Two weeks ago, I organized a little game on tumblr: A song for a fic. Anyone could submit a song they associated to SanSan and I would write a story inspired by one of these songs. This one-shot is a gift for zsra187, who chose the song Bleeding Me, by Metallica.
This is both SanSan and about the process of healing and becoming someone else (that's what the song Bleeding Me is about). Some of details are freely inspired by an interview James Hetfield, Metallica's frontman, gave in 2001. Hope you'll all enjoy this!
Outside the main building of the hospital, a sinuous path led to the morgue - if only the suspension of your car resisted the potholes. That was how Sandor Clegane went to work every morning: gritting his teeth and going easy on the accelerator lest the suspension broke or his truck had a flat tire.
Stunted trees and buildings that accommodated maintenance and surgical stores were wrapped in a thick blanket of fog that morning. The sun wouldn't disperse the mist before hours passed and by the look of the clouds above - gray and heavy - it might be a pea-soup day.
The perfect atmosphere to start another week in the morgue.
It was the perfect cover, the Elder Brother had told him. People didn't go to the morgue unless they had a good reason, and those who had a reason to spend some time there were too afflicted to pay attention to the tall, sullen employee who prepared the corpses. Let alone to ask embarrassing questions. And it's an occasion to reflect on your past, to make amends for these people your former self killed, the Elder Brother had added once, rubbing his veined nose.
Remembering the older man's shitty homily, Sandor snorted and parked his car.
His contacts with the other employees of the hospital were sparse; that was another advantage of his job. For some reason, the nurses, doctors and hospital porters avoided the three employees of the morgue and if one had been curious enough to ask questions or to tease him about his uncommon job, Sandor just needed to frown to discourage the fucker. Things worked this way, for a very long, long time.
He left his truck with a grunt: with the cold, humid weather, the ache in his thigh reared his head again and made him limp slightly. He had overheard his coworkers once as they whispered that Sandor was the cliché of the funeral home employee: ill-tempered, vaguely scary with his burns and sometimes limping along like some weird character of a black and white horror movie. He had rolled his eyes at the time knowing that a few years earlier, he would have rearranged their faces and scared the shit out of them for mocking him. Why did he let the morons walk away without a scratch, that time? He didn't know: he just didn't feel the urge to do that anymore.
Sandor came in the quiet building, mumbled a perfunctory hello to his coworkers who sipped coffee and headed to the cold chamber.
Now that his daily routine revolved around stainless steel doors that hid body bags containing men, women and children, finding an excuse to yell and to hit someone seemed futile. After years doing this, he still gritted his teeth when he had to look at the remains of a child and more often than not, a tightness squeezed his heart no matter how old his "patient" was. As he remained unmoved on the outside - and as nobody fucking wants to do that - Sandor prepared the bodies before Dr Klerks, the coroner, examined them. He made long incisions, cut off things, sometimes used a saw for the trickier bits. Once Klerks' show was over, he tidied things up, stitched the bodies and they were as good as new.
Sometimes he remembered a time when things were different, when he dealt with living beings who spat on him and whom he threatened, injured or even killed, instead of taking care of dead bodies. He remembered when those living beings shied away from him. When the needle wasn't in his hands to stitch lifeless bodies; it was in a girl's ivory hands; she enjoyed sewing her own clothes once in a while and he mocked her for that, amongst other things, when this girl's blue eyes pierced through him and saw the despondency, deep down. It was a long time ago. Those days are gone, he had told himself more than once.
Sandor didn't harbor any kind of nostalgia concerning his past job - despite the decent salary and the benefits in kind he had when he worked for the Lannisters - he wouldn't have sneaked off otherwise. But I guess some memories are more difficult to erase… Those blue eyes, he saw them again, as he moved past one of the stainless steel doors of the cold chamber; the metal shone, distorted his reflection as he inched nearer, but he saw her eyes, her face, as vivid as ever. The little bird was somewhere, far from him, living her life and finding some kind of happiness, he had hoped. A long time ago, he had resigned himself to the idea he'd never see her again. He thought it was for the best, at least for her.
With time, he had closed his heart from illusions and focused on what mattered: changing, leaving behind that monster, that anomaly the Hound was. And the Elder Brother had helped him, sparing no effort until he quit drinking. There was a time when he planned his life around hangovers. If the Lannisters threw a party on a Saturday night and he didn't work, he had to drink and Sunday was hangover day. He had missed a few Sundays this way, sleeping it off and waking up as the sun went down to find himself thirsty and in a haze; in this case, he usually fought fire with fire and drained another bottle.
He had rebelled against the temperance the Elder Brother dictated towards him; he had cursed and insulted the older man. Never had the Elder Brother given in, despite Sandor's threats and his unconventional way to thank the man who accommodated him, by breaking stuff and by scaring away the neighborhood. Now Sandor didn't drink and he saw it as a personal achievement. It wouldn't compensate all the things he had done in the past - all that shit, he thought - but at least it counted for something.
Gregor wouldn't have been able to do that. He squeezed his eyes shut, exasperated by the fact he still couldn't help comparing himself with his fucking brother, even after all these years, even after Gregor's death.
