Author's Notes: This has been a real labour of love for me. It was initialled inspired by something I found on Neil Gaiman's Tumblr entitled '"15 Texts I Almost Sent You" by d.a.s'. I don't know who d.a.s. is, but I enjoyed the piece and immediately began rolling over fic possibilities in my mind.
These were written over several months and feature various tones and allusions (#10 was written after imbibing huge quantities of A Softer World; #14 and #15 were written after large quantities of Borgen and The West Wing was watched) depending on what was going on at my life when I was writing them. It features many pairings, most of which aren't canon, some of which it's hard to tell what the pairing is.
These may at some point be expanded into a more elaborate universe, but for the moment they stand as is.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
You want a better story. Who wouldn't?
- Richard Siken, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out"
1. I left my favourite pair of underwear at your house. I know your mother hates me, can I come pick them up?
She taps out the message on her lunch break, her fingernails clicking against the screen and all she can think of is the way he tasted like beer and sweat and the way his fingers tangled themselves in her hair. It was undoubtedly the best fuck of her life and for a moment her thumb hovers over the 'send' button.
But she also remembers crawling out his window the next morning so that she wouldn't have to talk to his family but running directly into his father.
'Lovely day, isn't it Mr Stark?' She manages to force out after several seconds of mutual floundering. She can see Loras' car just down the block. A soft rustle from the bundle of clothes in her arms and a pair of green and gold lacy underwear falls to the grass between her and Ned Stark.
He raises an eyebrows and she flees.
If she feels a twinge of regret, she reminds herself it's only about the underwear. But even her favourite pair isn't worth the humiliation of having to walk back into the Stark house and look Robb and Mr and Mrs Stark and all the others in the eye.
[delete]
2. It's been almost a month and I still miss you like a fucking limb.
She writes the message after someone says something and she turns to where he should be to make a joke, to hear whatever politely scathing comment he would reply with and he's not thereand all she can think about is how much she fucking misses him.
She breaks up with him because he's going off to uni at the other side of the country and she's still got three years left at Mordane's. She breaks up with him because she can't be the one to tie him down because he's going to be brilliant and she refuses to be a deadweight that will drag him down when the only direction he should be going is up. He saved her from Joffrey and herself and so now it's her turn to save him.
If she asks, if she sends that text, she knows he'll come in a heartbeat, he'll hold her in his arms and stroke her hair. And she fucking wants to send that text more then ever, wants to go back to the way it was, but he'd still be Oldtown and she'd still be in King's Landing and she know's he'll run this fucking place one day. So instead she takes another yellow cigarette from the cigarette case he gave her, lights it, and blows a puff of smoke into the night sky.
[delete]
3. I didn't know my bones could ache until I met you.
She types out the message as she lies exhausted on her bed after he quite firmly trounces her once more; his white-clad arm thrusting and parrying like a snake, his foil more an extension of himself then a piece of metal held in his hand.
'A girl is getting better,' he offered her a hand to help her up off the mat where she had flopped down on the ground.
She grabs his hand, pulling him down next to her, and all she can think about is how very close he is and how absolutely gross and sweaty she is. She banished these thoughts from her mind as ridiculous, he's seen her much grosser and sweatier before, besides, she's never been concerned about how she looked before and starting now would be very stupid.
'I've been practicing.' She says instead, and absolutely doesn't think about how absolutelybloody his hair is in the harsh fluorescent of the gym.
'A man can tell,' he heaves himself up from the mat and pulls her, protesting, with him, 'Come along, lovely girl.' He pushes a sweaty strand of hair off her forehead before turning and walking away.
She's always been bold, brave, brash and loud like her brothers, but she is not sure that she is willing to give up their perfect equilibrium for something known' something that might be perfect and wonderful but might also ruin everything.
[delete]
4. You know, a week before we broke up, do you remember? I had bought a book of poetry. You asked why I didn't read something more interesting and I could feel my insides splinter.
