Work Text:
1.
The first time it happens he has three fingers in her cunt, a thumb rubbing furious circles on her clit, and her hips are canted in the air as she gasps out please please oh God I’m gonna – please I’m so close Daddy please –
His hand is gone before she realizes what’s happened.
“What did you say?”
She gapes at him wordlessly.
Anger twists his face. “I’m not him,” he growls, and stalks out of the room.
It’s only when the door slams that Sansa registers what it was she had said.
Well, fuck.
She passes a shaky hand over her face. The room is cold without his body over hers and she wraps the blanket around her as she gets up.
He’s in the kitchen, sitting at the table and staring murderously into the dark outside the window. His fingers grip tightly around a glass of water she knows he wishes was vodka.
“Do you think about him when we fuck?”
“No.” Her vehemence shakes her whole body.
“Then why —“
“I don’t know. It was a mistake. It just came out.” She watches her foot trace a crack in the linoleum. “I’m sorry,” she says miserably.
He says nothing.
“Sandor, please.” Her voice is barely above a whisper.
He keeps his gaze fixed away from her.
She watches him for a while, chewing her lip, and then she walks to him and cards a hand through his hair.
“Tell me how it happened.”
He huffs and tries to shake her hand off. “Not now.”
She tugs his hair, gentle but insistent. “Tell me.”
He doesn’t meet her eyes, but his shoulders loosen a fraction. “I cut the security cameras. The sun had just set. I got in through a window in the library.”
“I was in the living room,” Sansa prompts. “He was on the other side of the fireplace at his desk.”
“He didn’t see me until I already had the gun on him. Neither did you. I told you to go outside and get in the truck.”
“And I did.” She had been scared, then, and too startled at the sight of Sandor Clegane back from the dead to do anything but obey. She regrets it now. She should have stayed and watched.
“I took him to the basement and tied him to a chair. He told me about the money in the safe, more in the bank that he could get me, favors that he could pull.”
“And you said…” She runs her fingers through his hair.
His eyes lift to meet hers. “I said I was only there for one thing, and it was to watch him die.”
She smiles. “Then what,” she asks, though she knows. This is their ritual.
“I broke each of his fingers, one by one. He was screaming so loud by that point I stuffed a rag in his mouth. Then I got a hammer and took it to his knees.” He pulls her into his lap and she straddles him, still stroking his hair. “He bled all through his fancy suit trousers.”
She nuzzles his temple and he kisses her neck. “And his face?”
“I broke his nose and jaw with the hammer. I wanted him to still be conscious but he was fading in and out. And then I got my knife.”
The sheet has fallen to her waist and he kisses the slope of her breast over her heart.
“The knife,” she reminds him.
“I slit his throat and watched as he bled out.”
She lifts his face to hers and cradles it in her hands. “And you saved me.”
He smiles. “And I saved you.”
They fuck on the kitchen chair, and this time when she comes the only words on her lips are his name.
2.
“This is what daddies do with little girls,” Littlefinger had said, and then he’d raped her. She hadn’t known what it was. She hadn’t known a man’s body could go inside you. All she knew was that it hurt, and he was lying, because her daddy never did that to her.
But Littlefinger was her daddy now. That’s what he said. He was her daddy and she was his little girl.
“I could never love your aunt. Crow’s feet and saggy tits. But you… you are the daughter I have always wanted.”
Alayne Stone did what her daddy told her. She wore what he told her. Pigtails and schoolgirl skirts and socks with ruffles. Everything — her bedroom walls, the en suite bath, her designer backpack — was pink.
Sansa had never liked pink. She preferred purple. But Alayne Stone wore it without complaint, and when she outgrew her clothes she asked for new ones.
He hadn’t liked that.
“You’re getting big,” he had said, and she didn’t know if that meant fat or old, but whichever it was it made him unhappy. That’s when the dieting started. Egg white omelets and celery sticks with hummus and individual almonds doled out as snacks. She was hungry every moment of every day. She fantasized about breaking into the pantry and gorging herself until she was sick. She never did. Alayne Stone knew the cost of survival.
