Author's notes:
Here it is, the third and final part of what was supposed to be one chapter. Please enjoy.
Chapter 19: Remembering (Part 3)
Present time
Sandor had no idea how long he had been sitting there in the bed where they had made love what felt like years ago.
He felt poleaxed. Stunned into speechlessness by what she'd been telling him. Simultaneously, he understood so much more now and then nothing at all.
How could two people who had witnessed the same event remember it so very differently?
Though, truth be told, his recollections of the fight and its immediate aftermath were hazy at best, save for a few details that stood out so sharply in his mind, he'd likely never forget them for as long as he lived.
Once he'd seen Gregor, once he walked towards him to begin the fight of his life, the one fight he had dreamed and fantasized about for more than twenty years, reality had receded, every worry a distraction, every thought of something else than the fight a smudge on his crystal-clear focus, every sound a distraction tuned out to a faint buzzing.
Sansa had said that people had chanted his name, had loudly demanded Gregor's death, but he couldn't remember any of it. She'd told him about where she'd been standing, but he hadn't seen her, hadn't even thought to search for her face in the crowd of onlookers.
Thinking back, there was only Gregor.
He'd been focused on executing a plan that had been created, honed to perfection and meticulously gone over time and time again. Every night before going to sleep, he used to sharpen his sword and review his plan to kill Gregor. It had been his lifeline for as long as he could remember.
When Joffrey had told him of his decision, he'd been almost ecstatic that his fight with Gregor wouldn't be some chance encounter, some situation of self-defence or anything where he would be unprepared, unable to use the weapon forged for precisely this purpose, the shield he had thought up and commissioned years before.
For years, he had used every opportunity that had presented itself to watch his brother fight, to take note of his tactics, his weaknesses. One of Gregor's greatest weaknesses, even in the training yard, was sound. The high-pitched sound of children's laughter, of women calling out for someone, of crying and scolding nearly always made him lose his focus. Sandor knew Gregor stuffed his ears with little pieces of wool to drown the sounds of battle, if he had the chance. He'd hoped he wouldn't do so this time.
The other weakness was his immobility, the way he stood his ground, relying on the reach of his sword and the massiveness of his shield and armour to protect him. There would be no sense in trying to hammer through his armour, to waste strength running against his shield. But every armour had its weak points by design and Sandor had made it his life's mission to learn about each and every one of them, studying where he could do the most damage, talking to a maester once to assess the various damages he would be able to inflict.
His plan had become flawless over time and its execution had been almost disappointingly simple, if not for his screw-up of underestimating Gregor's ability to adapt and move rather more quickly than expected. Luckily, the damage done was barely more than a scratch, something he only really became aware of hours later.
When Gregor had been on his knees, Sandor had seen fear in his brother's eyes for the first time in forever. Not the fear of dying, Gregor had never been afraid of that, but the fear of being left like this. A cripple, never able to walk again, an easy target for all those who would love to take revenge for all he'd done.
It was an appealing thought to have him taste his own medicine, force him to spend the rest of his life damaged beyond repair, suffering people's disgust and pity, their vile contempt and their thoughtless cruelty.
Maybe, under different circumstances, he would have done exactly that. He could not have cared less about the Imp's fate, he could just have pretended mercy or an unwillingness to kill his own blood and walked away from the yard, the fight without a clear conclusion.
There had been no choice about that, though. He'd made her a promise and in addition wasn't about to run the risk of Joffrey deciding he would see Sansa married to Gregor despite him being crippled.
In a way, not having a choice had been a blessing of sorts. He'd fought Gregor because he had been commanded to do so, had bested him on grounds of his own abilities and cunning and finally killed him to save an innocent maiden from an unthinkable fate.
The Gods, if they truly existed, would probably know and judge him for all of this just being a lie to cover his thirst for revenge, but in the eyes of everyone else, no one truly could reproach him for slaying his own kin.
