This update was written during long distance travel that didn't go exactly as planned.
I wrote it to keep myself a bit positively occupied.
Uploaded on a brief WiFi respite.
It's very imperfect, but perhaps not entirely unreadable.
I'll see your comments, if any, in a few days.
Thank you for reading.
Ten
The robots should have brought him his armour by now. They were bloody late. It was time he ordered newer models. Still he remained attached to the old clinking ones, maybe because they were uglier than him. Perhaps he ought to have them reprogrammed, to ensure their proper functioning.
Unlike the bloody serving machines, his weapons and protective suits were state of the art. He couldn't accept anything less if he was to be successful in... In doing what?
The purpose of his meticulously cultivated belligerence eluded him.
He couldn't give a straight answer to himself as to why it was important that he be armed at all.
Opening the eye under the familiar, deep, hated scar that stretched unpleasantly, he glimpsed a yellowish, sickly-coloured ceiling.
What in seven hells?
The steel-plated walls of his private resting chamber were cool and plain grey.
He rose brusquely, remembering.
His landing on the Green Moon.
And Sansa.
That melody in her voice which made him feel at ease, instead of lashing out to unload his anger.
A primitive bed creaked under him, hard and too short; the sound of dry wood breaking. His arse had sunk into it during night, almost piercing the thin, rubbery mattress. He rose menacingly from the ill-suited furniture despite that there was no one around him whom he should threaten.
Wearing only baggy, black underpants, he still sweated like a pig.
Unlike the robots and the advanced killing tools he had obviously just dreamed of, air conditioning must exist, he concluded.
Even on the Green Moon, he thought with contempt about the place, terribly unsure if he had any good reason for his arrogant attitude.
Uncomfortably devoid of any driving purpose, objective or direction, he aggressively folded the screen separating his miserable bedroom from the rest of the flat, finding brief joy in the brusque action.
Sansa wasn't in the kitchen. He realised he'd expected to see her right there, preparing tea for both. Wasn't it something wives did for their husbands? But not on the Green Moon? Maybe women only served food and drinks as part of their paid jobs.
It was too hot for tea anyway.
He remembered people also fucked for money.
Seven hells, but it was probably too hot for that too.
Sansa was offered such prestigious position by the creepy maester. No, not maester. Maesters don't exist. Commissioner for Public Health.
A fine, nosy gentleman with power to lock up loonies who dreamed of spaceships, before employing their wives to work on their backs. The memory of Baelish' offer to Sansa made Sandor imagine he was crushing him, like he might squash a green bug that escaped quarantine, capable of transmitting a dangerous disease from outer space. He wondered what quarantine was and couldn't remember with precision. Insects, however, lived on earth. There was nothing in space. Only darkness and faraway stars. Be that as it may, making Baelish piss his pants from fear would be a most joyful endeavour.
Much better than folding screens.
He recalled women were free to do as they pleased on the Green Moon and caught himself wishing that they weren't. On another day, he would give a damn about what women could or couldn't do, but today he felt like a jealous ass. Worse, he wasted a moment wallowing in what could only be described as lack of civility on the Green Moon.
Being awful almost gave him purpose.
Was he always like that? What did that make him?
A primitive display in the living room caught his attention: a large, square box instead of a thin plasma screen, dating from the time of the First Men by the looks of it, thousands of years ago.
Sandor wasn't sure if plasma existed as a substance. His brain was unable to take a rational decision on the matter, suggesting both that it did and that it did not with equal ferocity. Perhaps he had been drinking the night before, some illegal strongwine from the Green Moon, and he now suffered from hangover. But wait... He was on the buggering Green Moon. How could a product be smuggled to the place where it originated from? It made no sense.
He couldn't make two and two out of it.
Where in seven hells was he coming from?
Not from heaven, but decidedly not from here. And there had to be a good answer to his question, even if robots and plasma didn't exist. Without any proof, he thought they might. Just like spaceships.
But he intended to keep his madness to himself, not sharing it with anyone, Sansa included. In case she betrayed his trust and sold him to the good Commissioner out of fear of Sandor's overly friendly, wall and door-breaking personality.
