A Need to Suffer

Down and Down Again

Chapter Four

Down and Down Again

(So I’ve had several requests to continue this story, from a lot of lovely reviewers (thank you very much for all the love you guys have given this fic, it excites me to want to give you a little more…) that and I do like the idea of Ramsay serving Sansa as she explores her new wants and desires! *evil grin* So, without further ado…)

Ramsay had remained unmoving in the bath waters for long minutes feeling the course of throbbing pains coming from the entirety of his body. He hurt both inside and out, and thinking on how badly he hurt and would hurt in the future if Sansa deemed it to be so crashed down upon him sending another wash of despair to swallow him whole. She was the head of the house, his sole warden, and to displease her would mean pain for him. He would have to do as he was told or suffer for it, orders given and carried out no less by a woman. The thought that this was to be his life now was dully settling into Ramsay’s mind. What a melancholy end to such a great rise to power, he thought distantly.

He had done well for himself, being a bastard of a raped widow. His mother never really could care for him because of what his father, Lord Roose Bolton, had done to her. Raping her under the tree that his mother’s newlywed husband sagged from a rope wasn’t the best way to conceive a child. She’d petitioned Roose for some kind of assistance raising the boy, and to shut her up and send her on her way, having never really cared whether he’d had a bastard son but only whether word of it got out that he had, Roose had sent the foulest smelling of servant’s… Ramsay’s first Reek.

Reek and he had been inseparable, and the servant had done his best to pass on everything that a fatherless boy would need to know. Ramsay was a young boy then around the age of five, and Reek wanted to serve well. He insisted that Ramsay lord over him, groveled to be beaten for his offenses, and he showed Ramsay who he needed to be to be a true lord before he’d ever been informed that he actually was a lord. Reek had taught him to hunt; the hunts were something Ramsay had grown to love! There was no finer beast to hunt than the two legged ones Ramsay had found especially if they gave a good chase… there wasn’t going to be any of that anymore. His mind faltered as he thought on what would always follow the chase; it used to fill him with a sense of nostalgia, but now, it reminded him of what he’d just endured. Suddenly the memory was sullied and forever spoiled for him. It was hard to enjoy the conquests he’d had when he was painfully reminded of his own degradation.

His mother had begun to groom Ramsay to understand that he was of noble stock, and Ramsay took this to heart. But a lord he was not, it wasn’t until he’d reached puberty that he was told by his mother who his father actually was; she had grown weary of her lack of control over the boy and was willing to risk her own death to have told Ramsay so. He had been eager and full of expectations back then to meet the lord of the land, his father.

Roose was never a warm man, but he had had Ramsay taught to read and write even if the boy had never shown much care for finer etiquette and further grooming. Roose didn’t care as long as the boy wasn’t an illiterate moron and kept to himself. His ‘amusements’ though, they were a problem, and Ramsay had been awarded new ‘friends’ (that kept an eye on him and reported back to Roose of his escapades to help cover the boy’s messy tracks.) From his status as the Bolton bastards, the new friends he’d garnered had been more than fond of his proclivities and just as engaged and encouraging to be vicious. Success was all Ramsay would allow. He’d poisoned his eldest sibling to take his place, and the king had made him a rightful heir as a Bolton, no longer was he a Snow. He’d even overthrown his father, became the sole heir to the name, and led an army to battle carrying high the banner of the flayed man. He always did take pride in that banner, and took to the act fervently after the discovery of who his father was.