Chapter Text
Chapter One
Meereenese Hinterlands, Slaver’s Bay, Essos
A bullet whizzed past Sandor Clegane’s head so close that he felt the air stir against his unscarred cheek. At the sound of the dull thwap as it hit the ruined wall of the hut behind him, he instinctively crouched against the wall and swept the scope of his rifle along the tree line of a nearby ridge. His vision was hampered by the thick black smoke spewing from the wreckage of the Humvee and supply truck that only minutes before had been leading a military convoy through the war torn region. Now they lay on their sides, warped and scorched by the rocket-propelled grenades that had destroyed them. The remaining vehicles in the convoy had pulled off the road and were taking heavy fire from insurgents on both sides of the roadway.
The sun beat down relentlessly on his back, and, beneath the Kevlar vest and camo jacket, his T-shirt clung damply to his body. Sweat trickled into his eyes. He blinked it away, not taking his gaze from the sniper scope mounted on top of his rifle.
For most of the week he had lain concealed on a rocky ledge a mile from the remote village where intel said The Sons of the Harpy were planning another attack against Westerosi forces. He and his spotter had slept in shifts, barely eaten, and after five days of hyper-vigilant surveillance—with no sign of insurgency— they had received word that the intel had been false. They’d been extracted from the region by a special ops contingent and had been traveling back to their operating base when they had made a detour to provide security to the supply convoy. They’d heard the explosions and had seen the smoke just before reaching the scene.
Sandor couldn’t believe how completely they had been suckered. The local military, with whom they had spent countless weeks training, had provided them with the intel about the insurgents. While they had been focusing their attention on that village, the real enemy had been planning their attack along this lonely stretch of road. Sandor didn’t know if the false intel had been deliberate or not, but it didn’t matter. They’d fucked up, and now Westerosi troops were getting killed.
The local military had likely been infiltrated. This didn’t come as a surprise, but Sandor couldn’t help but wonder which of the men was responsible. He’d come to know many of them personally, and the realization that one of them had betrayed the Westerosi soldiers—betrayed him—infuriated him.
“Otherfucking son of a woods witch,” spat the man who crouched next to Sandor, peering through a large spotter’s scope. “If we had intercepted the convoy just ten minutes sooner, that could have been our Humvee in the lead.”
“Yeah, well, timing is fucking everything,” Sandor growled. “Just keep your head low. We’ve only got two weeks left in this sandbox, and then we’re outta here. Try not to fuck it up by getting your head blown off.”
Just fourteen more days and then this tour would be complete and he’d be on his way home, far away from this blistering hellshole where he’d delivered death to the enemy more times than he cared to recall. With 86 confirmed kills over the course of four separate tours, Sandor was well on his way to becoming a legend within the Marine scout sniper community.
But he didn’t want to be a legend; he just wanted to finish this tour, go home and try to build a new life. After twelve years of service to his country, he was ready for something new. He couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t want to be a soldier. As a young boy, he’d dreamed of exciting, courageous battles. He would play with his little army men for hours...that is, until his cunt of a brother saw his own toys, discarded and long since forgotten, mixed in with Sandor’s and flown into a rage. Gregor had effortlessly picked up his little brother by the front of his tshirt, dragged him across the room and held his face against the grate in the fireplace. Gods, he could still hear his own desperate high pitched screams, could still smell the sickening scent of his own charred flesh. When his father died and left him alone with his brutal brother, who was responsible for so many of his scars, he knew it was time to escape...or die. So he had enlisted in the military right out of high school. He’d excelled at everything the Westeros Royal Marine Corps threw at him, but found his real skill lay in his deadly accuracy behind the trigger. The military had honed that skill to perfection, but Sandor knew that sniping had as much to do with observing and reporting as it had with shooting at a target. He didn’t just randomly shoot people; he carefully selected his targets before firing upon them.
He’d never had a problem executing the mission, and he’d never lost a minute of fucking sleep over it, either. He firmly believed that killing the enemy before they had an opportunity to do harm was the sweetest thing there was. He’d known men who couldn’t kill a target because they’d become too emotionally attached to the subject. Sometimes, after days of observing a person—of watching them eat, breathe and laugh—a sniper might feel an emotional connection to the target and be unable to kill them when the call came.
Sandor didn’t worry about that happening to him. Just the opposite, in fact. He felt so little emotion about what he did as a sniper that he sometimes wondered how difficult adjusting to life after active duty would be.
He wanted a job where he wasn’t forever chafing from sand in his Gods damned shorts and boots. He wanted to sleep late on the weekends. He wanted to take his bike for a cruise along the coast and feel the cool breeze of the Narrow Sea on his face. He wanted to cook a steak the size of the Iron-fucking-Islands on the grill and drink a cold beer whenever he liked.