The primitive display had one large and a few smaller buttons. He might be able to turn it on to check what's up by logging into inter-planetary network with privileged access as… As what? He didn't know what position he occupied in the society of his origin nor why he thought himself entitled to such special rights.
But of course there was no such thing as inter-planetary network, that was only a bad dream.
This here was real. He should dress and get to work in the bloody bar. Craster's, was it? Maybe he had overslept his shift and Sansa was already there.
He pressed the big button on the miserable display, wondering if it would explode and turn into burning plasma or morph into something marginally familiar or usable.
Rather than dirty, worn out or backward as everything else around him.
Nothing happened. The device obviously malfunctioned. Why did he expect any different.
He chuckled contemptuously at himself. Pitiful.
When he was about to smash the useless screen into pieces, the rampage forward made him step on a little black box that stung his bare foot.
The display came to life from the contact with his bony, excessively large heel.
The creep Commissioner, Baelish, advertised his famous institution for mental well-being in mellow voice. A warm welcome to patients from the whole of the Green sound was cracking and of lousy quality. Not a word was being mentioned about honest sex-trade as side business to all the shrink stuff.
Sandor wondered if he could make a living from that or if a pretty face like Sansa's was a must. Maybe ugliness wouldn't be a problem. The customers wouldn't have to look into his eyes, they'd be more than welcome to focus on other parts of his anatomy.
From there, his imagination jumped to having sex with his wife.
Recent memories rushed unbidden into his consciousness, too few and yet too important. He needed to make more of them.
His leg wound, the stupid weakness it gave him. Sansa holding his hand when he woke. Sansa accepting his invite to a date. Sansa strolling with him through the unknown city, at ease in his company. He was done for. He had dared hope for marriage that wasn't only on paper and he couldn't shake it off.
When it concerned him, it was a done deal. She was his wife. Divorce didn't exist in his head.
But it did on the bloody Green Moon.
The hospital image on display changed abruptly into two juxtaposed portraits. One showed a dishevelled man with long, greying brown hair, and another bugger, a ginger, a happy-faced giant. Both were older than Sandor, in their early forties. The red letters in the middle claimed preposterously: "Choose the President of the Green Moon. This Sunday. Remember that you can also change the world."
Right.
The first robot candidate was called Mance Rayder and the second Tormund Giantsbane. Sandor wouldn't pick any of them to run a robot repair facility, and much less an entire world. With such leaders, it was no wonder that undesirable customs like divorce existed.
"Sandor," a crumpled blanket on the couch behind his back said timidly. A nest of tousled red hair dived out, explaining where Sansa was all along, tucked in as a three months old.
"It's you, right?" Her voice was even more musical than he remembered it and it worked like an immaterial balm on him, erasing the compelling longing to shatter objects and people from his whole being.
"Who else?" he replied, feigning indifference.
Her eyes were confused. She stretched her arms towards him, bare until above the elbow where the bell-shaped dark blue sleeves of her T-shirt begun.
"Sandor," she called him.
Was she was asking for his help to wake up?
She was wasting her time. He wasn't the helpful type.
He sat on the floor in front of her, crossing his huge legs with difficulty, and gave her a square, fixating look. To his surprise, her hands landed on his sweaty shoulders, light as bird feathers.
As soon as she was anchored to him, she began explaining her trouble in an unstoppable, shuddering waterfall of words.
"I had a horrible dream," she claimed. "Dr Baelish concluded I was mad. He locked me up in a castle high up in the sky and he gave me medicine so that I stop seeing spaceships. I strove to listen to him, for my own good, but I couldn't stop hallucinating. Wolf-ships came every night, piloted by my family, but none of them could see me in my captivity. It was as if I didn't exist. As thought I was made of water or thin air."
"Everyone has idiotic dreams from time to time," he offered. "They don't mean anything."
She pondered his words. Her gaze became clearer.
Wolf-ships. He'd never seen one. Dragonships, yes. Not that he'd tell her. He felt as if he ought to have forgotten all about them because they were now out of his reach forever, but he wasn't able to, due to some inborn defect only he possessed. Talking about defects…
Wasn't his face was more than enough?
