Sansa knew the day was going to be problematic when Joffrey told his hulking, scarred shadow to sit on the other side of her, effectively trapping her between them.
"Wouldn't you be more secure if you were flanked by us?" Sansa said, trying one last-ditch effort not to be hemmed in on both sides. "Your safety—" here, she had to swallow past the lump of loathing in her throat to continue the lie "—Is important enough to merit a bodyguard, so you should use me on the other side, as another barrier."
The truth was that Joffrey Baratheon was so obnoxious, so prone to shooting off his mouth, and assaulted with such frequency that his doting mama had decided to hire a personal shield to protect her precious boy from the unfair persecutions others would persist to visit upon his frail body.
In truth, Joffrey was wiry and resilient, like a tough piece of jerky you just can't pulverize enough to swallow. However, even his caliber of toughness could not overcome a group effort of drunken frat boys, or a pair of rednecks with shotguns and hunting knives, or a gang of homeboys who didn't take kindly to being reminded of how their ancestors had come to emigrate to the United States.
It was when that last bunch had almost shot Joffrey in a well-deserved drive-by that Cersei had put her foot down and insisted that her husband, Robert, cough up the dough to hire a bodyguard.
"Too expensive," Robert had grunted for the fourth time, heartily sick of hearing it.
"Don't you care about the safety of your son?" she'd whined.
Robert had serious doubts as to the paternity of 'his' son, and as he'd come to realize certain defects of character in the boy, was kind of wondering if perhaps the homeboys didn't have a valid point. It was just a matter of time before the kid ended up messing with the wrong people and really did get himself fucked up.
On the other hand, Cersei's whining was getting on his nerves.
"Fine," he said at last. "He can have a bodyguard. Singular. And I'm not paying for an expensive one."
Cersei had called in some debts, sent a few people on the guilt-trips of a lifetime, reminded a few others of their obligations to the Lannisters, and ended up with the second son of the Clegane family: a humongous fellow with a hideously scarred face and even worse personality. He was tough as nails, though, could fight like a demon, and would work for room, board, and a modest stipend.
Cersei had found her man.
She hadn't realized, however, that Sandor Clegane had no seeming understanding of the concepts of deference or respect, not even for his employer. Perhaps especially for his employer. What he did have, however, were opinions— firm ones, usually uncomplimentary, and he wasn't shy about sharing them.
It had taken all of 13 minutes before Joffrey was storming into his mother's sitting room to complain that his new bodyguard had insulted him. Specifically, the still-swollen and purple-bruised black eye and broken wrist he'd enjoyed as a result of taunting the aforementioned homeboys. Joffrey was gibbering in rage, but Cersei had been able to make out something about Clegane mocking him for 'his mouth writing checks his scrawny ass can't cash".
It had taken all of Cersei's coddling persuasion, and the imminent arrival of his promised bride— one Sansa Stark, scion of the ancient family from Winterfell up North— to calm him down and accept his new reality: he now had a burly, irreverent bodyguard to keep him from a well-deserved premature death.
That had been in March. In late May, the fair Sansa had arrived with stars in her eyes to be affianced by arrangement as a binding force in the alliance between the troubled Baratheon mega-corporation and the more modest but also more stable Stark holdings. The idea of bringing about such a connection through the force of love and marriage had Sansa enthralled, raised as she had been to be a sheltered, naive, and wholly unworldly creature in many ways.
'Unworldly' as in 'untutored in the ugliness of reality', but also in the way she seemed to float through life, gazing at things that weren't quite there, or perhaps were there only to those with eyes to see them. One did not descend from a family steeped in a thousand years of legends of werewolves and greenseers without becoming a bit fey, after all.
In short, Sansa was entirely unprepared and particularly ill-suited for the brutal ambition and naked greed of the Lannister clan. Despite the wolfy lore of the Starks, she was a lamb in the midst of all those lions, and in the month she'd passed with them, she'd gone from a laughing, glowing sprite of a girl to something faded, drooping, sad, and wilted.
Sensing they were losing their much-needed link to the Starks' rejuvenating investments, yet so oblivious they couldn't figure out that their heinous personalities were the reason why, the Lannisters had closed ranks. Sansa was forbidden use of her phone and permitted calls and emails only while supervised, Cersei and Joffrey looming to ensure her compliance in sharing only favorable details about her stay in South Carolina to her family back home in Ontario.