Her body stopped growing. Years passed but she stayed the same, concave stomach and hip bones jutting angrily underneath the skin. She stopped menstruating. That worried her but pleased him, because above all things Petyr abhorred mess. Her rapes were antiseptic and latex-covered. He removed every hair from her body with wax and hollowed her out with douches and enemas. The first time he raped her he stopped to wipe the blood of her hymen off his penis with a moist towelette.
When she told Sandor about that he had snarled.
“What would you have done?” She asked.
“I would have licked it up.”
They had fucked for the first time in the flatbed of his truck, seven hours and four hundred miles after killing Littlefinger, his blood still on Sandor’s hands, because she had seen in his eyes what he wanted and had figured it was easier to say yes, plus it was the least she owed him. She hadn’t thought it would be good. She hadn’t known it could be, but she had found something in his arms, staring up at the stars, and when she came she laughed.
He’d taken her to his home, a small house buried deep in the woods.
“It’s not what you’re used to,” he’d said defensively as they pulled up.
“It’s nice,” she’d said, hugging herself as she peered into the forest that surrounded the house on all sides. “Is there anyone else around?”
“No. There’s no one for miles. We’re safe here.”
The first thing she’d wanted was food. He’d grilled her a steak and watched as she demolished it and then looked up at him.
“Can I have more?”
He’d made her another without a word.
These days Sandor cooks her burgers and spaghetti and brownies and cinnamon sugar toast. None of her old clothes fit anymore, and she’s glad. She prefers her new ones, although they’re not what you would call fashionable, just baggy sweaters and jeans from the department store. She has a new body to fit with her new life. Sandor likes it. He likes the dimples on her ass and the stretch marks on her tits and the way her stomach puffs out over her waistband. Her period comes back and she designates a couple of old towels to lay on the bed. When they fuck the blood stains them both and she likes it, because it reminds her of Littlefinger’s blood.
It’s a good life, she thinks. They are happy. Mostly happy.
They both have moments when the past catches up with them. When it happens to Sandor he holds her like a child clutching a ragdoll and she whispers in his ear I’m safe, I’m safe, you rescued me, feel my body, I’m safe. When it happens to her she walks in rapid circles around the circumference of the yard, faster and faster, careening between trees, and she tells herself I’m free, I’m free, he rescued me, this is not a cage, I’m free. Sandor watches from the porch. He knows better than to try and touch her; she knows better than to try and leave his sight. When eventually she has exhausted her body she collapses on the ground and then he gathers her gently in his arms and carries her inside.
3.
The winter rain drums arrhythmically on the windshield and Sansa leans over the wheel like it will make the house appear sooner. Every bump on the narrow gravel road makes her bladder protest. She squeezes her legs tighter and bites her tongue against a whine. When she finally pulls in front of the house she throws the truck in park and bolts through the cold rain, groceries clutched to her chest. She has her boots off, food dumped on the kitchen counter, and is halfway to the bathroom when she hears the sound of the shower running.
She pounds on the door. “Sandor!”
There’s no response.
She pokes her head through the door, wrinkles her nose at the cloud of steam. “Sandor!”
“What?” He bellows from the shower.
“I need the bathroom,” she complains.
“I can’t hear you. I’m in the shower.”
She bites her tongue — no shit — and presses her thighs together. A minute later the water turns off and Sandor’s head peaks from behind the curtain.
“What.”
She keeps her voice dignified. “I said I need the bathroom.”
He squints at her. “All right.” She waits. His arm reaches for the towel — slowly, like he has all the time in the world — fucking languorous —
“Sandor!”
“What?” He huffs. “I’m not stopping you. Use the bathroom.”
She gawps at him. The nerve of him; and there he goes, starting to smirk; she knows that smirk, when he’s made her beg for it, when he’s used just the tip and won’t give the rest until she’s crying; but to do it now, for this —
“You’re disgusting.”
He shrugs and pulls the curtain fully back. “I’ve been inside your cunt a hundred times. Why shouldn’t I see what comes out of it?”
Retaliation is on her tongue when her bladder stabs meanly and a hot droplet forces its way to her underpants. She stumbles to the toilet and pulls down her layers with shaking hands. She squeezes her eyes shut but can feel his own hot on her and it freezes the muscles twisting and begging inside her for release. Nothing comes.
“Go on, little bird.”