He couldn't help but notice that Sansa's long legs were bare under the thin blanket, and that she had slept with her precious drawings of her family, but not with him.
Would that he had been her notebook overnight, a cherished, inanimate object in her tender hands.
"Could you please switch it off?" she gazed tiredly behind his back, at one future President of the Green Moon and one future loser.
He pivoted while sitted, just enough to repeatedly hit the big button on display. This time it worked miracles. Maybe if he hit it harder, the air conditioning would start in their suffocating flat. The box blackened. The girl's blue eyes brightened further, gaining in sharpness and focus. The flat was still too hot and growing warmer by a second.
"Would you mind if I..." her words dwindled into uncertainty, but one of her hands flew from his shoulder to the craters of his scars, which were waiting stupidly within her reach. He almost snarled at her for transgression. But her touch stopped him, holding him in place, unwelcome and yet desired zealously. Just there, at the ruin. When her long fingers skirted the deeper crevices, he could feel the tenderness of her caress, causing small needles to travel down his spine, and when they turned to higher, insensitive ridges, he missed it.
He was left speechless. He was almost certain no one had ever done this to him.
"I'm sorry," she apologised when he didn't respond. "I shouldn't be curious. I think that my mother used to say so. It isn't polite."
Her hand dropped. He caught it instantly and put it back where it was, his own palm lingering over hers.
She smiled warmly. "So it's okay? It doesn't hurt you or anything?"
He shrugged.
"It's too warm here," she complained when he never spoke.
"Maybe it's better at Craster's," he found his words. "They have ventilators"
"Our shift only begins tonight," Sansa said, "we are entitled to rest."
"You think we'll rest if you keep your hands on me?" he asked incredulously.
She didn't seem aware of any consequences of her actions while he was increasingly grateful that the shorts he was wearing were both opaque and too big.
Her hands froze. Her eyes were on his naked chest now. Her cheeks were flaming. Maybe she was getting a hint of what she was doing to him. Perhaps she wasn't as innocent as she looked.
To his disappointment, she looked back up, straight into his face. So she was just gaining courage to do that, wasn't she?
"How did you get hurt?" she surprised him by asking bluntly, undeterred by his taciturn reluctance and arrogance.
"I dont know!" he finally found his snarling voice. "I hate my face, I know that much."
"It must have been a terrible accident," Sansa proclaimed solemnly.
"I don't think so," he instinctively rebelled against that assessment despite having no clue what had actually happened.
"Who would have done such a thing of purpose?" Sansa wondered. "It had to be a tragic occurrence."
She had imperceptibly drawn him closer to her. His lips weren't far from hers.
"I don't know," he whispered, his raspy, burned voice breaking at the end of the sentence. He felt like her captive, at her mercy, chained by two soft hands, unable to escape his imprisonment.
"Mr Baelish and Ygritte ruined our date last night," she said tremulously, half-closing her eyes. "We didn't have peace."
"What does that mean?" Suspicion was born in him, the wish to reject her with words before it was too late and he was completely caught in her net like some rare, gaping, stupid fish. There had to be something she wasn't telling him. She must need something from him or why would she look so willing to give him this?
"You said you knew what goes on in marriage. I don't," she was nervous, barely able to speak and appeared painfully honest. "I hoped you'd know how a date should continue if a couple was left alone and undisturbed."
"It depends on how you want it to end," he rasped readily.
"I t-think," she stuttered, "I didn't want it to end last night. But I also couldn't take it further after the inopportune visit to our apartment. You were so angry. You seem calm this morning. I watched you since you woke."
What?
He'd be damned to seven hells.
He claimed her lips and forgot he had a face.
They had done it before. She wouldn't mind, would she? Not with such questions, not with such foolish wishes from his person.
Taking her in his arms, sneaking his hands under her broad T-shi, he caressed her bare back. She hadn't been wearing a bra overnight. He didn't go for her teats, anxious to keep some of his brains, in case she'd make them stop. Their kiss lasted, long and supple. Sweat was everywhere, creating the crazy longing for different wetness in Sandor's head.
"This isn't a sin in marriage, right?" she murmured after a while. "Shouldn't we wait a little?"
"A sin should be an act of evil," he reacted. "What do you think?"