He's a little bit drunk when he types the message up; Sam, Grenn, and Pyp are suitably far away that he can still mope and brood in peace, but close enough to keep him from starting a fight or attempting to drive.
It was Dorothy Parker and he'd thought it was beautiful. He could remember his eldest sister reading the words aloud when she was fifteen and broken, after Dad and Joffrey but before bathtubs and Mountainvale and the words reminds him of home.
She'd flicked through the book and laughed her absolutely maddening laugh and said, in a voice that was teasing but always seemed to cut him to the bone, 'I don't know how you can manage that stuff. Why don't you read something more interesting?'
When she said that he wanted to cry, because she just didn't get it, and she was supposed to because she said she loved him and meant it.
He thinks that that might mean something, that she didn't ever seem to understand, but he misses her laugh and her hair and her smiles and her casual 'You know nothing's. But she has never understood him just like he has never understood her.
And maybe it's a sign.
[delete]
5. You said poetry was all lies dressed up to sound pretty. When I look at you these days, I want to ask if sadness sounds pretty to you too.
He taps out the message when he's too drunk to walk and he knows the bartender is calling Jaime or Bronn or maybe, if he's particularly unlucky (and he's on a bit of a streak) his father, to come heave him from the bar in his drunken stupor and shove him to his apartment floor where, with his luck, he would die in a puddle of his own vomit and be found a week later by the maid that comes in to clean his apartment (But would it really be bad luck? he wonders, the only thing unlucky about it is that no Lannister should have such a pitiful death.).
She used to dance around his apartment in her underwear and the diamonds he gave her for her birthday. She laughed and said it would be the only occasion she'd have to wear them, 'All dressed up for the ball with nothing for the silly whore to do but sit at home and wait'. She had laughed when she said that, but there was a slightly bitter twist to the words that should have been the first sign, but he was too fucking stupid to notice, too caught up in her silky laugh, exotic looks, and tight cunt to notice anything was wrong, the way her eyes would wander on the rare occasion he took her out, the way she laughed when he copied love poetry across her skin as they lay in bed. It had been naive to think that their relationship could go on as long as it did, and foolish to believe that his little slice of paradise, or as close to paradise as he will ever be allowed.
Sometimes he hates her for it, sometimes he wants to curse her to the Seventh Hell, sometimes he wants to destroy all the pretty things he bought her, all the silks and jewels that she desired.
Mostly though he just drinks.
[delete]
6. It's 3 a.m. and this alcohol tastes like you.
He barely manages to tap out the message on the tiny phone he hasn't yet gotten used to when he's too drunk to stand and the bartender is giving him a look that suggests he will soon be cut off, but he fucking misses her.
When they kiss he tastes dust, salt, sweat, and blood and he thinks about how beautiful she is. They don't do it often, because they could be court martialled or reassigned and even if soldiering means absolutely nothing to him, it is everything to her.
He thinks it's ironic, he's welcomed with open arms and she's the one who wouldn't rather be anywhere else. And together, together they're practically unstoppable, no matter what his cunt brother and that sisterfucker Jaime Lannister says. Neither of them are scalpels, meant for precision work and a more selective blade, that is best left to the man codenamed Red and his partner Cat, no, they are great longswords, meant for slashing and destroying and absolute fucking brutality. But they're good at that and it's the first time he's been good at something in a long time.
But he's not a razor-sharp longsword primed for battle, he's rust-flecked and dull with the handle broken off. He's no longer psychologically and physically fit, or so his CO tells him, with hands clasped tightly around a bundle of papers and his lips tightly compressed. A liability, is what he reads between the lines, fucking useless. She smacked him later when he said this, on his burned side.
'Fuck, that hurt.' He grumbled.
'I'll do it again if you don't stop talking like some self-pitying fucking charity case.' There is bite in her words, even if he can tell there is no malice in her eyes. And he knows that she's the only one who will ever understand, and he shouldn't get yell at her, because she's not the one who melted half his face or has been irritating and fucking sympathetic since his ass landed in this fucking bed, but he's so fucking tired and angry that he just doesn't care.
