the world keeps turning (it's us that just stands still)

10

It's terrible, the waiting.

Arya mentions it to Sansa one night, when they are both standing staring out over the side of the castle wall, both of them squinting through all the snow to find what might be hiding behind it.  Sansa just laughed.

"Yes," She said, and there was something alien in her movements, in the toss of her head and the way that her fingers were curled around the windowsill.  Sansa had taken to wearing men's clothing around the castle when she wasn't holding meetings.  The better to fight in, she had said.  Arya thinks that is an apology for that night with the poison.  "Waiting always is the worst part," It's her quoting voice.  Sometimes she pulls out the lessons she had learned up at King's Landing, and her voice is always the same, a warped version of the little girl who used to know every word to every last lovely song.  This one, Arya knew, was one that she learned from Cersei.  Arya hopes that the two get to meet, if only for Sansa to tell her how much she had learned from her, right before Arya gets to cross another name off her list.  "Especially for the women."

Not, of course, that they hadn't been busy.  There was the last remaining harvest to pile up in their stores and take stock of, fruit to preserve, meat to smoke.  Horses to examine and decide whether to butcher or bring within the gates (the crypts had been turned into a stable, and Sansa looks like she wants to cry every time she walks by, but Arya knows better.  The dead are dead, and need nothing of the living.), firewood to bring in from the woods outside the walls, floors to scrub and fires to build and weapons to forge, battle lines to draw up, letters to write, always letters, all of them to lords and ladies and measters of the south, warning them of what's to come.

Arya's not confident that any of them are listening.

"Arya!" The paper that she was writing on gets ripped out from underneath her hands, and the quill makes a black streak through her words.  Sansa glares down at her.  "You can't say that!"

"I wasn't going to send it," She shoots back, crossing her arms and glaring right back.   Arya had been sitting here for so long that her hand was starting to cramp, and every time she picked up the pace to catch up to the pile of letters that Sansa had been sending, Sansa snaps at her to slow down because no one will be able to read her writing.  Across the table, the measter just glares, and she feels an undeniable pang when she remembers that it isn't Measter Lewin.  "I was just having a bit of fun."

"Just wasting parchment, you mean?"  It feels like before, when the two of them were always at each other's throats, snapping at the slightest provocation.  Arya is amazed that they can still be able to squabble like they do, but with the coming war, their tempers are stretched thinner than ever.  Only Bran seems to be calm, but his absence of emotion tends to be another source of worry rather than soothing.  She is ready to be on her feet, thinks of slamming a dagger between Sansa's fingers just to scare her, but then Sansa's face softens.  "Just do the seals," She says, her hands fluttering over at the pile of loose parchment that had been gathering on one of the tables, and Arya knows it as close to a compromise as they will be able to get.  "Gods knows that you're terrible at diplomacy, anyways."

That's why we have you, Arya thinks, but doesn't say it.  Truly, the North would have been lost without Sansa, no matter what the men like to say about Jon.  She was the one that won them Winterfell, she was the one that held the men together when they were most likely to abandon them, and now she was the one shoring the defenses for the only fight that mattered.

"I don't know why we're bothering," is what she actually says, dripping a bit of wax onto the first letter and biting back a snarl when she sees that it is addressed to Cersei.  Her last warning, apparently.  "They're not going to listen.  It sounds like a fairy tale.  Though maybe," When they were little, long ago, Arya used to babble constantly, every thought that came into her head.  She would talk through dinner, and through needlework, and when they were supposed to be falling asleep, and Sansa would be forced to listen.  Sometimes, she was even interested in what her little sister had to say.  She isn't interested now.  "They'll make it far enough south and finds it's too warm for them and just melt, like a snow man."