She shakes her head. She’s full up, ballooned heavy with liquid heat, and it doesn’t matter. “I can’t.”
He kneels in front of her and her eyes peak open, avoiding his stare and latching onto his chest. There’s water on him in droplets, traveling lazily down dark hair and gathering in the thick patches under his arms and at his groin. Her cunt clenches. The water inside her shifts, pressing on new spots. She makes a piteous sound.
His fingers bully its way into her cunt. She gasps.
“Does that help?”
She shakes her head. “Worse.”
“How about this?” His other hand settles above her pubic hair and presses down. She cries out and buries her face in his breast.
There’s nothing and then there’s a flood, pushed out by Sandor’s heavy hand, a deluge pouring around his wrist and hitting the porcelain in an obscene rainfall, the sound loud and rude, and he’s telling her good little bird that’s it fuck you’re so good and she’s biting her tongue against the only word in her mouth — Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.
4.
She blushes after and can't quite meet his eyes. He's still smirking at her but whatever words are on his tongue he keeps there. He starts putting away the groceries. When he pulls the newspaper out from between the pork chops and the pears his mouth ticks down slightly but he hands it to her silently. She opens it flat and starts racing through the headlines. This is her own ritual, scavenging for any scrap of hope.
The headlines yield nothing. It's been a long time since there was anything, even about Sandor. He's still wanted for Littlefinger's murder and the abduction of Alayne Stone. No one is looking for Sansa Stark anymore. Everyone knows the Starks have been dead for years.
"Anything?" He asks, and she knows the effort that is keeping his tone light.
"Murder, rape, and corruption," she says.
"Nothing good happens out there." He shuts the door on the full refrigerator and gestures about – the kitchen, the overstuffed couch in the living room, the windows showing deep woods on all sides. "We have everything we need here. This is the best place in the world."
"It is," she agrees. But she turns back to the front page anyway. She reads through every story, shifting through the words, searching for something, anything, some tiny hint that she is not the only one left.
5.
The second time she says it, she panics. He's faster than her, though.
"Why do you want that?" He growls as he pins her in place. His face is close to hers, still smelling of her cunt.
She swings her legs wildly, landing a few sharp kicks, but he is unmoved. "I don't."
"You lie, little bird."
She gives up and goes limp. Her eyes screw shut. She doesn't know how to explain the thing inside her, sometimes sweet, sometimes acid, and the word that sits sour on her tongue but refuses to move.
"Because if you're my daddy it means he isn't," she says, and realizes it's true.
His grip loosens. When she opens her eyes the anger is gone from his face, replaced by curiosity.
"He was a bad daddy. He hurt me. But you…" Her voice quavers and disappears with the last of her courage. She is uncomfortably aware of the softness of her belly and the goose-pimples puckering her nipples.
He hooks three fingers into her cunt. "But I don't hurt you."
She shakes her head. He pushes a fourth finger inside.
"I'm good," he says.
She nods and works herself down on his fingers. "You are," she gasps.
"A good what?"
She whines. "A good daddy." He makes an animal sound and lunges for a kiss.
She learns that night that she can take his whole hand inside her and that he can play with her like a doll, pressing on new nerves and slick skin deep inside her. She is nothing but sensation, filled and fucked, and when she feels his fingers push so hard that water leaks from her cunt her eyes well.
"It's ok, little bird. Daddy's got you." His hand moves, the torque of his wrist wringing her cunt of wetness. The insistent stream rushes out of her and she lets the groundswell take her.
When she comes to, Sandor has taken his fist out and is staring with wonder at the crude gape of her pink flesh. She tries to talk but has nothing to say. She doesn't need to; he dips his head and laps her clean.
6.
Spring slinks in late, and Sansa cracks the windows to tepid air as she cleans. When she is done scouring and scrubbing she follows the surge of domesticity and attempts cooking dinner. Soon she has the windows cracked farther and is encouraging a fog of smoke outdoors with a rolled up newspaper.
"I think I salvaged it," she tells Sandor as she places their plates on the table.
He inspects the large, dark shape. "What is it?"
"A lamb chop, of course," she replies primly.