'What the fuck do I have after this? Huh? I won't be able to get a job! I don't have a family except for fucking Gregor, who's a useless fuck who'd rather get fucked by a goat then lift a finger to help his own flesh-and-blood! And look at you, you've got Daddy and your pretty little house on your pretty little island to go back to! What the fuck do I have, except for a fucked up face that looks like it got run through a cheese grater?! What the fuck do I have?!' He railed at her like this, as loud as he could, for what seemed like hours until he finally tired himself out.
'Are you quite done with this little fucking pity-party you're throwing? Well fuck you.' Her mouth was pressed into a hard, angry line and her arms were crossed tightly across her chest.
'Brienne, –'
'I just came to let you know that I'm being sent out on a mission so I won't be there to see you off.' She turned sharply and stomped away, slamming the plywood door with enough force to make the whole unsteady room rattle.
She's in some terrible shithole and won't have the reception to get the message anyway, even if she did have a phone to receive it on.
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7. I saw you staring at me today during Lit class. I smiled at you and you didn't smile back. I almost cried.
He types out the message on an impulse, because Renly is just so fucking beautiful that it physically aches to behold and he wants to tell him how utterly fucking perfect he is.
Sometimes he catches the older boy staring, and it makes his spine tingle in a funny way. Sometimes, on days he's feeling daring, he stares back, like the day that Mr Connington makes him read The Lady of Shallot to the entire class, or when Renly plays Antonio in the school production of The Merchant of Venice. Sometimes, he smiles and Renly smiles back, and Margie laughs at them both.
He gets Renly's number from Margie's friend Sansa, whose father was roommates at uni with Renly's oldest brother. She gives it to him written in blue sparkly ink on a white sticky note with a kiss on the cheek and if he tucks a pack of her favourite Sobranie Yellows in her bag a few weeks later in thanks, no one is any the wiser.
But now he stares at the blinking cursor on his phone and the perfect boy a few metres away and all he can think about is all the things he wants to say but uncertainty gets a grip on his heart and all the daring that prompted him to write that text escapes him.
[delete]
8. The girl who sits next to me smells like you.
He gets a whiff of lemons, Earl Grey, and cigarettes, and for a fraction of a second he is utterly convinced that it is her, but then he turns and it is not Sansa, it's someone else, someone who is so utterly not Sansa he wants to cry. But, as his grandmother would say, this is neither the time nor the place for waterworks, and so he smiles at Not Sansa and turns to the lecturer and hopes nobody notices the tightness in his knuckles.
He types out the message because he misses her and wants her to stop being sensible andnoble and just date him because he's ridiculously in love with her and his hands won't stop shaking since he got that first whiff.
Later, he'll wonder how he could have been so stupid to think that they smelled the same, because Not Sansa's (who, he learns, is named Arianne) lemons are mixed with some other citrus, the tea is English Breakfast, and the cigarettes were Marlboros, which Sansa had always turned her nose up at. But there he is, hoping anyway.
And he wants so badly to send the text, because he knows she'd text back, no matter what, and he wants so badly to share his life with her.
[delete]
9. I miss you.
They are old friends by now, he tired and arthritic and she scarred and brittle. They cannot participate as they once did in the festivities, instead relegated to the occasional sedate foxtrot and a seat on the dais befitting their age and infirmity, and it is all she can do not to seethe a little in envy as Olenna Tyrell, a woman twice her age, is led about the room in a slightly less sedate waltz by her most certainly not sedate grandson.
She has always loved and hated weddings in equal measure. When she was younger (not even young, just younger) they were highlights, time to reconnect, they inspired delight and hope within her. But now, after all that has happened, she finds herself weary of them. She remembers her own quite well; it was a sharp, sunny winter's day, the bride was beautiful, the groom was nervous, her mother was still alive and Edmure newly born, and for a few hours Cat was sure everything was going to be alright. Doran had been there too, in the second row with Mellario and Elia, but she hadn't really thought about her best friend then, it had all been Ned and Father and how perfect everything was.