By July, she'd basically become an abductee at her hosts' seaside manse in Charleston. She had another month to go before the summer was over, and she was starting to doubt she'd be allowed to leave. And she desperately wanted to leave. Robert was literally always drunk, Cersei was literally always catty, and Joffrey was literally, consistently, endlessly cruel.
He'd started out impolite, progressed to mean, and settled into a steady routine of cold malice that he occasionally supplemented with fiery, unhinged brutality. He never struck or gripped her where the marks could be seen outside of Sansa's clothing, but she knew it was just a matter of time before he gave up on keeping her presentable and just kept her as a prisoner in the house so he could indulge in full-blown depravity without repercussions.
Trying to find ways to escape had become her favorite pastime, but so far, all had come to naught. One curious thing had developed, however…
Joffrey's bodyguard, the monumental Sandor Clegane, whom Joffrey called Hound or Dog, would in bizarre, oblique, usually rude ways point out to Sansa any chinks he'd noticed in the Lannisters' security. His comments always sounded as if he were mocking the security team's ability to protect their employers, like he were bragging how much better he'd be able to do.
But Sansa— while being a bit fluffy in her interests and perhaps not the most observant when it came to human nature— was not a stupid girl, and she came to see and understand that he was pointing out ways of escape.
And for that, a little crack had formed in the shell she'd built around the tender little muscle beating in her chest, the shell she needed to protect herself from the virulence of the Lannisters, the apathy of Robert Baratheon, and her own desperate loneliness.
Each time he found her in whatever corner of the manse she'd hidden herself for a few blessed moments away from Joffrey or Cersei— and he found her every damned time; had he microchipped her, like a cat with a propensity for running away?— to sneer about another tragic lapse in Lannister security, the crack lengthened and widened a little more. She began to notice little things about him, little things that would pull at her.
Sometimes, as when she realized this big, tough man was sensitive enough about his appearance to try and hide it as best he could with his long hair, it made her heart hurt on his behalf. Other times, when Joffrey would call him Hound or refer to him as a dog, and he'd laugh that loud braying laugh that seemed so callous and crude, she heard the bruised dignity behind it.
Joffrey only hit her when Sandor wasn't there.
He was the only thing to come between Joffrey's rage and Sansa's vulnerable body. A misspoken comment on her part, or just her being a convenient target for Joffrey's fury, and her 'loving' fiancé would fly at her like a man possessed, only to be blocked by Sandor. He simply placed himself between his employer and his employer's victim, an impassive, impassible bulwark absorbing the blow like it was nothing.
Sandor wouldn't say a word, just stare coldly down at Joffrey, but his contempt was clear: only bullies prey on the vulnerable. And real men aren't bullies.
Opportunities to hurt Sansa weren't frequent, but Joffrey took full advantage when he could. And there was no way Sandor could keep him from being vicious to her with his words, short of muzzling him, so Joffrey's invective became scathing, and ceaseless, and ever-creative in how he could humiliate and shame her.
There was the time he took her to the fanciest restaurant in town, berated her because her choice of meal didn't 'go' with the wine he had selected, and left her there to pay the extortionate bill. Which Sansa couldn't pay, because they didn't allow her to have any money.
(Sandor had silently handed over a credit card and stood there, silent and still as an Easter Island head, until the waiter returned it and they could leave.)
Then there was the time they'd all gone to a dance club and, finding Sansa's dress too prim because the hem came to her knees and the neckline only plunged to her cleavage and not her waist, he'd ripped the entire thing down the front.
(Sandor had removed the Oxford shirt he wore over his t-shirt and handed it to her. With the belt salvaged from her ruined frock, it actually looked like a rather chic shirt-dress, better than the one she'd been wearing, so Joffrey sent her home— with Sandor— in a rage that his meanness had been thwarted.)
And now they had gone out, again, and Sansa just knew that some horrible thing was going to happen for Joffrey's amusement and her public humiliation. It was the World Series, the year's major league baseball event that would be highly televised. Sansa was trembling with apprehension to think of what Joffrey might have in mind.
