Nice Guys
Notes: Obligatory Sandor x noble lady he snatched from blackwater post !!! unfinished and i hate it but goddamnit i love my problematic boyfriend sandor clegane
Tags: noble lady x Sandor Clegane, fluff (???), banter, they hate each other wink wink, sandor and his chicken, average night on the road, brief pov switch idk, stereotypical reader, the start of a slowburn but sandors his usual pricky self and reader is holding onto nobility for dear life
2000 words sort of
Sandor was not a particularly nice man, she'd decided in the weeks of travel. Not that she'd had any grand delusions previously, but he was as irritating as he was amusing, and crude as he was kind. He was a difficult man to like, sometimes. Especially when he seemed to find such joy in throwing her highborn upbringing in her face.
"You said you weren't a thief." She grumbled, frowning at the chicken Sandor had most definitely stolen from the small farm nearby. They had no money or goods to barter for such a thing.
The weather had held, for a while, but the nights were still chilly, and she tucked her cloak around herself. It used to be embroidered, with delicate stitches of all such colors, but you could hardly tell anymore. Everything seemed to be stained with mud beyond the walls of the Red Keep.
Sandor grunted, turning the spit as it roasted. There were still a few feathers stuck in the bracketed joints of his armored elbows. She'd winced when he gutted the bald little thing and mounted it on a stick.
"Then don't eat it." He glared at her in that way he did, like she was nothing at all, and also the most bothersome little creature to ever have the misfortune of crossing his path. "Yer stomach don't care if it was a bloody maester."
She was hungry. Meals used to be regular— warm and fresh and well-spiced, served on shiny platters with delicate engravings of swirling leaves and prancing animals. She'd thought she'd known hunger before, but that had given away to a certain type of hollowness she'd decided was starvation, or at least closer to that than hunger.
"Ungrateful wench." He muttered, and she flung a twig that bounced off his shoulder with a pathetic little plink, like a drop of water falling from a great height. He didn't even look up at her, and she huffed, smoothing her skirts as she hugged her knees.
"I'm still a lady." She said, glaring into the fire. Perhaps her only weapon against him was just that: fire. Though it felt cruel, she'd thought of what she would do (what she could do) if Sandor changed his mind. If he decided she was not worth the gold or the effort or was not filled by his stupid, stolen chicken, and decided to eat her instead. All she had over him was fire, even if it made her stomach hurt to think about.
"Do you see any lords around here, girl? Any shining knights or marble floors or a fucking throne? You're no one." Sandor was staring at her over the licking flames, now, and she looked away, his gaze too heavy to bear alone. It felt like he hated her, sometimes, but Sandor seemed to hate everything that wasn't a tall mug of ale and slicing men in half.
"I have a name." She pointed out, frowning. "As do you. That means something."
"Aye, shall we go parading down the streets as the deserter and damsel? Put up the banners of our houses and invite the Lannisters inside?" Sandor snorted, growing more irritated by the minute. She could practically see his hackles rising, and she didn't need her imagination to see his lips pulling back from his fangs.
"You'll regret having a name when there's a line of blond cunts waiting to stab a hole in you and fuck it." He spat, eyeing her.
"Sandor!" She stared at him, reeling from his crass words and rather vivid imagery. He'd make a great bard, if bards were supposed to make people feel like slapping each other upside the head. She was sure she'd have aged thirty years by the end of this journey. "Don't speak like that."
"Shall I find you a feather pillow to press to your face?" He grunted.
"You are he most loathsome knight I've ever had in my service" She scoffed, standing, intending to walk towards the treeline to brood. Or maybe find some acceptably poisonous berries to shove down his gristled maw. There was no saving Sandor Clegane's decorum, or lack thereof.
"I'm not your knight. I'm not your brother. I'm not even your dog." Sandor said too slowly, angry, as he so often was. He was a vessel of hate and anger and wine, and he was a very large vessel, at that. "Sit down."
"You are insufferable." She snapped, some strange, intolerable feeling buzzing under her skin, making her tongue sharper than it would be otherwise. "You said you would protect me."
"I said I would keep you safe, girl, and you're still alive to bitch about it." He was watching her, now, and even if she did run, he would catch her. But she was stubborn, in a way that would have been admirable if it didn't make Sandor want to shake her, and she turned on her heel and started to march towards the woods in the least intimidating one-man charge he'd ever seen.
