A/N: Thanks to everyone who has shown interest in this story! I'm not sure how often I'll be updating (heavens knows I really, really, really, owe you all a new chapter of The Maiden in the Tower which I swear I'll get on soon) but hopefully because the chapters are short that there won't be too much space in between updates. Especially because the story isn't linear so I can just write whatever I want. Whenever I want. Very conducive to plot bunnies...

This chapter takes place the day after the first chapter. There's a lot of exposition, but I think it'll be useful to know going forward.

Thanks to Winterwasp, Guest, and grumpirah for reviewing chapter one!

JULY 1869

"Why do you even trust me?" he asks her, his face carved into deep hollows by the campfire. The scars look even more gruesome by firelight. Sansa thinks she remembers that better than most other things about him. "I could have come and gone and not known you were there at all, little bird."

Sansa remembers a time when he strove to make her shake with fear. She hadn't understood it then, she an innocent thing of fourteen, but she does, now, with many miles and men between him and her. Peter did teach her more than just a thing or two, and she was a Madame in her own right. She can only hope that he has changed in every way but one. She can only hope that she still has hold over him.

She will not tell him that.

Because you were my only hope? Familiar faces are hard to come by. The men her father brought with him to the Dakota territory are either dead are long-gone, and the Lannisters have moved onto to richer veins, better gold. Those passing through Eerie bring word that the Lannisters have all the gold in Casterly Rock, an upstart mining town in Nevada, in their possession now. And her mother's family is as good as dead, as far as she knows. They're all dead. Her parents, her brothers, her sister. All dead, except her.

And somehow, Sandor Clegane. The Hound is dead.

And somehow Sandor Clegane, she had noticed his first night in Eerie, no longer drank.

She looks back at him, and he is waiting for an answer. And now that she has no one else to rely on, she must give him one. Because I made you break? But she doesn't want a broken man to be her savior, and Sandor Clegane seems wholer than when he left her, and she does not want to seem impertinent.

Instead, she laughs as if it is still all a game, and gives him an answer she knows he will accept. "You know how to survive, if you've made it these five years. I'll need that."

"Well, you won't be getting any gentle survival out here, little bird. There's no place to powder your nose on the run."

Are we on the run, then? Sansa knows that the Lannisters tried to have him run in on destruction of private property and arson, after he fled, and sent their own men after him for less legitimate reasons.

"I'll have no need to powder my nose out here, Mr. Clegane. Unless you're under the impression that I intend to market my wares to the tumbleweeds," she retorts loftily. Indeed, she has changed from red and lace gown into a plainer dress of pink cotton, fashioned her hair into a simple braid. "Weren't you under the impression that you were rescuing me from a life of sin?"

He looks up from the fire to look at her almost appreciatively, but it is Sansa who is appreciative that there is no wanting glint in his eye, nothing like how he looked at her while they lived in the Landing, when she was a girl who looked like a woman but knew nothing of the sort.

Sandor Clegane can now appreciate (Sansa does not think it is the right word, but she does not presume that he is still infatuated-with her or her innocence-after all these years) without desiring destruction.

Or perhaps it is because she is not some naive little girl on the cusp of womanhood that he no longer feels some perverse obligation to both shake the innocence from her and crawl inside her veins to inhabit her naivete, to reclaim her innocence for himself. Destruction, then, had always seemed imminent, been imminent. He had been such a man of loathing and loyalty and the battleground had always been his own body. Sansa had picked over his ghost, climbed through constructed iron bars and hollow walls of the Hound around the small child that he was, the stunted grotesque of boy whose face had never left the flames. And the little boy, who had reached out for the little girl that she had once been.

Well, I am now a woman. What of him?

"Girl, you were the one who went looking for me."

A teasing smile pulls taut across her face. "I never went anywhere. You saw me, I was in my room the entire time. You paid for a prostitute."

"Don't spout your bullshit at me, just like when you were back-"

"You trusted me as well, Mr. Clegane." She watches as he takes apart his revolver, cleaning it with a well-oiled cloth, worn cotton rubbing over tarnished filigree. She remembers this gun; she wonders if he still possesses the knife. She wonders what it would feel like to be the metal under his fingers, wonders if they would be any different from the other fingers she has felt on her body. She may no longer believe the Hound to be like one of the romance heroes of her stories, but that does not mean she no longer desires him. "What's to say that I won't be a burden?"

"I owe you a debt," he grumbles.

