A/N: The usual trigger warnings for sexual violence and abuse. Sorry it took so long to get this up. Part three should be along in about a week, if all goes as planned. I'm the maid of honor in my sister's wedding, which is July 29th, so we're starting to enter crunch time. However, since the semester is over my life should be a little easier now. Just a smidge.
The cold wrought iron bench vibrates when he sits down next to her. Sansa believes that she would be the only one crazy enough to sit outside in this weather, stinging drops of freezing rain falling in gasps from the darkened sky.
He says nothing, but pulls a pack of cigarettes from his black wool coat's pocket. He brings one to his scarred, dry, and chapped lips, his plain white Bic lighter following it soon after. Sansa watches him as he lights it with a practiced roll of his thumb, eyes widening briefly as the flame licks the end of the cigarette.
She pulls her heavy blue parka tighter around her, watching rain freeze on the ends of his straight black hair––
"Hello," she says, refusing to move. She was here first. Besides, if she risks moving at all, the seat might get wet and the fact that her ass isn't frozen is what's keeping her from going back inside.
He grunts at her in response, taking a drag off the cigarette like a dehydrated man takes to water.
"That's bad for you, you know," she mumbles, watching the security lights on the White House lawn turn onto a higher setting as night begins to truly fall.
Sandor Clegane laughs, shaking his head at her, but not looking at her. "It'll kill me," he agrees, complacent enough.
"So why do you do it?" Sansa inquires, mesmerized by how small it look in his large, calloused hands, the way he rhythmically brings it to his mouth, flicks hot ash off the tip and onto the moist ground.
He looks at her then, raising an eyebrow. "Why do you care?"
"I don't."
"I didn't come out here to talk," he rasps, looking away again, his eyes betraying a twinge of anger, and guilt, and something like sadness that Sansa does not expect.
She snorts, surprising herself with the unladylike action. "There are other benches in the Rose Garden."
"Why are you out here? Everything's dead and it's raining." He takes one more long drag and tamps out the cigarette against the bench, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. Dark grey eyes flickering to the sky, he corrects himself. "Sleeting."
Sansa can feel the muscles of her cheekbones tightening, imperceptible to the eye, but she has learned to read her emotions and what they do to her and how to control them. She wants to roll her eyes at him, but doesn't have the luxury of making any more enemies. So she looks away to him, to the useless hands in her lap.
"It's better than being inside with him," she mumbles. "And I know he won't come outside."
He rumbles a laugh, low and bitter. "No he won't, little bird."
She wants to ask why are you here? why do you serve the Lannisters if you don't like them? why are you talking to me? why do you talk to me? why did you protect me? why did you push me upstairs? why did you seem so frantic? why did you wipe the blood from my lip? but she doesn't. Answers complicate things more than questions. She's learned that much.
"I think he might treat me… gentler, tonight," she says, and doesn't quite know why. But Sandor Clegane is already intimately aware of what Joffrey does to her behind her bedroom door. And maybe she wants to see—
Why are you gentle when you touch me? why did you tell me to clean my wounds? why do you call me little bird? why do they call you the hound? why do you work for these people? why didn't you run away?
He clearly doesn't know how to respond, so she keeps talking, the words flowing and rushing out like a river to the sea, words and words coming together in waves of disjointed, jagged sentences. "I mean, they've finally driven Baratheon's men back into Virginia and are pushing them down, and now they're in Maryland, so DC is no longer a warzone, I mean, sure it still is because there's dead bodies everywhere and people are rioting at the capital but now I guess it's safer but I don't know. And since Canada invaded Vermont—I mean, can you fucking believe that—my brother's no longer talking about the South and my mother's returned home—"
"You said fuck," he interrupts her, something resembling disbelief on his face.
"Yes," Sansa says, enunciating the word with a deliberate hiss, before continuing. "But anyway, now the first lady and Joffrey are happy, so I was thinking maybe he'd leave fewer bruisers."
What a strange world, she thinks. She now lives in a world where this is what she dares to hope for, when her father used to promise that she would marry someone kind, and brave, and gentle.
"I just—you said the work fuck." Clegane laughs, and extracts another cigarette from the pack.
Sansa wrinkles her nose in distaste. "Why are you out here, anyway?"
Holding the cigarette between his teeth, he answers, "can't smoke inside the White House, girl. You know that."
"I'm not a girl," she mutters, a sudden jab of frustration flaring in her gut.
