LION TRAP, game of thrones

𝐈𝐈. fire

The fever dreams brought him to Winterfell.

He was 6 and sat in the courtyard after sword training, watching the sword master put away the wooden swords. His siblings had already disappeared and Sansorr was the only one outside. Soon he would have to go to eat with them.

The teacher walked towards the armory and Sansorr, driven by his curiosity and admiration for the man, followed him.

When the teacher noticed him and turned to face him, his face was not angular, handsome, and graced with a charming smile as in the true course of this memory, but a black swirl of hungry, violent nothing.

"What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to see where you were going."

Sansorr's voice was childlike, not yet that of an adult.

"Come on. I'll show you."

Sansorr didn't want to go. He begged his childish self not to go with him. But his chubby body started moving and Sansorr stayed behind, disembodied and frozen, watching as he followed the teacher until they were out of his sight, behind the closed door. He didn't want to follow them. He knew what would happen now. He knew the sword teacher had stayed in Winterfell afterward.

He'd told Lyanna, and she -even then, pugnacious and brave- had told her father so that he would punish the man. But instead, his father had seen to it that Sansorr received the punishment.

From then on, the maesters no longer attacked him with leather. Only red-hot irons.

He wanted to break out of his stupor, not have to look at that door. He would much rather go to Lyanna, look for her in this nightmarish memory.

But the fever did not take him to her, but to the chambers of the maesters.

The smell of burning flesh was so omnipresent that Sansorr was suddenly sure it wasn't a dream after all. That he would never leave this room again.

"Please don't," he whispered.

"You have to be brave. Remember that you are a Stark, Sansorr. You have to endure it and it will only make you stronger."

"Please, Papa... Please," Sansorr sobbed now, the hiss of red-hot iron was somewhere behind him and he felt sick with fear.

His father stepped into his field of vision and put a hand to his cheek. "You are a Stark. A Stark can take this without tears. Be a man."

And as he fought the tears, his father's gray eyes turned green. Tywin Lannister. Now Sansorr knew he had woken up.

Tears still ran down his cheeks, wetting his rough lips, but Sansorr's mouth was too dry to lick them up. His lips were slightly parted and the only sound he could make was a rasping gasp with each breath. His muscles spasmed under the fever, but he was no longer trembling. The hunger pangs were gone too, though he couldn't imagine that was a good sign.

Tywin's hand was pleasantly cool against his cheek and Sansorr realized that he was only being held upright by the lord's grip. The door to the chamber was open, soft midday sun shining in on them, but just barely reaching Tywin and making the last of gold in his hair shimmer.

Sansorr's eyes were boiling hot in their sockets and Sansorr could barely look around, his gaze lingering on the Lannister.

Tywin placed a cup to Sansorr's lips with indescribable gentleness and then ice-cold water wet his tongue. His body suddenly seemed to remember its thirst and Sansorr drank so greedily that he choked and began to cough with a gasp. Tywin pulled the cup away again, however, and also his hand on his face, so that Sansorr slumped down.