Chapter Text
By the time Walder Frey's blood had been warm on Arya's fingers and speckled on her face, she'd come to love killing so much it was like a sexual awakening to feel the life slip from his body.
“Killing is the sweetest thing there is,” Sandor Clegane had once told her.
“Death is our god,” she'd have replied to him, if he'd been alive to hear.
**
Arya's tour of revenge, by necessity, was a changeable thing. She knew where she was destined- King's Landing- but the winter wind brought rumors of the Brotherhood Without Banners, and like one of the dried leaves of the dying summer, she was carried away by it. The Brotherhood, whispered Frey's court, had been making trouble in the Riverlands, cutting off supply lines and attacking Frey camps. She wasn't sure if Beric Dondarrion and Thoros of Myr were still on her list, if she was honest with herself, but she was curious to see them and find out.
Arya had not been trained in tacking and it took her longer to find the Brotherhood than she'd have liked. But they were showy, and they left a trail of dead in their wake and she lapped up their leavings, as eager as a bloodhound. She snaked past their sentries and lurked on the outskirts of their camp, watching. She kept her true form, on the assumption that if she were caught she would be recognized and not killed outright. Still, the successful infiltration of Frey's court had made her overconfident and she did not even hear the tread of footsteps coming up behind her as she crouched behind a tree and spied on the Brotherhood from a distance until she'd been grabbed from behind.
She was wrenched back and a knife was at her throat before she even knew what was happening. She twisted and kicked her lower body like a wildcat, but the arm clenched tight around her breast was immovable and the knife was steady, giving her the impression the wielder didn't particularly mind if she cut her own throat or not. She stopped, breathing shallowly to keep the blade from cutting any deeper, wildly trying to imagine escape and to twist her fantasy into reality. She could kick her heel back, she thought, and try for his groin. It was a satisfying thing, to feel the soft impact of vulnerable flesh beneath her feet.
“Go on, kick me if you like,” a voice growled in her ear, as though her attacker could read her mind. “Won't hurt me as much as it will hurt you to have your head cut off.”
Arya froze, but from shock this time instead of fear. That voice rang through her memories like a struck bell. A thousand conflicting emotions bombarded her. “Hound?” she gasped reflexively, and the man behind her was obviously intrigued enough that he removed the knife and pushed her away roughly.
Arya stumbled forward against the tree, scraped her hand against the bark, and then spun around. She put her hand to the hilt of Needle, but didn't draw it.
“You!” she said faintly, feeling things she hadn't know she was capable of anymore. The memory of hate was replaced, suddenly and shockingly, by fierce joy. She took a step forward. Her hand remained on Needle, but she didn't know if she wanted to cut him for pretending to be a man she knew to be dead, or to throw herself in his arms. Her emotions made her feel suddenly desperate. “You're dead. You died. How are you here?”
Sandor's blank face reflected his own astonishment, but her questions surprised a laugh from him like she'd never heard before. It wasn't the bitter, hateful laugh she would have recognized but rather a bewildered, vulnerable noise.
“Seven hells, it's the Stark girl. So often I wondered- I never thought you'd outlive the year. How could you? You were bloody useless.” His laughter made her feel strange, but his eyes were greedy as they ran over her. And then he was wary again, looking around. He grabbed her shoulder and marched her deeper into the woods, away from the camp.
Arya arched up into his touch like a cat, even though it was a hard touch and not a stroke. It reminded her how long it had been since anyone had touched her with anything less than malevolent intent.
“I wasn't useless,” Arya argued as they stumbled along, saying the first thing to come to mind. She felt more like the Arya Stark her family would have recognized than she had in years, however, her heart fluttering with unexpected happiness. She stopped and launched herself at him, her arms wrapping tightly around his torso and her face crushed into his chest. He smelled none too sweet, but he felt good and solid. He was a little thin but not as ravaged with illness and emaciation as he'd been when she'd seen him last. Her soft cheek was crushed against his warmth and her fingers dug in to the muscles at his back “Are you real? Are you really alive?” she asked as Sandor allowed the embrace for only a moment before continuing to lead her away from the camp, dislodging her hold.
“Aye, after you left me to die a slow, gruesome death, you heartless cunt, I was found by a Septon who nursed me back from the grave.”