"No…" he says, appraising her. Sansa instinctively wants to squirm in her seat, but holds herself tightly, muscles tensed beneath her loose-fitting clothes. Sandor Clegane's eyes are not full of anger and lust, just a quiet sadness. "No, you're not. Might be easier for you if you were just a girl."
He stops talking, then, and she doesn't know how to fill the silence. Who is this man?
"There are other benches."
"Do you want me to move?" He seems amused.
Sansa sighs, fingers idly working at a napkin tucked into the pocket of her jacket. "Secretary Tyrell left the city last night. Apparently is now working with Renly Baratheon."
"I know," he answers, sounding irritated. "Still think he'll treat you gentler, little bird?"
"Don't call me that," she huffs. "I'm not a bird any more than you're a dog."
"Not to the Lannisters," he retorts, puffing on his cigarette. "Remember that."
She gulps, and then reaches out to lightly—and awkwardly, and Sansa Stark is not a woman who is easily made awkward—lay her hand on his arm. "You can call me Sansa, you know. It's my name."
"Okay, Miss Stark," he responds, smiling wryly, taking her hand off his arm and tossing it back into her own lap.
She rolls her eyes. "You're going to get lung cancer and I am going to laugh."
"Not very lady-like of you." Clegane sounds vaguely annoyed and vaguely proud at the same time. "What would your mother say?"
"My mother would say that I shouldn't have to put up with you," she replies, smirking. Oh god, what's gotten into me? This man could kill me! Have I lost my mind? "Besides," she continues, gesturing at herself, her smile turning wan and disquieted, "I'm not much of a lady anymore, am I, Agent Clegane?"
"No badge, little bird." Sansa watches his hands, his fingers as they curl around the cigarette, the asymmetrical line of his lips as they purse and relax around it. The way the smoke curls up through the rain, disappears into the night like secrets. He doesn't sound annoyed with her, though, slate-colored eyes on her again, watching her watch him. "You know that already. Want one?"
"Oh, no," Sansa says, stuttering a bit. "I don't smoke."
"You think you're gonna live long enough to die from lung cancer?" he asks quietly, his voice like the feeling of his handkerchief wiping her lip, the push of his hands against her shoulders. "Do you really think your brother, the lawyer, is going to find a way to save you? Smoke a cigarette, little bird."
"Before I die," she says, carefully, meeting his eyes. He taps one out of the pack and offers it to her. Hesitantly, she takes it. "I don't think I know how. And I told you, it's Sansa."
He barks a laugh. "You're probably going to make an ass of yourself if it's your first one."
"Well, thank the Lord you're here." The words spill off her tongue before she can think about them. Shit.
But he laughs. "The little bird has a sense of humor. And some talons."
"Sansa," she whines. "My name is Sansa and okay, how do I do this?"
"Well," he starts, clearly enjoying himself. "You put it in your mouth—"
"I'm honestly not as stupid as you make me out to be," she rebuffs, leaning back against the back of the cold, wet wrought-iron and immediately regretting it. Gracefully, she straightens her spine, and without a pause in her speech, continues. "I was accepted to Dartmouth and Georgetown—and Columbia and William and Mary and UNC Chapel Hill—"
"Shut up. I don't care, girl," he growls, holding out his lighter for her. "You people and your fancy fucking colleges and degrees. Not worth shit now, is it?"
He flicks his thumb, scraping the wheel down on the lighter, a sputtering flame appearing on the top. She leans over it, lighting the end of the cigarette, watching him warily.
"Inhale," he instructs her as if she is a child. She probably is to him, she thinks. Young and dumb.
The smoke hits her lungs, acrid and choking. Holding the cigarette away from her mouth, Sansa tries to tamp down the coughs rioting to get out of her chest while half-heartedly trying to glare at Sandor Clegane as he roared with laughter.
"You—did that—on purpose!" She coughs, bringing the cigarette back to her lips, inhaling gently this time. It stings her throat, makes her chest clench, and then she feels something release inside of her. And then she starts coughing again. "Why do you do this?"
He shrugs. "Never thought I was gonna live this long."
"How old are you, anyway?" she asks, no longer even berating herself for being impertinent.
Clegane stares at her, before turning away to tap his cigarette over the edge of the arm rest. "Thirty-five."
"Joffrey said that you were Navy Seal."
