Everyone knew only good people, the best people, were able to shift, that the gods looked within each person and saw the true quality of their hearts and blessed only the finest of them with such a sacred ability.

This 'goodness clause' gave cause for resentment, sometimes— Sansa's mother had never shifted into one of the merfolk the Tully's were known to become, yet the bastard she resented so had become a wolf before his tenth birthday. Catelyn took it as a personal insult that the gods would consider a mere child more deserving of Their gift than she, and sniffed that a person's humanity was more important, anyway.

Ned dared not suggest that her capacity for such resentment and disdain might be the reason the gods denied it to her.

Thus first Robb, then Jon, and then Arya had been granted the Change. All were delighted.

Theon's limbs made not a single twitch toward becoming tentacles in all the years he lived with the Starks. Laughing, he declared himself relieved about that, since Winterfell was nowhere near the open sea, and he didn't fancy having to boil himself into a weak soup in the hot pools to stay alive, but there was a glint in his eyes that said he was not as jolly about it as he seemed.

Sansa tried her hardest to reject the wolf she feared was within her, truly she did. She imitated her mother in shunning Jon, she followed her septa's lead in berating Arya's wild ways, she scolded Bran for his reckless climbing and Rickon for being half-wolf even when fully in human form. She nitpicked flaws in the servants' performance, was waspish to any who tried to befriend her, and in general was as unkind as she could be, within the limits of the stringent politeness drilled into her from infancy.

It didn't work.

Apparently, the gods saw past her charades and found her worthy, because the following month after she flowered, the week she expected blood once more, she awoke one morning to find that, sometime during the night, she had become a wolf instead.

Her balance was both off and more secure at the same time. It was bizarre for her face to be so close to the ground. She was horrified that her bottom was bent over and so far behind her and exposed. She could smell everything. Which was far from a blessing, as most things seemed to smell bad. Interesting, but bad.

Panicked, she tried to go her parents, but the door was shut and locked and she could not open it with just four paws and a long snout of sharp teeth. She began howling in despair, and soon their footsteps thudded close.

Ned and Catelyn fell to their knees to hold her, when they opened the door and found her there. She was a whimpering bundle of fur until, with a rolling shiver, she was a sobbing naked girl.

"I'm sorry, Mother," she wept over and over, "I tried so hard, I'm sorry."

Catelyn met her husband's gaze over their daughter's huddled form as he tugged a blanket from the bed to wrap around Sansa.

"I know you w-wanted me to be a lady, and proper, and I tried so hard not to let this happen…"

Ned tugged her into his arms, cradling her as he had when she was an infant.

What's that about? his drawn-together brows asked.

I don't know, Catelyn's widened eyes replied.

"But now it's all ruined, and—"

"How it is ruined, lemoncake, to be a wolf like your brothers and sister and father?" Ned interrupted, but gently. "Are you ashamed of our family?"

"No!" Sansa protested, face tear-stained as she lifted it to him. "But I see how how disgusted Mother is about Jon, how she thinks Arya should be less wild, and—"

Catelyn shut her eyes, in comprehension and sorrow. "Sansa, I am not disgusted with Jon." Her lips compressed. "Not about being a wolf. And Arya should be less wild. But those things have nothing to do the Change. It is only during the Change, and a day after, that a person is any different from usual. You can still be as proper a lady as you like, except for those few occasions when you… aren't."

They sat there, on the cold stone floor, in silence while Sansa absorbed this new information and calmed.

"I think," said Ned, "that you should get to know other shifters, as well. Not just our family."

The problem was that there were none at all near to Winterfell. The closest were the Mormont bears, and the idea of spending time on that wind-scoured island with those fierce woman, who positively reveled in their primitive sides, made Sansa shudder. Ned and Catelyn made inquiries with other families, however, and waited for replies.

Meanwhile, Sansa was loathing every moment of this new aspect of her life. It was all so… uncouth, transforming into a beast, with one's muscles and bones contorting until one was an entire other being, snapping and slavering.

The nudity made it all the more embarrassing, happening as it did during high emotional moments. The time that Robb had burst into a huge gray wolf and back again in the middle of dinner because the serving maid's bubbies were almost entirely on display was still remarked upon, years later, to his deep chagrin.

She knew that was stupid; that, as a wolf, she had no private parts easily revealed, and a thick coat of fur to cover what was there, besides, but a decade of her septa's instructions and admonitions about modesty, about decency and purity, had left its indelible mark on her tender psyche.