Arya's face fell. She couldn't blame herself for making the only decision she'd known to make, but she wondered how things might have been different if she'd stayed with him, or tried to find help.
“I could barely take care of myself. I thought you were as good as dead, but I....” she shook her head, remembering the way she'd truly realized what he'd meant to her only as he lay dying. My friend, she had thought at the time. My only friend. “I couldn't do it.”
Sandor's face flexed and he shot her an inscrutable sideways glance before his expression fell back into hard lines. “Was that it? I wondered... done a fucking lot of wondering the last couple of years. I wondered if that was your revenge.”
She shook her head and wanted to hug him again because it had been so long since she'd had anyone who knew who she was and what it meant to be Arya Stark. But she wasn't able to put into words what he'd meant to her in her own head, and had even less chance of speaking them aloud, and so said nothing.
“Where have you been?” Sandor finally asked, his eyes darting over her as if looking for the marks of abuse he'd no doubt imagined her suffering the past two years.
Had he cared, she wondered? Or had she been just one more dead child he couldn't prevent, one more scrap of evidence of a world that was cruel and unfair?
“I went to Braavos,” she said, and noted with satisfaction the impressed lift of his one good eyebrow. “I trained with the House of Black and White to be a faceless assassin.”
Sandor snorted in disbelief, though he looked thoughtful. “Did you now? And what are you doing here, then?”
Arya smiled coldly. “I've come to cross names off my list.”
*
It didn't take long for Arya to decide that she wanted Sandor to travel with her. She couldn't explain the fierce and possessive feelings that welled up inside her; she only knew that she wanted him to be hers.
He didn't require extensive convincing. Arya thought that at heart Sandor wanted a master; that he longed for a leader to give purpose to his rage and death lust. Arya could give him that.
Even Arya could not deny, however, that while she'd grown in ferocity, Sandor had become more thoughtful and measured in his ways. He outright refused to kill Beric and Thoros, for the logical reason that he didn't see the point in it when once he'd have killed them simply because she asked.
“They sold my friend to a witch!” Arya hissed angrily as she paced before him. “They kidnapped me! They deserve to die,” she said, whipping Needle through the air, their deaths dancing before her eyes. “The Faceless God has been thwarted too many times.”
“You really apprenticed with the House of Black and White?” Sandor asked around a mouthful of the venison jerky she'd had in her pack. She shot him a somewhat fond glance. It brought back memories of their time together, when food had been so scarce that a man with such a large appetite might have been forgiven for selling her to the first buyer, or even lending her out in exchange for a loaf of bread. He hadn't though, and she hadn't forgotten.
“Valar Morghulis,” she said with a smirk, and then because she couldn't help the desire to impress him, she turned away and pulled out the face she wore always tucked into an inner pocket of her tunic, bringing it up until she could see through the gaping eye holes and summoning the magic of the Faceless God. When she turned back to him she bore the pretty, placid face of the serving girl who murdered Walder Frey's sons. The servant of Death, she called her favorite disguise.
Sandor stopped chewing and his mouth fell open. A hand dropped to the hilt of the axe he carried with him now in place of a sword.
It was an unnerving thing to see the first time, she knew. “I told you,” she said smugly.
“How do I know you're really Arya Stark?” he asked coldly, and she rolled her eyes at him. She continued to pace, stabbing and striking Needle through the air. It helped to calm her, to cool the feelings inside her that were like blood lust but were something different. “Tell me something only she would know.”
“The Cunt of Tarth was the one who overcame you, but only because Rorge had given you an infected wound on our way to the Vale and both of us were starving.”
Sandor eyed her narrowly. “There were witnesses to that-”
“When I flowered and I asked you what I was supposed to do about my moon blood, you gave me a handful of moss and told me to shove it up my twat. You were a fucking awful substitute for a Septa, you know,” Arya overrode his suspicions cheerfully, grinning wickedly when Sandor's face contorted in disgust.
“How do I know they don't take your memories when they steal your face?” he asked sulkily, but it seemed like a token protest now. His brown eyes were following her movements and she realized that he'd scarcely taken his eyes off her.