Edmure laughs and claps his hands as something big band with lots of brass and leads her eldest daughter out onto the floor, where the other dancers quickly make room, though it is more fleeing then a polite distance. Doran smiles as the pair begin an energetic and acrobatic Lindy Hop.
'Remember when that used to be us?' And she does, because it was Doran Martell who asked her to the Dracarys Ballroom when they were both in first year because he's noticed her staring up at the darkened lights and Art Deco facade three times that week as they'd passed it on their way to class.
She remembers him being her best friend, because Petyr and Lysa were always a but too young and Oberyn and Elia had always been OberynandElia. They were Big Brother and Big Sister, who bandaged cuts and pursed their lips disapprovingly like they'd seen their mothers do. She also remembered first times getting drunk and promises to love each other forever, crying into his shoulder when Brandon Stark cheated on her with Barbrey Ryswell, and listening to him fret over Oberyn's suicidal recklessness. She remembers later, holding him in her arms because Elia and Rhaenys were dead and Oberyn was killing himself as some sort of twisted penance for not being there, remembers Mellario flitting restlessly from room to room, her hands dancing across the stomach that would become Quentyn, baby Arianne sitting on her hip, remembers contact lessening as Arianne, Quentyn, Robb, Sansa, Trystane, Arya, Bran, and Rickon were each born, both of them getting sucked into the parts on the Venn diagram where their lives did not overlap, parts that had once seems so small but gradually became wider and wider, remembers holding his hand through all the divorce proceedings and doctor's appointments. She remembers him wrapping her in a comforting embrace from his wheelchair after the funeral, remembers waking up in a hospital bed with him holding her hand.
Cat smiles, and she can feel the scar tissue that has long formed white hardened ridges down her cheeks protest at being bent, but they are not Cat and Dor anymore, not Sun and Fish, they are not the children who met on their first day at the Water Gardens, not the teenagers burdened by all their fears and insecurities at Summerhall, not the twenty-somethings at UCKL attempting to take the academic world by storm. And she misses that, misses them before this.
Later, in the cab on the way back to the flat that isn't really her home, despite the five years Catelyn's lived there, she pulls out the cellphone she rarely uses, opens the icon for text messages she never uses, and types out a message. The words sit on the screen in front of her for several minutes before they are deleted and the phone is set to charge.
[delete]
10. I have never had so many bad nights.
The message sits in the message bar, waiting to be sent out into cyberspace, pinging across Westeros' telephone towers, and he so badly wants to send it, because it's a fresh burner and he's sure that by the time anyone noticed the message's arrival he'll have dumped the phone and be long gone. His finger twitches over the send button, but he can hear Thoros' moderating voice in his ear, reminding him of the danger, not only to them, but also to her and her family. And he wants to believe that she wouldn't care, that she would tell him that she doesn't care that he puts her in danger, and he knows she would say that, except she has people to look after and he couldn't live with himself if anything happened to her.
('What would you do if something happened to me?' Neither of them try to look in the other's eyes, and though she asks with an air of jocular indifference her can feel her hand tightening into a fist on his chest.
'Kill the fucker and turn myself in, I guess.' She looks up at him then with a smile full of teeth and promise.
'People always say you bring out the worst in me, like it's a bad thing.'
'I wish I'd never met you just so that I could meet you all over again.'
Later he traces 'I love you' across her back in every language and code he's ever leaned, because saying it means something and right now, they don't mean anything, not really, they've made no promises or plans. It's better that way.)
He deletes the text and makes for the next rendezvous point.
[delete]
11. Sometimes I write poetry about you on the internet. Strangers who have never met either of us think you're cruel – they tell me if they had the honor of loving me, we'd have sex three times a day and they'd scream my name when they came.