On the other hand, perhaps it would be witnessed by someone in her family, who would come rescue her? Hope sprung eternal.
Regardless, she resigned herself to an afternoon of boredom interspersed with misery, and followed Joffrey down the stadium steps to their prime seats right behind the dugout. Sandor was a solid wall of protection behind her, and she knew he was the reason she wasn't being jostled by the crowd.
"God, hurry up," snarled Joffrey over his shoulder at Sansa when she fell behind a single step, instead of being pressed right up against him as he preferred. "Are you not even able to walk?"
Sansa sighed and hurried her pace. When they reached their row, she stood back, thinking Sandor would go first, then Joffrey, then herself, so her fiancé was safely sandwiched between them, but no.
Joffrey hip-checked her aside to go first, his hand a manacle around her wrist as he dragged her behind him, leaving Sandor to bring up the rear. She opened her mouth to comment on the arrangement but Joffrey sliced her a glare so cold it froze the words in her throat.
There went her slim chance at fleeing, but then maybe the person seated on the far side of Joffrey would take exception to him and throw a punch? It had happened before, according to Sandor, and the way Joffrey's personality kept getting worse, it was a strong possibility. Feeling cheered by the prospect, Sansa settled back into her seat and looked around the stadium, slowly aware that she was a little squished on her left side due to Sandor's sheer size overflowing into her personal space.
It didn't bother her, really— it was a chilly October afternoon, though sunny and bright, and Joffrey hadn't let her bring a blanket to put over her legs. Sandor was like a living furnace, so she slumped a little to the left and let herself absorb his heat.
Being one of the later series games, the excitement in the stadium was palpable, and it appeared that they three were the only people in the place who weren't in raptures to be there. Sansa knew Sandor preferred rugby and football, and she herself was more of a hockey fan, being Northern. Joffrey didn't care about a sport unless injuries were a frequent occurrence, like in boxing and mixed martial arts, so he paid zero attention to any of it, preferring to text furiously into his phone, its glow lighting his face from below like some creature spawned of hellfire.
Not too far off the mark, Sansa thought uncharitably, and turned to whisper to Sandor, "These tickets must have cost a fortune."
He grunted an affirmative. "A few thousand each."
Given that Baratheon Enterprises was hemorrhaging money like a gutted wildebeest, it seemed a less-than-prudent expense that only made Sansa shiver harder.
"He must have something truly awful planned," she murmured, more to herself than to Sandor, and almost missed the glance of surprise and, maybe, regret he shot her.
Inning after inning, Sansa sat there, edging closer and closer to Sandor as she got colder and colder, both as temperatures dropped and she became more and more anxious as to what Joffrey had planned. She refused all offers of food that Sandor made when the vendors came by (Joffrey couldn't care less if she ate or not) out of fear she'd yarf from excess nerves. By the time Joffrey's plan came to fruition, she was a wreck.
It happened during the seventh inning stretch. Joffrey remained seated, but Sansa was more than happy to stand and move around and hop a little to get her blood flowing. Beside her, Sandor was a tall, silent sentinel of protection who deigned to have a little stretch, himself.
If his shirt rode up, as he reached his arms over his head, and exposed a flat, muscled, hairy belly, well, it was just natural for a red-blooded heterosexual woman to notice, right? And to stare? And to curl her fingers tightly in her palms so that she didn't make the gigantic mistake of touching it? Because Sansa really, really, wanted to stroke her fingertips over that rippling plane of masculine pulchritude.
Averting her gaze, she sat back down and stared, unseeing, out at the baseball diamond, empty for the next short while until the eight inning began. Overhead, the jumbo-tron began flashing with a warning that it would be selecting another 'kiss cam' couple. It had been doing it periodically all night, and each time, Sansa had felt a pang of self-pity that all those nice couples had each other to enjoy for a cute clinch, and she had… Joffrey.
She sighed, and then she gasped, because the jumbo-tron camera had settled on her.
"Oh, god," she breathed, eyes wide and horrified. She glanced at Joffrey. He darted a glance back, his wormy lips curling in a sly grin as he kept his focus on his phone and steadfastly ignored her.
Ah. This, then was to be her punishment for the night: publicly rejected and embarrassed in front of 50,000 people at the stadium, and tens of millions watching on television at home.
