DISCLAIMER: Alas and lackaday, I do not own even a smidgeon of Game of Thrones.

NO LIGHT, NO LIGHT

The knife is at her throat before she can breath, and of the two words that come to mind she wonders which is the more damning, please or stop.

"Come now, little bird", his voice rumbles, rolling through the blood spattered breastplate that seems incapable of holding his giant frame in and churning through her shaking body. Lady shaking melting snow from her thick coat as Winterfell looms proud behind her. Power made flesh.

"You'll have to fight harder than that if Stannis does what he's come to do"

Stannis. She'd forgotten about him, the army battering Kings Landing, the eerie green light flickering distantly from the bay. She'd forgotten so many things in the interim where his fingers met her arm and her back had met the familiar softness of her bed. It is so dark in her room. She could have sworn she'd prepared a lantern.

If he is drunk it does not show now. The only unsteady movements come from the ripple of disturbed chainmail and the wildfire chasing the grey and black of his eyes as they hold her fast.

"I don't know how to fight", she blinked back the tears. Arya would have stuck her sword through Joffrey like she had her neglected sewing needles into their Septa's pincushion. Sansa wondered how she had not wished her sister had done just that sooner. She wondered what sound Joffrey's body would have made smacking the flagstones below them had she moved quicker. She had dreamed of Lady tearing him to pieces of vermilion and velvet, but Lady was dead and her feeble hands had not deterred three hungry men out for her maidenhood on a straw covered floor. She had seen the first man's intestines drop sudden and dangling into air but what she remembered was the line of Sandor's mouth as he let the corpse fall. Resolute, grim, cold. Maybe the Stranger's mouth looked the same when he came to take you.

"No, that you don't, little bird. You sing the pretty songs they tell you to sing, and you look-"

In his silence the battle outside resurfaces on the outskirts of her mind. Somehow that Sansa, she that nearly killed a king, comes back, albeit fleetingly and she hears herself ask in the now deafening quiet of her room. She throws her challenge quietly.

"How do I look?" She omits the 'Ser', just as she's been told. She remembers her lessons.

His eyes change. She had forgotten their colour before, forgotten, chosen not to notice, not realized, not looked long enough to determine – it matters not. Stormcloud grey and darkening with the promise of thunder. I have seen that thunder, she thought, and it is low and rolling like the clouds and the sea churning and then men die and it is little bird and you're alright now.

"Like spring. In this accursed fucking place"

Now her tears cease. Now she becomes so acutely aware of his weight on hers, the heat of battle and blood running high under tempered metal. The stench of death and wine and drying tears she can just make out on his mismatched cheeks. He wept as I sang the Mother's Hymn, she realized, but this is no time for an encore. Neither of us could endure a second performance. He holds her down and she forgets what his hand felt like pulling her up from the floor into air and remembers only that she reached.

"Then teach me"

She was proud her voice wavered but a little. His darkened face softens at the edges, crumpling like a firm cushion clutched tight by affectionate hands. He is confused.

"To fight. Teach me to fight" Eyes wide she clarifies her request. He laughs under his breath and she holds hers at how soft the sound is up close.

"You couldn't hold a sword up if you used both hands, little bird"

Her resolve crumbling she blurts out the sorry truth of her fighting experience, "I hit the first man" she does not need to elaborate here, he knows which man she means and his face shows it as plain as day, "I hit him and it wasn't enough"

As his weight leaves the bed she releases the breath she'd been holding. Rising, he stands taller than any man she can remember seeing. That was before she'd laid eyes on his brother but the Hound's imposing height still awes her. His shadow swamps her as she sits up on the bed. She is oddly calm inside it.

"Hit me"

Dumbly, "What?"

"Hit me girl. Do your worst, I dare say I can take it"

Her first emotion is of shocked outrage. There's no reason at all for her to do something like that, "I can't- I can't hit-"

That mouth twists into a snarl, "Hit me girl, or did that little shit do you a favour in taking your father's head?"

Cold hard ground under summer snows and the smell of the pinewoods. The heart trees watch and echo Stark, Stark in the crows' wake. He said he'd be merciful and something grew sharp inside me.

"I won't-"

"Hit me. You won't learn otherwise"

She is standing before she knows it, "But-"

"Little birds don't grow talons now? There's no wolf in you girl, that's plain"

She hits him. He doesn't even move.

"Harder"

"I can't-"

"You're angry now. That's good. Hit harder"

It's difficult. Her fisted hand connecting with the side of his face, the unburnt one, makes it so much harder. The burnt side of his face always looks so sad.

She tries again. He barely blinks. Then it rises inside her. There's an emptiness in his face, his stance when she hits him and she wants, needs a reaction now. His whole frame is silent and still and it was the same and not the same when Ser Meryn's fists and the flat of his blade struck her stomach and ribs over and over. Then he was silent and still and growing, like something was moving inside him and he didn't move at all before finally ripping his cloak off to cover her naked shoulders. She remembers again, through her tears of pain and fear he flinched, he flinched as she was struck-

Her hand sails through dark air and lands on his flesh with a definite sound. She is jubilant and unsmiling.

His head moves but his eyes never leave hers. When he turns back the blood trickles from his lip black and shining. She is horrified.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" words stream from her mouth unchecked. She flutters, hands frightened and apologetic and he thinks how much like a bird she is now, mouth open, lips atremble, the sleeves of her gown flitting about white wrists as she panics in her search for something unknown. She finds it in the pocket of her gown and Sandor forgets to stop her as delicate fingers reach upwards and she strains to dab at the cut she's opened in his lip with something torn and white.

His brain bursts to think it but she tries to remove the proof of her handiwork with the scrap of cloth he'd handed her the day the little shit showed her her father's head on a spike.

Why why.

"I'm sorry-" the tears are back, glimmering unshed in Tully blue eyes that are like thawing ice now. The cloth falls from her shaking fingers and then it is they, not the fabric that dance quivering on his face, the ruined and the unruined cheek, soft fingertips on his heated flesh and Sandor burns anew though her hands are cool as washed linen.

She is looking at him.

His hands find her slender shoulders through the cloth of her gown while his head thinks of her waist under his hard fingers. He is not sure which of them is pushing and which is resisting. Her hands, the Others take him, someone stop her hands they are dancing in the air above the mockery of his lips-

She is not safe, even here. Sandor invents new curses to heap on his brother's corpse when that glorious day decides to finally present itself. How she can look.

She is looking up at him, looking in him. Your father was a killer, your brother's a killer, your sons will be killers some day-

"You won't hurt me"

Gods help him, but she sees.

"No, little bird, I won't hurt you"