"I came out here for a cigarette, not to be annoyed," he snaps, but makes no effort to get up from the bench. The Rose Garden is grey, Sansa thinks. Not just because of the month. It is more than just the bare flower beds and wet, spongy ground that makes it seem empty, either.
Whatever courage she had fades, along with her smile. She lowers the cigarette from her lips with a stuttering motion, letting it rest over the end of her knee. Watching the ash cool and break off the end, she sits motionlessly, sinking back into the quiet, unresisting girl she is around everyone else. She does not need more people to resent her.
He still doesn't get up—Sansa turns her head almost imperceptibly to glance at him, following his line of sight out over the lawn and past the gate, where the security lights illuminate the streets, the crowds of everyday people milling about, waiting for an answer, waiting to leave, waiting for everything now that the fighting is over.
Sansa sighs, and brings the cigarette back to her mouth, and manages not to cough this time.
"I went to Annapolis."
She turns her head again, nodding, not that he's looking at her. She could say, and you mock me for going to Georgetown? but doesn't. She understands he didn't have much choice in the manner. It had probably been arranged by Tywin Lannister and that it was his only way to get away from his brother. To get out. She understands that feeling now.
"My father went to West Point."
The rain lessens, slightly. No longer a stinging, bone-consuming cold. Just there. Sansa finishes the cigarette, her first, and probably her last, and grinds it into the bench, smiling slightly at the stain the ash leaves behind on the white-painted iron.
She has to go back inside soon.
"What's it like to die?"
She isn't quite sure where the words come from, but he's probably the only person she can ask.
"I'm not dead."
She sighs, uncomfortable, her parka almost soaked through and her ratty Dartmouth sweatshirt not providing much warmth. The cigarette has relaxed something inside of her, and she's sure that if she cared enough to go searching for that particular shelf in her brain, she could find the box for what nicotine does to the body in freshman health.
"You almost did, though. When your brother…" she trails off, and deliberately doesn't look at him. She can envision the look of anger on his face without looking. "What does it feel like, dying?"
He seems to understand the question, then. "It won't be like that for you. They aren't going to burn you. It'll be quick. And clean."
"Like a hanging?" she whispers, resting her hands palms-up on her thighs. The rain drops fall there, and stay in her cupped hands.
He rumbles a sigh, standing up. "I have to go back inside, girl."
"Will it hurt, what they do to me?" Her eyes flicker up at him. Sandor Clegane is an intimidating figure, more than six feet tall and a wall of muscle. The scars, and the dark eyes and the dark hair. His twisted features contort into a complex matrix of emotions that she doesn't know well enough to untangle.
"Don't talk like that," he growls.
She shrinks. "Okay."
"Don't."
"Okay!" she says, more forcefully, fingers tightening around the napkin in her pocket again. "Okay, I won't!"
She watches him storm back inside, fingers worrying the napkin into smaller and smaller pieces until her fingers and filled with small, sweaty strips.
Come to the Rose Garden tonight, if you want to come home, is what had been written on it, before the ink had smeared in the palm of her hand. Sansa stands up, hand nervously rubbing her stomach, which was tender under her old soft hoodie. The angry purple bruise that Agent Trant had given her had almost faded to yellow.
It had been her own fault. She still needed to get better at hiding her emotions from them, from showing the Lannisters the pain that she holds, from showing them her resentment and anger and guilt. She is better at it, now, making them believe that she loves them, that she is obedient and will not stray.
She is afraid.
Is it a trick—will meeting this person here be her end?
At first she had thought it was Sandor Clegane, when he sat down next to her in the rain, and then he spoke nothing of it and neither did she. And now she worries more than if it is a trap, but if the person will be coming at all.
Sansa knows she must save herself, but she will need help.
This is helplessness. She has tasted it, and she does not like it. How could she have been allowed to turn out this way? To be this unable to save herself? Joffrey had spoken of how Agent Slynt had been locked up in jail and she had said that she hoped he stayed there.
She cannot speak this way. She cannot. Not if she wants to live.
(She isn't so certain anymore.)
Come to the Rose Garden tonight, if you want to go home. Or maybe it was some cruel trick of Joffrey's like when he dragged her into the morgue to see her father's autopsy. Or some subtle snare, a check of her loyalty. They think her broken. And quiet. But not defiant.
(She's not so certain she's defiant either.)
A member of the White House domestic staff strides past, but then pauses to look back at her.
"What do you want," Sansa demands.
