⊰ neverparted ⊱

                        ❝ It was I. ❞

Thomas saw no reason to LIE, though his brow furrowed at the sight of red drops of red form on her fingers. Drawing just enough of his energy, he managed to flick a clean cloth in her direction; the white square fluttering near her leg to rest on the mattress. He stayed where he was so that he didn’t ALARM her further, moving only to clasp his hands behind his back. 

He knew very little of the family that now owned his home. The older woman – her mother? an aunt? – with the SHRILL voice and young son who still fed from her breast was an unpleasant one. He had heard more than one of her maids grumble about how DIFFICULT she was, and from what he had seen over the years, that was an understatement. Now, there was this new one and that male companion of hers. 

It wasn’t his style to bother with the dealings of humans, and he didn’t ask her about him. Instead, he sat down on the chair so that he wouldn’t TOWER over her. His gaze rested briefly on the winter rose in her hand, before finally settling on her face. Now that he could see her better, there were distinct similarities between her and the woman. Lysa Arryn. Possibly an aunt, for they only shared the same nose. 

                                   ❝ I believe I frightened you earlier. It was not my intent, my Lady. ❞

          Fluttering handkerchief frightened more than the mysteriously bequeathed roses; so long as the apparition before her caused no more disturbances, then Sansa might explain its — his — actions as the hallucinations of an exhausted mind. Yet pale as moth’s wings did silken fabric drift, caught up from where it lay upon the mattress and exchanged for her treacherous bloom. She pressed it to injured palm without once looking away from ghostly apparition, taking in the aged clothes, the carefully indulged decorum, the weeping red wound beneath one eye. 

             His own hand could not possibly have inflicted such grievous injury; was it in poor taste to inquire how it had come about? Rumors swelled around the house and its grounds, though such whispers were always better heard than believed. Any ancient estate surely witnessed its share of deaths throughout the centuries, though murder leant a different sort of color to its dark and moldering halls. Petyr made no mention of such a past, surely an omission more deliberate than not; already poor dreams plagued her sleep, a condition he would not wish to exacerbate.

             Only once the spirit sat — or mimicked sitting — did Sansa look away, blotting at minuscule red specks until a faint ache, nothing more, remained of her clumsy fright. She found his eyes again, but could not tell their color. Indeed, most shocking of all were trailing wisps of long-dried blood, crimson banners which drifted in a current which failed to reach her own warm flesh. So many questions filled her throat, choking her, yet only one — the safest — managed to break free.

             “You have done no harm,” she promised, uncertain if it was truth or platitude that rolled from her tongue. “Please…what is it you should like to be called?”