Worse still was the way her senses sharpened, picking out details her human eyes could never have perceived. Feral appetites bloomed and grew, when the Change was upon her, and for a day afterward, to where she could not trust herself to eat in public for fear of humiliating herself with how she would gobble all the food in sight, heedless of crumbs as they smeared her cheeks or juices running down her chin.

And once her belly was full and Sansa couldn't take another bite, another, more worrisome urge reared its head, nose twitching at the dispersal of scent from the men around her, ears pricked in anticipation of a sound, any sound, that might indicate a potential companion for the rut.

It hadn't been so bad, at first, but she had been confused. Jory evoked in her not a whisper of fascination, though he was young and strong and comely, but one day her father had joined Sansa and her mother in the solar after an afternoon of sparring, the scents of leather and sweat heavy upon him, and Sansa almost fell from her chair at the way something clenched and held, deep inside her.

Then there was the time she'd found herself prowling after her half-brother, as he moved about Winterfell. A primal need to feel him sink into her, fangs and, and… male part… both, had curled in her belly, making her pant in shame and arousal until she forced the wolf back, racing to her chamber and crawling into her bed. She rucked up her skirts and slid her fingers through the drenched folds between her legs, the relief as immediate as it was shameful. Sansa stroked herself to a minor cataclysm, unable to stifle the howls as they poured from her throat.

That night, she had gone to her parents, requesting she visit her Aunt Lysa at the Aerie, or perhaps spend time at the Tully citadel of Riverrun. They did not ask why; her hesitant words and scalding blushing must have been enough of an explanation. They had had to send Robb and Theon and Jon away to the Umbers at Last Hearth just a few months after Arya's first Change, after all. Jon had only returned to prepare for his departure to The Wall to take the black.

Sansa's trip South had been announced the next day.

It was while she and her father had progressed toward Riverrun that Robert Baratheon's raven had arrived, commanding Ned's presence in King's Landing.

"Do you mind going there instead?" he asked Sansa.

"No," was her reply, for she sincerely felt anywhere was better than where her own family was a temptation to her. Robb and Theon could return to Winterfell, and Bran and Rickon could grow up without her fearing, once they came into their own wolves, that she might lose control with them.

She had an idle thought about how Arya handled her own… urges… before it was quickly banished. That was Arya's own burden, and Sansa would not pry into such a deeply private issue.

King's Landing was a shock, after the relative peace and spaciousness of Winterfell; noisy, dirty, smelly, nevertheless it was bright and colorful and warm. She was pleased at the delicate yet rigid rules of decorum, everything in her responding to the clarity and ease of interacting with others. There were no open verbal battles such as she was accustomed to with Arya, but as time went on, she realized there was also far less humor, and that an undercurrent of alternative meanings flowed beneath the surface of the conversations, laced with a faint green tinge of malice.

She had been shocked to learn that no one in the royal family shifted. Myrcella and Tommen were still too young, but the king and queen and eldest prince remained steadfastly human each and every day of each and every month. It said quite a bit about the gods' opinions of them, Sansa thought, though she'd never give voice to such a traitorous thought.

The court, in fact, had developed a custom that shifting was common, was trashy, was base and low. Those who changed were beasts, it was declared, and Sansa came to understand the sly whispers of those whose eyes followed her around the Red Keep. The flames of rumor were fed assiduously by Petyr Baelish, who Ned said had most desperately wanted to fly in mockingbird form while fostered with the Tully's in his youth, but not so much as a pin-feather had ever shifted on him.

Few of the court shifted, in fact, despite being from families of the blood. It was said that King Robert's brother Renly did, but not Stannis; that the Tyrell sons shifted, but not the daughter, father, or family matriarch. Interestingly, Prince Oberyn of the Martells was rumored to be able to shift some months, but not others; that he had gone years without shifting, in fact, before doing it every month for another set of years.

Sansa thought this meant that perhaps as people became better or worse, so too did their ability to shift come and go. She had always believed it a solid, permanent state, but clearly the gods wanted to monitor Their children on a daily basis instead of just peeking in at the verge of adulthood and making Their eternal determination.

Time went on. Sansa was careful to lock herself in her room during the full moons, so that there would be no embarrassing misunderstandings should she meet up with a male of the blood who might appeal to her wolf in a way she would regret. So, too, did she wish to avoid being observed by the court, and especially by Joffrey, who had become a creature all his own, something twisted and writhing with darkness even as his outward form remained handsome.

Disaster struck; King Robert was killed, and Joffrey took the throne. Ned was arrested, then sentenced to execution, and on that day Sansa's control over her emotions failed her in public for the first time. In her grief, her lamentations became howls, and her straining form shifted from that of pleading girl to desperate wolf, muscles bunching beneath fur to spring to her father's defense.