The moment stretched out, long and thin like a trickle of honey, but nowhere near as sweet. Why wasn't the camera focusing elsewhere? Why was it still on her? The seconds ticked by, and Sansa became more and more miserable as everyone in their section turned and craned their necks to peer at her.
"Little shit paid someone to keep that fucking thing on you like this," rumbled Sandor from beside her, but he sounded surprised, like he was just realizing it, not as if he'd been privy to the plan all along.
He also sounded mad, and Sansa realized that it was because a kiss cam gave a person two choices of kissing partner: one on each side. If Sansa were being ignored by the man on her right, her only other option was the man on her left, in this case Sandor, and Joffrey clearly thought Sansa would be so horrified to kiss the bodyguard that she'd reject him in front of all these witnesses.
The cruelty of it, for both her and Sandor, was breathtaking, and it cleared away the haze of misery in her head, leaving only a fine glow of angry determination. With a last fulminating glare at Joffrey, Sansa sat forward in her seat, scooched sideways, and faced Sandor.
He pulled his eyes from the jumbo-tron to look at her, the confused crease between his eyes melting away as he took in the expression on her face.
"Ah," he began, "you don't have to—"
She put her hands on his bearded cheeks and pulled in him, stopping his words with a kiss.
Sansa had never kissed a bearded man on the lips before. It was… good, warm and fuzzy and ticklish. Sandor's lips were quite nice, she decided, and released his face to sit back, having made her point, but Sandor's ham-sized hand came up to cup the back of her head, holding her in place.
Her eyes flew wide in shock.
"If you're gonna kiss me," he rasped against her mouth, "do it right."
It sounded like… a challenge.
Well, shots fired, then.
Sansa put her hands on his cheeks again, and set about kissing the daylights out of Sandor. He wanted a proper kiss? She'd kiss him until tiny birds tweeted madly in circles around his head.
Or so she thought, going into the kiss.
It… didn't quite end up that way, because it seemed like Sandor had taken it as a challenge, as well.
Their mouths clashed, their lips parted, their tongues slid and twined. A persistent sensation of what Sansa eventually came to recognize as desire stabbed her in the solar plexus until she was gasping into the kiss, heat flooding her limbs and pooling between her legs, bringing the tips of her breasts into full, aching prominence.
Sandor tore himself away after what seemed like a year or two. "What?" he barked over his shoulder at someone behind him.
A stadium attendant stood there looking profoundly uncomfortable. Behind him were two burly security guards, one muttering into his walkie-talkie something that sounded like "…huge son of a bitch, we're gonna need more guards…"
"Sir, ma'am, we're going to have to ask you to leave the stadium. We can't have you doing this. There are kids here."
Sansa blinked the lust from her vision and looked around to find that most of the stadium was watching them. And that she'd somehow found her way onto Sandor's lap, and his hand was between her legs, and she had slipped her hand under his shirt to caress those bulging muscles she'd spied earlier.
On the other side of Sansa's now-empty seat, Joffrey was staring at them with a combination of pole-axed astonishment and blind, barbaric fury.
Sandor looked inclined to resist. Sansa gulped in another breath and murmured into his ear, "If we leave now, we can go finish this somewhere else."
His gaze whipped from where he was visually dismembering the security guards to meet hers. He couldn't have looked more shocked if she'd pulled off all her clothes and started singing, "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts".
Then he grinned. It was just a faint little grin, but it was dirty, and it had secret things clenching deep within Sansa.
So he disentangled his hand from her thighs, scooped her into his arms, and stood up, seemingly without effort, as if carrying a five-foot-ten woman around was NBD. With a supremely bland expression of mild contempt on his face, Sandor didn't even deign to glance at Joffrey as he began to mount the steps to leave the stadium.
As soon as they entered the outer ring, however, and were finally out of the public eye and the damned kiss-cam, he set her on her feet.
"Joffrey will be after us soon," Sandor told her, "so if you want to get away from him and the rest, we'd better make a break for it."
Sansa gasped. "You'll… you'll help me?"
"Run now, explanations later," was all he said, and grabbed her hand to begin jogging toward the exit sign closest to where they'd parked the car.