"Nothing, Miss. Just wondering if you needed anything," the lady answers, limp brown hair pulled into a demure bun.
"No," Sansa says, pulling her coat tighter around her. "I'm fine."
"As you wish," she replies. Sansa eyes the woman carefully. Was she one of Cersei's spies? The woman scurries off. Doubtlessly to report back to the first lady, Sansa thinks. Had she seen the note on the napkin she found after breakfast? Was it planted by the first lady? The maids spy on her, of that much Sansa is certain.
Sansa pulls the tattered remnants of the note and throws them to the wind, watches them get weighted down and scuttled by the cold rain, bleed upon the grass.
She can hear the metro officers and various agents and military members milling about the perimeter, and the quiet breeding discontent of the people trapped in the city. She sings for them; she too, is among them.
Help me, she prays. Send someone to me. Lord please send someone to help me get out of here. As a child she favored her mother's Catholicism, the stained glass windows and the incense, the fancy robes and pious, somber-faced chamber singers, the pomp and pageantry. But now she finds comfort in the White House chapel, the bleak, stark white-walled place. It reminds her of her father's plain Methodist church. Please, Lord. Father almighty…
"I feared you wouldn't come, Miss Stark," a voice calls out to her.
Sansa stands up, whirling around. A man steps out from the portico, heavy, thick-necked, and shambling. He wears a dark grey raincoat, the large hood pulled over his face. The shadows shifting across his features, she recognizes the blotchy skin and web of broken veins underneath. "Special Agent Hollard," she breathes, heartbroken. When Sandor Clegane had first approached her in the Rose Garden, she had hoped so fiercely that it was him, but he said nothing. "It was you?"
"Yes, miss," he answers. When he moves closer, Sansa can smell beer on his breath. "Me." He reaches out a hand.
"Don't!" Sansa exclaims as she shrinks back. She has nothing to protect herself with, but she can outrun him. "What do you want from me?"
"Only to help you," Hollard says. "Like you helped me."
"You're shitfaced, aren't you?" she asks, a look of disgust crossing her patrician features.
"Only a beer, to give me some courage," he replies. "If they catch me now I'll be executed before sunrise."
And what will they do to me? Renly Baratheon is dead. My brother Robb does not have the support of the Northern Governors to march all the way here. Stannis is the only one left. What do the Lannisters need me for?
She balls her hands into fists. Her father had at least taught her how to land a punch. "Are you going to hit me?" Hollard slurs.
"I will," Sansa says through gritted teeth. "Tell me who sent you."
"No one, girl. Just an old tired Agent trying to do the right thing, not just follow orders for once."
"I prayed the Lord to send someone to save me," she hisses. "Why would he send me a drunk like you?"
But you didn't question a drunk like Sandor Clegane, did you? her mind adds in, unbidden.
Hollard slumps. "I deserve that, I know. But all these years, serving the FBI and the Lannisters, I've forgotten what it's like to be good. I could be good, my girl. I could take you away from here. I know how to get out of the city."
"How," Sansa asks, retreating when he advances. "How would you get me out of the city?"
"Taking you out of the White House would be the hardest." He appears to have given up on getting near her; Sansa relaxes the slightest bit at that. "But once we're out I could drive you as north as you want. The northern roads are clear; its just going south and west that are the problems."
Sansa tilts her head slightly—he did not answer her as to how he would take her out of the city. And he doesn't have the brute strength or intimidating presence of a man like Clegane. Could Hollard honestly best the men Lannister had spent years buying to get her home?
Was there anyone else who would be willing to help her?
No, she thinks. Clegane may treat you better than most, but he is still the Lannister's dog.
"Could we go now?" she asks wearily.
"Tonight? No, Miss Stark." His blood-shot eyes rake over her shivering frame. "We must wait until the hour is ripe. It won't be easy, or quick. They watch me now too."
"Of course." Sansa purses her lips together, truly cold now. The rain soaks through her parka, and all she wants to do is go back inside. To be warm, and safe, and dry. But she won't be, so she stands in the rain and listens to a drunk, the only man willing to try and get her away from all of this.
"We'll meet a again."
"Will you send me another note?" Sansa asks, voice hedging on desperation.
Hollard shakes his head. "Too risky. You'll just have to come here as often as you can."
Sansa sighs. "I'll try."
"Just… be patient. And strong." Hollard looks around, eyes slanting over the grey surroundings. "And wait. Wait as long as you can. Patience."
