A/N: GRRM built the sandbox, and I just play in it. Don't try Wynn's remedies at home.

Sandor

A man could learn a lot by watching.

In King's Landing, he'd stood watch over Joffrey, both before and after his coronation. The perverse fascination the boy had for causing pain to others and boasting of his own unproven prowess had rankled, as had the boy's habit of calling him Dog. Hound was one thing; it was based on his family sigil, after all, and hounds were noble hunters, trained to find and kill. But to be reduced to a mangy cur, begging for scraps and cringing away from kicks? No.

Everything seemed upside-down in King's Landing, though, not just the bratty cunt he served. They took one of the best fighters in the kingdom and made him play nursemaid. Not even a nursemaid, actually; he wasn't wiping noses and fetching sugartits. Just standing, watching, and doing what he was told. Kill a boy? Sure. Only because he was ordered, and because they'd have done worse had he brought the boy back alive. He'd made it quick, at least.

They were all like that, though, the noble lords and ladies and knights that flocked around the Red Keep. They lied, and they feasted, and they lied, and they danced, and they lied and they schemed and he watched them. He'd watched Sansa being broken by them, until he was nearly broken himself by fire, but she wouldn't come with him and now, in this cottage at the ass-end of nowhere, he supposed he understood why. She saw them too, but she thought he was like them. He couldn't blame her. He'd done what he could, but bound by orders, it hadn't been enough to protect her.

Her sister had been another thing entirely. The little bird had been fragile, but she sang the right songs and so avoided most danger. Only when her family's rebellion had outshone the cunt brat he served had she been in true danger. The wolf-bitch had none of her graces, nor the delicate beauty her sister possessed. I didn't want her that way, he told himself in the dark, and knew the lie for what it was but refused to examine it closer. At least with the wolf-girl he had no conundrum. Children held no draw for him, and she seemed less a girl and more a feral boy-child than anything else, something ferocious and fey and defenseless and vicious, all wrapped into a neat little package that carried a sword she called a needle.

The woods witch... Wynn... He'd given her his given name, not wanting to be called Hound anymore, certainly not Dog; he was done hunting and killing for others. Clegane meant his family, and the brother who'd maimed him and the father who'd allowed it. He'd spoken with Ray only a little on what that meant, on the dark rage he felt at being at everyone else's command, their beck and call, their names for him and the roles he'd served. He was done serving. She, at least, expected nothing from him but that he would heal and then he'd move elsewhere. That was simple enough. She didn't command, like Joffrey or his thrice gods-damned mother. She didn't ask questions, like Septon Ray. She just was, and with a lack of anything else to do, he watched her.

She was usually up before he was, in the pre-dawn, and he'd ignored her morning washing session more often than he liked to think about. She was tall, although he didn't realize how tall until she'd stood him up to measure him for clothing and realized her head hit at shoulder-height. She wasn't pretty. Her hips were good, though, when he watched her bend over the fire and stir something in the cooking pot, and the curve from her waist to the bend was revealed. Her face was rectangular, with high cheekbones and a sharp jaw. Her nose was a bit crooked, and he realized after studying it awhile that it looked like the noses of men he'd known, men who'd fought and lost and had it broken. Set well, yes, but broken nonetheless. She had eyes that were brown with flecks of amber that had never hesitated to meet his. She came back from bathing somewhere else with her hair wet and dripping, and he watched her put oil on it and twist it into many ropes that dried in long curls, but by the next day, it was messy again. It was the only messy thing about her.

He liked the way she moved. Whether she walking around the cottage, or bending in some household chore, there was a surety to it that stirred something in him. It was her domain and she moved in it. She taught the girl, and her arms reached out to pull down herbs tied to the rafters and he watched.

