Archive of Our Own

But there are no lips. No hair. No eyes. Just a space on the mattress and his hand stroking sheets that don't even hold her warmth anymore. Dreams melt away and reality is there, stark and ugly and without her. He looks through the hole that should be her and sees her table. A picture of her and Elle, mugging for the camera. Himself, smirking in family tartan, hands clasped over his sporran. A scattered handful of white gold and silver, precious things, too much so to be locked in a dark box. They needed the light, and to be close to hand, close to skin. No longer.

Sandor breathes out hard like a bull ready to charge and rolls onto his back, settling for the safe, featureless ceiling. It doesn't stay safe for long; not once his mind clicks and whirs into life. Angry babble in his skull. Growls and shrieks. Memories bubbling up and boiling over and they're as real as he is and she was. He sits up and sunlight smacks him across the eyes like a bat. Sits there and works the tension and sleep-stiffness from his shoulders, rolls and cracks and massages...

Already he can feel that strange, deep ache of absence. No marks or venom, but it's still there, like a hollow blade.

The way her hands would trail up and down his back. Caress his sides. Goose his arse and make him sputter. One more hour, love. They won't mind. Sometimes he agrees with her; sometimes his resolves holds. Every day, though, he counts as a victory, because he would turn and see her smiling at him, this bare and beautiful thing tempting him back under the covers.

Now he gets up and doesn't turn, because he knows what he won't see. 

Water pours down and around him and he's a rock underneath it. Same as the granite lump in his chest. He's staring at the bright, silly soaps and conditioners she treated her mane with, now untouched. Not slipping and sliding off the shower board and beaning her on the feet, sending her stumbling against his chest.

Water pours and he doesn't feel it. But he feels that memory; that flash of recollection that surges from his skin, not his mind. Warm and alive and shivering sliding slickness over his chest, his neck, until her hand cups his cheek. Such as it was. Gasoline cadaver where hers was a flushing peach under the steaming water. She caressed it and the precious few working nerves shot lightning through to his scalp until it tingled and it wasn't the heat or the water, it was her.

Water pours down and down and he is alone, until he slaps the faucet and even the hiss and gurgle of the shower leaves him. 

The kid isn't stupid. He knows how smart they are, how much they see and understand without having to be told. It's all animal instincts. They know when their sires feud and it frightens them. It threatens their stability, the noise and the stink of anger in the air, like a predator drawing close. He's sure the years beat that out of them; replace intuition with logic, and since when did that help when it came to human beings?

"Where's Mommy?"

His throat turns to ice and he has to choke down the shards. There's so much you can tell from a tone. A handful of words, a tome of questions. She can't see his face as he pours milk over her cereal, bobbing animal faces grinning at him from the bowl. By the time he turns and places it in front of her, he's neutral as he would be on the job. Cold, blank mask and he hates wearing it for her.

"She went to see grandma for a few days."

She's her mother's eyes and his hair and he would have preferred it the other way around. No more so than today, when he looks in those jittery eyes and it's like he's talking to Sansa, instead of Elle. Like he has to explain himself to her, a confession without a booth or a priest. She sniffs and swirls her spoon in her breakfast, making the faces chase each other.

"Why didn't she say goodbye?"

"Why does it matter so much to you? It's just money! They're offering, it not like they're loan sharks!"

"We don't need it! I have to, I'll get another job. You might want to think about getting one!"
"And what the hell is that supposed to mean?! I have to be here for-"

"God, then get a nanny-"

"Oh, 'cause we can really afford that, can't we?!"

His mouth gapes like a fish caught on a line and she's her then she's not and of all the people he can't fall apart in front of, she's the whole list. He grips his coffee mug tighter and gives her a smile he has to pull from somewhere deep in the granite. Leans over her like he does when he plays, looming like a troll or slaugh from back home. 

"Weeeeell... maybe she wants it to be a surprise. Like one big game of hide and seek, eh?"

