The first day that Sansa was gone, he only worried a little. He was still somewhat shaken up by the events of the previous day, so it could not be helped. The second day, he worried a little less. Sansa seemed assured of herself. She may not have been as big as the other mermen that he had seen, but she was smarter and faster, and that counted for a lot. The third day, he began to worry again. It was not like her to be gone so long. The only other time she had been gone for that long was when she came back with blood on her hands.
A fourth day passed, and then a fifth. Soon, Sandor was eaten up with grief and anxiety. Wherever she had gone, he wished he could've gone with her. It did not matter if she was on the other side of the sea, or captured, or dead, he felt like he should've been there with her.
He tried to distract himself with tasks and chores. He cleaned out the pit he used for fires, refilled it, and lit the fire. He washed himself and his clothing in the ocean to the best of his ability. He tried to shake all of the sand from his blanket, but found that task impossible. That night, he lay awake for a long time before finally drinking some of the wine that he had and falling into a drunken sleep.
He awoke too early. The sun had barely risen, and the sky was purples on one side and black on the other. He brushed the sand from his face and laid back down when a fit of coughing had him sitting up again.
"Sansa?" He called out hesitantly, and was met with more coughing.
"Here." The voice was hoarse and he barely caught it. He leapt to his feet and followed the sound. It was not yet dawn, and he could barely see.
"Are you injured?" He asked, and knelt next to her in the sand.
"Only," She coughed a bit more. "Only having a hard time breathing." Her fingers were a bit wrinkled and pruned, but he held on to them all the same. She coughed and coughed, and then turned and retched into the ocean.
"Are you ill?" He asked.
"I don't know." She was trembling. He stood and left her for only a moment to get one of the few remaining bottles of wine. He handed it to her and she gulped it greedily before dropping it and turning to vomit it back out into the sea. "What was that?"
"It was wine. The same wine as always." He told her. "You've never had a problem with it before. Maybe you are ill."
Light was finally peeking up over the horizon when he realized how pale she looked. She was shivering, and when he placed his hand on her arm, he found that she was freezing cold. He thought for a moment about bringing her up closer to the fire, but decided against it. It would probably only make her worse. She belonged to the sea, after all.
She lay halfway in the water, halfway on the land. Her cheek rested against the damp, flat sand as she attempted to breathe evenly. He waited with her while she recovered herself. He gently pulled her hair aside, trying not to have the knots catch on his fingers. He thought to run water over her gills like she sometimes asked him to. It seemed to comfort her. But when her neck was revealed, it was only skin. There was enough light for him to realize that there were no gills.
Uncomprehending, he ran his finger over the flesh there. Her hand came up to touch his, and he noticed she had no webbing between her fingers. There were no scales dotting the top of her hand either. His gaze ran up to her shoulder, down her back, and down further looking for the missing scales but never finding them.
"Seven hells," He looked over her again, and again, and again. "Seven bloody buggering hells, girl, what have you done?"
"What I thought was right." She gave him a weak smile. He hauled her up out of the water and carried her over to the campfire. He wrapped her up in his blankets and laid her underneath the lean-to before stroking the fire back to life.
"How did this happen?" He asked, settling down beside her and grabbing ahold to her foot through the blanket.
"I looked everywhere and finally found that witch." Sansa told him. "She didn't seem deceitful. She said she would help me, genuinely, but I must pay a price. She promised to give me the body of a healthy young human, and with her magic she is sending us a ship to get the both of us off of his island, and if you search the shore you'll find a bag of gold."
"What did you exchange?"
"Everything." She coughed. "Almost everything. All the things I had that didn't matter. Things like my claim, and everything that lies beneath the waves that my birth or my marriages gave to me. Once I set foot upon the ship that will take us to our future, I will lose the ability to swim in saltwater, and I'll never learn again."
"You've paid a big price," Sandor rasped. "And for what? Legs and a cunt and an ugly old man at your side?"
"That's what I wanted."
He reached out and took her hand. Her skin was different now. He found that he missed the way it felt before. "I never wanted you to change yourself."
"I had to." She shook her head. "I never would've been able to claim my birthright. They would've killed me first, or married me off to someone else. It wouldn't have meant anything, anyhow. Keeping you safe, keeping the both of us safe, was more important."
"I'm angry at you." For the first time in his life, he had to say it. He didn't want to frighten her. She might die if he did. He imagined she might have been swimming for hours to find the island again.
"It will pass." She smiled, and after a few minutes of silence, she lapsed off into sleep.
Four days later, the ship arrived. Sansa had wrapped her new bottom half in one of the bolts of cloth to cover herself. Sandor hid the gold the witch had gifted them, which was a large sum that he had not yet counted. Sansa walked like a newborn horse, and managed to fall down and hurt herself every time he looked away.
Apparently, his ship had caught fire some ways off of the fingers, almost off into the Shivering Sea. The new ship was bound to Braavos, and offered to take them there.
Sandor guessed that his ship had sunk nearly two years before they were found. The war was still waging in Westeros, and the Lannisters and the Starks were becoming scarce. He thought it was best not to return soon, if at all.
He told the crew that Sansa was his wife, but when the ship sank that she injured her head and was always a little dim afterwards. This explained her odd behavior, so the crew did not look twice when she said or did something strange.
"Listen, Sansa," He told her one day when they were alone. "People are going to want to know who you are. We have to make something up." He looked her up and down. "Tell everyone that you are Sansa Rivers, you hear?"
"Rivers? What does that mean?"
"Means you're a Tully bastard. No one would call you a liar, with your look."
"What's a Tully?"
"A fish, like you." He laughed long and hard at that. "And only some bastard girl would wed a man like me. So it's a good story, and if anyone asks, you're from Pinkmaiden."
"Sansa Tully of Pinkmaiden."
"Rivers. Sansa Rivers."
"Rivers." She blushed.
When they arrived at Braavos, few seemed to recognize him as the Hound. He wondered if people had forgot after all the time he had been missing, or if they were only avoiding him like people did before. He wondered if it truly mattered.
He had only been around one person for the past two years, and in that time it was easy to forget a lot of things about other people. He sometimes felt like a young squire again, unable to put words together and speak properly. Large crowds made him uneasy, and Braavos was mostly large crowds.
He used a bit of their gold to buy a small house for them. It only had one room, and was crammed together with near a hundred other houses, but it had a bed and a fireplace. He let her pick out a few dresses; the gods knew she needed them.
And so Sandor Clegane set out on learning how to live among people again, although he was never really good at that in the first place, but he also had to teach Sansa Rivers how to act like a proper human being, and he was never really good at that either.
