Chapter Text
She was small enough for him to hide her under his cloak, this girl he had – however reluctantly – sworn to protect. Yet now it was he himself who had stolen her away. And now he was in a dark, cold forest with a grumpy, exhausted horse and a little girl who had never slept outside and who was too young to understand that her life was in danger.
"You have to kiss me goodnight," the tired girl demanded from under his cloak, where she snuggled in his lap for warmth.
"What!?" he asked, not a little shocked.
Stubbornly she squirmed around to face him. "I won't be able to sleep unless you kiss me goodnight."
Those bloody maids, he cursed inwardly and brushed his lips awkwardly against the top of her head.
"No," she protested. "Here," she said and put a tiny chubby finger on her small cherub lips. He stared at the small creature, utterly out of his depth, but as she kept staring expectantly he sighed and relented. He'd snatched her from the only home she'd ever known and - not utterly incapable of pity - he didn't want her life to change too much all at once. If this was what Sansa did before bed, then this was what she'd get. Gingerly he gave her a little peck and grimaced; he'd felt like a great, hulking beast crouching over her tiny form.
"Your face feels funny," she giggled wildly and scrunched up her little nose. He pulled away with a shudder, both disgusted and ashamed to have allowed his scars to touch her, alarmed of having disgusted her. But she pressed her clumsy little hand on his ruined cheek, and then replaced the hand with her own peach soft cheek. He couldn't move, he was shocked stiff as she kept rubbing her face on his dark, gnarled ruin of flesh and bone and went on with the innocence of a child, "But think how funny it would feel to kiss someone with a moustache! Or a great beard, like the King!" But that was her, blessedly blind to the horror that was his face.
She drew her little fingers along the prickle of beard on the undamaged side of his face and little girl laughter filled the little clearing, even waking up Stranger to look up and snort testily at the commotion.
"Time for bed," he gruffed, baffled and disarmed by the little sprout's lack of reserve. Were all kids like this? Maybe the ones who hadn't been beaten and burned, he thought darkly and scowled.
"You're like a tree," the little girl mumbled sleepily and yawned when he tucked her back into the folds of his cloak. What she meant by that he never learned because in the next moment she was fast asleep.
Great beard like the King's, he thought. The girl didn't know that the King was dying.
This whole attempt was madness. He was a fool, he knew it, but the little bundle snuffling sleepily tucked inside his cloak had been the first and only person since he'd been burned to see him for himself and not just as a monster made of scars. True, she had pretty much grown up with him always standing somewhere nearby, but it was still enough to surprise him sometimes how this tiny little person could look him straight in the eye when grown men couldn't. She'd just taken one look at him and decided that this was Sandor, that this was what a sandor looked like, pure and simple.
The one time she had seemed to realize that his face wasn't like everyone else's, she'd asked, "Does it hurt?" with the innocence of a child.
"No," he'd shaken his head. A small lie. The lie had rankled, but she'd been too young for the truth. Bad things happened. Bad things kept happening. But she hadn't needed to know that. Not even when as they spoke her lord father had been stubbornly entangling her whole family into things better left in peace.
"Good," she'd nodded, and dashed away to play, never taking the subject up again, never looking at his scars as if there was anything out of the ordinary about his face.
Fool of a Stark, he cursed, lying down on the too narrow bed roll, still holding the sleeping child to his chest to protect her from the cold. To send a babe hardly able to walk to the Lion's den by herself with no one but an old crone of a septa to look after her. A crone who too was no doubt slain by now.
He had hated his new duties at first, had thought it degrading for a man who had proven himself in many battles to be demoted into playing a nursery maid for the prince's betrothed, a prince's who had barely been weined from the teat himself. Madness, all of it. But the girl had a way of getting to him.
"Where are we going?" she would ask.
"We're going to find your family," he'd answer. She was too young to understand.
It wasn't the right time.