Author's notes:
Thanks to everyone who has been with me so far.
This chapter is the one all the dire warnings were about. Please take them seriously. This will not be pretty and it will not be romantic.
Chapter 3 : Bleeding
She heard him come up the stairs with slow, almost halting steps and with every one of them, her heart clawed its way further up her throat.
He had to duck his head to step through the doorway and even in the room had not an inch to spare to the ceiling. His intimidating size made the room seem to shrink around him and she had to remind herself to breathe when the thought occurred to her that maybe not only the room would be too small for a man like him.
His eyes were oddly bright when they flitted first to the fire in the hearth, then to her and then came to rest on the bed.
"I...," she began but her voice broke and she had to clear her throat before attempting to speak again. "I brought some water, if you'd like to wash."
At her gesture, he turned to the wooden screen behind which a washbasin and the pitcher were standing on a sideboard.
He nodded and held out his hand to her. Only then did she notice that he carried a packet.
"Put this on the bed," he commanded in a voice that seemed curiously unsteady as well.
She took the packet while he turned and walked behind the screen.
When she saw what it was she held, her head started to spin for a moment and she wished she were still naïve and stupid and just wouldn't know.
It was a linen bedsheet. Not of good quality, but clean and almost white.
A bedsheet that tomorrow he would bring back to Joffrey with her blood on it.
… fuck her bloody
Shame and despair swamped her. Her throat burned with the urge to cry, her stomach clenched furiously with the need to throw up and her hands shook so badly, she barely managed to unfold the piece of cloth and drape it over the mattress as she had been bid.
With her hands still shaking, she undid the laces of her dress and let it fall to the floor before she lost her nerves completely.
Behind the screen, water splashed and the sounds of leather, mail and metal buckles falling to the floor could be heard and she wondered if he would come out naked. She had never seen a naked man before.
As it turned out, it would be a while yet until she did, because he emerged from behind the screen clad in a linen undershirt and halfway unlaced breeches. He looked as if he had dressed again after washing himself. Strands of raven black still stuck wetly to his face and left dark patches of wetness on his shirt where his hair lay against his shoulders and back.
She wondered what his hair felt like to touch, if it was as silky smooth as it looked, or coarse like men's hair usually was.
He made no move to undress himself further, nor did he stir in any other way.
Sansa felt a bit at a loss.
For some reason, she had always surmised that what they were about to do would be done naked. And she could readily admit to some curiosity regarding how the fearsome Hound would look underneath his armour and his clothes.
Her musings had distracted her for a moment, but when he finally took a step towards her, her misgivings came back with a vengeance and she couldn't stop herself from flinching.
He stopped dead in his tracks and looked at her from across the room, eyes blank and unreadable.
"I'll not force you," he said.
"I know," she gave back with a slight nod of her head. "You won't have to."
When dragged in front of Joffrey, she had always found something to hold on to, some inner strength to face what lay ahead of her with stoic dignity. But now, here with only the one man she had sometimes believed to be the source of her strength, she had none left.
She held herself together by the skin of her teeth and prayed he wouldn't see how dearly she wanted to throw herself at his feet begging to spare her.
But she couldn't do that to him, he didn't deserve her weakness.
Taking a deep breath, she grabbed the hem of her shift and drew it over her head and then stepped out of her smallclothes, kicking them away with one foot.
He stared at her, his eyes roaming her body from her toes to the root of her hair and she shivered under the intensity of his gaze. There might have been a time when she would have been ashamed of her nakedness, when she would try to cover herself with her hands, but he'd seen her thus often enough in the meantime, if under different circumstances.
This time, though, there was no mistaking he wanted her. If not for the way he devoured her with his eyes, she also noticed the sizeable bulge that had formed in his breeches. She couldn't remember him ever looking at her like that before.
After he closed the distance between them, he reached out a tentative hand, but instead of touching her face to pull her in for a kiss, or maybe grabbing her breasts, he gingerly traced a scar on her belly that went all the way from her right hip to under her left breast.
"I would've liked to kill him for that," he rasped.
She nodded, her throat closed so tightly she couldn't speak.
The scar had been Trant's doing.
Eager to comply with Joffrey's wishes to rip yet another dress from her, one sharp edge of his vambrace had dug into her skin and cut diagonally across her belly when he kept ripping.
She wouldn't even have noticed, the wound not being deep despite bleeding rather copiously, if the Hound hadn't startled everyone in the room by hollering so loudly the walls seemed to shake.
Trant had stopped what he was doing, Joffrey had started to whine and screech at Trant that he wasn't supposed to kill her and look what he'd done, while she stood there dumbfounded, looking on in fascination as the remains of her dress slowly turned a deep crimson.
Only seconds later, she had been swept off her feet and carried out of the room, while the Hound had snarled at everyone that "this is over for today".
She shivered at the memory and the involuntary movement brought him up short. He quickly snatched his hand away and something flashed in his eyes that was gone before she could identify it, replaced by cold indifference.
"Get on the bed," he commanded.
Obediently, she did and lay down on the white sheet, feeling more and more like a sacrificial offering instead of a maid about to be bedded.
"Spread your legs."
It was all she could do to hold back a gasp at this request.