He's lying, and he knows if she asks, he'll have to stop. But she trusts him. He's her Daddy; he's god and creation as far as she's concerned, tied with Mommy. She trusts him and so did the one that left; that's why his daughter's still there instead of with her. Because Sansa was in such a state that she knew she couldn't frighten their little girl and now, with the city bustling beyond the window and another day falling off the calendar since she left, that thought is a thin blade through his navel all the way to his spine. 

Despite everything said and screamed and spat, Sansa trusted him. She still did. 

"Are you sure?"

"Your pride isn't helping us!"

"Oh, don't fucking analyze me, I don't fucking-"

"Keep your voice down, she's sleeping-"

"Then don't go turning this on me like it's my fucking fault!"

"I'm not, it's no-one's fault, it's just-"

"You want to run to Mommy and Daddy instead of going without a few luxuries for a while?"

"That is not fair and you know it!"

The only job you have as a father is to make sure your kids have it better than you did. That they have more chances, more opportunities, can be more than you were. He crouches down and strokes hair like brushed midnight and he knows he's failing. He's lying and he's evading and he woke her up last night and did the same thing. Sandor had grown up with lies cloaking him. Now he was on the road to gifting that to Elle.

He hugs her so she can't see his eyes, voice muffled in that tiny bonnet of curls. 

"Aye," he lies. "She'll probably come back later." 

She doesn't come back. She doesn't call. No texts. No email. He even stretches his meagre knowledge of modern technology and braves Twitter and Tumblr. Zip. Nothing. Like she just fell off the Web and the Earth with it. He stares at the phone on the kitchen counter and wills it to ring, even as the urge to call her gnaws and bites and he batters it down.

He was not in the wrong. She just doesn't understand, and he has to make her.

His hands clench tighter around the counter and he's at war with his own mind again. Make her?Force her? Since when did he think like that? When had he started thinking like that? The words batter against his stubbornness and his pride and the silence is all he breathes into the room. Muted television from the little one's room, but only for another twenty minutes. Something with dancing fruit.  

There's the endless hum from the street outside and the A/C whirring diligently away in the vents but aside from that it's still. Cold because of it and in the same animal way his daughter knows something is wrong, Sandor knows this is wrong. The paintings and photos are just things now. They're not memories or long afternoons watching her with her tongue sticking out one side of her mouth, trying to mix just the perfect shade for a cherry tree. And that's all he would do: watch. Paint her onto his mind with his eyes, every curve and stroke of her hands and her fingers. The smudges on her cheek and fingertips where she shades or spread. Her eyes focused like lasers even when she did that stupid one-eye-closed-thumb-raised thing that he chortled at.

Everywhere he looks he sees detritus. Leftovers. He swallows and the face that has the bangers in the precinct drop the fucking act when he cruises by twitches, cracks like a wall hit by a battering ram. Doesn't fall, but there's damage there. Thoughts he doesn't want and can't get rid of and he's haunting this place. 

It's their home. Theirs. Not his. Without her he's just a shade. 

He tucks Elle in and her last question is about Mommy. Grumbling frustration as old as the scars on his face threatens to rasp from his lips but he can't do it. He'd spent years learning to hold back his anger; with Elle, it was as simple as holding her in his arms for the first time. She'd been so still, a bundle of warmth and wrinkly flesh he didn't know what to do with. But she was sleeping so Sandor whispered over her head, "What do I-"

"ooour?"

He'd never forget the sound. Like a tiny monkey in his arms it called to him, soft and barely even human, just a gentle animal call of alarm. When he looked down she'd opened her tired, half-blind eyes and looked back. Never seen a face before, and she saw his first. Little hands like seed buds reached out for him and snagged a thumb. Her whole hand could barely fit around one knuckle, and Sandor felt every year and every regret of his life up until that moment shatter and fall away into nothing.

