Since he did get the short end of the stick in this fic so I figured the least I can do is give him a POV, right?

SANDOR

Sandor had been in the solar since long before dawn. He had rarely gone into that room, leaving the administrative part of the regency to his wife and the maester, preferring to watch directly over the future ruler of the North. Rickon was a good boy, if a bit wild and Sandor had done his best to redirect that wildness into the acceptable pursuits like fighting or riding. The northmen respected strength and competence and Sandor made damn sure the boy could keep up with the best.

The point was, Sandor had few reasons to be in the solar and the only reason he was there on that particular morning was because - as much as he would deny it to anyone but his wife - he was feeling sentimental. His encounter with Sansa in their daughter's room had unsettled him greatly and he spent most of the night tossing and turning in his too small bed in the guest room he had taken for his after the accident.

When he had been told for the first time that Sansa had lost her memories from the past eleven years, he hadn't been quite sure what to do with himself. Eleven years was more or less how long he had known her and he had known even before the maester had spoken to him in that commiserating voice of his - the one that had almost made Sandor punch him - that Sansa had forgotten about him.

His first instinct upon learning of that had been to get drunk until he would forget, too. The notion had passed quickly but it had still left him feeling like he had somehow betrayed Sansa's trust in him. Which had been utterly ridiculous, of course. It had not been like she would have known in her current state.

In the end, he had dealt with it as usual - by clamming up and doing his best to ignore everyone and everything with the exception of his own children. Sansa had always claimed that he had been a good father and he hadn't been about to disappoint her.

When he had seen Sansa stand over Catelyn's bed the previous night, he had thought that maybe her loss of memory had been a temporary thing. He had said that thing about the green silk scarf to see if she would turn around and tell him with a smile that she had known that. Instead, she had been frightened out of her wits, as much as she had tried to hide it. And then she had started with her polite nonsense and he had known that whatever it had been that had made her come into their daughter's room that late in the night had had nothing to do with her memory coming back miraculously.

It had been frustrating to see and hear her display the behaviour that had so irked him at the beginning of their acquaintance - a frightened child hiding behind her courtesy when she couldn't have looked him in the face without bursting into tears. So it had caught him by surprise when she had not only asked him to talk with her about their past but also touched him of her own volition.

It had been that tentative touch on his arm, right above his elbow that had caused him to lose sleep so completely. She hadn't remembered him, that much had been clear by her nervousness but that touch... Tall as Sansa was, he still towered over her a fair bit and so she had developed a habit of touching his arm above his elbow to get his attention. It had become an unconscious gesture on her part and he probably shouldn't read much into it, lest he would be disappointed in the end.

"So this is where you were hiding," Arya was leaning against the door to the solar and watching him and Sandor berated himself for not paying more attention.

"What do you want, wolf bitch?" he asked tiredly. She had been on her best behaviour ever since the accident but they had been hostile to each other for so long it was hard to let go of the ingrained habits.

"An epitome of manners as usual, eh?" she moved further into the solar before she tossed his cloak at him. "Sansa must be waiting in the godswood by now. She wants to talk to you. Maybe she will finally send you away."

"You would like that, wouldn't you?"

A strange expression flickered across her face.

"No, I wouldn't," she said quietly enough that he wasn't sure at first if he had heard her at all. "It's not that I like you or anything," she said more loudly, glaring at him as if the very concept was insulting. "But when she finally wises up to do that, she shouldn't be a pale imitation of her child self."

"Careful, girl," Sandor told her, knowing nothing enraged her more than him patronizing her. "That almost sounded like you give a damn."

"Piss off, Clegane!" she muttered before she turned her back on him. "And get your arse over to the godswood. It's not polite to let a lady wait."

"As if you would know anything about being a lady," he told her before leaving the room abruptly, depriving her of having the last word. But the brief levity didn't last as he crossed the courtyard quickly. His wife was waiting for him and he didn't intend on making the wait any longer.

The Winterfell's godswood was a large place that had always made him feel like the time passed differently in it. The air was warmer around the springs and as he approached the largest one, he could see Sansa sitting on a bench that had been installed there during the rebuilding of Winterfell. He didn't want to startle her as he had last night and so he stopped at the end of the path, observing her for a moment. He couldn't see her fully as she was facing away from him but he noted she was more pale than usual. She might have even lost some weight, not having eaten anything during those days she had been unconscious but her figure was obscured beneath a dark, fur-lined cloak.

"Sansa," he called out and could see the effort she had gone through not to jump at the sound of his voice. As fidgety as a scared bird. She had outgrown her timidity a long time ago and this regression was almost painful to watch.

"My lord," she replied as she stood up, facing him fully. Well, she was facing in his direction but her eyes were downcast, not looking at his face. It was a prudent gesture, he realized. As much as he hated her inability to meet his eyes, having her look at him and become repulsed by the sight of his scars would have been much worse. Still, some things should be addressed.

"Call me Sandor," he told her as he watched her reaction. "I never liked all those sers and my lords you were spouting."

"That would not be pro-" she paused as if something occured to her and she gave a small nod. "Of course, Sandor. As you wish."

He wondered if he was wrong to force this familiarity on her when she was still clearly so out of sorts but for all her paleness and seeming frailty, Sansa had always proven to be strong enough and he knew beyond any doubt that she could handle calling him by his first name.

"Your sister said you wished to talk to me."

"Yes, I did. Could we sit down? I still feel somewhat weak."

He followed her to the bench, sitting so that she would look upon the whole side of his face. It was a small courtesy that he extended to her willingly enough. She must have noticed because he saw her looking at him before she directed her gaze to her lap and her fidgeting hands.