"It's so sweet and it makes me feel frail," she whispered. "A weakness can also be a sin, can't it? But I still don't want it over."
He lay on his back on the floor dragging her with him. Her hair ended in his mouth. He took it out and kissed her again.
They must have squashed the little black box he'd stepped on earlier because the screen startled them both by returning to life.
A morose woman in her early sixties, with braided black hair, looked extremely worried, pointing a stick at the map of the Green Moon. "Today's temperature in Castle Black is one degree lower than last year, I repeat, one full degree lower."
"They should be grateful for that, shouldn't they?" Sandor wondered, not understanding.
The signal was suddenly lost, leaving only noisy, white and grey, gritty snow on the display.
Sandor hit the big button again and the device went blissfully black.
Laying on top of him, Sansa took the muted screen as a sign to continue kissing him, very softly, in utter silence. He grabbed her butt while she seemed busy, felt the smooth texture of her thin underwear and placed her little, dressed cunt near his cock, to see how she would react. He wondered if that was how their date should end. Was she wet? He was reluctant to check just yet. Or would she hate him later, if he took matters too far and things didn't turn to her liking?
Would she leave him if he hurt her, as soon as she found a moment to do so?
To his growling misfortune, someone banged loudly on their door.
"Maybe you should open it," Sansa suggested between kisses, still focused on his face, oblivious to anything he might have in his pants.
"Maybe we should pretend we're not here," he disagreed with what she said, but proceeded to obey her nonetheless, setting her aside gently, getting bloody up.
He pulled the door open so hard that he almost unhinged it. "What?' he asked aggressively.
It was their orange-haired neighbour, Ygritte.
Talk about spoiling dates.
"Haven't you heard?" the normally feisty girl looked genuinely distressed, he had to give her that.
"What?" Sandor repeated in a somewhat calmer, less murderous tone.
"The temperature has gone down! For a full degree! Haven't you been listening to the morning news? It's unheard of."
"It's still damn hot," Sandor was't getting the point at all.
"Jon's right," she seemed to be speaking to himself. "We've got to find the means to leave."
"No one leaves the Green Moon," Sansa said, appearing dressed behind Sandor's back, in those extremely tight trousers she'd been wearing the night before. Her legs looked even more naked in them, just differently coloured. Blue rather than creamy. "There's nowhere else to go," she said matter-of-factly. "Is there?" she breathed out. Hope coloured in her voice, making it tremble with positive expectation.
"You two don't get it. The temperature hasn't lowered in thousands of years. It only ever increases," Ygritte said convincingly. "Our leaders make us believe that the reversal of the seasons is impossible. That the weather will stay warm forever. Eternal summer! We have to invest in cooling systems and water protection and all will be fine…" she sounded bitter. "Please come over to my place and I'll explain what winter means if it should return. It's not in the materials for newcomers because it should never happen. Besides," she sounded nonchalant and friendly now, "I was so distressed by the news that I made too much food for breakfast for myself."
Sandor wasn't buying her cordiality, but he could eat some, and information on winter was potentially serious. He'd love some colder weather, but not if it meant trouble now that he… he wanted to get back to his earned rest part.
With Sansa.
"I could make breakfast," Sansa mentioned half-heartedly.
"You'll invite me tomorrow?" Ygritte beamed. "That's lovely, thanks! Come on now, today's my turn!"
Sansa looked stunned. "Err, the invitation. Yes, of course. I will. Tomorrow, I mean. I… I'm not hungry today. Might I skip breakfast?"
She was so beautiful when she strove to maintain her composure.
"She's our neighbour," Sandor pointed out. "Isn't it a sin to throw away food?" he vaguely remembered. "We could sit down, have a bite, help her finish what she's got."
Sansa looked even more surprised now. "I thought you didn't appreciate her company."
Another man would shrug. Sandor stood like a boulder. "I don't," he said flatly. "But I'm hungry. I'll be on my best behaviour," he gave an evil, unfriendly grin to Ygritte who was completely unphased by his antics.
Decency began with getting dressed, he was guessing.
He sauntered back to where he'd slept and picked up a smelly T-shirt and a bit longer shorts from the floor.