He takes a bite and doesn't try to disguise the wheezing cough that follows it. She finds her voice rising a bit hysterically. "It's not that bad!" He's laughing now, and it only makes her more defensive. "I can do calculus and a grand battement and say thank you in six languages and eat escargot with the correct fork. Cooking cannot be that hard."
He lifts a forkful of vegetable tendrils. “Why are they so stringy?”
"They're supposed to be julienned,” she says, pained.
"At least you're good in bed," he says, and she shoots him her most disdainful look, an action undermined by simultaneously taking a bite of the lamb and immediately choking on a mouthful of over-salted ash. She groans and drops her head to the table.
He's still laughing, but he gently cups the curve of her head in his hand, combing through the hair. "There now, little bird." She nudges against his caress, letting herself be mollified. But when she looks up to meet his gaze she flinches back and grabs their dishes.
She stands at the sink gazing out the window, heart rabbiting, too scared to look him in the face and see the love that is there – vast, unconditional, unguarded.
What scar tissue sits in her chest that prevents her from returning it? She threw her heart away to so many when she was a girl, never to anyone who deserved it. She worries Littlefinger hurt her more than she had even felt at the time and that her heart, starved and scarred by those fearful years, lies misshapen in her breast, turning blood to acid.
"Sansa?"
The sun has set and the oppressive dark hugs the house. She looks out the window and tries to find anything beyond their little world of two, but there is only their reflection, and so she watches herself, and watches him watching her.
"I'll clean the windows tomorrow," she decides.
7.
"I'm not him," Sandor says sometimes. "I didn't rape you; I didn't steal you."
"You're not," Sansa will say. She doesn't add You didn't need to; I had nowhere else to go.
8.
With summer comes a host of repairs for Sandor to do around the house. She helps where she can but mostly watches.
He mends the fence and she lays in the grass, bored. A grasshopper meanders across her leg and she sifts through the pea-sized pebbles in the dirt.
She flicks one at Sandor but he doesn’t notice. She flicks another and he twitches as if bothered by a bug. The third one hits his shoulder and he turns. She smiles guilelessly.
He goes back to the fence. When the fourth pebble hits his neck he lunges suddenly and she shrieks, springing to her feet and running laughing across the yard. She stops behind the slender trunk of a pear tree.
“Little bird,” he warns.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Sure.”
She sticks her head out. “I’m bored.”
“You’re a brat, is what you are.”
There’s a shine in his eyes as he inches toward her. An excitement so sharp it almost hurts surges through her. She giggles and shakes her head.
“Come here, little bird. I’ll give you something to do.”
“Nuh-uh.”
He moves slowly, a predator’s pace, and then he strikes, but she slips out and sprints screaming into the woods.
She laughs as she runs and her hair streams behind her, her skirt a flag in the wind. She knows she is only this far because he has let her and she doesn’t care. The air serrates her lungs and she is wild, unfettered, and free.
She is stopped suddenly by arms around her waist, bringing her back flush to a wall of muscle and masculine sweat and she screams, kicking wildly and scratching at anything she can reach.
He drops her.
She whirls on him, shoving him to his knees. “Don’t do that!”
He gapes at her, stunned, and when she shoves him it brings him to his knees. She’s still screaming. “Stop it!”
She hits his chest, blows as feeble as raindrops, as feeble as her tears, and then she grabs his cock, hard in his jeans.
“Is this what you wanted?”
He opens his mouth with no answer. She squeezes harder. “Is this what you wanted back then? When you met me?”
He nods dumbly. There are tears in his eyes now, too. She tugs him cruelly through the rough fabric.
“I was fourteen. I fantasized about boys, not men. I’d never even been kissed.”
Her hand moves rapidly.
“Did you think about this? Did you want to fuck me?”
“Yes,” he sobs, and she slaps him with all her might across the face, and he comes, crumbling into a heap at her feet.
It leaves as quickly as it came. She shudders, suddenly cold, and looks at the man sobbing on the ground. Her heart lurches.
“Oh, Sandor,” she whispers. She reaches out a hand but he flinches away. She tries again, moving slowly, until her hand rests gently on his heaving shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
9.
She’s sweet as sugar to him the next few weeks. She apologizes, mollifies, cossets and coos. He returns to her arms tentatively, tempted by soft words and softer kisses.