Ned, bent as he was over the block, was having trouble keeping his own form in its original shape as his wolf tried to break free.

"Hurry," he told Ilyn Payne, wanting to make it pass quickly, for Sansa's sake.

Her lapse into wolf-form made her the laughing-stock of the court, much to Joffrey's delight. He began to devise cunning new ways to try and make her shift due to high emotion, beginning with mere insults and humiliations and progressing steadily to physical abuses when the wolf within her refused to leap to his bait.

For the first time, Sansa embraced her wolf, held it close to her, drew strength and endurance from it. Something cold had solidified within her, some core of steel and fur and blood, some resolution that they would not find it so easy to break her.

This core served her well, month after month after month. The abuses grew more frequent, and more brutal, and still she remained stubbornly human. It became worse when Joffrey called off their engagement and instead announced his betrothal to Margaery Tyrell, the Tyrell who the gods did not see fit to grant a Change. Sansa thought it a match made in all seven heavens, and said as much with perfect honesty, to the misunderstanding delight of the happy new couple.

Her sole bulwark throughout all of this, her lone support, her only counselor, was also the most unexpected: the scarred giant in Joffrey's guard, in his cloak as big and white as one of the sails on the ships Sansa watched, longing to sweep out of the harbor forever on one.

Hound, they called him, though he had a name, and mocked him for having an animal's name without an animal's blood. He came to her in odd moments like a wizard in a play, to impart some pearl of wisdom before slipping off into the shadows off-stage. Sansa always came away from each interaction feeling confused, grateful, and worried, all at once.

Then he met her on the Serpentine, on the day after her full moon Change, and there was something in his scent and proximity that provoked the same reaction in her that she'd had to Jon, those many months ago. Clegane had been in the middle of disguising advice with his usual barrage of invective, insulting her manners and voice and everything else, when her senses, still animal-sharp from yesterday's shift, became aware that his fierceness was… not just mere irritation.

Sansa let her lips part, the better to roll in a breath over her tongue, to inhale him deeply.

Yessss, this beast was in season and make no mistake about it.

She eyed the thick vein at the side of his neck and thought of how much she'd like to sink her teeth into the flesh around it, just close and deep enough that he'd feel all the danger of her. She wouldn't hurt him, no. Just spice up his flavor with a hint of alarm, make him wonder the smallest bit if he'd come out of it alive.

Sansa roused from her thoughts to find that he had fallen silent, had finished his tirade and was staring at her with an expression that could have been surprise, or bemusement, or concern.

"Your eyes," he said, with admirable calm, "have gone yellow."

Sansa stepped closer, going one stair down so they were but a hand's thickness apart, so her face was directly level with that tempting, throbbing vein, and trailed her nose up his throat. He was salt and blood and musk and she wanted to back into him, feel his long body curve over her as he thrust in—

"Yours have gone brown," she replied, after straightening, and so they had, turning to the liquid darkness of rich earth.

Clegane went pale beneath his ruddy tan, and clamped those eyes shut, drawing in breath through his nose as fists the size of boulders clenched and opened, clenched and opened. When he opened his eyes again, they were their customary gray, with clear sclera, piercing and hostile as ever.

Without a word, he turned and left her there on the steps.

Sandor had noticed the girl right away, because of her looks. She was lovely, in all the ways he'd never realized he preferred. Apparently he'd been craving a woman with hair like the fire that had destroyed him, with gentle ways that reached some parched place inside him, with a hatred for injustice that rivaled his own, with strength that made him recognize a kindred spirit who had overcome, just as he had.

It hadn't happened at first, not when all he'd done was hissed a few words of advice into her ear about how to please Joffrey while passing on the stairs or in a corridor. But on the day Ser Dontos had cooked his own goose with his foolishness, when Sandor lied to the king for her— He! Had lied! To the king! For her!— to protect her from Joffrey's wrath, he noticed something was… amiss… on the evening of the next full moon.

He had been edgy all day, for one thing, in a way that even flagon after flagon of sour red could not blunt. And the wine had tasted different, did not satisfy him. The color appealed, but it was disappointing on his tongue, lacking the thickness and taste of copper he longed for.

His fingertips felt itchy. He hadn't known such a thing were possible, but there it was— he rubbed them and rubbed them against the coarse weave of his trousers, not realizing until almost too late that his hand had moved closer and closer to his groin until he was rubbing it directly. The itching in his fingertips ceased, but at what cost? Disgracing himself in a winesink? Even now, some of the patrons were eying him, uneasy, clearly hoping he wouldn't pull out his cock and have a public wank right in front of them.