His stomach howled like a ship's engine starting, after long-lasting repairs in a space dock.
Xxxx
Xxxx
Ygritte called the food scrambled eggs, freshly made, warm, smelling great. There wasn't enough for Sandor. He swallowed what he got in a few bites while Sansa had barely just started on a fourth of the portion he devoured. He wondered if there were eggs for breakfast in his lost world and couldn't remember. Robots didn't eat them, that much was certain.
Their fiery neighbour talked nonsense of past miseries. Sandor only half-followed. Stories too incredible to be true. Scary local folk tales, most likely. Winter was a hoax on the Green Moon.
"The people here were eaten by ice monsters in the past?" Sansa asked incredulously.
Her blue gaze was shrouded again, but not with sleep. It contained an indigo cloud of anger at injustice and an infallible decision to set the world to rights.
Sandor almost laughed at her enthusiasm, decided not to. Mocking her wouldn't bring him any closer to her pants.
"Your Governor can't mount a defence to protect you?" Sansa wondered with indignation.
"There's no Governor. Our Presidents and the magistrates do their best, but if the cold winds begin to blow there won't be much anyone can do," Ygritte explained coldly.
Magistrates sounded familiar to Sandor. He was pretty certain they existed in his old world. He thought they did a lousy job so perhaps it was the same over here.
Then, with his uncommonly sharp hearing, he registered… scratching from his and Sansa's theoretically empty apartment. And he didn't think they had mice.
"Give me a minute," he said, leaving lazily to surprise the intruder, trying not to look rushed. "I'd like to put on a clean T-shirt, maybe have a shower."
"No, wait!" Ygritte tried to stop him which only made him go faster. Our mouse is your accomplice in crime, isn't he? Or she? Do you work with Baelish? What do you want from Sansa and me, girl?
It was a he.
The pretty boy, Jon, was stealing Sansa's precious notebook with her drawings. The only souvenir she had from her family.
Sandor was about to grab him by the neck and pin him to the wall of Ygritte's apartment. With some luck, the masonry would collapse if he pushed him hard enough. The happy couple could then spend the next few days rebuilding.
But just before committing that inevitable act of aggression, he realised Jon was genuinely distressed by his finding, pale and contrite, on the verge of crying like a girl over a thickly scribbled page.
And Sansa was right behind Sandor, holding his upper arm, leaning her chin on his shoulder. He wished his tunic was sleeveless and imagined her palms wandering lower, over his waist and into his underwear.
"I'm truly sorry, miss," Jon told Sansa politely, "I didn't mean to intrude on your privacy. I just wanted to steal his drawing of the dragon and I seem to have found your memories instead," he handed her the notebook with impeccably good manners.
Sandor would have at least hit him if it weren't for the idiotic innocence on his face. Whatever this was, it wasn't an act like Ygritte's and it didn't come with second intentions. Jon wanted his drawing of Sansa piloting a dragonship, with the emphasis on a latter depiction.
"Well that would be in the dustbin over there," Sansa explained courteously. "Sandor wasn't satisfied with his artistic work," she made an understatement.
"I'll take it," Sandor said coldly, moving towards the trash faster than Jon.
"But you didn't want it? You didn't need it if I was here with you?" Sansa asked.
"Doesn't mean I'll give it to him," Sandor replied jealously, retrieving his notebook and clutching it to his chest. "Or to anyone else," he felt a foolish need to emphasise.
Sansa's lips curved in a smile and she appeared content with his stupid, chivalrous gesture.
Ygritte coughed ostensibly. "We were about to leave," she said. "Come on, Jon, I don't think that they fancy more eggs or anything else from us."
"Tell me about them dragons if you don't want to let me see one," Jon pleaded.
"What's that to you?" Sandor wondered.
"'It feels like madness but it might not be," Jon affirmed sternly. "My father arrived at the Green Moon after my mother, carrying a bag of golden dragons. His money built us a home before my parents got jobs and settled in as everyone else. But there was more to it than the coin. He fancied himself born to a dragon family in heaven. They flew spaceships that could spit fire. He dreamed about them every night and he'd tell us in the morning that one day we'd see them. Mom taught me he was just mad from very early age. That sickness ran in his family but not in hers, according to her recorded memories. I pretended not to believe in his words because I didn't want to make Mom sad, but I often wondered... My father's ancestors supposedly had a special gene or something that went with the technology they developed."
