Title: Breathe Through Me (1/?)
Author: Demelza
Disclaimer: Game of Thrones and its characters belong to GRRM and HBO. I'm just borrowing them here for a little while. No infringements of any copyrights are intended.
Rating: O18
Summary: Sanrion AU – Hospitalized in a mental asylum for many years, and under the care of two torturous Doctors, a young woman frequently escapes to a better world she built for herself. Only, cracks have formed in its walls and now she's faced with two very twisted and unsafe worlds-the imagined, and the real.
Author's Note: This is kind of a hard one to write a note for, without giving away the end plot. Suffice it to say, as dark as it is, I've kept the chapters short and will aim to post two at each update and get them out as quickly as I can so that Sansa gets her freedom (and a happy ever after).
Author's Note 2: This deals with dissociative and avoidance disorders, a combination of which I suffer from myself. I've not taken the Hollywood route in writing the disorders, rather I've written an exaggerated version of how I've personally lived with them through the years. That said, I hope I tackle them in a respectful manner.

I

Lying on the gurney in the cold isolation room, a blanket cover her from feet to her chest, she stared blankly up at the white, tiled ceiling. Her flesh burned where it had been sliced, each cut deliberately placed and deep enough to only inflict pain and never kill. For years the treatments committed by the father and son Doctors hadn't broken through the defenses she'd built up. But the months past - she didn't know exactly how many - had seen cracks form, had seen their horrors bleed into the life of safety she'd long escaped to.

As she lay there, mindlessly shifting her gaze from one black speck on the ceiling to the next, she began to feel herself being pulled back to the surface. The cuts in her stomach and shoulders began to scream. She blinked out the tears that welled in her eyes, forced her gaze back to the first black speck and found the path she always followed. But her eyes soon flicked to a speck a tile over, down to the left, up to the right, across two tiles, down a third.

Panic made her heart race.

She wasn't supposed to be here. She was supposed to be in there. In the safe world where she was happy with a wonderful, loving family in a castle surrounded by snow, and a great tree with a white trunk and blood-red leaves adorning its branches.

They hated her now. They all hated her. Mother, brothers and sister. The King and his Queen-Regent mother. Guilt and grief, she felt the flat side of a cold, stinging blade as it struck her bare back over and over. She wanted to be free, but the hate of a million people who were meant to love her screamed at her instead and she couldn't fucking breathe. She tried and tried to take in a breath, but her chest felt pinned down, the joy and the hope being squeezed out of her.

But the creak and groan of the great doors resounded in her head and then came his voice, "What is the meaning of this?"

Through blurred eyes she saw him, short in stature, hair the color of gold, and he commanded attention. He'd never existed here before today. For some time now the events of this twisted version of her world played out without him. When he spoke to the King and made his commands she felt a peace that she'd forgotten had once resided here for thousands of years.

He came to her, hand out-stretched, head bowed in reverence for her.

She wanted to utter her thanks to him for saving her, she fought to say the words, but she was ever loyal to this new, hateful world. And so it pulled her away from him and down dark alleyways filled with terror, bitter manipulation and an endless emotional pain.

This was not the world she had built.

It was theirs.

The incisions in her body pulled her left and right, slashed at her once happy life, tore at her very soul.

She was beckoned then. Beckoned to see the King off before the Battle of the Blackwater. Before she saw him her gaze found his. The stranger who'd never had a place in this world, but who somehow now did. His voice was kind, but hers was wrought with the hate they wanted her to feel.

She would never let anyone in, least of all kin to the King who beat, humiliated and tormented her.

This was their world.

In a beat, a fight for the peace she yearned for, she heard herself promise she would pray for him. But their hate twisted her heart; the darkness within wanted him to be brought down by the invading forces, just as she wanted it for the King.

And oh, that King. He was as sure and cocky as he was cruel and unrepentant with his repugnant abhorrence for the self-proclaimed True Heir that threatened to steal his crown.

He was just like them. Made of venomous hate.

She tried then, between one beat and the next, to pull herself free. For a moment she glimpsed the white tiles and the infinite black specks that had once trekked a path through the safe world she found refuge in.

But their world, their darkening world that was fast replacing the one of solitude she'd built within, pulled her back in like a suffocating straitjacket.