"I know that things must have been hard for you these past few days and I just want to say that I am sorry for being unable to-"

"Don't!" Sandor cut her off the moment he realized what she was about to do. "Don't apologize for that!"

"But I forgot about you, about our children, about our life. Don't you hate me for that?" she insisted with such a vehemence that he wasn't sure where it was all coming from.

"Trust me, little bird, I spent too much of my life hating many people for great many things. You never were amongst those people. Never will be."

"Oh," she said quietly. And then, "Why did you call me a little bird?" she asked curiously and Sandor wondered if her interested tone was a good or a bad thing.

"I used to call you that all the time in the King's Landing," he admitted. "And I started with it soon after we met up again. A force of habit, you could say."

"I think I like it," she told him as she blushed, looking down again and Sandor tried to squash the hope that had risen up in him. She was just being polite, that was all.

"Is there anything you want to know?" he asked in an effort to distract himself from her words.

"Arya said we had had a connection of some kind in the King's Landing. What did she mean by that?"

That was more direct than Sandor had expected but he could answer this one easily. Shortly after their marriage, Sansa had, through various means, extracted all he had thought about her and their relationship during their stay in the capital. Having already talked about it once made it easier for him to repeat it to her now.

"It is a long story but the gist of it would be that you made me face up to some things I would rather forget and I made you see the world for what it was."

"But what does that mean?" she asked. Sandor sighed as he leaned back. Maybe the best course of action would be to relay to her the details of one of their encounters.

"Do you want to know why I started calling you a little bird?" he offered. The first night of the Hand's tourney might not have been his best moment, getting drunk and trying to scare her but it was the first time he noticed her true self and revealed a part of himself in return. Besides, Sansa had always liked tourneys. If he told her how he had won one, well, it couldn't hurt, could it?

"Yes, I would like that," she agreed as she turned on the bench to better face him.

"King Robert held a tourney to honour your father," Sandor started as he tried to ignore the way she was paying attention to his every word. "It was a big thing, knights and freeriders coming from all across the Westeros. Only the jousts took a whole day and it got so late that the last four competitors were to ride in the morning instead. I was one of them. Jaime Lannister was another, then my brother and the youngest Tyrell, Loras. I wasn't a pleasant man back then, Sansa. When off duty, I used to drink until I could barely stand. I was officially on duty that night but it was a feast and everyone was drinking. And I was the closest to facing my brother in combat that I was in years and I needed the wine to deal with it better," he held up a hand when she opened her mouth to ask. "All in good time. So, you were this bright-eyed girl, wet with love for Joffrey," he fairly spat out the name, the years doing nothing to lessen his shame for his inaction back when Joffrey had sat the Iron Throne. "And Joff was playing his part valiantly until the feast was over and he ordered me to take you back to the Keep. Gods, you were scared and I was really drunk by then and then you tried to talk to me. It was all polite nonsense about how well I rode that day - as if a lady like you knew the first thing about jousting. It was all learned phrases and it reminded me of those talking birds from the Summer Isles, the ones taught to speak and then kept in a cage for the amusement of their owner. And you seemed just like them, repeating what you have been taught, finding polite words for even a brute like me," he frowned as he recalled what followed next, his fist clenching in remembered fury. "What angered me, though, was that not only did you have polite words for me, you had polite words to say about my brother, too and I couldn't have stood that. In my mind, Gregor didn't deserve any kind of courtesy, much less from someone so bright and pretty as you. So I lashed out at you. I forced you to look at me, to look at my scars and I told you in detail just why my face looked the way it did. I told you how it was Gregor's doing, how he was the one to hurt me by pressing my face into a brazier when I was still a child," he paused then, hearing her gasp. "I told you all that because I wanted to scare you, to show you that knights and titles, they were worth nothing. And then you surprised me more than anyone ever had."

"How?" she asked and he turned to face her, scars and all, suddenly aware of the small hand resting on his clenched fist. He couldn't recall when she had touched him and he was taken aback almost as much as when she had told him that his brother had been no true knight.

"You were kind to me. Instead of running away and crying, you tried to comfort me. And that was when I realized that you were different. That you meant all that polite nonsense you spoke. That it was more than just words for you. That somehow, you were better than everyone else. That maybe you really were just a little bird caged for the amusement of your owners but you couldn't see the cage for some reason," he broke off before he would tell her even more. Sansa was now looking at him, looking at his face and she had such an expression of kindness and compassion in her eyes that he could almost believe his wife was back with him.

"I..." she stopped to sniffle a bit before she smiled, not widely but it was genuine. "That was beautiful."

He pulled his hand away from hers, embarrassed by his outburst. She had always been able to do this to him, to make him reveal more than he had planned to.

"So that's why I started to call you a little bird," he finished roughly in an effort to save face but her little smile got wider as if she suspected that was what he was trying to do.

"Thank you for telling me," she told him before she regarded him with a thoughtful look. "Did you get to face your brother in the joust?"

"Not exactly," he replied, the topic of that second day safer than the night preceding it. "I unhorsed Jaime and the Tyrell boy managed to unhorse Gregor. Gregor didn't take it well and attacked him. I intervened and we fought for a short time before we were ordered to stop. Since I saved his life, Tyrell yielded to me and I was named the champion."

"I am sure you would have won regardless," she claimed and Sandor couldn't help but feel a bit better at her display of faith. "Could you tell me more?"

"Of course, little bird. What do you want to know?"

And just like that, they started talking to each other again.

A/N: Not yet over, peeps. There are still some topics to cover *cough*thefirstkiss*cough*.