Arya peeled the servant girl's face off and Sandor's face got the same look of fascinated disgust it sometimes had when he picked something particularly nasty from his teeth. She settled opposite Sandor, crouching on her heels among the roots of the tree he sat under and eyed his mutilated face. “I'm not really a faceless assassin. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be No One,” she confessed, because though their relationship had never been simple, it had always been honest- sometimes brutally so.
“You aren't no one,” Sandor said in confusion. “You're Arya Stark.”
Arya sighed in relief and nodded. “Exactly.”
They were silent for a while as Sandor worked his way through Arya's jerky. She couldn't seem to stop staring at him, as hungry for his face as she was for food or revenge. He'd known her family, she thought. He'd met them and talked to them and even if he had hadn't liked them, she craved the bond that their shared memories made between them.
“I killed Meryn Trant,” she said, her voice husky with pleasure, placing her triumphs before him like a cat bringing a dead mouse to her master for praise. “He came to Braavos and I followed him to a brothel. He liked to beat and rape young girls, but I-” her eyes drifted close and she smiled at the memory. “I took the face of a little girl and went to the brothel. There were two other girls and he beat us because he liked to hear us cry. The other two girls gave him what he wanted and wept, but I kept silent until he grew frustrated and sent the other two away. That's when I took off my disguise and I stabbed him in the eye. My face was the last one he saw before he died...”
She drifted off in the memory for a moment before opening her eyes again. Sandor was looking at her with a wary but not disapproving look.
“Cunt got what was coming to him,” he said with a nod. “He always did like to hurt little girls.”
“He did, but the faceless men weren't happy. My sight was taken as punishment and I was made to earn my way back into their good graces. I had to prove that I could be No One, and when I was given a second chance I failed at that too. So they decided to kill me.” Her hand went to her still tender belly, rubbing through the cloth at the soreness that had never quite gone away.
Sandor followed the path of her hands. “What did they do?”
Arya, unashamed, pushed up her tunic and pulled her loose Braavos style pantaloons over the curve of her hips to expose the raw, barely healed collection of welts on her abdomen. “Stabbed me in the belly. It might not have been so bad if I could have recovered in peace, but the cunt who tried to kill me came back to try again.” Months later, even with what little medical care she'd been able to find in Braavos, her insides still didn't feel quite right.
“I killed the assassin they sent for me and I took the faces and came back to Westeros.”
Sandor's eyes trailed over the bared skin and without thinking she pulled the tunic up to the plump underside or her breasts, as if to show him how much she'd grown. Sandor's gaze lingered for a moment before she let the fabric drop and pulled her trousers back up, feeling a little unsettled and unsure why she'd done that.
“What about you?” she asked, rolling forward from her crouch so she was near enough to touch his leg. He flinched back from her touch and made a warning sound, but did not kick her away.
“I want to see,” she said, and though he looked liked a dog waiting to rip her throat out at the slightest provocation, he allowed her to untuck his trouser hem from the incongruously fine boots he wore and pull the fabric up to uncover his hairy leg. A puffy pink scar marred the slightly uneven line of his leg where the bone had protruded, but it seemed to have healed well. She'd noticed his limp, but she knew he'd be just as deadly, no matter his lameness. Next she moved up his body, one hand planted on his thigh and the other going up to his neck to examine the ugly scar Rorge had left behind.
“Should have let me burn it,” she said, and it felt so oddly comforting to taunt him again that she ran her fingers over the skin more than was necessary. She could hear the sharp intake of his breath and smell the tang of garlic from the jerky on his breath. “You were burning with fever when that woman found us. She'd never have beat you otherwise,” she said loyally, but Sandor just shrugged stiffly, dislodging the stroking of her fingers.
“She was the most vicious bitch I ever met,” Sandor said, a hint of admiration in his voice until he noticed Arya glaring at him. There faces were close together. “Except for you, that is.”
Arya trailed a finger over the mangled ear Brienne had left him with and withdrew, crouching beside him again and giving them both a bit of space to breathe.
“We could find her and kill her,” she suggested, trying to make her offer seem as though it were all the same to her whether Sandor joined her or not.
Sandor's eyebrows shot up. “We?” he asked, clearly playing the same game of indifference she was.
Arya rummaged in her pack so she wouldn't have to look at him and brought out a strip of the venison. “I have money,” she said through her mouthful. “I stole it in Braavos. I can feed us, if you come with me.”
