Players and Pieces
DISCLAIMER: I hold no rights to the characters used or referenced, no money is made of this, everything is with their rightful owners.
*A/N* Another old snippet that I finally had the inspiration to continue ^^
This is a companion pieces to "Liar, Liar" and "The Mockingbird's Song", you should read those first if you haven't already.
"I want revenge," she announced quietly, staring numbly out of the huge window onto the city. How innocently those towers glittered in the light of the morning sun…
She heard him sigh softly at the determined sound of her voice, then he shifted and pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder – a loving gesture, but this was Petyr Baelish and she knew better.
Loving a woman, setting his heart on someone, would be a liability. It would make him vulnerable. Petyr would never allow his heart to love.
"Joffrey," he murmured against her skin. He knew her, inside out, though she scarcely spoke these days – Sansa had often wondered how he had learned so much about her. But then again, they said he had his spies everywhere, and she had been engaged to the leader of the city after all.
Had she found out that he had watched her in her sleep all this time, Sansa would not have been surprised.
"I want him to pay," she breathed, still gazing at the glimmering skyline.
"For further notice, sweetling," he said in his ever-gentle voice that was impossible to read even now, even for her, "most men would not take it well if you asked them to help avenge your lost lover." His fingers trailed over her arm and her neck. "They would feel… exploited."
Sansa almost laughed. Was she exploiting Petyr? Of course she was.
Was he exploiting her?
Well, she didn't exactly know in what way, but fact was, Petyr Baelish had not taken her under his wing in a fit of charity and she doubted he kept her around because he liked her pretty face.
Maybe he liked having her in his bed, but that was not the reason, either.
"But… the boy is wild and selfish, and if he doesn't pay attention he'll get us all killed before long."
He sighed again, his lithe finger tracing down her spine. Sansa failed to suppress a shudder and could just picture the satisfied smirk playing around his lips.
He could have tattooed property of Petyr Baelish all over her body for all the difference it would have made – he was her saviour, the only ally she had left and he pushed her buttons just right.
There was no escaping him, because for all of Joffrey's power and violence and false titles, when it all came down, it was Petyr who ruled this city.
He owned her in a way that had nothing to do with the way Sandor held her heart, owned her in a way not even Joffrey ever had.
"Well, I want him dead," Sansa gave back tonelessly. Make it my birthday present.
"Mh." His lips brushed over her jawbone, tender as ever, yet Sansa would not have been surprised if they had bruised her skin. "Bloodlust suits you."
"Will you help me?"
"He's a danger," he replied lightly. "And he tried to kill me."
"Did he?" she inquired, her voice without inflection, smooth, no edges. She'd learned from the best.
"He blew up my favourite car," Petyr answered conversationally, his hands back underneath the anthracite silk of the sheets. "I don't know how he could believe I wouldn't know he'd try. Idiot, he wouldn't last a week without me."
Sansa knew he was right – his powerful family might protect Joffrey from the outside world, but the cunning businessman was the only one who knew how to protect him from his own inner circle. Petyr himself included. She'd lost count of how many rulers that hadn't fit into his schemes he'd arranged to be arrested or killed.
Sansa also knew she should have felt some kind of guilt – if Joffrey had attempted to kill him, then he'd done it because of her, because Petyr dared to make her his lover.
Or, as Joffrey would surely put it, his dirty little whore.
But Sansa just wondered what car he was talking about – Petyr owned several cars, all expensive, all fast, all bullet-proof, and all black. To Sansa, they all looked exactly the same and she had no idea how he could have picked a favourite.
"So, safe to say I hold a little grudge against him myself," he murmured against her lips, but kissed her before she could answer. Stole her breath away. Would he ever stop doing that?
"Do you have a gun?"
His lips curved into a smile, never leaving hers, and suddenly she found herself lying on her back, pinned onto the mattress. "Baby steps, sweetling. We want to live through this."
Who said I wanted to live through this, she thought, and let him kiss her again.
For the fragment of a second, she thought she'd tasted vodka, sharp and strong, but the moment was gone as soon as it had come.
.
"Joffrey's guards aren't hard to fool," Petyr said with a shrug, then looked up at her and added in a voice designed to hurt: "But you know that, don't you?"
Sansa glanced at her feet, her eyes stinging with tears, but she didn't reply. This was a test, nothing more. He was building an armour around her, and he wouldn't stop until she could shrug off jibes as easily as he could, no matter how much they hurt.
"Then there's Jaime. He's not stupid, and he's probably the best shot in town. And should he get his hands on a knife then you wouldn't want to stay in his way."
"Jaime has weaknesses," Sansa argued, shaking her head. "He's vain."
"I wasn't finished," Petyr replied testily. "It all stands and falls with Cersei. She'd fight like a lioness for Joffrey."
"Good," Sansa answered. "I want her to fight."
"What for?" Petyr asked, sounding bored, his eyes back on his laptop.