"His Dad was trying to build a dragonship in the last year, but he ended up burning their house instead," Ygritte told Sansa. "Jon was lucky to be on duty that night. Conflagration caught his parents in their sleep. The fire brigade was too late. The funeral was magnificent. Everyone loved them, despite that his Dad was a loony."
"Don't call him that," Jon rebelled.
Sandor's guts clenched savagely from the notion of an unknown couple being burned alive in their sleep. Absentmindedly, he felt his missing ear. Burned, burned, burned… Terror was in him and he was six year old. There was no escape.
"But Ygritte, you were helping your friend to search for dragons in my chambers… in my and my husband's flat I mean," Sansa protested. "Why did you do that if you think Jon is being foolish?"
The paralysing fear vanished from in his head. He was in present, big and strong. And he held his stupid notebook harder when Sansa mentioned him as her husband.
"Temperature has dropped for a whole degree, miss," Ygritte lectured Sansa. "Haven't you heard?"
"There's a special place which gives clairvoyance on the Green Moon," Jon interrupted. " A high ridge of hills we call the Wall north of Castle Black," he clarified. "It's a whole day hike to get there. Nothing is actually built over there, there's only more lush forest like everywhere else on the Green Moon," he explained. "But when you approach those hills and climb on top, you slowly become less sure about the universe being as it is and about spaceships non being real. Mind you, you're still not sure that they are real. But to stand on that invisible barrier feels as if all certainties planted into you by good society and proper education have been purified from your being. And you are left free to dream and to assume."
"What else do people assume? If space is nothing to them?" Sandor wondered. "That they are rich and clever?"
"Those born here very little out of the ordinary," Ygritte replied sceptically. "I tried. I know. It was a major disappointment."
"Maybe because you are already free," Sandor reminded her coldly of what her books preached. "Isn't that your way of life? Nice and normal. So different than the madness of backward newcomers who commit crimes on your wonderful moon until they settle down."
He expected a quarrelsome answer, but Ygritte ignored him, giving a sad, emotional look to Jon. She'd let him in her pants alright.
Jon returned to her a rather intensive, smouldering gaze, but then looked away, either bored or feigning boredom, like Sandor. That was worrying. Every enemy Sandor had encountered so far had been a little predictable. But this boy here was a loose cannon, and Sandor didn't even know to what end.
"In our daily life, freedom often means that we can change our mind about whom to date every hour or so," Jon declared. 'The time it takes on average to have sex or to get married for fun and then have sex." He gave an uncharacteristically patient look to Ygritte. "You can have the time of your life with almost anyone, Ygritte. Why obsess with me? I'm not into relationships. I find it uninteresting."
It was Ygritte's turn to look away and refuse to speak.
"I don't want the paper hassle of a marriage," she squeezed out after a long while. "And we don't have to last forever," she stressed. "Only be together for a while. What would be wrong with that?"
"Nothing," Jon shrugged. "But it's not for me."
Sandor didn't get what their problem was. Perhaps these two could fuck in those lush hills, maybe that was the liberation they required. Then they might stop swallowing each other with their eyes, while keeping their solitary hands uselessly to themselves.
Not even Sansa with her good manners and obsession with the absence of sin was that stern towards herself, from the precious little intimacy Sandor was able to witness when they decided to continue their date this morning. He hoped, he almost prayed to see more of her abandon very soon.
"What do newcomers feel on the Wall?" Sansa broke the newborn silence in the flat.
Our flat, Sandor thought idiotically, beginning to love its sick yellow colour. Even the bloody heat.
"I don't know," Jon said, "I was born here, just like Ygritte."
"But your Mom arrived pregnant from heaven-"
"My Mom is none of their business, Ygritte!" Jon retorted angrily. "We barely know these people and there's no love lost between us."
"What I wanted to say is, he's still a newcomer in a way, he wasn't conceived here," Ygritte didn't surrender in her views. "That fact can make him prone to madness, not his old man."