He stares at the cursor, at the 'post' button, at the words on the screen, considering. He'd met her through family; her father was he and his siblings' godsfather and their fathers were the type of men whose friendship was they type of somewhat inexplicable fraternal bond that could only be broken by death and they children were thusly thrown together at every opportunity. Neither group of offspring and mothers particularly liked it, though her sister was easily the most gracious about the whole affair, between the impeccable manners Mrs Stark had managed to imbue one of her children with and what he's sure was a crush on his brother (who's horrible, and he's sure the only reason Joff hasn't been carted off to the Aerys by now is Grandfather's influence to protect the family name from 'the shame of it all'). But then his father died in a hunting accident and her father died attempting to save a woman and her baby from being mugged (He though about the vast disparity between those two deaths even at ten) and they stopped seeing each other except at official dos and she stopped talking to him altogether.
He'd still see Sansa often, looking increasingly worse for wear, but Arya ran off to Braavos or back to Winterfell, opinions varied, though her sister remained determinately tight-lipped about the whole thing, despite attempted interrogations from the likes of his mother and Mr Baelish.
He thinks they might have been in love, if she'd bothered to look past his layer of baby fat and blond curls, but she didn't, and so he loved her in the depths of his heart, where only truly wild things can be loved.
Sansa lends him a book about poetry and he writes about love, because that's what poetry is always about, when you peel back all the metaphors, rage, and drug addiction so that only the bones remain. He started posting stuff on the internet (because that's what people do now, they air their private emotions for all to see) under a pseudonym, because he's sure Joffrey would kill him if he ever read some of the stuff he's written.
He writes and he writes and suddenly people are noticing; he gets messages back telling him how they understand, how they thing what he's done is beautiful, how they think she's so lucky that he loves her, how he makes them loathe and adore her in equal measure (he's not sure how he feels about this).
He types out the text (the number's old and probably doesn't work anymore, but that doesn't really matter) and stares at it on his screen. for all that he can air his feelings to the world he will never be able to tell her how he feels.
(He posts the poem and deletes the text.)
[delete]
12. They think it is beautiful, how I am broken. I don't think they understand.
He cupped her face in his hands, like she was some precious object to be handled with only the lightest of touches, and she loves him for it.
'You're beautiful, like the most brilliant of diamonds.'
'To be kept in a vault, tucked away from the world? Or wrapped up in shiny metal and hung around a pretty neck?' She thinks she is being cruel to him, but she is not a pretty thing to be handled with only kid gloves, not now, not ever.
'I would never hurt you, you don't have to be like that with me. You're safe here.' The look in his eyes bleeds, like he is the one who has been through hell, like she is the bad guy and he's the victim. Fuck you, she wants to scream, fuck you for thinking you have the privilege of being able to hurt me.
Instead she rolls over and pretends to go to sleep. It's no an argument worth having, she tells herself.
She types out the message to a number she has not attempted to contact in years.
She does not send the text.
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13. You used to tell me I was beautiful. I tried saying it in the mirror the other day, but it sounded wrong without your mouth wrapped around it.
She types out the message when she's a drunk on Dornish red (it reminds her of kissing him) and has spent an hour staring at her naked body in the mirror, letting the words roll across her tongue, thinking about how wrong they sound. (This is not the first time she's done this, or even the second)
Her fingers retrace another of the paths his had taken, fingertips brushing the ridges of scar tissue that mar her torso. She hates them, even now, considers surgeries and clothing to hide them from the world, but he didn't, he told her she was beautiful and sting, he would kiss the scars, making her feel just a little less broken.
When they'd met she'd been smoking to die; 'Trying to catch me a little death.' she'd told him with a grin, swirling her scotch in her glass. (She'd been fucked up on the new meds Dr Colemon had put her on, but she'd still taken them because there are some habits not even a couple good rounds of electroshock can cure a girl of.)
'Now why would a girl like you want to do a thing like that?' The sleaziness of the words is negated by the grin playing along the corners of his lips.
'Why not? Because I can! Because I have the freedom and authority to make these decisions and it feels amazing.' She'd done a little drunken pirouette, stumbling slightly but catching herself on the rail of the porch.
'I'm sure you could use that freedom and authority in much better ways.'
'Ah, well, I'll make better mistakes tomorrow.' She'd waved him off, laughing.