While she didn't mind him seeing her naked, having him look at her... there, was an altogether different matter. She knew, of course, that she had to open her legs to him at some point, but somehow it hadn't occurred to her that he would actually want to look at … that.
She hesitated while he stood at the side of the bed, waiting.
The fire was low in the hearth, only a few little flames just flickering over embers, painting the room in a deep orange hue and casting long, dark shadows.
Still, for what was expected of her, it was not nearly dark enough.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she slowly bent her legs and then let her knees fall apart.
There was a longish silence and then she felt the mattress dip beneath a considerable weight, but nothing else happened.
She found him kneeling between her legs, when she opened her eyes again, his palm over the bulge in his breeches while his gaze was glued to the spot right at the juncture of her thighs.
The effort it took to keep still, to not snap her legs together again, not to squirm away and out of this bed and this room and this house was making her tremble.
If he noticed her watching him, he gave no sign of it. Intend on where he was looking, he stopped touching himself and touched her between her legs, dragging two fingers along her cleft and probing her entrance. Rough, calloused fingertips scraped over dry flesh and he shook his head.
"This won't do."
While she was wondering what this meant, he left the bed to rummage around behind the wooden screen and came back with a little earthenware jar in his hand.
Kneeling between her legs again, he reached into the jar and his fingers came back thickly covered in some sort of pale salve. She didn't have to wonder for long what it was for, when he reached down and put the stuff on her lady parts. It was so cold she could barely supress a shudder.
A smell of lavender and chamomile permeated the room, informing her of the ingredients used in whatever he'd put on her.
Then he leaned forward, bracing himself on one outstretched arm and fumbled with the other down there somewhere.
She closed her eyes when she felt something hot, huge and insistent pressing against her entrance.
It will happen now, she thought, steeling herself against whatever was to happen next. I'll soon be a maid no longer.
A piercing pain lanced through her for a short moment.
She was about to heave a sigh of relief that this hadn't been so bad, when the blunt pressure against her went on relentless, invading deeper and deeper, stretching her until her inner walls felt as if on fire.
She tried to do what she always did, holding herself motionless and gritting her teeth, but to no avail. He didn't stop pushing inside her and she soon reached the point where she couldn't stop the tears anymore that rolled out of the corners of her tightly closed eyes.
After what felt like an eternity of agony, he stopped. She opened her eyes, hoping against hope it might be over now, that he'd withdraw.
Above her, his face was in a rictus of pain as if he could feel what she did. The muscles in his neck stood out in sharp relief with the effort it apparently took him to hold his weight on his arms, almost no other part of him touching her but the one that felt as if it ripped her apart.
Then, to her relief, he did indeed withdraw... only to thrust back in again. Much faster this time and with so much momentum she was rocked back on the bed.
Her whole body howled in pain at the impact and she closed her eyes and bit down on her lip to keep herself from crying out. He did it again and again until she tasted blood.
If you want her hurt, no one can hurt her as I can.
The room rang with the creaking of the bed and the harsh, desperate breaths the man above her was taking.
She tried to concentrate on those sounds, on the smell of lavender in the air and on the chafing of the rough wool of his breeches against her inner thighs. Everything but the burning pain inside her.
And then, when his thrusts had become so forceful and quick she was sure she wouldn't be able to take it much longer, it stopped, he was gone from inside her.
Opening her eyes at the sensation of something warm and sticky splashing onto her belly, she saw him over her, holding himself in his hand, furiously pumping while long strings of a whitish fluid spurted from him.
More tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and when he lifted his head to look from the mess on her belly into her face, she turned her head away.
She couldn't look at him right now, not if she didn't want to break down completely.
His breathing slowed to normal after a while and at last the bed creaked when he left it. She heard his heavy footsteps retreating and then the splashing of water. There was some rustling and the unmistakable clink of mail being put on and buckles being fastened. Then the footsteps came back.
"Get up and clean yourself," he growled.
Reluctantly, she did. While she would have liked to just stay there and feel sorry for herself, it probably was a good thing he didn't let her. He never did.
The spot of blood on the sheet was as big as the palm of her hand. Knowing first hand that even shallow wounds could bleed quite a lot, she was astounded that something that had caused so much pain had bled so little.
There was some blood on her thighs as well, she noticed when she went to wash, and she was certain there had been some on his manhood and his hand where he had touched himself, but still she thought it should've been more.
Her shift and dress landed on top of the screen and she took them and hurriedly dressed herself, grateful for not having to be naked around him anymore.
When she came back out from behind the screen, he had already stripped the bloody sheet from the bed and bundled it tightly together.
He looked ready to leave, dressed again in full Kingsguard regalia, pristinely white and a marked difference to her shabby grey dress.
They stood almost as they had before, on opposite ends of the room, looking at each other as if they'd never met before, with no words to say.
His eyes were like polished steel; blank, cold and impenetrable. "I am going back to the keep," he said finally, breaking the painful silence.
She nodded and watched him walk toward the door, but then a thought struck her.
This arrangement was not only contingent on her compliance; it was also very much about the pleasure he derived from it. No man would stay with a mistress who didn't please him.
"Was it... did you enjoy it?" she asked, eyes downcast.
He snorted.
"It was worse than with a whore."
He left her with those words ringing in her ears and once she heard the door fall shut behind him, she threw herself on the bed and cried like she hadn't cried in a very long time.
...
tbc