her back now and he was above. Her giggle was sweet, but it became another groan as he drove back inside her, driving in to the soft wetness between her open thighs. Except now, he had the whole weight of his bright and burning craving behind every thrust. Her hands were in his hair, so tight it was painful, but the sensation just drove him on. That, and the way she was looking at him. Glowing, gasping, whispering words of encouragement under her breath.

Yes yes harder please yes don’t stop don’t stop please oh my god yes….

He buried his face in her neck, resisting the urge to bite on the soft flesh of her shoulder, trying to concentrate on the sensations across his body, and remember them. Her finger nails in his skin, her gasp in his ear, the tightness around his cock, feeling every little pulse and quiver as he fucked her. So close now, any second he would explode. The thought of it was almost enough to finish him. But he would have no satisfaction until she had had hers.

He sat back, rocking on to his heels, exposing her bare body to the air. Keeping his hands on her hips as they rose, he kept them joined, rocking slowly now back and forth, enjoying the view of his cock sliding in and out of her. But that was not his focus. With gentle fingers, he parted the wet, pink folds of her pussy to find her core. Unsure now, he took his cue from her, watching every little flicker of her body as he ran this thumb across her tip. She arched and sighed, her fingers curling in to the sheets. He watched the taut muscles of her stomach flex and stretch as she writhed, each flick of his thumb electing new and exciting expressions across her face. He picked up the pace, daring to press harder, faster, reading her sighs like a map. He wasn’t in her any more, but that didn’t seem to matter to him now. All he wanted was to see her completely under his control, wrapped up the growing waves of her pleasure. Faster, he circled his fingers across the sensitive skin, faster, faster, faster, and she pushed her hips up towards him. Her breaths were quick and shallow, her eyes were somewhere far away. He didn’t stop. Faster, harder, every time she moaned. Faster, harder, gripping on to her thigh, his teeth gritted. When her cries began to fall away, he knew she was close. As her body began to tense under his fingers, he could see the last of her control begin to leave her. As her head snapped back, he felt her begin to tense around his fingers. And as she came, shuddering and gasping, writhing in to his hand, he had never seen anything so beautiful.

Slowly, slowly, unwilling to break the delicate peace that had fallen across her, he edged his way upwards, covering her now limp body with his. As he reached her chest, he lay a path of kisses up towards her face, ending just at her throat. Above him, he could hear her begin to laugh; a sweet sound, that echoed in his ear when he lay his head on her ribs. For a little while, they said nothing. Did nothing. Could not move. Him, with his head on her chest and she with her fingers loose in his hair. Gently then, he felt her little tug.

‘Come here.’

He pulled himself higher, to bring his face to hers. He thought it would be hard to look her in the eye now, unsure of exactly what he would see. But when it came to it, he found it surprisingly easy. Flushed and red and grinning, something of a mess, she was still real. She kissed him playfully, her hips beginning to wriggle under him again.

‘Don’t go quitting on me yet Clegane’ she said ruefully.

‘We aren't finished yet.’

Chapter Text

In a perfect world, one with no sharp edges that ran like a river through the earth, unhindered and clean, then Arya would have woken up in her old room rested and safe, with no nightmares still clinging to the corners of her mind and no bruises, no blood, no sore throat from the screaming she wasn’t sure had even been hers. But although she still woke with a start, and her instinct was still to reach for her gun (she had not allowed Sansa to take it, however sweetly she had asked), at least in retrospect there had been just a few less horrors for her last night. The bed underneath her felt soft and forgiving, and she didn’t leap from it straight away.
She couldn’t stay in the room long though, not once sleep had truly left her. It was not the same and yet eerily familiar, a strange mixture of two worlds and she had worked hard to avoid both. The rest of the house offered her no real relief, but she fought the old urge to bolt and kept her poise, walking through it like she would any other place; watchful, careful, with purpose.
She couldn’t find anyone in the dining hall, or the study, or any of the hollow old rooms that had once been home. She realised then that it was still very early, and suddenly felt chilled to be the only soul awake down there. She had to retreat somewhere less threatening, somewhere more neutral before her carefully held façade began to crack again. She bit her lip at the memory of the gun barrel at her head, bit in to it like a dog with a rat, bit and shook, to kill it dead. It wasn’t anger or fear that drove it, although both those things were there, always. Rather, it was something she was much less accustomed to, something bordering on shame. Embarrassment that she had let the memories consume her, and humiliation that she had put Sansa in the firing line.
Sansa. Stupid, naïve Sansa with her big ideas and her flawed logic. Sansa, still clinging to the past and trying to build a home in ashes.

