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

12

They are going through some sort of baptismal rite.

"You are the prince that was promised," Lady Melisandre is saying, and rotates a bit, so she moves from being directly between Daenerys and Jon to standing right in front of him, her hand reaching out to trace over his chest where the stab wounds lie hidden. Arya had caught sight of them, once, when she was bursting into his quarters with some message or another- they were still open, gaping things, black at the edges, the dead skin curled and rotting, a reminder of what he had almost been. "And you-," She turns back to Daenerys, and her smile is beautiful in the firelight, just like everything about her is beautiful, and Arya hates her, hates her even as the firelight pulses in the gemstone at her neck and the flames roar up in the grate standing in front of her. "You are fire made flesh. Gifts from the lord of light to fight for the living in this war against the darkness."

Arya had almost screamed when she had been summoned to her father's old chambers and found the furniture pushed to all the walls. It had been the one room that Sansa had made sure was left empty, even as every other inch of Winterfell was being filled to bursting. Rulers were allowed their follies, and this was Sansa's- to preserve as much of Winterfell as they could as a shrine to those that they had lost.

"You have grown with the Lord's blessing. Been tempered by the fire of the world as steel is formed in the forge." Arya wants to kill her. Feels that in her bones, deep in the pit of her stomach, the same way she had felt when she faced Jaimie Lannister or the head of King's Guard or all those people that she had sought out and killed. "And now the war has come."

A log snaps, falling into the fire and sending sparks spitting into the air, swirling around the Red Woman, but she doesn't even flinch, just closes her eyes as they bite into her robes like there was no greater pleasure in life to be burned.

Death by fire is the purest death, She had mused, standing off at the window while the measter wrapped the fresh wound on Arya's ankle. She had come to her to find out what they looked like, these white walkers, if it was as terrible as all the men were saying, even though she must have seen the truth in her flames. Maybe -and it scared Arya, if this were true- maybe the Red Woman was still hoping that her visions were wrong. What is waiting for us out there, that is not a good death.

"Step into the flames." They've got red silk wound around their hands, Daenerys and Jon do, their skin pressed palm to palm, a bastardized version of the what happens when you are married in the light of the seven. "Step into the flames and be reborn."

Arya's breath catches in her throat, and she sees the hesitation in Jon's eyes, the half second where he pulls back, but Daenerys, who truly had been born from the flames and faced the fire many times since then, does not hesitate, dragging both their hands towards the flames and the sparks and the red hot coals. No one had expected it to be that sudden, and they lean forward, all of them in one horrified motion, to see what would happen if Melisandre's magic fails, if the thing that seems to protect Daenerys should fail to shield Jon as well.

"You are the children of the light." The Red Woman looked as close to happy as Arya had ever seen her. She looked at peace. "It is time to face the darkness."

"Are you mad at me?"

Gendry doesn't answer the question. Doesn't even look at her. Hadn't looked at her, not since he had knocked on the door to her room with the message she had sent to him still clenched in his fist, holding it so tight that he had ripped the paper. He doesn't seem to know what to do with her behind closed doors anymore, not when neither of them are pretending that she hadn't purposefully called him to her at a time where the servants wouldn't be around and Sansa wasn't going to be around to supervise. They don't have time for niceties- death was creeping closer at a pace that wasn't creeping at all, and Jon was going to be sending Gendry off to war tomorrow.