⊰ hamndgirig ⊱

life has almost been snatched from her too many times for it to be anything other than important. ( when all tries to prise cold and calloused fingers from whatever’s left in her life, she survives. draws her feet up, cracks lactic from her knuckles, she survives. and she will survive. will spit bloody, dislodged teeth from a chapped and split lip before she surrenders and leaves herself to die. )

why are you telling me this? ( there’s a wry comment stuck on her tongue that she swallows again—a twisted threat, and one that ushers the clenching of fingers at her side. there are plenty of men who’d want to see someone like that dead. plenty of people who’d oblige. only one of her who’d fight it. ) a part of her’s still unnerved. she doesn’t invite friendship. she doesn’t anything sweet. ( she invites only a foul grope and an unprovoked smack—still, she’s not sure how. it’s her size, maybe. it’s being a woman. i am not a victim. )

                 ‘ what do you mean by that? ’ —- that strikes something within her. the first thing that has gripped her. the first thing tha’ts made her seek similarities—there’s beauty in what stands before her. ( she’s tall, with a face that people would stop for—with a body that mimmi would die to be beside, and one that would even entice kalle bastard blomkvist and bring him to his knees. nothing like hers. ) but there’s a moment of brief considering.

          Sharing even the reason for her arrival in such a frigid corner of the world invited more risk than perhaps Sansa should have allowed. Eyes and ears could be purchased all about the world, distance or cost no impediment to those whom she sought. Still, this woman who spoke more in glances than with words seemed not at all the sort to seek such employ; alone for so long herself, Sansa could recognize isolation in others, the preference for solitude over wealth or power. 

             She did not feel safe — there was a tension, a pulsing, warning chill that emanated from her laconic acquaintance — though she could sense it was not only strangers who were met with such tight-lipped apathy. Perhaps telling a soul who would never care served as reassurance, a sign that her troubles remained but a minuscule ripple across humanity’s great expanse. The world contracted with her drive, vision narrowing until only the task at hand remained in sight; at times, Sansa welcomed those brief brushes with others well beyond such all-consuming hurt. 

             “I mean— ” For a moment eyes meet, the solitude enforced through carefully cultivated space between them brought to an end, before she offered a confession to that neutral ground. “There are people who hurt my family, who want to hurt me. As a girl I only wanted to hide, thinking they would leave me alone, but it isn’t quite their way. I have to make them stop, in whatever way I can.”