('I don't want to break you.' he tells her later, as they lie entwined in her bed.
Her smile is wolfish, 'I'd like to see you try.')
[delete]
14. Everything I say sounds wrong without your mouth wrapped around it.
She used to be his speechwriter, that's how they met. He was running for his father's old seat against that fucker Roose Bolton and she was an old schoolfriend of his sister's.
'She's the best of the best. Bolton's dredging up all the shite with Talisa, Jeyne, and the Frey girl – What the fuck were you doing with your life in uni anyway? –, and we need all hands on deck if we're going to keep this place out of the hands of the Boltons.' He wonders when his sister got so old.
She has a tongue that slices like Valyrian steel; sharp, articulate, and cruel when necessary and they fight for weeks, because even if he's paying her, his father always wrote his own speeches, and he can't let her take that connection away from him (a little voice inside his head knows he's being stupid) until, after a somewhat terrible performance she smacks him and tells him to pull his head out of his ass and let her do her fucking job.
And he fucking wins. Uncle Brynden claps him on the shoulder and Mother smiles wanly from her wheelchair, the scars oddly contorting her face. Sansa's talking with a couple prominent movers and shakers, cigar and scotch looking perfectly in place in her hands.
She's standing by the door, swirling her glass of red wine tiredly in one hand and scrolling through her phone with the other.
'Thank you.' She looks up at him.
'You're welcome, I hope you're as good as I made you look.' She smiles, but he feels a sinking in his stomach, 'The Centres have hired me to polish Renly Baratheon up a bit and make him slightly more palatable to the voter base.'
'You're leaving?'
'Yeah.'
'I guess this is goodbye.'
'Bye.
'Yeah.'
'See you 'round Stark.'
He hires a new speechwriter, coming highly recommended from her, but the words never feel quite right in his mouth. He types out the message because he's tired of staring at speeches that make his head ache and he just wants her back.
[delete]
15. We were never in love, but, oh God, we could have been.
She doesn't meet him for years, even though they're both floating around the Red Keep, she as her father's aide and he as Stannis Baratheon's chief of staff. Needless to say, they don't exist in the same political circles, even if Westeros' government is fairly ogliarchal and incestuous; she's little more then a glorified PA, even if she is Balon Greyjoy's daughter and the theoretical heir to his seat once the old bastard finally kicks the bucket (what with what that bastard Ramsey Bolton did to her baby brother, Euron and Victarion being up to their eyeballs in the Krakens, Aeron being all damp and priest-y, and everyone else being dead) while he's the right hand to the brother of the second most powerful man in Westeros (because anyone who says that Robert Baratheon is more powerful then Tywin Lannister is full of shit).
She sees him speak at the Centre Party convention, it's powerful, full of lofty ideals and the sort of hope that Asha's felt slipping away from her day by day since she arrived in King's Landing with a shiny new PoliSci degree from UPyke and dreams of changing the world and liberating the Iron Islands from the yolk of the Seven Kingdoms and she feels a twinge in her stomach that is something between respect and lust (if she does a little Google-stalking when his speech is finished that's nobody's business but her own).
What she learns over the next year or so does nothing to lessen Davos Seaworth's appeal; he's loyal, even to a fault, rumour has it he'd gotten better offers to work for Salladhor Saan's company in Lys but turned them all down to stay with Stannis and 'make a difference' or something equally ridiculous; he has one of those irritating marriages that've been going on forever but they're both still stupidly in love; he started off dirt poor in Flea Bottom and managed put himself through law school almost fifteen years after dropping out of high school.
When they finally meet she smiles and thinks she could fall a little bit in love with the greying man who tactfully curbs some of his superior's uncompromising stances in favour of getting things done but still stands his ground on issues he cares about.
When she gets back to her hotel room she places the card he gave her next to a tumbler full of the kind of booze you can only find in the Iron Islands which is pretty much made of anything that can be fermented and her cellphone, the message carefully typed out in the message bar, waiting to be sent.
She downs the drink and deletes the message.
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