Hello! Here is my Secret Santa fic for @seaworthit <3 I hope you like it!
--
From each tree, dangled a body, neck stretched far too long. The faces of the dead were bloated and blackened, all of them swayed lightly in the wind like banners. There were some differences between them. Their clothes were varying degrees of ragged, their hair was different lengths, but all their faces looked the same in death. She could not have told one from the other.
Death lives there, Jeyne Heddle had told her in the inn before she’d set out.
Death doesn’t live, Arya had replied. Jeyne had given her a significant look.
Stranger things have happened, the girl replied carefully.
She’d mounted a horse that had gone unclaimed in the inn’s stable for a long while, and had ridden in the direction that Jeyne had said Gendry had gone off in. She didn’t know what she wanted to find. Gendry had been stupid then and was likely still stupid now, and was unlikely to…
A girlhood wish. She wasn’t much older now, but she had lived a thousand lives in the house of black and white. She’d survived a thousand deaths. She wasn’t the same girl who’d dreamed of being Wenda the White Fawn, and that wasn’t even what she wanted now. Although she wasn’t even sure she’d wanted it then. This is stupid.
The branches creaked beneath the dead weight of the hanged. Where she could make out a sigil on their breasts, she saw the twin towers of Frey. Good. They’d killed her mother, had killed her brother. It wasn’t him of Many Faces that had done it--it was Walder Frey. The north remembers, and your blood isn’t surviving the winter.
Hers hadn’t survived the autumn. Father, and mother, and Robb, and Bran, and Rickon, and Jon. She’d wished a knife had taken her in the heart the way it had taken Jon when she’d heard what had happened in the Happy Port. And no one knew what had become of Sansa.
I could go and look for her. She could be some lost princess like in the songs, in need of rescuing. Sansa would like that, would like that Arya was thinking of her like that. Even if she’d wrinkle her nose at the state of my clothes.
Although if she was on the run from the Lannisters, then perhaps she’d given up some of her airs. Surely losing everyone would have softened her heart, too? None of it mattered now that Joffrey was dead, and Robb. Even Sansa would be able to see that. It would be good to see her again. Even if it’s just the two of us, the pack survives. Father always said that.
But first, Arya was going to find Gendry. To make sure that he wasn’t part of her pack. She knew where to go to find Gendry; no one knew where to go to find Sansa.
It was already getting dark, and the hanged men were casting long shadows around her, like fingers extending across the snow, trying to strangle her.
I’m a direwolf, she thought. Ghosts can’t kill me.
Somewhere in the woods there was Nymeria too. In her dreams, she’d dreamed her with her pack, and Arya had pleaded that she come back. I was trying to save you, she tried to tell the wolf. I wanted to save everyone. But the wolf hadn’t come--not yet. Arya would keep trying. Nymeria had survived. She had survived, and Arya had survived and the gods wouldn’t have done that to them if they weren’t meant to be together, would not have let Arya dream of her to ease the nightmares of everything else.
“I’d stop were I you,” came a lazy voice and Arya saw a glint in the semi-darkness. The tip of an arrow pointed at her.
“Friend or foe?” Arya asked calmly. Needle was at her hip, but she did not reach for it, not yet. Not unless she wanted an arrow through the throat.
“You tell me that,” the voice replied. “Friend or Frey?”
“Haven’t killed them all yet?” she asks.
“Lord Walder had many get,” the voice said. “We’ll find them all in the end.”
“I’m too horsefaced to be look that much a weasel,” Arya replied. “Come take a closer look, friend.”
And he stepped out of the trees, and once she had run to him crying.
Harwin looked as though he’d seen a ghost.
“Arya Underfoot?” he whispered, and he lowered his bow.
Arya dismounted.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Jeyne Heddle said I could find Gendry this way,” she said.
He hesitated. “Aye, you can,” he replied edgily. “But mayhaps it’s best not to.”
Arya narrowed her eyes. “And why is that?” she asked.
“There are horrors a girl should never have to know.”
Perhaps it was because he’d called her a girl, or perhaps it was because somewhere in the distance a wolf howled, but Arya shook her head. “I’ve known every horror there is. I’m not afraid of it.”
She pushed past him, leading her horse up the hill on foot. She heard him let out a sigh and follow.
“How many?” she asked him as they passed more swinging Freys.
“Not all of them,” he sighs. “The man had more get than a rabbit in springtime. But she’ll have her due.”
Arya looked at him. “She?”
And Harwin looked away. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said quietly. “But child, remember--she’s not who she was when you see her. She isn’t how she’d want you to remember of her.”
Arya’s foot faltered midstep, but only for a moment. Rise and eat and run with us.
There was a fire up ahead. It flickered in the gathering darkness, and she could tell from afar that there were several men standing beside it. Several of them turned when they heard her approaching. “She’s with me,” Harwin called.
She saw Lem Lemoncloak though his cloak was black in the darkness. She saw others she didn’t recognize, and some she did, though all their faces looked haggard and hungry. Likely Luke had lost an eye and Beardless Dick had a nasty scar that crossed his face and made him look oddly like the Hound.
“Where’s Gendry?” she asked them. She didn’t see him standing by the fire.
“Not here, is he?” replied Lem.
“Where did he go?”
“He went north,” Lem said. “Went with the Tarth woman. Told her he’d bring her daughter back from the Boltons. ”
“Sansa?” Arya asked and Lem laughed.
“Sansa? No one knows where she is. No, the younger one. Arya. She married Bolton’s son, didn’t she?”
Arya stepped towards the firelight. “No, she didn’t,” she said quietly.
