OPEN | prompt three | PAIN

[wrens]

prompt three | P A I N dressing-room style. start your own thread. tag others. wash, rinse, repeat. open to all.

 

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[regimes]

[ His jaw clenches, but otherwise, his expression doesn't yet change (but the pressure of his palm against her back grows by the tiniest fraction).

(This is love too. He doesn't have to believe it. Perhaps that's what he's apologizing for, in the end. He wants to believe it, yes, but want is a different creature from need. He's only made it this far by making sure that he doesn't have to have anything.) ]

Would you?

[ It isn't a plea; it's only the question of whether she would or not, given the choice. ]

[swelter]

[ Yes.

It's a question she doesn't have to consider, if only because he's gone to such great lengths to ensure she has no other answer. The heart of a young woman who longs to be loved can be easily deceived into jumping through hoops, so long as there is something held just beyond reach. Petyr is married now and to a woman who would just as soon lop of Sansa's head at the throat than allow her a moment alone with her husband and his gleaming eyes.

Sansa's lashes flicker as Petyr's palm presses. That she can move him at all still fascinates her, makes her feel drunk and heady. Her wrist twists. ]

Do you love her?

[ One answer is dependent on the other. ]

[regimes]

[ The steady rhythm of his breath breaks, the change written in the increasingly unsteady rise and fall of his chest.

Still, his answer comes with no hesitation: ] No.

[ (He never has. That in itself is a little tragedy, one of the many that peppers his history. Hearts and hands given to the wrong people, always the wrong people, love squandered and hearts broken and everything bloody in between.

Another little tragedy: he has never had nothing in so thorough a manner as he has made sure that she has.) ]

[swelter]

[ And do you love me?

Sansa knows better than to ask; she's already been given his answer. She had made sure to wring it from him in those last few days before the Eyrie, when the stops grew more frequent and the hours driven each day grew less and less. It had been less than a week but for Sansa it had felt like an entire lifetime laid out before them — a string of anonymous hotel rooms, of aliases they forgot as soon as they'd been written in motel ledgers. Rolled down windows and desert swelter and a suitcase each.

He'd told her then, out in the desert. Told her and then buried that truth along with her name and her red hair.

(Everything in life is tragedy. All that varies is whether you give or you get, whether it's a papercut or a large, gaping hole.)

Sansa leans forward to press her mouth against his cheek, to feel the way his breath loses its pattern and becomes something else. Something she made. ]

I know, [ she says instead of asking. ] Remind me.

[regimes]

[ Remind me, she says, and his mouth finds hers, his frame shifting to cover her with its shadow.

They had spent a lifetime out in the desert, without names and without attachments to the worlds they were moving between, dust at their heels and nothing in their possession save a single car and the contents. They won't ever have that sort of simplicity again. Still, he kisses her as if to reclaim it, fervent in a way that is almost childish.

(Everybody wants to be loved. Petyr Baelish is no exception.) ]