But most of all, he wanted to finally meet the lovely Sansa Stark, his little songbird. The pretty elementary school music teacher had been sending him care packages for nearly a year and a half as part of an adopt-a-soldier program. He’d never even met Sansa, but her sweet letters and photos made him miss home in a way that he never had before. Her warm humor and detailed descriptions of even the most mundane tasks left him grinning like a fucking idiot long after he tucked the letters safely away.
But it was the personal stuff she shared with him that made him long to get back to meet her. She’d only recently moved to Maidenpool from Wintertown in the North, and despite the upbeat letters, her homesickness was a palpable thing. He found himself impatient to get home to ease her loneliness. He wanted to be with Sansa more than he’d ever wanted anything else. He wanted to spend time with her and get to know everything there was to know about her...from how she took her coffee to how she looked in the morning with sleepy eyes and a soft smile after a night of very thorough lovemaking . Oh, yeah, he’d been packing some serious heat for Sansa Stark since she’d first written to him.
Her letters had started out innocently enough. Bronn’s wife, Margaery had enlisted several of her fellow teachers to a correspondence program with the men from his unit and she had informed him that she and some of her students had adopted him. She had thanked him for his service and asked if there was anything he particularly wanted or needed. He’d thumbed through the handmade cards and notes until he’d found a picture of her standing with a group of young children in her classroom. All he could think was that his own elementary school teachers had never looked like her. And a good thing, too, or he might never have made it to middle school.
In the eighteen months they’d been corresponding, Sandor had slowly been able to open up to her through letters and emails. He told her about his childhood, his scars and the numerous surgeries and countless hours alone—hurting and scared—in the Brotherhood Without Banners Pediatric Burn Unit to repair his mangled face as much as possible. He told her that it was his own brother who had done it, and that their father had covered it up. She told him of her own abuse at the hands of a sadistic ex-boyfriend. She sang to him and sent him YouTube links to the school concerts she organized. They told each other of their loneliness and their hopes that they could soon meet in person.
Through all their letters, her one consistent message had been to take care of himself, to come home safely. She worried about him—him—a man she’d never even met. He’d never had anyone who gave two pinches of white dog shit about him. How would she feel if something did happen to him? Would she grieve for him? Lately, she’d been finishing her letters with “P.S. I can’t wait for you to come home!” Maybe he’d spent too much time in the sun, or maybe he was going soft, but he couldn’t prevent his imagination from conjuring sappy images of just how she might greet him. She gave him a whole new reason to come home in one piece.
A year ago, Sansa signed her letter with a postscript with her number. During that first phone call, they’d immediately clicked, and fifteen minutes had never gone by so fast. There hadn’t been any awkward silences, only a sense of disappointment that they couldn’t talk longer. After that, Sandor called any time communications were available in camp, always late at night for her.
Three weeks ago, in anticipation of his return, he’d taken a huge chance and asked Sansa to meet him at a hotel in Dorne for the week. He hoped she hadn’t heard the desperation in his voice when he’d made the proposition during a brief phone call; he’d tried to sound nonchalant about it. No pressure, and she could say no and he’d be fine with it.
Which had been a complete fucking lie.
To his immense relief, Sansa had actually agreed to meet him at an oceanfront hotel in Sunspear. The room rate had been astronomical, but Sandor didn’t give a fuck. What else did he have to spend his money on? He wanted to make Sansa feel special. Hells, she was special, and he was looking forward to getting to know her better. He’d even sleep at the marine base if she didn’t want him staying with her. He just knew he couldn’t wait until he returned to Maidenpool to finally meet her. There was a part of him that suspected he shouldn’t have such strong feelings for a woman he’d never even met, but he didn’t care. He knew they were real.
Now he fixed his eye to the telescopic sight of his rifle and carefully scanned the ridge on the far side of the convoy. “There,” he muttered in satisfaction, spotting movement among the trees. “Target,” he called quietly.
“Target,” replied Bronn. He peered through the large spotter scope he carried.
“Sector A from TRP 1, right 50, add 50.”
“Roger,” Sandor replied and repeated the coordinates back to his partner as he adjusted the scope on his sniper rifle. The sporadic sound of machine-gun fire from the battle didn’t distract him. Nothing short of a direct hit would break his concentration. All that mattered was the target. Eventually, the insurgent would make an attempt to fire his weapon and when he did, Sandor would be waiting. Even the punishing sun that beat down on his back didn’t faze him.
“Lone soldier behind the tree, rifle in right hand,” Bronn said quietly.
Sandor peered through the scope at the man who had emerged from behind a tree to focus his weapon on a marine who was attempting to drag a wounded soldier to safety.
“Roger. Target identified,” Sandor confirmed, lining him up in his crosshairs. “He’s drawing down on one of our men.”
“Dial 500 on the gun,” Bronn directed.
“Roger, 500 on the gun. Gun up!”
“Send it.”
With steady hands, Sandor deliberately squeezed the trigger at the same instant the target fired his own weapon at the soldier struggling to drag the body of a fellow soldier to safety.
Bam!