It was in the kitchen that she found some sanctuary. As a child, she had never been allowed there much. Too small and dirty, too likely to pinch food from the table and trip up a maid. At the time, it had made her resentful, but now she was glad that it held hardly any significance to her. In the quiet, she began to make herself some breakfast from what the cupboards had to offer. She thought about what she would do with her day, now that everything seemed unnervingly different. But the thought was left hanging at the sound of the backdoor opening, and the hurried, timid footsteps that followed. At the other end of the room, the door to the courtyard and gardens was swinging shut and a woman bundled up against the cold was hurrying forward, untangling her red hair from the scarf she had wrapped around her head, eyes elsewhere. She nearly ran straight in to Arya, who had watched her approach with amusement (and not, she realised later, by reaching for her gun).
Sansa blinked, silently, her face a blank canvas. There were still creases in her cheek from the pillow she had slept on.
‘Oh. Sorry, I… didn’t think you’d be up yet.’
She took a step back, finally freeing her hair from the confines of the scarf, which she wrapped almost immediately around her neck. Arya eyed her suspiciously.
‘Been somewhere?’
She leant back against the countertop, taking a bite from the sandwich she’d made, and allowed her expert eye to cast across her sister. She was in the same clothes as she had worn yesterday, the ones she’d had on when she’d put Arya to bed last night. Except the scarf. It looked old, and a bit tattered. It was the wrong colour for her, with a stupid childish embroidery that was definitely not her choosing either. Picked up in haste maybe? But if she was worried about the cold then she would have picked something warmer, thicker, a coat or shawl or pullover. The scarf was thin. To hide something then? Oh definitely, what with the way she had all but strangled herself with it. What do you hide on a neck? Arya smiled ruefully.
‘I was just checking on some things, in the yard. Getting an early start.’
She returned her sisters smile with a thin one of her own and made to move around her, seemingly trying to get as much distance as she could between herself and backdoor. Her attempts to look casual as she checked the positioning of the scarf were almost comical, and Arya stifled a laugh in to her food. It was so weird to see her like this, on the back foot. Sansa, who was always the neat one, and so poised.
‘Uh huh, yeah, I can see.’
Arya raised an eyebrow, hoping to goad her in to more ridiculous lies, but Sansa was quickly regaining her composure. So very like her. Now that she was away from the door and sure that her secrets were well covered under all that hair, she was able to look Arya in the face. A look of concern was quickly settling there, and Arya found it much less amusing.
‘How are you?’ she asked tentatively, in a tone that made Arya cringe a little with its sincerity. She shifted uncomfortably.
‘Fine. I’m fine. Thanks.’
‘Last night…’
‘Last night’ said Arya abruptly, ‘was…..difficult. And weird. But it won’t happen again. You have my word.’
Sansa smiled softly, and lay a hand on her shoulder. Arya was surprised when she didn’t flinch.
‘I don’t care about that. I just want you to remember what we talked about. What I promised you.’
Arya blew the air from her lungs in one long sigh. She knew Sansa was going to want to re-tread this again, and again, until Arya gave her something back so she summoned a smile. It was all she could do right now, when her shame was still so acute. She hoped Sansa would not push it any further yet.
‘I know. Just…. Just give me some time, ok?’
Sansa gave her shoulder a squeeze and withdrew.
‘Ok.’
They stood a little longer, quietly, Arya softly chewing and Sansa fiddling with her hair, but for once it felt like an easy silence. Like two separate people, alone and together, neither one an influence to the other yet not minding the company. It was not like falling back in to old ways; there were no old ways to fall in to. They had been children when they knew each other last. And yet, for a little while, it did not seem unnatural. Until curiosity got the better of her.
‘What’s under the scarf?’
Sansa stared at her, wide eyed and pale, momentarily struck dumb.
‘Nothing!’
Her shrill answer washed out the very last doubt from Arya’s mind.
‘Then take it off.’
‘No! I mean, what? What are you even talking about?’