There had been surprise on Gregor's face the moment his own sword had ripped through his throat, as if he truly hadn't suspected him capable of this sort of mercy. Probably because it was a decision Gregor himself would have made differently. Even if Sandor could take no pride in what he'd done, no satisfaction and no peace of mind, he took with him the knowledge that until the end, of the two of them, he was the better man.
Even if only on account of her.
Her, who stood before him what had felt like mere moments after the end of the fight, breathless and with eyes reddened from too much crying, stammering and stuttering and utterly beside herself. There was no trace of her usual cool remoteness, her quiet dignity or her high-born bearing. She'd been flushed and wild-eyed and he, still reeling at the thought that Gregor was gone, had had no idea how to deal with her.
In his head, only one thought had roared and drowned out all others.
She should be his. Joffrey had promised her to Gregor and now that he was dead, she should be his. He should be claiming her right here, right now.
It was an unwelcome surprise to learn that he had given voice to those thoughts, that – hadn't it been for Blount's interruption – he might have acted on them and they might well both be dead now.
He'd be very careful later on to clamp down on those urges, but back then, months of wanting her, months of forbidden fantasies only indulged in during moments of weakness, had been breaking free, devouring every sense of self-preservation he possessed, every scrap of common sense. Helped, no doubt by the way she had stepped towards him as if drawn, looked at him as if he was the answer to all her questions.
Maybe, he reasoned, all the emotional turmoil of the fight had left both of them unable to act rationally, had stripped them of their defences, if only for a moment. Had left them weak and vulnerable.
To force her to relive that day, to remember that weakness and to acknowledge the fatal consequences it could have had, was maybe the cruellest thing he'd ever done to her.
…
Sansa had moved out of his embrace at some point during the last part of her story, telling it from somewhere huddled against the bed's headboard, curled into herself, naked and shivering. She flinched violently when he touched her and he let his hand sink again.
Where to begin to bring her back? How to apologize?
Slowly, he got up and rummaged through his clothes behind the wooden screen.
Usually, she would follow his movements with her eyes, brazenly appreciating his naked body. At some point, after she'd done it a few times, he had started to believe she really liked seeing him like that.
Now, her gaze was directed at the embers in the hearth, staring unseeingly.
He got on his knees in front of the bed, blocking her line of sight.
"I still have it," he said.
Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked for all the world just as she had back then, when she had stood in front of him after his victory, stammering and making no sense, pleading for something with her eyes, out of her mind with something he didn't understand and was no closer to understanding even now.
After long moments, her eyes focused on him.
"What?"
He held his hand out to her. Curled in his palm, decidedly the worse for wear, dirty and bloody, was the strip of cloth she had given him before the fight.
"I kept it with me ever since then," he confessed, "because it was you who gave it to me."
Gingerly and slowly, she lifted her hand and picked the fabric out of his palm, looking at it oddly. He heaved a sigh, loath to tell her a part of that story she didn't know about.
"When that door closed between us after you gave this to me, I stood outside, wanting to barge back in and get myself a few memories even sweeter than a kiss on the hand. But... I think I realized that nothing taken by force could be as sweet as what had been given of your free will."
She rubbed the cloth between her fingers absentmindedly.
"You would never hurt me," she said in a dead voice. A mantra, or a prayer, maybe, which reminded him of something else.
"I slept in front of your door, fearing Gregor would be coming back. At the first morning light, I went to the Godswood to prepare for the fight and stayed there until it started."
"The Godswood?" she asked, surprise shortly flickering in her eyes.
He shrugged.
"No one bothers you there, it's a quiet place and..."
And one for prayer, too, he added silently, not sure it was something he ever ought to tell her.
Because he had prayed. Well, maybe not in the usual sense of the word and surely not for himself, but he had felt it necessary to remind the Old Gods that they owed something to the last remaining daughter of Winterfell.
That if he died today, they ought to find another means to keep her from harm and do it fast. Otherwise they bloody better see to it he came out of this alive.
"I had my way already mapped out," she broke into his thoughts with her detached voice. Her fingers still stroked the strip of fabric in her hand. "I had a clear path. I would've run past them; Blount would have taken too long to catch up. I would have run over the yard and up to the battlements. And then I would have jumped."