They ran and ran and ran. Once, Sansa thought she heard Joffrey screeching her name, but her pulse was pounding so loudly in her head, there was no way to tell for sure.
Finally, they reached the car. She'd barely gotten her seatbelt fastened before Sandor was peeling out of the parking spot, aiming the car like a rifle toward the gate.
"Where to?" she asked breathlessly once they were safely hurtling down the highway.
He dug his phone from his pocket and tossed it to her. "Call your family. We're going to need their help."
Sansa called the first number she could remember: that of her sister, Arya.
"What the fucking fuck, Sansa?" Arya squawked down the line. Sansa thought she sounded very much like a cawing bird. "We all saw you on the television. Who were you soul-kissing? That wasn't Joffrey."
"No, that wasn't Joffrey, thank god," Sansa replied, her voice shaky. "I need to talk to Dad. It's important. We—" she shot a glance toward where Sandor was peering straight ahead at the road— "I've escaped from the Lannisters. Sandor helped me."
"Escaped?" Arya sounded nonplussed. "I knew Joffrey was an asshole, but was he that bad?"
"Worse." Sansa's laugh was humorless, bitter. "There'll be time for the whole story later. For now, I need to talk to Dad."
Ned was calm and controlled and very, very angry. "Give me ten minutes," he said, "and I'll call you back."
Ten minutes later, Ned rang to tell them that he'd arranged hotel rooms for them for that night in Virginia, as well as a rental car they could switch to, and opened an account in a bank that had a small branch in the hotel so they could have some cash on hand.
"Robb and Jon are on their way down to meet you," he then said. "Coordinate with them where you can meet. It'll probably be somewhere in Pennsylvania, tomorrow afternoon. You can come the rest of the way home with them."
"Oh, but—" Sansa paused, looking over at Sandor. She didn't want to part from him, but how could she assume he'd want to leave his life in the South to come North with her? There was nothing between them except for some kindnesses on his part, and the most amazing kiss to ever occur since the beginning of time.
Not exactly what one could base a relationship on.
"Yes, okay," she agreed. "We'll keep in touch so you know we're alright."
Then she shared her father's plan with Sandor. His hands gripped the steering wheel until it creaked, but he said nothing, seeming displeased. Sansa wasn't sure about what, however, so she kept quiet and gazed out the window at the blurry orange glow of the streetlights as they drove past.
Mile after mile flew by. They left South Carolina and were halfway to Virginia before whatever Sandor had been stewing over exploded from him.
"So you're just going to leave me in Pennsylvania?" he demanded. "Thanks for kissing me until we almost fuck in the middle of the goddamned World Series, and helping you escape the craziest family in America, but I'm done with you now so you can go to hell?"
Sansa whipped around to stare at him in shock. "What? No! That's not at all—"
She squinted to study him in the dark interior of the car. There was a set to his jaw that spoke of grinding teeth and barely-banked rage.
"I'm not. Done with you. Not unless you want me to be," she began, her voice small, since she was feeling unsure and sort of like she was on a tight wire, desperately hoping not to fall. "You're… you're a good man. The only good thing to happen to me this entire summer. I want you to stay with me. But I couldn't assume you'd just leave everything in South Carolina to join me up there. It's another country, and very different from where you're from, and your family is—"
"My family is trash, through and through," Sandor ground out. "They pretty much sold me to the Lannisters to pay off a debt they owed— my service as a bodyguard in return for wiping out a loan. And now that bridge is burned, so if you won't… won't take me in—" he spat the words, clearly hating sounding like a homeless stray— "I'll have to find somewhere else."
Sansa was horrified but unsurprised. Everything the Lannisters touched, they ruined. "We won't take you in," she said, "but we'll ask you to join us." She never met a man who more needed a family, a pack, than this one.
Sandor's shoulders relaxed fractionally. He licked his lips, seeming the slightest bit nervous. "You promise?"
What a dear man. Sansa unbuckled her seat belt and scooted right up against his side, thankful for the big bench seat the luxury car boasted. Instinctively, his arm came up, and she nestled herself under it, sighing happily as its warmth wrapped around her.
"I promise," she replied against the firm slab of his pectoral, rubbing her cheek on the soft flannel of his shirt. "I promise, Sandor."