⊰ hamndgirig ⊱

                                 fingers dig into jean pockets, coiling frigid tips around a crushed carton. fishing a cigarette from it, she purses it between her lips and rolls her thumb over the butt. she has had her moments. blomkvist swims to mind immediately—his kind eyes, for starters, and blonde hair that’s seen better days. ( he’s old enough to be her father, as he reminds her, but not nearly as surly. nor vile. mikael bloody bastard blomkvist had changed something in her that had doused whatever crooked, shrivelled black mess of her heart that was left, with gasoline and struck a match. he let her burn with an arm around erika berger instead. she regrets giving him that power. regrets the anger that flicked the underside of teeth against the tip of a match and coughed out a flame. )

she doesn’t offer an answer. steps have been retraced into idiocy—and it’s only blomkvist who’s made her act like that. every decision she’s made has been conscious, stemming back to all the evil. the decision to bite her tongue around doctors, swallow only silence and spit it back out in their direction—blankly ignore them, yet offer a strained sense of conversation with nurses. calculated. to avoid authorities like the plague. calculated. to live as a difficult woman and pegged as one—not difficult, no. a socially retarded one.  

                        but even with the smallest, plucked semblance of similarity, there is nothing alike between them. so lips twitch around her cigarette and she flicks the lighter. wordlessly offers the carton to her company with a shrug.

          Foul habit, smoking. Yet where once she might have coughed, or slipped a sly glare which spoke to how fervently she despised the acrid, winding smoke of tobacco, now Sansa merely glanced away. There were far greater things to feign offense over than a bit of nicotine and tar, and she sensed a fragile truce extending between them in tenuous strands, better kept whole. Was even speaking together idiotic? Reaching back, she tried to remember when last an actual conversation had graced her day; not the inane pleasantries exchanged between server and served, nor the endless to and fro within her own mind as possibilities unfolded, then collapsed back upon themselves. Alayne, I am Alayne. No one cares about a daughter without her father’s name. Moments of doubt, moments of longing, all of them scattered so densely across the years that at last her life resembled a shatter mosaic, hastily patched together with a childish touch.

             Time passed and no tell-tale rasp of mechanized flint cut through the silence. Only rustling paper caught averted eye, a few stray cigarettes jostled in silent offer. “Never took it up,” she demurred, one corner of her mouth twitching in what might have been a smile. “But please…” Inclined chin bid the dark-haired woman still indulge, though she hardly seemed the sort to await permission. Indeed, when presented with the old adage, Sansa doubted she would beg forgiveness either. Yet aggression was not that which seemed to radiate out from the slim, hunched figure — only aversion. To whom or what Sansa could not even guess, though a proffered smoke apparently absolved her of any guilt — for the moment. 

             “Thanks for that, by the way.” Sansa had never thanked a stranger for their insult before. “The mind is a dangerous place to get lost in.”