"Go on, then, the wolves will save me the trouble." He spat, watching her. She'd come straight back as soon as she felt a chill or something moved in the dark, weak little bird that she was— no choice but to cower in his shadow to hide from the lions.
And because she was a stubborn, stupid thing who believed every cruel, harsh thing that came out of his mouth, she picked up her pace.
"How lucky I am!" She exclaimed, throwing her arms up like she was speaking to the gods themselves. "That the Hound finds me not worth biting!"
He let her get ten steps away, intending to let her go the night cold and hungry, just to teach her a lesson, when an unfamiliar and sorely unwelcome feeling came to him. Perhaps the lack of wine was clouding his judgement, but he let out a sharp breath, and caught up to her in six easy strides, grabbing her by her shoulders and rotating her back towards the fire like he had the chicken, giving her a shove.
"The Hound finds you a prissy little whore with more complaints than sense." He scoffed, nudging her along like she was a stubborn donkey down a rocky path.
"I am a lady!" She declared again, outraged by the horrors of being touched by a brute such as him, and flopping back to her spot by the fire, where the top of the chicken was currently blackening. Sandor swore and hurried back over, turning the spit. He hadn't wrestled either of the stupid birds before him just to eat char.
"No wonder you are so unpopular." She sighed, as if this was any new realization, hugging her knees and smoothing the ragged hems of her skirts again. She could prance around in rags or a gown, or nothing at all— would hardly change the trough of shit they'd found themselves in.
"Popular? Does it seem like I give a damn about being popular, girl?"
"One would hope not, because you're doing a bad job." She said pointedly, like that would wound him so deeply he just might just have to become a septon.
"Good. I'm not a man to be liked, bird." He grunted, narrowing his eyes at the bird roasting over the fire. She'd probably never even known the whip of a flame, only the warmth and the brilliant orange and whites and reds. He'd been that way, too, before Gregor made two monsters.
There was a blessed silence, for a time, and he sliced off a drumstick and flung it at her, grinning when he heard the dull, wet thud of it meeting the her bodice and her panicked squeak as she attempted to juggle the steaming bit of meat.
"Don't play with your food, girl, didn't they ever teach you that?" He mused, teeth sinking into the other leg, the hot juice running into his beard as he shifted away from the fire. The embers winked at him threateningly.
"What would you know about the sensibilities of a lady?" She snarked, blowing on her food far too much to be for anything but show, cautiously nibbling at the meat.
"They sound boring." He grunted, taking another bite and chewing. It was always ladies, with her. Ladies in silk gowns, ladies who curtsied, ladies who washed their hair with flowers and talked gently to animals and cradled their chicken leg like it was their newborn while taking too-small bites. It was infuriating, ladies. They should all be thrown into the sea, if just for Sandor to be free of this one.
"You know, in some awful, strange way, you've been as kind as you are terrible." She sighed conversationally. Sandor wished she would shut up and take a proper bite and stop picking at what remained of the tendon. "You make me loathe you one minute, then you do something nice. I start to like you, and you go and make an ass of yourself."
"You want to like me?" He raised a thick eyebrow (the only one he had, to be fair), giving her a look as close to quizzical as Sandor Clegane could manage, before cracking the chicken bone between his teeth to suck at the marrow. She made a sound like he'd just eaten her foot.
"I do like you. But only sometimes." She said sagely, and he snorted and tossed what remained of the bone into the tall grass, and carved himself a fat breast off the chicken. Once this was all over, he'd drink himself dead and fuck something. Probably himself, but occasionally the gods threw a hound a bone.
"I'm the only one who doesn't pretend to like your snivelling arse." He replied, apparently chewing too loud for the queen of the bum-fuck-nowhere woods, because she made a face at him and wrinkled her nose like a snarling thing, only in a sort of pathetic way.
"I suppose that is what I like and dislike about you." She sighed.
"You like and dislike a lot about me."
"There is a lot of you to like and dislike." She replied pointedly, eyes flicking from shoulder to shoulder like they were a fortnight's travel apart.
"You calling me big?" He said gruffly, hoping to see that little flash in her eyes when she thought she'd angered him.
"You are big. You are the biggest man I've ever had the somewhat displeasure of meeting."
He snorted at that, flicking chicken juice off his fingers and in her general direction, which earned him a gasp and a slightly larger twig bouncing off his breastplate.
