She followed him; he heard her steps behind him and hung back til she was abreast with him, and they walked together through the brush in silence.
He was still pale with sick and she wondered why he liked to drink at all, if that was what it won him. He eyed her, a glint of grey from the side, and when she caught it she frowned at him. He frowned back, and patted at her shoulder.
When they reached the creek he rolled his breeches to his knees, yawning, and took off his stained shirt and left it on the bank. He wasn't much smaller without it, same as the plate; he was brown but laced with scars so completely that in truth he was as white as she. She sat herself on a rock ledge and as she hung over it to look down into the creek small fish darted out, afraid of her shadow. He waded out, shading his eyes, dropping bread from his pocket to the slow surface of the creek, his spear in his other hand. She watched him watch the fish. They darted all around his legs in the water after the bread and she piped to him from her rock, "Why not those?"
"They're tiny, just look at them, I'd be here all day. Shhhh. They'll leave if you keep talking. As will I." She doubted that, but kept quiet and watched his face reflected in the water. He didn't appear to be blinking. His good side was calm and pale, his bad side, fragmented by the fishes' ripples, looked a tiled mosaic of black and red. She thought of how simple he'd made it for her: while most men had their bad side under their faces, his sat in front, one exact half, to remind her. She thought how monstrous it would be if she could see what everyone's face-under-face might be. It would have made King's Landing much easier, and then thought a little, solemnly, on her own face– And they'd have known me right away, wouldn't they. How transparent she had been, really, anyway; and yet, she was still alive.
He was motionless, waiting for the fish, eyelids hooded, deadly patient. She turned over and leaned back on her palms, looked at the sky and was glad that he'd not wanted to ride. She watched a hawk rolling lazy through the clouds and touched where the Hound'd bit. He was old, and she'd noticed that the older one got the more difficult an apology came, quite unlike the admissions which had tumbled constantly from her in her youth. The bite had been ridiculous, something an animal would do. Clearly it came from the weakness in the well; an anger, a fear.
She turned then and watched one big shadow winding slow around the rocks, wind up to the Hound, slow like a ship sailing underwater. He aimed, she saw, for the shadow underneath the shadow, and he leaned down quick and then the shadow became a big bright silver wriggle on the end of the spear, and he was wading over, triumphant. She watched him pull rocks around and lay the speared fish by her in its shallow creek-bed pocket, giving her another side-eyed glint, and then waded back. She waited through two more, deadly patient on her own, and then he, after looking down judiciously at the little creek-pen, turned to her on her rock.
"This is enough. I don't know that I even want to eat them, fucking wine. Fly away back, now, I need to wash. Stay by the horse." And then he handed her the spear. She grimaced at the end all striped with shreds of fishscale and he grinned wolfish at her, good eye wrinkling, liking the disgust, standing well above her. She stared at him then. It was direct, unlike the muted gazes courtesy taught to give, and new, and she shocked herself with how easy it was, to look sharply and to not falter, to not spare him. It skewered him and he lost the grin and then stepped back, cowed a little, shied his face away as a horse does when it doesn't want its bit. But, pity for the beast–before he turned his eye away, she saw the weakness shining clear in it. It was herself that she saw, simple as that.