Author's notes:

Nothing new here, just a variation of a well-known theme. Please mind the rating, though, it's M for sexual explicit content.

Sansa is aged up in this story to be what back in the day passed for consenting age. If you don't like it, this story might not be to your taste.

Sandor is the one from the book not from the show. He is a fairly young man who can be rather talkative if he wants to. (In most SanSan scenes in the book, he talks way more than she does.) For visuals, imagine Geralt from the Witcher (3) with scars and black hair.

Quotes from the book are NOT marked separately. While I don't want to claim them as my own, I'd rather not want to disrupt the flow of the story with weird formatting.

So, here it is. I hope you enjoy.

Prologue

When her voice trailed off, she feared he might kill her, but after a moment the Hound took the blade from her throat, never speaking.

Some instinct made her lift her hand and cup his cheek with her fingers. The room was too dark for her to see him, but she could feel the stickiness of the blood, and the wetness that was not blood. Something inside her unlocked and emboldened her to speak.

"I cannot go with you and I do not want you to go either," she whispered. "They'll catch us, they will not give up."

In her inner eye, she saw them on the road, dirty, hungry and weak; hounded mercilessly until their strength, even his seemingly inexhaustible one, gave out. And just now, it was easy to see that he had weaknesses too.

She kept caressing his face, the leathery, uneven texture of his scars oddly familiar, and suddenly the thought of never seeing his face again, of never again feeling dwarfed by his intimidating size, and of never having him spit his hurtful truths at her grew unbearable. Unimaginable.

"I don't want you to die," she whispered, only when she heard herself saying those words knowing how true they were. On a level she yet failed to comprehend, he was important to her.

And if his coming here, offering escape, meant anything at all, it surely meant he felt something similar.

He made a sound in his throat, a small, broken thing.

"Little bird," he said once more, his voice raw and harsh as steel on stone. Then she heard cloth ripping and footsteps retreating.

Chapter 1

Cersei turned to her, skirts swishing with the abrupt movement.

"I will not see my son humiliated, do you understand?" she hissed between clenched teeth, green eyes flashing anger. "You're to act humiliated and sad."

Sansa nodded, already fighting valiantly against the urge to smile her relief, to lift her face to the sky and thank the gods – old and new – for her deliverance.

"I understand, your grace", she said demurely, looking down on her clasped hands. "I am indeed very sorry King Joffrey chose to end our engagement, though I fully understand his reasoning."

Cersei looked somewhat satisfied.

Tywin Lannister, the man who had told her that Joffrey would marry Margery Tyrell instead of herself, looked bored with the proceedings and dismissed her with an imperious wave of his hands.

"What is to be done about the deserter?" he asked Cersei when Sansa was on her way out, a spring in her step, despite her best efforts of acting distraught.

Her blood ran cold all of a sudden, her elation evaporating. She slowed her pace to be able to hear the rest of the conversation.

"As far as everyone tells me, Clegane hasn't deserted, he was just… otherwise occupied for a while, nobody knew where he went in all the chaos," Cersei said, waving her hand dismissively. "You know he sometimes has ideas of his own and I, for one, could understand him being unwilling to follow Tyrion's orders."

She made a face that clearly showed her disgust at even mentioning her brother's name. Sansa had never understood the deep hatred this woman seemed to feel for her own brother.

"They said when he came back a while later, he went berserk on everyone standing in his way," Cersei went on when Tywin didn't respond. "He practically held the mud gate by himself, knee deep in the bodies of the men he'd killed, while all my brother managed was getting his face cut in half."

Sansa thought it a bit unfair to expect from a man as disfavoured by nature like Tyrion Lannister the same as one would expect from a giant like the Hound. She also wondered why Cersei of all people would defend a man who to her was little more than a servant. But since it was her who had chosen Sandor Clegane to be Joffrey's sworn shield – a task he so far had done admirably – she might feel it was a matter of not being wrong about the man she had placed this much trust in.

"I don't care about his heroics," Tywin snapped. "He turned craven at a critical moment. He is a liability."

Sansa wished she could be invisible. Fortunately, nobody seemed to notice that she was still standing in the doorway.

Cersei again made a dismissive gesture.

"I really do not care what you do with him. I just think the elder Clegane will take it amiss if we kill him and so will Joffrey."

'Ah, there was the real reason,' Sansa thought, for once relieved that even Joffrey's mother wasn't keen on suffering his displeasure.

"Nobody said something about killing him," Tywin said, sounding more and more impatient. "He's to be stripped of his Whites to show he dishonoured himself. We need a place in the Kingsguard anyway to give to the Tyrell boy. Clegane can practice with the soldiers, gods know the Roses can use someone who teaches them how to hold a sword."

Sansa sent a heartfelt prayer of thanks to the Seven, her steps so light nobody heard her leaving.

