Disclaimer: I don't own "Game of Thrones." Everything belongs to whoever owns them, my wishful thinking aside.
Authors Note #1: I wanted to explore Sandor's thoughts about Sansa in 1x10 during the scene where Joffrey is showing her the severed head of her father. After Sansa nearly pushed him right off the wooden gang-plank before Sandor stepped in and daubed at her bloodied lip with a handkerchief. Spoilers up to 8x01. This is essentially Sandor looking back on that moment and how it shaped everything that came afterwards.
Warnings: missing scene, drama, angst, could be considered pre-relationship, romance, pining, Sandor catches feelings and he has no idea what to do about it.
Viridity
"Here, girl."
She came into his life delicately, quietly, violently and very much without his say so. He wasn't looking for her, but there she'd been all the same. Waiting for him to prove himself wrong. Watching him with her little lady eyes. Seeing something he wasn't. Even when he'd tried to make her see him for what he was. A killer and nothing more.
Not like her gentle, gilded knights with their bleeding good intentions and pretty lies. Not even like her father, who played the role of the good man despite the blood he was drenched in. Clean armor didn't mean shit, as far as he was concerned. It was just proof you had to wash it regularly to cover your sins. To keep up the lie.
And that wasn't him.
He let his armor bleed.
He let it show it's wear.
He let the world see the truth.
His truth.
Gods know the poncy knights wouldn't.
At the time, he hadn't understood what made him shield her on the battlements. Where the boiled head of Lord fucking Stark had been arranged on a pike for all to see. He still didn't. And he wasn't ready to either. Thinking about it as much as he had was enough to send him drowning in a wine skin. Keen to forget every bleedin' thing other than all his raw edges slowly going numb.
He'd been pissed at himself for days afterwards. By all rights he should have had her hide for the murder that'd been burning in the back of her eyes. Looking at Joffrey like she was finally seeing him for the twisted, whimpering cunt he was. Not the drivel about princes and kings she'd been fed from the cradle. If Joffrey had seen what he had, her pretty head would have been right next to her fathers.
But the runt hadn't seen it.
He'd made sure of it.
The ugly truth was, he'd seen himself on her face and he hadn't liked the reflection. Not on a girl's face. Seeing the moment before it could happen as the bird's pink skirts rippled in the wind. Highlighting delicate, washed-out freckles as she took a step forward, then another. Eyes bright, dead and bloodshot as a rivulet of blood smudged down from her mouth.
She would have pushed him clear off the ramparts and gone down with him. Ending it. For revenge. For her father. For her family. For the North. For the death of every happy dream some cursed septa had filled her head with over the years.
He knew the taste of that kind of rage.
It had a bitter tart that he recognized all too well.
He'd tended to it carefully over the years, keeping the feeling just below the surface. Still snarling, seething, angry and alive- so long as it suited his purposes. Coveting his brother's death as a reward for getting through one day and the next.
Her rage had been raw, new and dangerous.
A siren song of the worst bleedin' kind.
Because it was the kind of rage that burned white-hot only in the moment and died to coals in the next. The sort of rage only grief can muster. Gods know she had reason for it. Even if he couldn't let her go through with it.
Fucking pity, really.
He quite liked the idea of the mewling cub broken across the flagstones.
He just didn't want the price to be her.
Looking back on it, that'd been the lynch pin to his demise right there.
It had been so subtle he hadn't figured it out until the bitch of fucking Tarth laid him out, dying in the moors. Not long after the she-pup robbed him blind and left him to rot. He'd started his fall for a fucking woman. A girl-child with fire in her hair. And a gods damned lady at that.
The Gods really did have a sense of humor.
Especially with his face.
Still, it had been that moment on the battlements where he knew he'd underestimated the little thing.
Confident that if she survived, she'd probably grow up to be a formidable woman someday.
And he'd tried…not well, but in his own way, to help that happen.
He was riding towards Winterfell, alongside the Stark bastard and more men than they could properly feed in this godsforsaken white waste when he finally admitted it to himself. Able to own the fact, with remarkably little shame, that he'd been bloody well lost from that day forward.
"Save yourself some pain, girl. Give him what he wants. …You'll be needing that again."
A/N: Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think. – This story is now complete.
Reference:
- viridity: innocence