Fucking hell.

He had pulled his cloak around himself and swept from the winesink, stomping back to the Keep at a punishing pace. Once in his quarters, he flung off his armor and clothing with as much speed as he could manage, then fell backward onto his bed, hands on his cock before his back hit the mattress.

One stroke, two, a third. His muscles locked as he let out a strangled outcry. He sincerely hoped it could not be heard beyond the thick stone walls and sturdy oaken door, because there would be no doubt as to its cause, and wouldn't that be rich, giving the other cunts in the Kingsguard more ammunition to taunt him.

As if his face weren't enough.

Also not enough was that single wank. Sandor fell headlong into a weary sleep, only to awaken a mere hour later, his skin sensitized against the prickly weave of his blanket everywhere it touched, building an excitement in his belly that rippled outward.

He was mortified, even as he wrapped his palm around himself again, that the old faded wool was the reason behind this sudden rebirth of arousal, but it just felt so good. And who was there to see, or know? He was alone, as ever, and gave himself permission to writhe against the blanket, just a little, enjoying the soft abrasion's tingle, feeling it all flow ever inward toward the center of his body, where one hand stroked and the other cupped and squeezed.

He came.

He slept.

He awoke, then stroked himself, and came again.

And again.

He was very grateful for the bottle of oil he kept in his room for sword-sharpening purposes. It served to whet a different sword, that night.

When the sun began to brighten the sky from pure black to something more bruise-like, Sandor was on the verge of a fifth climax in as many hours. Concern had blossomed into fear long ago, but he could no more stop what he was doing than he could empty all the seas with a soup-bowl.

As sensation began to overcome him once again, the Stark girl flashed before his mind's eye, lissome as a reed, pale and lovely, and that hair… he imagined it trailing over his body, imagined her wrapping it around his cock before she lowered her mouth to him, imagined the wet suction…

Breath shuddering through him like a bellows, he watched as his mind showed him an image of Sansa bending over the Serpentine's railing, a mare offering herself in rut to a stallion. The flesh at her center split open, gleaming the tender pink of a shell's interior. Sandor nosed at her, inhaling her musk before taking a taste, letting the salt of her paint his mouth with its flavor.

He saw Sansa swaying her hips with an impatient whine. She stared over her shoulder at him, wondering why he didn't take her. She had waited for him, hadn't she? She had waited so long, and been so good, but he wasn't—

And then he was, he was right there, the head of his cock finding the wet notch of her before pressing inward, his hands steady on her arse as she shifted, uneasy as a new-broken horse trying to find its balance. She was unsure, inexperienced, but he would guide her through. She would be safe with him.

Sansa looked back one last time, lids heavy, breath panting past lips reddened and wet. His hand, the surrogate for her body, flew along his shaft, tighter and tighter until finally the thread of tension within him snapped. He came and came and came, in heavy gouts that burned like drops of molten steel on his skin. Her scent, taste and touch faded slowly like ghosts, leaving him alone with nothing but the briny smell of his own release.

Sandor felt a bone-deep exhaustion. This time, when he slept, he did not awaken until a pounding on his door roused him abruptly.

"Hound!" shouted Boros, hammering with such enthusiasm at the oak that Sandor was sure his fist would leave impressions. "You've never been this late before! What a whore you must have used last night, she must have cost her weight in stags! Is there any gold left from your tourney winnings?"

His braying laughter, as he ambled off down the hall, pushed Sandor closer to cold-blooded murder than he'd ever been before.

"Go fuck yourself, you useless cunt!" he shouted back, heaving himself to his feet and toward the washbasin to go about the business of making himself as presentable as he could in the shortest possible time.

Washed, dressed, armored, he rushed to Joffrey's solar. After a few minutes of his liege's usual feeble attempts at cruel jibes, his lateness was forgotten and they went about their day as usual. Sandor had the usual copious opportunity to think as he stood, bored and uninvolved, behind the king. He spent it wondering why his last wank had satisfied him when all the previous ones, blindingly pleasurable as they'd been, had not.

The only difference had been Sansa's presence in his thoughts while he did it.

Sandor did not know much about shifters; there were none in his godsforsaken family, despite the Cleganes' crest of dogs, since not one of them even approached the goodness everyone knew the gods required for such a gift.

And the Lannisters, well… there had been some in the past who had shifted into lions, and once upon a time Tywin's sons had shifted, if Sandor recalled correctly, until they were sixteen or thereabouts. Tywin himself never had a hope in hell, nor had Cersei, and Joffrey… ha.