His throat closed and his stomach turned at the precise picture she'd drawn. He could see it all too clearly in his mind's eye, could see that it would have worked, that no one would have stopped her until she would have flown down in a cloud of billowing skirts and come to rest broken and bloody somewhere down on the outer bailey.
It hadn't happened that way, fortunately, but still he felt the irrational wish to talk her out of it, to tell her his defeat would not have been a reason to throw her life away.
"Just because I wouldn't have been there to protect you?" he asked, urgently. "Others might have; they would never have let you marry Gregor. It's like you said, they all know he doesn't exactly have a reputation for producing offspring. They might have…"
She looked at him, glared at him, to be more exact, fire sparking in her eyes, at last bringing some life back into her.
"No, no… NO! Don't you understand?" she yelled at him, scrambling back from where he tried to put his arms around her. "Don't you understand I wasn't worried about that? That I wasn't worried about not being protected, about losing my... my bloody shield?"
She wasn't?
She had been threatened to be married to Gregor and that had NOT been her main concern?
He reached for her again as she dissolved into tears, shaking with great, hiccupping sobs. But again she tore herself away from his searching hands, making him realize that he needed the comfort of touching her more than he longed to give comfort to her.
"I was terrified of losing YOU!", she sobbed and it sounded like an accusation. He just didn't know which of them was the accused here. "Do you understand? I couldn't stand the thought of losing YOU!"
Pain, deep and brutal, ripped through his gut and fisted around his lungs, having him gasp for breath like a landed fish while his throat closed in on itself as suddenly everything made sense.
Her pleading for his life, her guilt at thinking she'd brought destruction on him, her desperate wish for him to succeed and her mindless confusion once the nightmare was over.
She cared. Not for herself, because she had been beyond that even then, regardless how much she reviled herself for feeling grateful about Gregor's death. She cared for him. Had cared even all those months ago only to be taught in a brutal lesson that her feelings were a deadly threat, and her happiness something to be paid for with blood and pain.
His hands shook so badly, he couldn't even wipe away the wetness that dripped down his face as he sat there, feeling stripped of his skin, raw and defenceless and at her mercy. How could he expect her to unlearn that lesson, when even now they still lived under the very same threat should their happiness ever be discovered?
"For one glorious moment," she said, "for only the time it took to say one sentence, I felt strong, secure in my knowledge to have you at my side. When he took that away, showed me that he held your life in his hands just as he holds mine…," she trailed off, shaking her head.
"I went mad because I realized I couldn't live in a world without you in it and I knew… I KNEW that the second Joffrey learned of it, he would not have stopped at anything to get you killed. He couldn't learn of it, he couldn't know. And so I couldn't know it either, because sooner or later I would've betrayed myself again, betrayed you. Brought something on you even your strength couldn't have saved you from."
Her gaze fell on him then and it was as if she was seeing him for the first time that night, as if she only now noticed the state he was in, pathetic and pitiful as it was.
And she took pity on him.
Slowly, she scooted back to him, raised herself to her knees and wrapped her arms around him, holding his head against her breast. Grateful, he crushed her to him, his arms closing like a vise around her delicate body.
"I buried it," she whispered into his hair. "Everything I felt and didn't understand at the time. I cut it out and buried it and went on to live without a heart and without hope. I took the coward's way out."
He drew back.
"The coward's way?" he echoed, aghast. "You saved both our skins when I didn't even know what was at stake."
Shaking his head, he tried to put into words how he had wondered for weeks why she had turned into a stranger all of a sudden, why she had changed from the girl who had given him a kiss and a favour into someone he barely dared to offer his arm to when he escorted her.
"You never gave up," he said. "We're both still here because you found a way to go on living, because you gave me a chance to do what little I could to protect you."
She took a look around herself then, again with a wondering, wide-eyed gaze as if only now noticing where they were, still naked, still between rumpled sheets in a cosily warmed room, the vanilla scent of candles wafting through the air.