"I will be," Sansa promises. What is she getting herself into? "I'll be patient."
This man is not her knight in shining armor, but he will have to do. Knights are erratic, and unpredictable. He mimics a bow, and slinks back into the portico.
Taking a deep breath, Sansa runs out of the rain and back into the storm.
She hardly recognizes herself. Her face in wan, almost waifish. Her auburn hair is limp and lackluster, hanging in dark curtains around her haggard face. Soon all of her beauty will be gone, and Joffrey will be tired of her. He will have used her up. And he will toss her away.
Is this what being a pawn is really like?
Being a political daughter is something she knows well. She thought that that was her role as a pawn. Smile, look nice, chatter endlessly to the press. Stand by her father as he won re-election. Shake hands with the members of Maine's state senate. Flirt with their sons. That was so easy.
Life was so easy then, a pawn on the right side of the board. It was her duty. And she enjoyed it, she enjoyed the spotlight.
Sansa thinks of all the times she chided Arya for complaining about it, tears welling in her blunted eyes. She's happy that Arya has run. Arya wouldn't have survived with the Lannisters, and if she had waited that night for Sansa to run with her, they never would have made it out of the city.
I hope she's safe, Sansa thinks. And then prays.
She is cold now, all the time. This girl from Maine, she feels a deep chill that she has never known. Cold, and bruised. She lets her towel drop, standing nude in front of the full-body mirror. She can pick out the finger marks on her hips, waist, shoulders. Moving up and up. She wonders when Joffrey will take to squeezing her neck as he pumps into her. It'll hurt, she thinks.
Dispassionately surveying her body, she watches as gooseflesh crawls across her skin in waves. Her flesh is so blemished now. Who would find her pretty, now?
At least Joffrey spares her face.
She doesn't even bother getting dressed, simply tears down the covers and slips beneath them, silently. So quietly, ignoring how her limbs quake, her hands tremble as she pulls the blankets to her chin.
She turns her head away from the door, shutting her eyes against her tears when the door opens and Joffrey rips down her coverings, blocking out his voice as she turns her mind in against itself. He climbs over her, his words filtering through her ears like water through a sieve. They slip through, unheard and unprocessed, as his hands roam her body, grasp at her breasts too tightly, turn her over onto her belly.
Burrowing her face into her pillow, Sansa thinks of Sandor Clegane's hands. Rough, and large, but capable of gentleness. How they felt as they wiped the blood from her lip, handed her the cigarette, pushed her up the steps.
She cries out as Joffrey enters her roughly, biting her lip against the pain when he shoves his hand into her hair and twists, jerking her face up, straining her neck.
Clegane's hands were calloused, and strong. At least twice the size her hers in the width. Probably warm.
She closes her eyes, allowing the world to fade to black.
The next morning, she is brought in front of the Lannisters as they sit in the president's dining room, eating their breakfast.
The president informs her that her family's house, in Winterfell, Maine, burned to ash during the night. That it is a sad accident. A true American tragedy.
And that there are no survivors.
Sansa feels something—
Not snap. Not break. It is more of an absence of feeling, maybe, she doesn't think, as her legs stop feeling like they are attached to her torso and she slides to the ground. But the ground doesn't exist.
She floats, maybe, her mind disjointed and foggy as it all closes in around her. Nothing exists. Her limbs tremble and shake and threaten to vibrate off of her body, her hands feeling like nothing, but her fingers look like the fine-boned wings of a fragile bird, poised to take off into flight—away, away from all of this.
They're dead.
It's almost funny. Almost.
Sansa is trapped in this moment, which has no ceiling and no floor and no walls, just space and air that she is gasping to breathe. She is weighted down by nothing, she is a bird flying away. Flying and flying and then she will get tired and land and drown.
Or get picked off by a bigger bird.
She is a pawn, a little chirping bird. And they've only been waiting for her to get too close so that she could be picked off.
The king is dead. The queen is dead—Bran, Ricky, Robb, Momma, Daddy. The game is over. The game is just begun. Why are they still playing with her? She did everything they had wanted; she wrote the letters, played their games—
They're dead. They're all dead.
She's dead too. No one will fight her now. She's dead.
She can't dig into herself to feel anything. Her hands claw uselessly at her blouse, short, grubby fingernails swiping at her pale skin, leaving livid red marks. She can scoop out her insides, red and bloody and slick and swinging and meaty and muscle and sinew and weak and so easy to tear and break and render—reach into the dark cave between her ribs, pluck out her heart. Give it to them. Give it all to them.