He was a father. That was all that mattered from that moment onward. Everything he was afraid he would never feel for his child sprang into him, every whisper that told him he was too ruined was silenced forever. He finally willed his neck and eyes to look past her, at Sansa, pale and spent. Lying in bed, hair plastered to her forehead, boneless and doped up but still there. Smiling even though doing so meant she had to close her eyes, she was so, so tired.

"She likes you."

He's breathing ragged and he knows something is wrong. His chest is clenching. His ribs are fingers, his sternum a palm, all of them crushing tighter around his insides and why does it hurt ? How can it be physical like this, all these things that touched him in places he didn't think he had anymore? 

He throws back his head just to get some air to his lungs but he knows it's more than that. He's staring up through the ceiling and the floors above them and into the stars and wanting to find some answer there. He's choking and he's snarling all at once, just for a moment until he smacks the side of the kitchen counter hard enough to rattle the knife rack and fuck his hand hurts.

"What's your name?"

"Sandor, ma'am."

"Officer?"

"Detective."

"Oh. Like the TV shows, huh?"

"Probably a lot more boring than telly."

She was a victim, one of hundreds he'd been called out to, and the moment he walked through the door he was doomed. He'd never had a type, because he'd never been anyone's, but one look at that mane and those eyes and he was a Redhead Man. The prick had waved around a gun and left with a handful of bills and she was working the register. She was frightened and the EMTs were doing as best they could but the whole time he questioned her, her coffee was sloshing and shaking and he wrapped his own around hers like gloves. 

He didn't know why he did it. Touching someone so intimately was frowned up and there were a dozen regulations and a thousand citations as to why. But she was afraid and her glassy eyes were replaying that bastard's cruelty and careless violence over and over like a movie she couldn't switch off. There was a bruise on her brow. He'd hit her. She was scared and he didn't want to see that, so he'd held her hands and she looked at him.

Weeks and months and years. They blew by him like autumn leaves and he never noticed until he woke up one day and she was next to him, nuzzled against the hairs of his chest, nose crinkling when she brushed against the thick mat. But still at peace. Without a stitch and her hands across him and there was happy gurgling from the baby monitor. 

It was a modest apartment in a modest neighborhood, but it was theirs. They'd made it that way. She had. A million little feminine touches he'd hardly understood but twig by twig, his little bird had made their nest and now he was standing in the middle of it alone, and it wasn't right-

"Why don't you fucking walk if it's too much fucking bother?"

"You... You don't mean that."

"I'm done arguing with you. We're not taking the money."

"Since when do I need your permission to-"

"As of fucking now!"

"You're acting like an asshole, Sandor!"

"And you're still a fucking princess."

The words gouge at him across time, and they'd felt so righteous when he'd barked them at her. Part of him enjoyed that crumpling of her features, like he'd finally made an impression, finally got through to her. But then came the tears, and what the fuck was he expecting? Tearful apologies? "You were right, Sandor"? She tore through her drawers and packed a bag and she was gone in a quarter-hour and he said "fine". Like she was heading to Jeyne's for a visit and she'd be back. 

But she wasn't back. Not her body. Just the life she'd left behind, that he'd pushed her from.

He rubs his face and he wants her hands on him. She's too much of him now, and goddamn it he'd let that happen. Rage, primal and male and instinctive, courses through him and lashes out, trying to blame her for gelding him through his soul. But he knows that isn't true. His eyes are fixed on that picture from San Francisco. The three of them, Mommy and Daddy and Elle squashed between them, face frozen in a chubby-cheeked squeal of laughter as they tickled her in front of that towering crimson bridge. 

Something moves in the glass of the picture. His reflection. Vicious and scowling. Not the grinning face in the picture, with Sansa's fingers wrapped around his shoulder as she reached behind his back. She'd kissed him moments later, her tongue a crackling circuit that melted every hate he'd ever held on to. She stroked his face and that was just one of more than he could ever count, and he'd tried. Because one day she would leave and it would be-

"Christ, what are you doing?"

"I'm going to my mother's, I can't stay here when you're-"

"When I'm what? Acting like a man?"