Sansa was turning a shade to match her hair, looking for a way out but finding none. Arya pressed her advantage.
‘Seriously, I’ve done my fair share of sneaking around to know when someone’s doing the same. What’s the big secret?’
Sansa shook her head.
‘Nothing. I mean, I don’t know…. It’s silly.’
She could have left, but she’d chosen to stay. And she was a better liar than this, Arya knew. There was something, underneath her embarrassment, that was making her smile. Arya could sense a certain little shine, betraying her. But she wasn’t looking to be cruel, to drag it out. She just wanted to confirm her suspicions.
‘Sandor?’
Sansa could not have looked more shocked. It was palpable, the way it ripped across her face. She began to stammer for words, but none of them was a denial.
‘Oh come on’ said Arya brightly. ‘There’s a goddam hicky under that scarf, don’t lie. You’ve been dancing around each other for years!’
Sansa’s fingers curled around the scarf protectively, and she looked away.
‘We haven’t…’
It was such a half-hearted lie, Arya almost felt like teasing her again just to punish her. But Sansa had begun to smile again, soft and low.
‘I don’t know that hell I’m doing’ she said gently, looking at her feet.
Arya could not pretend she was happy over her sisters chosen bed mate, but she could understand it at least. What they’d been through. What they represented to each other. She remembered the way she had found him, half drunk on his own remorse when he thought he might have lost her. And Sansa’s smile was genuine, however small and shy.
‘Seriously though, a hicky? Are you 12?’
Sansa burst out laughing.
‘I don’t even know! Oh my god. I’m a mess. It’s a mess.’
Arya joined in the laughter, the pair of them bent over on the countertop, lost in giggles.
‘And you think sneaking out like a dirty secret is going to make things any easier between you now?’ Arya chuckled, once she had regained herself a little. ‘Seriously Sansa, what the hell? You want to make everything difficult?’
Her sister sighed, and bent her head to lean it on her hand, propped up on the work surface. Her hair fell in one long wave over her shoulder, a great tangled weave of red, threads of gold in amongst the auburn. She closed her eyes.
‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ she said quietly, almost as if Arya wasn’t there. She wondered if she was meant to respond.
‘I thought I did, but now I don’t have a clue…’
Arya watched her, feeling the unease build again. She had grown uncomfortable with seeing another person’s emotions, and all the untidiness they entailed. She had trained herself to see people as allies, as resources, as targets. Even Gendry was….
What exactly?
She turned away at the thought, back towards the windows that lined the opposite wall.
What exactly was he to her? A bed? A body? Pain relief? When they had first slept together, she had felt none of the apparent conflicts that Sansa was going through, and she certainly didn’t feel them now. If she never saw him again, from this second on, it would mean nothing and she would feel nothing and that would be the end of it.
She laughed silently at the bare faced lie she just told herself. Why did she insist on doing that? Why must everything be so neat and threadless? Such a clean, bloodless cut.
‘Don’t run away.’
Sansa opened her eyes again, stood, tucked the hair back behind her ears. The expression on her face was confused. Arya tried to clarify herself.
‘I mean, don’t let things fall back in to the way there were before. Whatever this is…’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the back door. ‘Whatever this is, it mean something’s changed. So find out exactly what, and then you’ll be prepared.’
Sansa smiled.
‘You’re so clever sometimes. It’s ridiculous.’
Arya threw a mock punch, a little awkwardly.
‘Sometimes?’
Sansa grinned all the harder, but said nothing. The pair of them continued to stand as the silence reformed around them, this time coloured with their own lost thoughts. Arya finished her sandwich, and felt the pull to leave tug at her a little harder now. Small steps, she reminded herself. Small steps.
They parted ways at the front door, with Sansa insisting on wrapping her arms around her stiff limbs in something like a hug, and promises that she would come again, and soon. The morning air felt clean as she walked the stony path back down towards the town, tangling the smells of wood and snow in to her hair. It felt like ice in her lungs. Small steps, she said again, with each sturdy footfall. Small steps.