"What little you could," she said and then smiled at him. A sad, sweet smile. "It was you who brought us here," she whispered.
"There would have been nothing to bring here if it wasn't for you."
She shook her head in self-derision but he took her face in his hands.
"And don't you dare feel guilty for getting me in that fight. I owe you for giving me that chance, owe you for having it be more than just plain revenge."
"You could have died," she said, desolation in her voice as if he really had.
"No," he said with way more conviction than he had felt at the time. "I knew what I was doing, I knew he was going to die. He did not have a sliver of a chance."
She was quiet for a long moment, but then he heard a very low chuckle coming from her.
"Arrogance suits you," she said.
Still not quite sure it was what she wanted, he lay down with her in his arms and pulled the covers over them both, building a nest of warmth and closeness and hoping it would be enough for now.
She was quiet against him, her only movements the breaths she was taking and he couldn't shake the feeling that whatever had just changed between them could not be undone. Not by any amount of lovemaking and not by a thousand apologies. He'd dragged something into the light that had been kept hidden for a reason. Something as precious and as vulnerable as a new-born babe.
He had torn down the walls each of them had built around themselves and now there was no going back to pretending.
"Why did you insist on your title?" Sansa suddenly asked. "Why did you keep the lands?"
He'd been asked that a number of times and he had an answer for it that usually flowed easily from his tongue.
Having never taken a knight's vow, therefore he had no business being Kingsguard in the first place and since he wasn't really Kingsguard, the rules of the guard didn't apply to him. Since they didn't apply, he could jolly well keep the title and lands that were by rights his now, easy as that.
But it was a lie and he knew it. Only one of the bricks in his wall of self-defence, told others as well as himself to shield the truth. The truth he owed her, especially now.
"Could give you a lot of bullshit reasons," he said slowly. "But I guess I just wanted to be someone, to have something to offer…," he gulped, the words lodging painfully in his throat, "… to offer a future wife."
She didn't move, as quiet as before and he knew it was good enough, not honest enough.
"To offer you," he whispered, burying his face into her hair to hide his embarrassment, his fear.
A gentle hand caressed him then and he found himself soothed with kisses like butterfly wings, soft and ever so delicate and he knew he had done right.
Pulling back from him, she sought his gaze and looked at him out of red eyes, her cheeks streaked with tears.
"Lord Clegane," she said, the tears on her face not evident in her surprisingly clear voice. "I want to congratulate you to your victory over your brother. I am delighted you won, proud of you for your bravery, your smartness and your strength and honoured that you chose to wear my token during this fight."
He nodded, unable to say anything.
"I am glad you are still alive," she went on, "because I need you." She bent down and placed a gentle kiss on his lips. "For this…," she said, then took one of his hand and placed it on her breast over her rapidly beating heart, "…and this," then she took the other and laced her fingers through his, "… and for this."
He understood at once. It was a catharsis of sorts for her, exorcising the demons of a past that haunted the present, a vision of what she thought should have happened if their world was not filled with deception and lies, if they could have acted naturally on the basis of their true feelings and not been forced to beat back every genuine emotion that had bubbled to the surface.
"I'd be happy," she whispered against his lips, "to be your queen of love and beauty."
Not trusting his voice, he did what likely he would have done had she said those words to him back then. He flipped her over and rolled on top of her, assaulting her mouth with kisses that meant to tell her what his failing voice and even more failing wit would not have sufficed to convey.
Maybe, he thought after she lay in his arms afterwards, already asleep, this wasn't so bad a thing in the end. Because yes, they could not go back to their intimacy from before, they had burned that bridge behind them once and for all, but maybe there was something to discover going forward. Something that terrified him probably as much as her, something that held dangers and most of all the risk of both their destruction. With the walls of self-deception gone, they had to rely on each other now for protection, for strength and for solace, but if his experiences in battles had taught him one thing, it was how much more foes you could take on with a trusted ally who had your back.
...
tbc