"You came looking for me without knowing that I had wanted you to."

"I owed you a debt before that. And besides, you sang knowing I'd come looking for you. Care to explain that one, then, little bird?" His face is close to a snarl, but Sansa decides to continue to tread a line close to impertinence. It is not too late to turn back and tell Peter she was kidnapped.

But she had spent many nights at her window thinking on Sandor Clegane, during the hours between the close of business and dawn. The Hound is dead, she had been told by Peter, when news of the outlaw's death had been told by one of the Moon Door's patrons. She had made sure that that man had chosen her as his girl for the night, had simpered and smiled for his ever-building tale of how he was present when the Hound fell to a band of ennobled outlaws, and shook the truth from his story later on.

She had picked apart the Hound's corpse like a vulture, circling over her memories and words of others, and his own, bare feet propped up on the windowsill, morning air drifting between her thighs as deep purple shadows stretched, catlike, along her skin.

Why had she spent so much time, thinking on a man who had held his knife to her throat? (Or rather, the man who saved her from the riot, or the man who wrapped her in his jacket when Geoffrey had her stripped in the town square.)

He was - is - not one of the pretty boys she favors, with skin like wispy clouds and hair like wet silk. No, he is cowhide and tanned leather, red scars, a snarling revenant who climbs in bed with her at night, scarred lips nipping at her dewy petals, calloused fingers at her breasts. She had wanted him drunkenly, lustfully, nothing like the practiced ladylike aloofness that made her a sparkling diamond in a town long run-out of gold.

The Hound is dead. As are her delusions, but not her wanting, even as he sits across the fire from her. Perhaps it was not then, when she learned of his supposed death, that she realized that she had dreamed up the kiss, but when she first realized that Peter would never take her to Aunt Liza or Cousin Robert, or when he first groped her breast and breathed Cat into the skin of her neck, bringing alive the dead woman who never loved him inside the shell of her daughter.

Peter had, of course, made sure to hollow Sansa out first, scoop her heart out and leave the rest for his monument to her mother.

She had taken clients to keep him from taking her.

She owes Peter Baelish nothing - and now she can only hope that he did not recognize the Hound as the man who came into her room the night she left. He'll send men after them, she's sure - she's his ace in the hole. Was. Was his ace in the hole.

Sansa looks up at him, and shrugs. "You're the lesser of two evils, I suppose."

"Evil," he says with a self-indulging kind of chuckle, with a twisted grin. "Got that right."

"Well then," she counters, feeling anger flare in her breast. "If you believe yourself so evil, why did you come to me?" He says nothing, but laughs and shakes his head, still cleaning his gun. "And don't give me any of that debt... nonsense. If you were evil you wouldn't believe in that. Unless you intend to ransom me, but I don't have a darn clue to whom you think is left to pay you."

The grin dissipates just like the smoke curling up into the stars. "I'm not gonna be any good for you, Miss Stark. Can't promise you won't go hungry. Can't promise you won't die of thirst. Can't keep you clean. I can't even promise to keep you safe."

It is her turn to smile bitterly. "Mr. Clegane, does it look like any of the men who have promised to keep me safe have made good on their promises?" Yourself included. He flinches, and she knows he remembers. He holds no petty ideas of grandeur or honor about himself. That will keep her safe enough.

The cloth stills on the gun. He could kill her, right now, with that very gun, and no one would find her body. The vultures would pluck out her eyes before dawn, carry off her hair for their nests. But she trusts he won't, and that's more than she can trust Peter. God forbid her usefulness had run out... but there is still her fortune to claim, the Stark money in the bank in San Francisco. Peter was only waiting on the government to declare her sister legally dead, so she could claim the money even still as Tyrone Lannister's wife.

She laughs, somewhat at him and somewhat at the bleak spectacle her life has become.

"A hound will die for you, but never lie to you. You told me that. Or were you too drunk for you to remember?" Sansa stands, and neatens her dress, her hair. "Either way, I'll take honesty over false promises and pretty words. I've learned that." He looks at her strangely, with that almost appreciative kind of look in his eye again. Sansa sighs, trying to shake the day - fleeing on horseback at dawn, the hours spent in silence with her arms wrapped around his waist. And she was never a good horseback rider, to begin with. Swallowing hard, she looks past him. "I think I'll sleep now."

She doesn't wait around for his answer. She doesn't think either of them are ready for any answers, yet.

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