Chapter Text

It was still early, and the frost hadn't melted. It made a pleasing crunch under foot as she re-trod her steps back across the yard, her heart fluttering hard in her ribcage. Nervous, maybe, although she had no reason to be. She knew what was waiting for her back in that room, and the smell of him was still all across her like an ink stain. With luck, he would still be asleep and she could weave her way back in beside him as though she had never left.

So maybe that’s why she was nervous. Sandor was an early riser, and she was not looking to explain herself. It had all happened so fast, one moment awake and the next creeping in the kitchen door, she had almost no recollection about the steps in between. If Arya had not been there waiting for her, she would have continued on her way to who knows where. If she cared to examine it a little more, she would have been forced to admit that one of the feelings she had experienced, waking up in the hollow of his shoulder, was fear. Beside him, she couldn't help but feel small. And conspicuously naked. It had made her feel uncomfortably vulnerable, now that the red haze of her previous hunger had subsided. And fear too that he would wake, and turn those grey stone eyes towards her and once again lock her out, become the unknowable, the unreachable. Fear too perhaps that she would hate any other outcome just as much.

She walked slowly, taking her time between the broken down farm machinery that still littered the yard, unconsciously laying her hand across it as she went, cold metal sharp under her fingertips. The battered red carcass of a tractor made her linger, the still-bright rust suddenly seeming unnatural against the grey white vista of the yard. It was stripped now of almost anything usable, just a shell that couldn't be smelted down; the fields here had not needed ploughing for quite some time. She remembered though, when it did work. Harry had brought it up from the town with a lot of high hopes about churning up the cold ground and replanting again, and she had watched with a kind smile as he had tried but ultimately failed. She stopped, still with her hand on the metal. There were a lot of ghosts in Winterfell, but Harry was always conspicuous in his absence. It was odd really, given that he had died here, with his blood seeped in to the ground; he was tied to this place more than most of the others who still lingered. But yet Sansa wasn't haunted by him, and had never been. He came to her in moments like this, when she remembered something soft or happy, when she drew on the strength he had given her, not rising like a sad spectre out of the shadows. Maybe because she had no regrets. She had been wretched to have lost him, that was true, which even now was still a blunt and unyielding kind of sadness. But that had not been her fault, and regret only came with things not done. She had loved Harry. She had been loved by him. There had been no fault in that.

And now all of a sudden, she felt guilt. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupid to have thought about him now, of all times. She wretched her hand away from the tractor as if it suddenly burned, and then felt guilty for whole new set of reasons. She kicked the earth, hard. Time was passing now and any chance of her slipping quietly back in to Sandor’s bed was fading too. Any second he’d be awake, and could find her standing in the cold, thinking about her dead husband. What a mess.

A quiet little voice found her then, or rather a voice and a memory. Her own voice in fact, and the memory of a smell. Soap, and underneath it, something like ashes. Torn up leaves, wood turning rotten, the earth and all its dirt. Sweat. Sweet and fresh, tinged with all the colour of the living. And her voice, soft and low, reminding her that this was what she wanted; of the warm, sharp heat that stabbed in her belly.

As she opened the door, she was fully expecting to find him awake. As she crept towards the bed, she kept her body tense and ready, prepared for whatever she found. But the figure under the blankets was just as she had left him, one arm sprawled in to the empty side of the bed where she had been only a short while before. His breathing was heavy and slightly laboured; a fact she remembered noticing just before she fell asleep. It was kind of comforting in its irregularity. Quietly, she undressed again, although could not quite bring herself to return completely naked. Underwear still on, she eased herself carefully back under the covers, trying to keep her cold limbs away from him as best she could. But the warmth from him was so inviting, she felt it melt in to her bones almost at once and a slow happy smile began to spread across her lips. Feeling satisfied, she allowed herself to relax a little, but in her doing so, a cold foot found its way to his shin and she felt him jerk awake with a gasp.