She wasn't to marry Joffrey and the Hound wouldn't be punished for choosing to heed her plea.

…

She woke that night with a start at the disconcerting feeling that someone was in her room. Before she could do anything else, a large hand clamped over her mouth.

"Don't scream, it's me," a rasping voice demanded.

She let out a shuddering breath.

"Oh…" she said, "it's you."

She winced a little at the thought that she probably couldn't have sounded more witless if she had tried. She waited for some derisive remark, but was only given a quiet snort.

"Are you alright?" he asked a moment later, the question apparently his reason for being here.

"Yes," she said, reaching out into the darkness. Her hand met rough cloth covering a limb bunching with hard muscle that she surmised must have been his upper arm. "Yes I am."

There were a lot more words that needed to be said, things she somehow should express: her thanks for him trying to take her away, her gratefulness that he was still around, looking out for her; relief that nothing truly bad had happened to him. But the words didn't come and she doubted he would want to hear them anyway. She just tightened the grip on his arm for a second in a fleeting and unobtrusive caress.

"I thought you'd be more relieved at being rid of Joffrey."

He sounded angry, but then he always did. She wondered where he had been during the announcement, she had tried through the whole ordeal to catch sight of him.

"I am," she said hastily. "But they forbid me to show it."

He snorted again.

"Figures".

"What about you?" she asked, when nothing else came from him. "Are you… disappointed?"

He barked a short laugh, so full of derision it made her flinch, but she kept her hand on his arm.

"Not having to stand around for hours on end, watching the little fucker ruin everyone and everything he gets his fucking hands on, yeah, that's a real disappointment."

A rough, calloused fingertip fleetingly glanced over the back of the hand, sending a curious spark of warmth up her arm.

"Will be getting harder stepping in between you and him now, though."

She hung her head and let her hand fall back into her lap.

"I know," she whispered. "Dontos said…"

Realization hitting a bit too late, she gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth.

His sudden alertness was almost audible, a hound catching the scent of prey.

"Dontos," he rasped, "What the fuck have you to do with Dontos?" The strain of not being able to yell at her lest he would make his presence here known was making his voice break and grate like a rusty iron door and when she didn't answer, two huge hands clamped around her arms, shaking her a little.

"Tell me, you little fool, what fucking mess have you gotten yourself into now?"

Fear flashed briefly through her, cold and numbing, but then the same indefinable something that had given her courage the other night reared its head and chased it away.

"Dontos approached me a few weeks back," she told him. "He told me he can help me get away."

A few minutes and what had felt like a thousand questions later, he had the whole of the story out of her; including - to her acute embarrassment - the details about how Dontos made free with her personal space.

The Hound had risen from the bed and paced her room with steps that to her ear sounded agitated and angry.

As if it was the most pressing of her concerns at the moment, she made a mental note to keep a candle at her bedside from now on, just in case of further nightly visits. One never knew.

"This stinks of the buggering Spider," he finally concluded, "or Littlefinger. Dontos cannot lace his own breeches these days, he wouldn't know how to come up with something like this."

He resumed pacing and then abruptly sat down on the bed, the mattress dipping deeply under his weight.

"So I wasn't good enough to take you away, but he was?" he asked into the darkness.

She opened her mouth to tell him how this was completely different, but suddenly realized that from his point of view - well, from every point of view - there was no difference at all. Even the Hound's drunkenness that night wasn't a viable excuse, because even that night he wasn't half as drunk as Dontos seemed to be most of the time.

He had stayed because she asked him to and now he must feel as if she had used him, betrayed him.

Dark as it was, she could feel his eyes on her, anger blazing from them, could hear his harsh intakes of breath as he waited for an answer.

"Back when he asked, I was desperate," she said at long last. "When you asked, the world was on fire and I was so afraid... of everything..." she trailed off for a moment and then added, "just the thought of stepping out of my room was unbearable".
It wasn't much of an explanation at all, but she felt the tension between them ebbing a bit.

"You have to make a choice," he said after a while.

"I've made my choice," she answered, reaching for his arm again. "I've made it when I begged you to stay."

He put a large hand over hers and squeezed a little. "Alright then," he rumbled and there was a tangible significance and importance to these two words that made it clear that a promise had been made and a pact had been sealed.

"I have to find out who's behind this," he said finally, withdrawing his hand from hers. "For now, keep meeting him if he asks, I'll find a way for you to let me know what happens."

He got up again and it sounded as if he was going to leave, but then he halted. When he spoke, his voice came from somewhere near the door, quiet but insistent.

"If he so much as breathes on you again, I'll cut off his hands… among other things."

It didn't even sound particular threatening. More like the statement of a fact – an undeniable one.

And despite the ugliness of the threat, she couldn't help feeling safe and protected.

...