Immediately and without looking away from the sighting, Sandor chambered another round. Through the telescopic sight, he saw the target go down.
“Center hit,” Bronn called, as he followed the bullet’s vapor trail.
“Stand by.”
The pitiful shriek of a crying child reached him, and Sandor huffed out a breath of annoyance as his fingers flexed around the bolt handle of the rifle. He rolled his shoulders to ease the tension. “Roger, center hit, stand by.”
“Confirmed hit. Target destroyed.”
“Roger that.” Sandor swept his scope back to the soldier who had been attempting to rescue his comrade and swore as he saw both soldiers lying motionless on the ground. He closed his eyes briefly in regret, but when he opened them again, he saw the second soldier slowly raise his head and it seemed to Sandor that he looked directly at him. The soldier glanced down at the front of his uniform and when he pressed a hand against his shoulder, Sandor saw blood seep through his fingers. “That fucking cunt got him.”
Sandor swept his scope across the immediate area, prepared to cover the soldier should he come under attack again. Despite his injury, he managed to grab the other soldier’s flak jacket and drag him to safety. Only when he had reached the relative shelter of the trucks did Sandor pull his gaze away from his scope. He rolled onto his side, swiping a hand across his eyes to ease the strain. The pitiful wailing of the child continued.
“Fucking Hells, where is that kid?” he snarled, because as much as he wished otherwise, the persistent crying did distract him.
“Ah, damn,” Bronn muttered as he inched his head around the edge of the wall to survey the destruction below. “There’s a kid in the road, right in the middle of the fucking firefight.”
Sandor craned his head over the low wall to peek at the dusty road. A swift glance told him that this was no kid; this was a baby, sitting in the dirt about a hundred yards away. Sandor used his rifle scope to survey the surrounding area. No fucking way the insurgents would use a child to lure the marines into the open. Would they?
Sandor had seen a lot of twisted things during all his tours in Meereen, but something that sick would definitely take the cake. He swept his scope over the tiny village that lay beyond the battle. A woman stood in the doorway of a small house, her face contorted in fear and grief. Two local men physically restrained her from running to the child.
“Well, shit.” He pushed himself away from the ruined wall and bent low. “Cover me,” he called.
“Hound!” shouted Bronn, and made a grab for Sandor, but missed. “We only got two weeks left and you, my friend, are a big fucking target!”
“It’s not my time,” Sandor flung back. Bent over, he sprinted along the low ridge that paralleled the road, keeping an eye on the crudely dug trench where a dozen or more insurgents still fired at the convoy. They didn’t see him until he was almost level with them. One man stood up to take aim at him, but was immediately felled by a single bullet, courtesy of Bronn.
Sandor veered sharply as two more insurgents stood up. He’d left his sniper rifle by the wall as it wasn’t any good for close combat, so he jerked his pistol from its holster and swept the area with a spray of bullets, not waiting to see if he’d hit his targets.
He reached the nearest truck and flung himself behind it, peering through the dust and smoke as he regained his bearings. Two marines lay on their bellies in the dirt beneath the truck, firing toward the ridge, while a third provided cover. When Sandor pointed toward the child, the third soldier gave him a thumbs-up and shifted his position to provide additional cover.
Sandor made his way along the line of trucks until, finally, nothing stood between himself and the child except twenty yards of open, unprotected road. Sitting in the dirt, wearing only a grimy tunic, was a dark haired little girl. Sandor guessed her to be no more than two years old.
Holstering his pistol, he made a run for the kid. A bullet hit the ground near his feet, sending a spray of dirt and rock upward. He flung up an arm to cover his face, but he didn’t stop. Bending low, he scooped the terrified toddler into his arms and then continued his sprint toward the hut where the child’s mother watched with a mixture of hope and horror on her face.
Reaching the house, Sandor thrust the child into the outstretched arms of the woman, just as something hit the back of his head with enough force to propel him through the open door of the hut. He did a sliding face-plant along the dirt floor, his body curiously boneless. He was only dimly aware that his helmet had come off and had landed beside him. He watched, detached, as it spun crazily on the hard-packed floor until it came to a stop just inches from his face.
Sandor struggled to focus.
Taped to the inside of the helmet was a photograph of a young woman. Her skimpy pink tank top clung to her curves and outlined softly rounded breasts. The smile on her face suggested she was well aware of how her nipples thrust against the thin fabric, and that she enjoyed the reaction it caused. Of all the photos that Sansa had sent to him, Sandor liked this one the best.
He blinked as something warm and wet trickled into his eyes, and his mouth was filled with the metallic taste of blood. Darkness fluttered at the edge of his vision.
He frowned. There was something not quite right about the photo. What was wrong with it? His vision blurred and he squinted hard. Then he saw it; the photo was splattered with blood. His blood. Ah, damn.
His last thought was that now he’d never get to meet pretty Sansa Stark. He’d never have the opportunity to wake up to sleepy blue eyes and a soft smile. Then darkness descended and he knew nothing more.