"I want her to lose, and she can't lose if she never fought."
"There's revenge, sweetling, and there's idiocy," Petyr said, in his gentle voice inlaid with steel. "You want Joffrey to suffer because he slaughtered your pet dog." His words were like a stab in the stomach, but Sansa forced herself to endure them without blinking. There was no pity in Petyr's voice and no more to find in his heart, and the more she showed weakness, the crueller he would get.
"If you want to paint the walls with Joffrey's blood then you're no smarter than he is and likely to end up just the same."
I don't want to be smarter than him, Sansa thought. I don't care if I end up just the same. I want to see him bleed.
"You know nothing of revenge," she said instead.
He just smiled, a cruel, slow smile full of sharp white teeth. "I stood by and watched as the man who held everything I wanted from life was killed, watched his blood and his brains splash all over the pavement. I tasted that triumph and it was sweet, Sansa, and you know why? Because I didn't even get my hands dirty on his blood."
Again, she suppressed a shudder. She'd known he was cold, but that he could say such things without ever looking up from his calculations…
"I know all there is to know about revenge, sweetling."
Sansa washed the shock off her face before he could see it and plastered a smile on her lips instead. "Then you're just the man I need," she muttered, took the laptop from him and kissed him.
"Self-restraint and patience, Sansa, that is what this is all about," he murmured, his lips less than an inch from hers, his haughty smile on his face and a dark spark in his green eyes. "The only sensible form of revenge is in taking pleasure in the outcome, not in the act. Drawing it out will only make you get caught. Do you understand that?"
His voice was quiet now, sharp and very, very cold, just like she remembered him from Joffrey's council meetings. Oh, he could be frightening if he chose to be; far more than brute force ever could. Because once he'd donned his façade, there was no soft spot you could use to save yourself, no weakness in his armour. Pleading with Petyr was like trying to scale a solid glass wall – it was well and truly pointless. There was simply nothing to hold on to.
His fingers' grip on her arm was growing almost painful. "Do you understand?"
"Yes," she replied, her voice painfully easy to read compared to his.
"When the time comes, we can find a convenient way to get rid of Joffrey. But that is all. He'll die for what he did to you, Sansa, to both of us-" He coaxed a trace of grief into his greyish eyes, and it was just as convincing as the cold and the lethality that had been in its place a moment before.
For a moment she was almost tempted to believe it, that he really hurt the way she did over the loss of her mother – his childhood love.
But she had learned to mistrust any displays of affection from him; it was something he considered a loss of control, and Petyr clung to his control as if his life depended on it – and in a way, she supposed it did.
That was the most unsettling thing about Petyr, Sansa thought, the way everything he did was so unbelievably convincing, it was almost unnatural. Even when he was simply making small talk, and especially when he was lying – it always sounded so sincere.
"He will die, sweetling, but he will die on my terms."
He seemed to wait for her to agree, to promise she would allow him to be in control. It almost made her laugh. He was in control, and it was not like she had the choice to decline his offer.
His protection was the only thing keeping her alive.
Sansa preferred not to think about what price she might have to pay for his services one day.
Sometimes he wondered if she had any idea of the immense power she had over him.
He doubted it, though – Sansa was ever the innocent, sweet little thing, it was part of what he found so exasperatingly alluring about her; and she had suffered far too much emotional abuse from her former captors to perceive herself as powerful.
But she was, she had more influence on him than anyone had had in years, and stole away tiny bits of his carefully constructed control when he wasn't looking. She was, for all her frailty and her innocence, the one person he was truly afraid of.
It wasn't just the fact she could drive him crazy with a smile or even a phone call, or the fact that if she put her mind to the task she would probably find a way to make him come in his pants without even touching him.
It wasn't the fact that he just couldn't shake that possessive feeling whenever she walked out the door, the one that made him plant tracking devises on her and send his minions after her.
No, what scared him were things like how much he liked to see her smile. How he found himself doing and saying stupid things just to hear her laugh, and that warm, content feeling that sound gave to him. He caught himself wanting to be in the same room with her, not to fuck her, not even to talk to her, but simply because he found her presence so calming.
He had never thought that someone would one day be able to threaten the life he had built, and he'd certainly not expected it to be somebody like her.
But there she was, her blue eyes stripping him from his lies, his persona, his armour. She made him feel so naked when she did that, so utterly defenceless. For most of his life now, he'd had Littlefinger to protect him, and he didn't believe Petyr was strong enough on his own.
He had the feeling he would break in her delicate fingers, like glass, just like he'd broken in her mother's hands.
Petyr seemed so weak to him, so flawed, and she so strong in her goodness and her purity and her flawless character. Sansa was the greatest threat he'd ever faced, and the only thing he could do to save himself was to never let her see which of them really had power over the other.
Because he couldn't let her go and rid himself of the temptation, the threat – that would, no doubt, shatter Petyr, and he couldn't rely on Littlefinger to pick up the pieces.
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