“what do you fear, lady?' he asked. 'a cage,' she said.”; sam

[mutiny]

to know me is to hate me
Is to hate what i’ve become

How could anyone be afraid, she asks. He is not a particularly frightening thing, Mutiny, despite the rows of razored teeth, the impenetrable dark of him. He has always been a mild thing, careful. And yet his mother had whimpered in her sleep and he had known, somehow, that he was responsible. If only because she’d smile at him but the light would stop just short of her eyes. Because, though she insisted that she loved him, that there was nothing he could do to make her love him any less, the distance between them grew and grew and he understood then that he frightened her.

But he does not tell Ygritte this. He does not share with her his shame of being something so terrible that he can strike fear in others, even his own mother, without even trying. He huffs out a self-conscious laugh, mouth lopsided, when she asks that he not sink those wicked teeth into her own flesh. He has eaten his fair share of hares, birds, small woodland creatures, it has never once occurred to him to sample the flesh of another horse. “I won’t,” he vows, so self-conscious that it makes his nerves hum beneath the impossibly dark skin.

He doesn’t have a scary face that he’s aware of, but before he can tell her this, she has dimmed her own shine and cast her gaze away with an apology. He wants to tell her that she has no reason to apologize for asking a monster to show her how monstrous it can be, but she is already asking him something else. It sets his head reeling, how quickly she moves on, as someone who has largely avoided conversation his entire life purely because it meant getting close enough to others that he might unwittingly strike fear in them.

Does he have a home? He shakes his head. “No,” he tells her because he has no reason to lie. “I was born in the meadow, but I have never really called anyplace home.” He rolls a shoulder in a shrug and then asks, “do you?”

— mutiny