tywinning:

“Were you in love, Lyanna?” you tearfully ask over a baby’s cries, holding my cold hand. “Were you in love, sister? Tell me the rivers ran red for love. Give me that much.”

I did not love Rhaegar.

I did not love him when his long fingers plucked out the notes of a sad song, his silver voice singing a bride’s tears on her wedding day. I wept, because the girl in the song — she was me. 

I did not love him when he leaned over from the saddle with a wreath of winter roses. They were my favorite flower; at least, they used to be, before his metal gauntlet caught in my tangled curls as he queened me. He pulled out a lock of my hair when he drew away impatiently. I should have seen he wanted a piece of me, even then. In the silence, with every face turned toward me, I was the only one who could hear the princess screaming, hoarse screams. I dropped my eyes. I did not know when I would be able to raise them again.

I did not love Rhaegar, not even as he held out his hand in the hour of the wolf. “Come with me. I can take you away.” I hesitantly agreed. I was no stranger to horses, and the prince and his Kingsquard knights had plenty to spare, but he insisted I climb up in front him — another warning I missed. I could barely breathe, he held me so tightly, but the wind was in my hair and at last I was outracing everyone.

I did not love him when the fingers that knew my song suddenly sought notes to play on my bare skin, with no care for harmony. Just because I looked a woman did not mean I knew what women know. I was not yet sixteen.

I screamed at him when word came of our brother and father. Burned. Strangled. I understood how Princess Elia must have felt, screaming for so long with no one listening. I screamed as he kissed my swelling belly and rode away without a word, like I was nothing more than eggshell. Made to be broken and discarded, no matter how beautiful. 

I whispered to the baby moving in my belly, quietly, so Rhaegar’s knights wouldn’t hear. I told him to be headstrong like Brandon, to be true like Benjen, to be noble like you. He learned nothing of his father, not from me.

I screamed in my bed of blood. I hated him by the time I heard your sword singing to me, singing sweeter than Rhaegar ever sang. I screamed at the pain, screamed in triumph. I was alive and he dead.

I screamed too soon.

“Promise me. Promise me he will know nothing of his father. Keep him safe. Promise me, Ned.”

“Were you in love, Lyanna?” you tearfully ask over a baby’s cries, holding my cold hand. “Were you in love, sister? Tell me the rivers ran red for love. Give me that much.”

I was, dearest Ned. I was. 

I was in love with having a choice. Rhaegar opened my cage, and said I could run free, if only I chose to. He said a direwolf was no pet, and I agreed.

It wasn’t my fault I was deceived. I was not yet sixteen.

“Summer once, summer again,” she murmurs through closely-held lips. How many days, how many corridors, how many nights, the night on the serpentine, the night when green fire splashed the night sky. It has been fourteen years since they saw each other last.

He has spent the years past the end of the war on his family’s lands with a lordship, and she tied to the Red Keep as Dany’s hand. She could have inquired about him, she thinks, but did not, when her mind still had trouble sorting out what was real and what was not, not when the dagger of betrayal lurked in every dark corner. It is the Queen’s summons that brings him here now.

He wets his lips, uncertain. “My lady.” 

Neither knows what to say. He is not the drunk, ruthless killer. The Hound is dead, and Sandor Clegane lives again. And she is not the young, naive, girl, or the bastard. Alayne Stone is dead, but Sansa Stark…

She forgets how to smile for a moment, her easily-wrought charm, the smiles that placate lords and pull secrets from other’s lips, dies, like Sansa’s snow castle, or Aunt Lysa, out the Moon Door.

“You still can’t fool me, woman,” he says with a half-smile.

Lady Stark snorts, unladylike. “And yet I am a better liar here than all of them.”

“What does that make me, then, Lady Stark?” His face changes. He is softer now—not yielding, or as vulnerable as he was the night of Blackwater. He was vulnerable. And broken. She realizes that now, but does not forgive, or forget. She does not have the luxury. 

She flinches, fingers rising to the wolf pendant on her choker. “What does that make us, Lord Clegane?” 

Something familiar settles over his twisted features, and she realizes he has learned to be vulnerable without breaking. Sansa, the girl, rises up in her again. He hesitates to speak.

She hums. “Summer makes babes of us all, does it not? It was summer here before, and all we knew was pain. But come again, and perhaps… I have guards, my lord.”

He looks up at her, puzzled.

“I do not, however,” she allows the mask of the schemer to break, to allow the girl to live again, “have friends. And I do so dearly need one, in a place like this. If you would be so obliging.”

His eyes widen, with fear, perhaps, or something stronger, but Sandor Clegane nods his head.