Sandor deflected her question for the moment. “I thought you didn't like stealing.”
Arya shrugged a shoulder. She'd abandoned most of her morals by that point, though being back in her homeland was bringing some of them back to her. She wondered what sort of person she would be if she ever made it back to Winterfell, where the memory of her father's nobility and her mother's love would haunt her every day?
“They could afford to lose it,” she said, justifying the theft in her own mind.
“And what are your plans, wolf girl? Aside from killing the Brotherhood Without Banners, that is.”
“I told you, I'm crossing names off my list.” Arya then told him in detail about the deaths of the Walders to prove how serious she was. Sandor was gratifyingly impressed.
“Fucking hell, girl. You're a brutal little cunt, aren't you?”
“Yes,” she agreed proudly, and they shared a smile that could only be understood by killers.
“And what good would I do for you, then? If you want to go unnoticed then I'm a piss poor traveling companion. There's too many in these parts who know my face, and a thousand fucking more that know me the closer we'd get to King's Landing. There's still a price of my head- or there will be when it's found out I'm still alive.”
“I've thought of that,” Arya said, rising and brushing off the seat of her pantaloons and returning to her pack. It was a large pack and carried every valuable thing she owned in the world. It contained the faces she'd stolen from the House of Black and White and the ones she'd added to the collection during her travels. She hesitated for only a moment before pulling out the face of a man about Sandor's age.
“You've been a worshiper of the Many Faced God for as long as I've known you,” she said, as much to herself as Sandor, to convince herself that what she did was right, even if it was against every rule the faceless men had tried to teach her. And yet like any religion that she knew of, the House of Black and White was a cult of politics and mortal rules, and were not necessarily the mouthpiece of the Many Faced God.
“Like hell I have!” he said, clearly outraged. “Fuck the gods!”
“That's the Stranger, to you. The Many Faced God goes by many names in many religions,” she said, unperturbed by his vehemence.
She didn't know if what she hoped would work, really, anymore than she'd known the Many Faced God would let her continue to use his gifts once she left the House of Black and White. But she'd trusted that the Many Faced God knew her soul and knew she was a true apprentice of death.
Arya turned back to him, the face cradled in her hands. She stepped over the roots of the tree he sat beneath and then crouched to straddle his lap. It was almost sexual and it made Sandor lean back against the tree away from her.
“You said to me once that killing was the sweetest thing there was,” she said softly, looking at his lined and scarred face without flinching. “Death is our god.”
Sandor closed his eyes, his brow creased. “The Septon tried to teach me there were other ways,” he said hoarsely. “There are... good people, even in this gaping cunt of a country.”
Arya caressed the side of his face, her fingers trailing over his mutilated skin, a visceral reminder of the evil in this world. He'd probably have broken her wrist if she'd touched him two years ago, but now he just shuddered and pressed his lips together.
“What happened to this Septon?” She could tell from the wistful tone of his voice it hadn't been good.
Sandor's eyes opened. They were burning with the old hatred she recognized. “He was murdered.”
Arya's lips tilted up into a grim smile. “And what did you do to the man who murdered him?”
Sandor's lips mirrored her cruel smile. “I killed him. And stole his boots.”
That explained the expensive cut of the boots he wore compared to his peasant's tunic and trousers. Arya let out an appreciative bark of laughter. “There are people in this world who deserve death. Cersei. Jamie. Your brother. Melisandre. We could kill for the rest of our lives and still not stamp out the evil in Westeros. And I want you to help me.”
And then, before he could protest, she brought the mask of flesh to Sandor's face and let the magic of the Many Faced God flow through her hands. It felt right, the way it did when she called on the gift to change her own appearance. The Many Faced God knew Sandor had paid tribute to him hundreds of times over; knew he had death in his heart.
Sandor's body did not altar noticeably, for that was not the way of the magic. He was a very large man, and could not become a small man no matter the form of the original face. But his skin smoothed out and his scars disappeared. His shoulders narrowed and his straggly brown hair shrunk back into his skull, becoming short and dark. The eyes, somehow still familiar, peered out from the face of a man Arya had never even met.
Arya scooted back off Sandor's lap as his large hands flew to his face, touching unmarred skin. He gaped at her, speechless for the first time in all the years she'd known him.