"Acting like Joff! Like Ramsay! Like that bastard that stuck a gun in my face for a hundred bucks!"

"Sansa, be very fucking care-"

"Or what?! You'll hit me? That what you are, Sandor? Following in Gregor's footsteps?"

"Better that than your faggot brother or your dead fucking sister-"

His cheek still burns. She has a good hand on her, that was for sure. He's taught her well, like any good cop does, and a real punch would give him some whiplash come the morning. But it was a slap, angry and wild and scorching through his skin until it made his teeth bite and gnash against his tongue. Sandor felt it, but it was a good burn. It goaded him. it fed him. Just like the tears of broken trust in her eyes; like holes in the ten-ring, letting him know he'd hit his mark. 

It became more than just a fight about money. They both wouldn't back down, and soon it was just about hurting each other. Dredging up hateful words and smashing things precious that couldn't be put back together. But that was the last salvo. She'd stared at him like everyone else had in his entire life, seeing his face and nothing else, then turned on her heel and Sandor heard the front door slam.

Elle cried. He went to shush her back to sleep. Then he waited for her to come back, and she didn't. He waited for her to call, but she wouldn't, and neither would he. He'd snorted and tossed his phone aside, arrogance like armor covering all he wouldn't look at.

But now he could. He did, and it was all so clear to him.

His fault. This is his fault.

"Fuck this."

No more silence. No more waiting. He tears across the room like he's going to bust down the door, pulling on his jacket and somehow managing not to tear it to shreds. Pressure has been building for hours, a gas line and a volcano both, exploding out of his hands as they grab keys and phone and clip his badge and gun to his belt. Mrs Garcia down the way can watch Elle for the night if he slips her a few bucks and keeps an eye on her grandson. He's already planning as he walked, rehearsing his lines and the fragmented Spanish he'd learned on the Spanish Harlem beat. Opening the door and-

"H... Hi..."

He stares and stares and he must be dreaming or crazy. Bag over her shoulder. Tears streaking her face, dried but she still swipes at them with the back of her hand. Her face is composed but her eyes are a tempest, frightened and unsure, because of him. He takes a breath and holds it and... nope, she's still there. Chewing the inside of her lip and trying to think of something to say. 

Her lips part and he knows the words she'll speak, but he'll be damned if he'll let her do that to herself. He all-but-lunges across the tiny space and pulls her into his chest so tight her words die in a gasp. He digs his nose through her curls and her scent gets his legs numb and quivering, he's sure of it. He whispers the words in her ear and they aren't broken, or hoarse. But they're still desperate.

"I'm sorry. I was... love, I'm sorry."

"Don't hate me for this," she says, and the tears are back, nails in his back now as she clutches him like she's worried about losing him. That he's worth keeping, even after all he'd said, almost breaks him right there in the hallway. "I don't want that. I don't want you... you to resent me, or some-"

Sandor moves his lips from her ear to her mouth and the city and the building and the hall vanishes. He vaguely heard a door open a crack, a muttering from someone that that sounds about twenty years older than anyone who enjoys kissing anymore, and he ignores both. Because she's kissing him back, as hungry as he is, desperate for a fix and her hands are on his cheek and in his hair and dead nerves and cold skin are alive and hot. All because of her. He nips her bottom lip and breaks the kiss under protest, forehead resting against hers. Her hands gathering his own, small and fragile. 

He isn't a subtle man, and he knows it. So he settles for honesty, because all he can see is her hands, and her eyes the night before, and if he isn't honest now, Sandor knows he'll be seeing them in his nightmares.

"I won't, birdie. I won't. I can't... Arya, your brother... fuck, I dun' even know what t'say. 'Sorry' is just so fucking-"

Sansa grips his big mitts and finally he drags his gaze up. Hesitant, peeking under his eyebrows, like a defendant before the judge. She's smiling, sad and with her lips curled inward, still hurting and wincing behind the bow of her lips. 