He liked the way her hands moved when she kneaded bread. Her hands were large, and a part of him itched to lay his palms against hers, to measure the difference. She had broad palms and long fingers, and he thought they'd be smaller than his, but still larger than the whores he'd been with who had laid beneath him and sighed and moaned until he told them to shut up. He'd be able to curve the ends of his fingers over hers, and her palms would look small against his hands, and he'd thread his fingers through hers and wrap his thumb around to hold hers still. She moved her hands against the dough and turned it and kneaded it, and then the large hands had scooped it up and placed it to rise, and later she'd taken it away to be baked elsewhere. She had hands that could do more than just needlepoint and hold goblets of wine. They'd set his leg and wrapped his injuries and bathed him when he couldn't move. Her nails were short and her fingers were long. He wanted to touch them, and he didn't want to.

Antha came in the mornings, and they talked about various plants. After she'd gone home, Ray would come and she'd disappear, and they'd talk. Ray seemed to be taking him apart, like he was barn or a keep, skeletal framework that he was nailing new cross-braces to. Ray made him angry, and he hated his questions, but late at night, he'd think things over, and find some kind of peace. He wasn't sure how he felt about it, but the lack of pain and shame was welcome and he looked at his past transgressions differently.

But he'd leave as well, and then it would just be her, in the dimness of the cottage, and her face would be set with that mask that reminded him of Sansa's when she'd chirped her courtesies and it turned his stomach. When he was still angry at Ray and yelled at her instead, he watched how her body tensed and braced, and how her face set and he listened to the measured words she said. It was similar to the little bird's, albeit far more practiced and effective, and he wondered who had played Joffrey, or Meryn Trant, to break her calm, to build that armor. Who had made her build a wall between herself and the world. Because she did have one, even if she pretended she was living in this village where no one came to her door but women and a septon, and he knew it.

"Men don't come here," she'd said, and he remembered. And no, no men had come there. The tall, rangy man had delivered the crutches, but he wasn't invited into her house. Ray came in, but he almost always left moments later, or Wynn left and he stayed. She didn't let men in. He was there, and she didn't shy from him. But she had, early on, and at night he thought about it. He considered how she'd shied away from him. A mental image of her crouched by the strawtick on the floor haunted him, muscles tense and looking like she'd been poised to either receive a blow or to attack and yet she didn't.

She could have killed him then, but she hadn't.

It was good being dressed in clothes again, fully dressed. He pulled the clothing on and pulled the crutches under his armpits and stood upright and it was good; his leg felt like it was healing.

But days passed, where he was still and calm and didn't move but only watched, because of the way she moved. He got up and walked around, and he watched how she startled when she wasn't expecting him, and his thoughts were consumed by it. Strong as she was, capable as she was, she expected pain. And he felt a strange longing that she never know that expectation again. It was foreign. It was unexpected and unwanted. He watched her mouth twitch, the bottom lip broad and almost pouting, and swore that she'd never expect it again. He wanted to grasp her hips and kiss her and tell her that she wouldn't have to feel that way again, but he couldn't. She wouldn't want him to and he knew it. She held herself apart from everyone, and she was untouchable, a woman standing at a hearth that he couldn't reach for, and he knew he'd be moved to a different house soon. He'd been there nearly a month and didn't need such care anymore.

Ray had come in the early evening, after they'd eaten, to tell the woods witch that a new group of refugees had arrived, and that one woman among them would need her skills soon. Saltpans had been sacked.

"Likely more than just her will need me, then," she said, her voice grave. "I'll start seeing them tomorrow."

Sandor stood at the open doorway after Ray left, staring into the night, wondering how far north his brother's men would go. An owl hooted in the distance and he pictured Gregor riding north, chasing the trail of the refugees as they fled before him. Finding this village, far off the main thoroughfare but not unknown. "For the night is dark and full of terrors," he said quietly, remembering the words spoken so often by the Brotherhood.

"Is he?" she asked, coming up behind him.

"What?"

"The knight. Is he dark and full of terrors?" and the look on her face was a mixture of confusion and concern, and her dark eyes were staring into his, and he thought then that this was the moment, and his breath caught but as he started to lift his hand from the crutch, she turned and stepped away to put more wood on the fire, and the moment disappeared like the sparks and smoke that flew up the chimney.