She is dead.
She is dead.
Why isn't she dead?
You've done this. This is your fault.
A laugh breaks from her, breaks her, and she vaguely feels herself being swept up off the floor, hysterical laughter bursting from her abandoned throat. Her diaphragm hurts, lazy and out of shape.
She wants to claw out her heart and show it to them, balance it in her hands. It would be ash now, ash and cinder. But blood, too, maybe. Their blood. Stark blood. But blackened and charred from a fire too hot. She got too close—
Too close.
Too close.
I was so stupid, she thinks, as someone large and warm carries her. Her eyes are wide shut, open and unseeing, something like screeches emptying from her lungs as she squirms in his grasp. Her body continues to move, her mouth opening futilely when the person lays her down on her bed, rolling her to the center, roughly pushes pillows around her head.
Oh god Oh god Oh god Oh god—
She's laughing and crying and apparently losing it, Joffrey won't want her like this, if she goes mad they can just say she killed herself—
But it's sweetness.
She won't know this way, won't see it coming. Maybe it will be better.
Sansa curls up on her side, tucking her knees up to her chin, holds them tightly against her hollowed-out chest. Yes, her heart. Her heart must be gone, dissolved, because she can feel nothing in her chest and can feel her heart pulsing in her fingertips and toes and in her head and ears—
It must be gone, and the pain in her chest is dying.
The someone's finger's dig into her hair—or maybe it's her father's, they are large and unpracticed, like her father's, not her mother's, try and brush through the morning-soft waves. She laughs, pressing her face into one of the pillows.
The numbness rushes out like the tide. Sansa feels the world consume her again, a new wave, one that picks her up and tosses her down, down, down, until she is drowning in this new sadness—
"The longer you keep him waiting, the worse it will be for you," Clegane warns her, half-exasperated half-irritated.
Sansa tries to her, her stiff, tired fingers fumbling at the buttons at the front of her pale pink dress. Joffrey's bodyguard is always rough-tongued, she knows, but the way he looks at her now sets her on edge. Has Joffrey found out about her meetings with Agent Hollard—she has been careless, Sansa thinks. She has met him a half-dozen times since her family's—
Since the house burned down a week ago.
Please no, she thinks frantically, tugging her brush through her hair. I have to look pretty. Joffrey wants me to look pretty. He won't hurt me—he'll hurt me less if I look pretty. He likes me in this color.
She smooths down the front of her dress, plaintively undoing one of the buttons, revealing a sliver of cleavage.
"Please tell me what I've done," she asks, steeling herself as he walks her out of the Residence.
"Not you," he rasps. "The northern governors are marching south again. With the middle states."
"They're traitors." Sansa knows the words by rote. "I have no part in what they do."
Joffrey's dog snorts. "They trained you well, little bird." He ushers her through into the West Wing, which is dark now, few lamps turned on, lit mostly by the bleak security lights filtering in through the panes of the bulletproof glass windows. He opens one of the glass-paneled doors into the Roosevelt Room, and roughly guides her through.
Agent Hollard, now assigned to Joffrey's detail permanently, to be mocked and belittled as the little prince saw fit, nodded at her and mouthed "be brave."
Men move aside to allow her through to the center of the room. What was once space taken up by a long, gleaming conference table is now open, a single high-backed chair placed at the head of the rectangular room. Sansa tenses, can feel their eyes on her. Undersecretary Gyles laughs, the young aides ogling her openly. Mr. Redwyne averts his eyes, his brother pretending not to see her all together.
A yellow cat lies on the once-pristine carpet, its innards splattered open by a single gunshot. Sansa steps around it, feeling ill.
Joffrey stands in the center of the throng, before the chair, wielding a long, gleaming shotgun. Agents Blount and Trant are with him.
"Joffrey," Sansa says halting before him. "My love."
"That bullshit isn't going to save you now, bitch," he hisses.
Sansa falls to her knees. "Please, my love, you know that I've had no contact with anyone, I would never betray you—I haven't—"
"Kneeling won't save you now," he says. "Stand up. Answer to your family's latest treasons."
"They're dead, my love, you know that, there's no way I could have," she pleads, takes a deep breath to staunch her tears, and continues, "there's no way I could have had a part, please, I beg of you—"
"Get her up! Hound—"
Clegane pulls her to her feet, not urgently.