In a morgue that probably looked like the one he worked in, his brother's dead body had arrived one morning, and some employee had to prepare him for the coroner and to stitch him afterwards. That notion made him feel dizzy. He had often wondered if he would see the people his past life revolved around: the Lannisters, the men who worked for them or… Or her. No matter how he glared at his coworkers whenever they dared to ask him about his personal life, no matter what elaborate web of half-truths he had weaved to protect himself - I think about her because I'm concerned, I hope she is OK, I hope she's not with some bastard who roughs her up, because she's so fragile she can't take it, yes, she would be better alone - he knew why he kept thinking of her and where he had found the strength to beat his addiction: he wanted to see her again, although winning the lottery was more likely. That was what he kept repeating himself until he caught sight of her, two weeks ago. He squeezed his eyes shut. No, not now. You need to focus on your work.
Opening a body bag containing the corpse of a fifty-year old bum should have sobered him up, but as he mentally recorded the mark of vomit at the corner of the man's lips, the multiple scratches on his hands and the swell of his belly, the vision of Sansa Stark jogging up the street imposed itself on his mind.
It had been a shock to see her, as he puffed on his cigarette outside of the morgue, two weeks earlier. Smoking his cigarette, he was pacing in the parking lot to take a break after he had prepared bodies for the family's visit. The morgue and the other buildings behind the hospital looked as if some giant had tossed them inside a field that skirted the street. Meager trees lined the building, so that the passers-by could ignore the place where dead bodies were stored and examined if only they looked ahead. These same trees partly hid Sandor.
At first, a flash of auburn hair had drawn his attention. Sandor had paused briefly before chiding himself: there were a lot of auburn haired women in the streets, when your fucking memory made you do a double-take on every girl that looked like a ghost from your past, and once you took a good look at them, you could only be disappointed. For the past few years, Sandor had looked around when a red-haired woman passed him and he had become an expert in pretending he was just appraising her beauty, even when the resemblance made him turn pale. But this time, it was different: long-limbed and slender, the girl kept jogging, looking ahead on the street, focused on her task. That graceful bearing, those features... It was her, in flesh and bone, as pretty as he remembered. His heart skipped a beat and when he wanted to call her out, his throat was as dry as sandpaper. Her brand-new headphones cut herself off from the outside world and so she ran, breathing in and out, going up the hill. She never saw him and once she moved past Sandor, he turned slightly, his gaze accompanying Sansa as her frame slowly disappeared. He had watched her auburn ponytail until the moment she turned left, dropping out of sight.
Afterward, he had asked himself if he had dreamed or eaten something bad, for he wasn't prone to hallucinations. The memory was so vivid though he told himself it wasn't a dream. What is she fucking doing there, in the first place? What happened to her? All these questions that made him toss and turn in his bed the night after were unanswered when he stepped out of the morgue, the next morning, at the same time. Before he could light his cigarette properly - expectation made his hands shaky, to his great embarrassment - he had caught sight of her silhouette running on the sidewalk, behind the trees. Speechless, he had looked at her while the ashes of his cigarette slowly fell to the ground.
The same damn scene happened every morning and his coworkers didn't understand why he had become a bundle of nerves when the clock showed 10:00 AM. Those fuckers ignored it but it wasn't 10:00 AM anymore, no, it was Sansa's time.
Sighing, he wondered if the miracle would happen that day too, if she would show up, running, lost in thought, blissfully ignorant as he spied on her like the most creepy perv. As he prepared the bum's body for the autopsy, he had tried to focus on his task but now that he was done, the trepidation was there again. When the tightness in his chest came back, he blamed the cheap coffee of the morgue for it, washed his hands and crossed the building to finally push the door open. His hands automatically reached for his back pocket and he retrieved his cigarettes from it, swallowing hard.
Never had he tried to stop her or to talk to her; he stayed hidden behind the trees, somewhat nervous that she could spot him there and discover he was observing her. I'm not ready to talk to her, he thought, as the first drag on his cigarette hardly calmed his nerves. Except for a bird that croaked somewhere, everything was silent when he made out a tiny frame in the fog. He recognized her as she came closer, wearing shorts and that sweater that was too big for her, he had seen it on her the other day. She ran, still obvlious he was there, contemplating her, the effort bringing a frown of discomfort on her face because of the slope.
Those long, pale legs ate up the miles, day after day, taking her close to him for a fleeting moment. Hardly had he seen her as she moved away from him. That was a good metaphor of what their time together at the Lannisters' had been like: he had met her, learned to know her, then it had been time to part ways. Except he had been the one who had run away.
He believed that she never had suspected how her presence affected him at that time; now the brief vision of Sansa running, made him weak at the knees, unbeknownst to her. His chest constricted as she moved past Sandor without seeing him: he swiveled his hips to follow her for at least a few more seconds. He wasn't ready yet to call her but with each passing day, the urge to open his mouth and to stop her - no matter how she would react when recognizing him - grew stronger. Not today, he told himself, as he kept staring at her bun. In the mist that wrapped everything that morning, her silhouette faded away in no time. Not today, but soon. He sighed. Tomorrow, perhaps.