He looked different, half awake. She took the opportunity to study his face while he was still only somewhat aware, to see what she found. Confusion mainly, and then a little of doubt, and a hint perhaps of fear. Or maybe that was just her projection.

She smiled.

‘Good morning.’

He rested his head back on the pillow, and she could feel the tension now in the arm that she lay upon. He wanted to move it but was resisting.

‘Hello.’

They lay in silence for a moment or two more, and she was impressed that he didn’t break her gaze.

‘Sorry I woke you.’

He grunted a denial.

‘You been up long?’

‘No, not really.’

His eyes left her then, and she saw them fall on the bra strap across her shoulder.

‘You been outside?’

She shook her head. She wasn’t really sure why she lied. Under the blankets, she felt his leg brush against hers and she knew she was still revealingly cold. When he looked back up, it was clear he’d found her out.

‘I just went to get some breakfast.’

He moved his arm then, pulling away from her to lean against it, propping his head up on one whilst the other came across his chest.

‘It’s ok. Thought you would have left if I’m honest.’

She could have snapped at him, for being so defeatist, but had to remind herself that she had indeed intended to bolt. Be kind to him she told herself.

‘I thought about it.’ It was as close to the truth as she felt like being. His eyes fell away then, and if he could have recoiled further, he would have done. He opened his mouth to say something, but it couldn’t quite come out. Instead, he let the silence curl around him again, and it would have remained had she not reached for his hand, finally giving him his voice.  

‘Look, I’m sorry…. I didn’t…..’

‘Shhhh’

She would not have him apologise for anything. It felt cheap. It felt like they had made a mistake and she wasn’t prepared to deal with his remorse on top of all that she was feeling. Turning on her side, she pulled herself up close to him, hands still entwined. If he tried to move again, he would have fallen off the bed, and so he had to bare her closeness, her nose inches away from his.

‘I thought about it, and then I came back’ she said quietly. ‘And if you could right now, I bet you wouldn’t mind running too. So let’s make a deal to not listen to our instincts right now and just stick with this, ok?’

She pushed her nose gently against his, before slipping downwards to nuzzle her face between his and the pillow, in to the dark. Above her, she could feel his breath crossing her ear; still heavy, still slightly laboured, now a little quicker. In the dark hallow of his throat, she pressed her lips against his collar bone and inhaled that smell again. Almost as once, his hand was in her hair, holding her. Almost at once, he was moving his mouth down to where hers lay, to cover it with a kiss of his own. Not hungry this time, or violent. There were teeth there, she could feel them, but they did not bite. She opened for him, allowing his tongue to press against the roof of her mouth, drawing a moan from her throat. She pressed her mouth against him, untangling her hand from his to wrap it back up in his hair. In to the space now between them, she drew in her body, to push it up against him. Still though, he remained gentle, his hands never travelling further than her shoulder. When he drew away, his fingers rested on the side of her throat, his thumb just on her jawline.

‘I don’t want to leave this bed, ever.’

She grinned, and curled her fingers deeper in to this hair. It was turning grey at the temples. She liked it.

‘I don’t think we can do that.’

He sighed, and closed his eyes.

‘I know. I just worry that if I do, this will all be over.’

She kissed him again, from the scars beside his mouth, to the still closed eye-lids, and all the space besides, covering his stupid, stupid face with her lips until she thought he might get message. He began to laugh, batting her away, and so she laughed too, until he wrapped his arm around her and pulled her tight in to his chest.

‘I don’t know how to do this’ he said quietly.

She wrapped her arm around him too, although it didn’t quite reach all the way. Still, she hugged him back as tight as she could.

‘I don’t either.’

‘I can’t hurt you. If I think I will, I’ll leave. I’m telling you right now. No matter what you say, I’ll be gone. Won’t matter. I won’t be that person.’

She believed him, wholeheartedly. It was infuriating and endearing in almost equal measure.