"What did you see that you want to go back to that place?" Sandor reformulated Sansa's question to Jon.
"I climbed to the Wall for the first time after the funeral," Jon's eyes were sincere, perturbed. "And I sensed that a dragonship was on its way here, searching for me. It would arrive too late to find my father. It might take me away from the Green Moon if I so wanted. Bring me home, wherever that is. Since then I can't stop thinking of it. Or maybe its my father's family madness that is finally getting to me now that he's gone for good. If that's the case," he swallowed hard, "then I'm happy my Mom's not here to see it. It would kill her…" he whispered, "if fire hadn't done that already."
"How interesting," Sandor said sardonically, not admitting his growing interest in the whole scheme. He wasn't mad. Spaceships existed. If he remembered how to find one, he could choose where to go with Sansa. He could offer her the world. Not be stuck on the Green Moon.
"If I am to take part in this lunacy, I'll need my jumpsuit," he told Ygritte, "I know you took it from me in the hospital, so please don't waste my time by trying to tell me that it doesn't exist."
Jon and Ygritte exchanged undecided looks.
"It's against the rules," she said. "And besides, your clothing is far too warm," she warned him, "you'll drop dead before you reach the Wall."
"My death is my own business, not yours," Sandor replied rudely. "I can go for a walk in the countryside without you if you prefer. I'm sure that the choice of hills near Castle Black is rather limited," he assumed arrogantly. "We can do without guides."
"Sandor!" Sansa exclaimed like an flying instructor admonishing a ten year old who stepped in a pile of alien shit. "We might not find the place without them. Or we'll walk for a week and suffocate or pass out from heat. Everything is green in the surroundings of Castle Black. We'll never remember our past nor what we did to deserve coming here." Her face was transformed with longing.
She'd return to her family, wouldn't she? She wouldn't go with him...
I'm not so sure that I want to remember, Sansa. He opened his mouth to inform her of his wishes in the matter and immediately decided against it. He wasn't craven. Past was nothing to him.
"You'll have your suit in no time," Jon said. " On one condition."
"What?" Sandor and Sansa asked in unison.
"Isn't it obvious?" Ygritte thundered. "If you two find a way to leave the Green Moon, we're coming with you."
"Fine with me," Sandor promised dryly.
Jon birthed a cold black look and said nothing at all.
Sandor wondered about his true plans. Perhaps Ygritte had lied for him again, wishing to cover up for her would-be boyfriend's unknown, possibly sinister intentions.
Well, he could kill him, he realised, if need be.
He could kill them all.
That chill certainty about himself frightened him. He didn't cherish it. Not at all. It was just a fact and a constant about his whole being. Maybe he was a malfunctioning robot that didn't exist.
He remembered the fat doctor, Sam, and the unknown sickness he warned Sandor about. Insects harboured in his blood. Little nasties swimming in his veins. He clenched his fists.
"Sandor, what's wrong?" Sansa asked with genuine worry, sounding as if she could look into him, see through him, know him so much better than he could ever know himself. He felt like a boy caught stealing green fruit or pulling his sister's hair.
He felt naked, exposed.
He was more unhinged by her perceptiveness concerning him than from forgetting his past and all reasons and forces that had ever driven him to exist and draw breath.
Unable to bark at her, he decided to brush off her concern. "It's nothing," he said curtly.
And yet he was so grateful for the sweet music she gave him in her voice. With every single word.
"It's just the heat," he muttered. "Would that I could jump out of my skin," he invented an excuse.
"If you say so," she singsonged. "It's very warm indeed."
She didn't look as if she were hindered by the weather. Her skin wasn't clammy but rather smooth, dry and velvet-like. Maybe her armpits smelled of flowers. Not that he would mind a bit more pungent body scent on her end. Not at all.
Or maybe she was an ice monster in hiding, about to devour him in his sleep and punish him for his continuous daring towards her person.
He'd stay close to her. She'd speak… seven heavens, she might sing at occasions... His demons would be kept at bay. And she'd be safe with him, wherever she decided to go.
He rasped indifferently, "Let's scale that Wall."
"This way," Jon said decisively, looking like a third candidate for president on a Sunday election.