"Lance," Joff says. "Tell her of this outrage."
Sansa has always thought Lance Lannister handsome and articulate, but she finds neither pity nor kindness in the way his eyes looked upon her. "Using some guerilla tactics, the northern governors marched on Maryland and burned cities and people behind them, women and children alike." Fire, Sansa thinks. He speaks of me about women and children killed by fire. "Thousands of family were butchered as they slept, without a chance to defend themselves. After the slaughter, the northern national guardsmen desecrated the corpses, defiled the bodies of the women."
Horror coils its cold hands around Sansa's throat, mirroring the feel of Joff's hands there the night before.
"You have nothing to say?" he asks, a sly, cruel smile winding its way up Joff's face.
"Sir," Agent Dontos interrupts. "The poor girl is scared witless."
"Shut up, dumbass." Joffrey cocks his shotgun, lifting the barrel level with Sansa's face. Is he going to kill me?
Do I actually care?
Her father, the quintessential soldier, had taught her to be a fighter. She has always called herself a fighter, fought for her 4.0, fought for Dartmouth and Georgetown and the perfect prom dress and captain of field hockey team and, and—
Am I going to fight to live?
"You fucking Starks are as wild as that backwoods dumbfuck state you call home." He takes a step towards her. Sansa does not recoil, but begins to shake. "I'll never forget how your stupid dog ravaged me."
"That was Arya's dog," she says. Not that it matters. "Lady never hurt you, but you killed her anyway."
"No, your father did," Joff says, "but I killed your father. I wish I'd done it myself. I don't know how my grandfather managed it. But good for him. I killed a man last night who was bigger than your father. He came to the gate and I shot him with this gun. They were calling for food and water, and I shot the loudest one straight through the throat."
"And he died?" With the barrel of a gun pointing between her eyes, Sansa finds it hard to locate anything else to say.
Joffrey scoffs at her, turning his back to sit stiffly in his chair. "Blount, Trant."
The two Secret Service agents swoop in from the flanks, Agent Blount seizing Sansa by her arms.
"Leave her face," Joffrey commands, voice eager. "I like her pretty."
Blount slams a fist into Sansa's stomach, driving the air out of her, the force of the blow reverberating through her limbs, ricocheting through her rib cage, ringing her head. Doubling over, Blount draws his gun and twists his hand into her long auburn hair, and for one terrifying moment she thinks he is going to click off the safety and blow out a knee cap or a shoulder or—he's going to blow my brains out oh God I don't want to die I don't want to die—but instead he brings it down against her temple, the crown of her head, again and again.
Sansa screams.
It'll be over soon—I don't want to die I don't want to die—
It's not the same as wanting to live, but Sansa soon loses count of the blows.
"Enough," she can hear Sandor Clegane rasp.
"No it isn't," Joffrey sneers. "Blount, strip her."
Blount shoves a meaty hand down the front of Sansa's delicate shirt dress, and yanks the buttons apart, ripping the fine cloth-covered closures from the fabric. The cotton tears away with a frantic rip, baring her from the waist up. Sansa hands scrabble to cover her breasts, when Blount rips her bra from body. She can hear sniggers, near-by and cruel. Her eyes glass over with tears, focusing solely on the blurred design of the carpet.
"Beat her bloody," Joffrey sniggers. "We'll see if those northern shits want her back then."
"What is the meaning of this?" The dwarf's voice—Vice President Tyrion Lannister—cracks like a whip, and Sansa knows that it is over. She stumbles to her knees, hound pounding and spots dancing across her eyes, breathing torn and ragged. "Is this how you protect the first family and their guests, Agent Blount?" he demands angrily. One of his pet agents stands with him. "What sort of federal agent beats helpless girls?"
I'm not helpless, Sansa wants to be able to say. I'm so helpless.
"The sort who serves his president, Dwarf." Blount raises his gun. Agent Trant stands up beside him, gun clearing its holster.
"Careful with those," Tyrion's agent warns. "Don't want to get blood over those fancy suits."
"Someone give the poor girl something to cover up with," Tyrion says.
Sandor Clegane unbuttons his suit jacket and tosses it to her, eyes not wavering from her face. Sansa cannot bear to look into his grey eyes, see the faint hint of something soft beneath the flint, beneath the steel and iron. Sansa pulls it around her, the heated silk sliding against her skin, fists tightly wound into the shell, clutching it closed over her chest. Somewhere through the pain and the tears, she can smell sweat and plain deodorant and maybe cologne and something that she's come to associate with Clegane's large, rough hands.