Robert had shifted in his youth, to a stag of course, but not long into his reign the Change had started skipping months and eventually ceased coming altogether. Robert had laughed it off, saying that he'd much rather enjoy wine and whores on full moon nights, instead of running about the forest, but his words rang hollow, and every month, that night was spent in a royal drunken stupor.

Sandor decided that he had just been far overdue for a woman, and his frequency of seeing and conversing with the Stark girl had wound him up, was all. Her ability to shift was a novelty to him. It would doubtless be fine from then on.

Until the next month, when it had happened again: the entire night was a blur of restless, itchy excitement that no amount of drink would cure, unrelieved until he submitted to the agonizing pleasure that only ceased when he permitted himself to imagine Sansa taking his cock, of him flooding her with his release until she was full to the brim with it.

The third month, when his fingertips itched, he didn't bother going to the winesink, just stayed in his room with the bottle of sword oil nearby. This time, however, he let the fantasy happen right away, instead of fighting it off until the last, and found that after his sole climax he slept the remainder of the night and woke refreshed and energized.

Comprehension bloomed, along with a sort of curdled apprehension. Why her? Why him? At first, he'd helped Sansa only because he saw in her the same blind faith in the goodness of knights that he'd had before reality— and Gregor— had put paid to those dreams. He thought to spare or lessen for her the misery he'd endured, to toughen her up before it could happen, so she was better prepared.

But somewhere, along the way, she'd stopped being an avatar for his younger self, and become wholly herself, beautiful and resilient and trying so, so hard. That trying of hers would break his heart some day, he thought.

He met her on the Serpentine, the next morning, meaning to berate her into some more counsel for how to please Joffrey, but she had been… odd. Different. Not her usual shrinking, wide-eyed self. She was heavy-lidded, and seemed bursting with some sort of secret intent he was not sure he wanted to know the cause of.

She had gotten good at meeting his eye, but that day, she stared at his neck, like she wanted to tear off a chunk of it, and the idea did not cause Sandor to fear. There were a thousand worse ways to die, and he'd committed each one of them. Feeling this girl's teeth in his throat would be the least, and best, of all of them.

Her eyes, that clear summer blue, went a feral gold in a heartbeat's space. His own senses seemed to sharpen— he could hear the distant cries of the gulls on the harbor as if they were right behind him, he could see each separate lash framing those shifted eyes of hers, and the pungency between her legs was as fresh and hot in his nostrils as if his face were buried there.

"Your eyes," he told her, "have gone yellow."

She came so near to him that he could almost taste her, and longing for it pounded through him. Her nose trailed from his collarbone to jaw, a fleeting streak of heat that had his breath catching, and for one wild second he thought he might bend her over the railing, thought he might fling up her skirts and press himself into that hot wet place that he knew, he just knew, waited for him-

"Yours have gone brown," she answered.

Everything within him froze. It was one thing to be affected by a shifter; quite another to become one. How—? Why—? He clenched his eyes, and fists, and willed away the sudden acuity of his senses. Slowly they faded, and once more all he could smell was the faint tang of sea air, and all he could hear was the thudding of his own pulse as it pounded through his head.

He told himself he was not fleeing. Was not afraid, not of a slip of a girl, a foolish thing who could barely keep herself alive without him telling her how.

But he was, at heart, an honest man, and knew it for the lie it was.

He was terrified.

Not of her— not truly— but of what she had wrought in him. Or of what the gods had wrought because of his attempts to help her.

Did it mean… could it possibly be… after all these years, all those killings, that they found him— him, a Clegane, brother to the vilest mockery of knighthood to ever exist— worthy of the Change?

He called upon his stores of willpower and made it through the remainder of the day without mishap, but once in his room that evening, he buried his face in his hands and contemplated the implications of such a thing. All night long, over and over, he turned the idea in his mind, examining it, studying it…

…wanting it.

Longing for it.

If the gods, whose existences he'd never truly believed in, not even when he gained personal experience of shifters, deemed him deserving of Their gift, then perhaps…

Just maybe…

…he was. He might be.

Worthy.

And that changed so much. It changed everything. It meant he hadn't deserved what Gregor had done to him. It meant that their father's weakness had been unjust, that he really had had been wronged, and that more than just Sandor knew it. That the gods knew it, and understood, and had been watching him all these years, and watched him still.

And that they cared.

And that they wanted more for him.

For the first time since he was six, Sandor allowed the ache in his chest to feel… well, not full, but a little less hollow, like it echoed a little less than before.

How to know for sure? Only time would tell.

In a month, on the next full moon, he would know.