"But you said it. You meant it."

He freezes, same nameless shock seizing him as it did when he'd gone in first on a warrant and found a shotgun pointed at him on the other side of the door. Now Sandor feels it again, that shock, the blankness of the brain followed a second later by cold realization. He swallows so hard it hurts and there's no cover this time, no Kevlar or backup. He has to brave the fire and his words come out choked and shamed.

"I didn't. I... I wanted to hurt you and... you know, San, you have t'know, I don't think-"

There's a giggle, a silver bell in his ears and his emotions are tossed on a tsunami, rocketing from depths to swell just at the sound of her. Not just because it's her, but because of the sadness under it. The pain still there that he put inside her, and Sandor knows it will never truly go away. That betrayal; that he could laugh with Brandon and joke with Arya and still say such horrible things. He shrinks from that truth, wanting to turn away and not face it but-

No. Not with Sansa on the line. He looks her in the eyes and sees forgiveness there. Understands just how powerful it can be, and how fast and sure it can cleanse sins and stains long-seeped into a soul. He's been fifteen years staring at the worst mankind has to offer. Things he can't ever talk to her about. He's heard about cons finding Salvation and rolled his eyes, thinking well, that's one way to impress the parole board. Now he sees it, and it doesn't need a cross or communion. Just her, willing to take a chance when there's no need, on someone like him. 

"I mean you saying sorry, silly," she says, squeezing his sausage fingers and he grasps onto her lifeline like a drowning man.

"I do. Fuck, San, I do. I just wanted to-" Hurt her. Can he even say it twice? Would it get easier? He doesn't think so. Now when there's that tightness again from the thought of it alone, gripping him and pulling him to the floor. Choking him. It's only her warmth in his palm, like when he first held Elle that keeps him on his feet. "-say things that would make you... make you cry."

Gregor. Ever the specter over his life and his actions. Dead and rotting, but never truly gone. Always the fear in Sandor, greater even than the one when he was alive, that he'd look in the mirror one day and see that black light in his own eyes. The worst of all and proud to be it, addicted to suffering.

Sandor felt a ghost of that the night before. Just the merest fraction, but he never wanted to feel it again. Now his eyes are gleaming and Sansa hugs him again. 

Despite what he'd said, what he'd done to her, what he'd put her through for a whole day, and he can't let go. 

His voice is a creak like a tree limb close to breaking, making his throat hurt when he rasped.

"This... This isn't home without you."

She sniffs and she holds him, thin arms barely making it around his back and they stand there floating above the cheap tile. Unwilling and unable. Let the neighbors talk. Her head shifts against his chest and he feels his ears bristle and dance with each hot pulse of her breath.

"And you can't change diapers to save your life."

"That, too."

He looks down and her delicate hands are on his chest... and she presses a kiss to his shirt, ridiculous and irreplaceable little creature that she is. He chuckles deep and low and in a moment of mirth, he feels pressure nudging behind his eyes. He'll never find another like her. Someone who'd shot herself through him like a hot dose and there is no detox for that. None needed. 

"We still need to talk."

"Aye, we do."

There's that smirk. An artist's stroke across a freckled, blushing canvas. A Renaissance smile that's demure or wicked, depending on the eyes. Wet and puffy as they are, they still kill him, DOA, just like that day he'd answered a 211 and rode to the coffee house. 

"Make it up to me properly?."

His turn to smirk. Nothing better than making good, after all.

"One thing first."

He takes her hand and closes the door and a song plays through the halls. A delighted squeal at a mother's return. A too-small shower just right for two. A bed filled with two proper halves making one and the moon throws pale tendrils over grateful, tangled limbs and mouths and covers. The city drones on unaware, spires of diamonds in the night beyond the glass, and Sandor groans into her, around her, inside her. Every sound she makes into his ear and hitch of her legs around his hips shaking him from scalp to soul.

He sleeps with her heart drumming softly against his chest; knows that when he reaches out tomorrow, she will be there.