"The girl's going to be your wife." Tyrion tells Joffrey. "Have you no decency?"
"I'm punishing her."
"For what transgression?"
"She's a Stark."
"You fucking moron," the older Lannister scowls.
"You can't talk to me that way," Joffrey growls. "I can do as I want."
"I'm the Vice President," Tyrion counters. "I can do as I want. Bronn, Timmett, help me bring her to her room. The poor girl needs a doctor, too."
Sansa moves as if in a dream, fingers clenching on Clegane's suit jacket. It drapes hugely on her frame, and in the first time a long time, she feels warm.
Tyrion took her back to One Conservatory Circle for the first time since her father left, so many weeks ago. Months, now, she thinks.
Several of the maids had ushered her into her old bedroom, stripped off her torn dress and bra, washed the blood from her hair, scrubbed her skin and poured warm water over her bruised skin.
Federal agents are sworn to defend the weak, protect god and country and the innocent. But none of them did a thing. Only Agent Hollard tried to help, but he's not much of an Agent anymore.
Sandor Clegane isn't an agent either.
Sandor Clegane hates federal agents.
I hate them too.
There are no brave men, no protectors. No knights, waiting to swoop in and save her. No one saves the pawn. Not until she becomes a queen.
When she is clean, and dry, Dr. Frenken comes to see her. He tells her that she has a concussion, stiches the rent of the thin skin covering her dainty skull. He bids her to lie face down on her mattress to rub a salve into the old welts on her back, from one of Joffrey's other beatings, ones he conducted in private, in her bedroom, as he rode her from behind and tore into her skin with his nails.
He hands her a pill.
"Sleep a bit, child. When you wake, it'll feel better."
No it won't you stupid idiot, Sansa thinks, but swallows the pill anyway, and sleeps. When she awakes, the sunlight streaming through the dainty curtains, Tyrion Lannisters is perched on the edge of her bed. She winces, shielding her eyes. He stands up and crosses the room to pull closed the blinds.
He looks at her silently, but not expectantly.
"Am I your prisoner?" she rasps.
"My guest." He shoves his hands into the pockets of his trousers. "I thought we might talk."
"As you wish," Sansa answers obediently. She finds it hard not to stare as his pinched, grotesque face. It is unlike Clegane's, she thinks. She has no problem anymore looking at Sandor Clegane. Not anymore. Sansa pulls the blankets up to her chest, sitting up gingerly. That morning, when her family was—
Her family is dead.
She must repeat it to herself, often, to make it true and real. Even now, none of this seems real. It is such a horror that it cannot be real.
"I had some of your clothes brought over. I hope you will find them satisfactory."
"You are most kind," Sansa mumbles. That morning, she thinks Sandor Clegane had carried her back to her bed, rubbed her back, stroked her hair. She cannot remember a face or a person, just his hands. She knows his hands. "Thank you for helping me last night."
"I am sorry that my nephew is what he is." Sansa cannot discern the emotions broiling under the dwarf's face.
"I love him with all my heart," she responds immediately. That morning, Sandor Clegane had held her, she thinks. And before the world slipped away entirely, pressed his lips to hers. And before, in the Rose Garden. He made her human again. He called her a woman.
A woman, not a girl.
Only a woman can be a queen. And knights. He had seen battle, Sandor Clegane. He had seen battle and had been scarred and his marks were proof that he had warred with life and had come out the victor. She will have scars too. On her back and her front and now her head—but she too—
She could fight. Maybe.
"Truly?" Lannister asks, sounding unconvinced. "Even now?"
Sansa falters, not for long, but she does falter.
"I will have a deadlock installed on your door in the Residence," the Vice President tells her. "Joffrey will not be able to harm you like… like he has been, again. But you may stay here, if you wish."
"Th-thank you," Sansa stammers, fingers clutching the blankets like she clutched Clegane's jacket the night before. "But I would rather return to my own bed. This house is where—I would see my father's blood, wherever I looked."
Tyrion Lannister studies her face. "I am no stranger to nightmares, Miss Stark. I understand. Please allow me to escort you back to White House."
Back into the lion's den.
But Sansa would be ready this time.
She is a pawn on the wrong side of the board, but she is closing in on the end.
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