“Lord of Light,” whispered Likely Luke, and Arya watched them all exchange glances. The ones she knew leaned over and whispered that’s her. Arya Stark, to the ones she didn’t know and by the old gods and the new, she wished Gendry were there. Of course he wasn’t. She shouldn’t be surprised by this. She never did end up where she wanted to go. Jon had been wrong--all roads didn’t lead to the same castle.
“Who is our guest?” came a voice.
Arya had never felt a hope so dark before because she recognized that voice. Beneath the rasping and croaking, there was a richness that she had known since the very day she was born, a roundedness, a firmness that not even death could take away.
“Mother,” she said quietly and she rounded the fire.
Her mother stood in shadows. She wore a hood that obscured her face but Arya could see the slashes at her throat, could see that her once auburn hair was white, reflecting the moonlight overhead. She could not see her eyes.
Her mother did not respond for a long while, and Arya knew that if she could see her eyes, she would see them flicking up and down, measuring the proportions of her face, trying to determine if her eyes were the same shade of grey as Ned’s had been, as Arya’s had been.
“I tried to get back to you,” she said, her voice breaking. “To you and Robb. I was so close.”
“The Boltons have you,” her mother said quietly.
“I don’t know who the Boltons have,” Arya said. “But it’s not me. I promise. You always used to get annoyed at how muddy my skirts would get, and Sansa and Jeyne used to call me horseface.”
And her mother raised a hand, gripping Arya’s chin tightly. “You have his face,” she said quietly. “You were the only one who had his face. It was long and wolflike. You looked like Lyanna.”
“Sansa looked like you. And Bran and Rickon had your coloring as well. And Robb. It was just me and Jon that looked like father.”
And her mother’s grip tightened and then relaxed. “I had a wolf named Nymeria,” Arya continued. “She was just a pup, and I named her after the witch queen from the songs. Rickon named his Shaggydog and Bran...I don’t know what Bran named his because he fell and he hadn’t named him yet.”
Please, mother. Please remember me.
Nymeria pulled your body from the river. You were dead, but you are alive now.
Can you bring back a man without a head? But you’re alive. You’re alive.
She blinked back tears and slowly her mother’s hand dropped to her side once again. “Arya Underfoot,” Arya continued. “That’s what Harwin and Fat Tom and the rest used to call me because I was always in the way, running about. I could never keep still.”
And her mother’s hand dropped to her side and grabs Arya’s wrist, vicelike and led her away from the fire, into the darkness of the forest around them.
“How did you live?” her mother croaked. “How did you escape Cersei Lannister?”
“Syrio helped me,” she said. “Father found someone to teach me to…” her voice trailed away. But no, she didn’t have to show her mother Mikken’s mark on Needle. Her mother had always disliked Jon Snow and might not thank him yet for the sword he’d given his little sister. She would when she learned that Needle had kept Arya alive but...but not yet. Not when she seemed to believe her. “When the Kingsguard came to get me, he protected me and I ran. I escaped into the city. One of the Black Brothers--Yoren--he was going to bring me north, but the goldcloaks killed him, and then I was on my own with Gendry and Hot Pie.”
“Gendry said you were taken by the Hound.”
“I was,” she said. “He tried to take me to the Twins. To you and Robb. But we arrived right when...when…” she swallowed. “And he took me away again. He wouldn’t let me save you.”
And her mother let out a bitter, croaking laugh. “There was no saving me, Arya. What could you have done?”
“I could have done something,” Arya said forlornly. She had never been able to shake the sense that that was the truth of it. That if she’d run into that castle, if only she’d tried, Robb and her mother would have survived. “I’ve killed,” she said quietly. “I know how to kill. I’ve killed loads of people to stay alive.” And plenty more not to. But she did not wish to think about those who wore black and white. She didn’t want the threat and fear of them to follow her.
“But not even you could kill all of Frey’s offspring when they surrounded us. Not even you could have killed Roose Bolton when you’d come to a party, when you’d had their bread and salt. But we will,” she spoke so emphatically that her hood slipped down from her head and Arya saw her face, saw scars like tears on her cheeks, the gaping hole at her throat.
Arya had seen death before, and death made everyone look the same.
But death made her mother look different.
“We will destroy them,” the woman who had once been Lady Catelyn said. “We will salt their fields, we will kill their children as they killed mine, and let the snows take their corpses. For Robb.”
This woman sitting here frightened her. There was something feral and cruel about her. Something that new no reason, no justice--only vengeance.
They killed Robb. They deserve it.
Their children didn’t, though. No more than Tommen killed father.
Distantly, she remembered Elmar Frey at Harrenhal. He’d been stupid, and annoying, but she doubted he’d had anything to do with killing Robb.
Her mother’s eyes were too blank to be approving. Indeed, she showed no joy at all that Arya had lived at all. There’s nothing left to her but hate.
Maybe she’d just been left alone with it for too long. She wouldn’t have been the first. Arya knew it too well. Maybe she would soften if Arya stayed. Maybe she would--not be the mother Arya had known, Arya remembered, but maybe she would be something softer than this. Something less broken than this. And maybe Arya would be too. Maybe after all this they’d find something to rebuild, something they could share and love together.
Needle hung heavily at her hip.
“For Robb,” Arya whispered. Her voice sounded odd, just as strangled as her mother’s. It sounded childlike, afraid. Her mother nodded. She did not take Arya into her arms. She did not smile, she did not sigh and turn the conversations to talk of lighter matters. No--she lifted her face to stare up at the moon, her mottled flesh glowing horribly and Arya wanted to weep because this couldn’t be her mother. It couldn’t be--and yet it was.