Her words in the forest still live with them, silent companions in the house. She is as destroyed by them as he. She hadn’t known she was capable of such hurt. Her heart lies broken in her chest. She doesn’t know how to repair it except pull him closer and hope he will fill in the fissures. She pulls him into her body every way she knows, mouth and cunt and hole. She rides him, her hole speared so wide by his cock she fears she will faint, and feels the pain and pleasure mingle into an electric hum crackling through her nerves. She doesn’t tell him that it hurts, because he likes when it hurts but doesn’t like that he likes it. She takes his thumb into her mouth instead and lets him pry her jaws apart so he can look at her, little pearls of teeth and her throat, pink and wet and quivering.
10.
If he notices that she doesn’t call him Daddy anymore he doesn’t say so.
11.
The months pass and the leaves tinge russet.
His truck pulls in as she rakes the last of the leaves into a pile. She abandons her work to help him unload the paper bags.
“Did they have the-“
“Last ones,” he says, pulling out a box of chocolate caramels. She tears it open, popping one into her mouth as she closes the front door behind them and humming happily. They put the food away together, stepping around each other in a quietly choreographed dance. She settles at the table with the newspaper, taking another chocolate and spreading it against the roof of her mouth with her tongue.
She turns to page seven and all her senses stop.
Sound, sight, taste, time all suspend. There is nothing, and then there is the vague sound of his voice, asking her name.
She looks up at him as he looks down at the paper before her: Arya and Jon’s black-and-white faces, solemn, grown, and the headline STARK, SNOW BACK FROM DEAD; CAMPAIGN FOR NORTH BEGINS.
Fear flashes through his face and it makes her speak reflexively.
“I won’t leave you.”
It’s only when she looks down at his hand and sees the cinnamon toothpaste he holds that she starts to cry. He always goes to the store with the cinnamon toothpaste, even though it’s an extra forty minutes away, ever since she had told him how Littlefinger’s menthol-laced kisses made her hate the taste of mint.
“I won’t leave you,” she says again, crying harder as the truth of the moment hits her, because there are Jon and Arya in the picture, alive; and here is the man standing in front of her, so much better than she deserves.
He turns heal and leaves. By the time she has realized what happened she can hear his truck starting. She runs to the door shouting his name but it’s too late. All she can see is the lights of the back of the truck pulling away.
12.
He’s gone the whole day.
She’s frantic with fear, pacing up and down the dirt road. She wishes she had a car to chase him. She wishes she had a phone, and anyone to call.
When she has worn herself out she collapses on the kitchen floor. Her tears keep her company. When she has finished crying for Sandor she looks at the picture of Arya and Jon again and cries with joy. Then thoughts of Sandor return and she weeps miserably.
13.
She wakes in confusion. The room is dark, the windows peering into pitch night. Her side is sore from pressing against the linoleum.
He slides down next to her and hands her a slip of paper. It takes a second for her to read the writing from the faint blue light of the stove clock.
A bus ticket.
“You’re going, little bird.”
14.
He drives her to the bus stop. She watches him drive, chewing her lip. She takes him in: the deep set of his mouth, the jut of his nose, the knotted roots of scar tissue. She wants the image to stay with her, burning through her eyelids like a sun.
The bus stop is only a metal sign by the road. He helps her take out her suitcase and they stand by the sign, huddled together against the autumn wind. He can’t meet her eyes.
“Sandor.” She rubs her hand up and down his arm. “I’m going to come back.”
He nods, still looking away.
She stands in front of him, pulling on his sleeve. “Sandor. This isn’t goodbye. I’m coming back.”
The bus pulls in with a gust of gasoline exhaust. He meets her eyes, and she sees heartbreak and weariness and distrust, but no blame. She stands on her toes to kiss him. She whispers it to his lips: “I promise, I promise, I promise.”
He rests his forehead against her. She can hear the bus door open behind her.
“Be safe, little bird.”
She wipes her tears so the bus driver won’t see them and takes a seat near the back. The window is muddied by scratches and grime. She watches him stand by the sign, staring at her. She presses her hand to the glass. His hand raises tentatively in farewell. The bus lurches forward.
And it’s at that moment, watching Sandor’s receding form as the bus pulls away, that Sansa Stark falls in love.