Season 8 Fics

we have begun to heal

pt. 2 of all of our aching.

She goes back to him, because of course she does.

They are older.  Ten years older, to be exact, which is not really old but is starting to feel like it.  She had finished mapping out the world three years prior- as it turns out, there is a west of westeros and a very definitive end to the end of the world.  Eventually, you bump up against more land, and you go onto that land find to that its somewhere others had been before, somewhere already named. 

Eventually, you run out of unnamed places.

Eventually, the only thing left to do is come home.

"You kept my maps."  They are displayed, actually, placed in the same honored positions that other lords would keep tapestries or family swords or filthy pictures of women that they pretend to have had.  "I didn't think you would."

She hadn't thought he would throw them out, really, but she didn't expect their connections to each other to be so openly displayed.  She had imagined them still rolled up in their scrolls, something for him to take out when he is feeling sentimental, when he finds it in himself to miss her.  They have kept in contact- a chain of rumors and whispers threading them together every time she ventures into town, mutterings about the Baratheon lord that she gathers up like gold coins, holding them sacred, and she imagines he had done the same for her.  There were letters, too, dated and waiting for her at anywhere he thought it would be likely for her to end up, a whole pile of them waiting at Winterfell whenever she deemed fit to visit her sister, a scattering of them at the Iron Islands. 

(It is an unfair form of conversation, mostly because he is kept guessing and chooses the places where his letters would wait at random.  With her, she always knows where he is, always knows how to get her words to him.  It's so one sided that she treated it more like a confession than a correspondence, pouring out detailed accounts of the things she had seen and the people she met, always somehow stressing the point that she is still alone, still not willing to come home.  She doesn't know why she's doing it, why she expects him to care, other than maybe the fact that she is lonely, that she wants one place to remained tethered to.)

(There had been a letter from someone else, once.  From a lady, someone he courted without much intent, who he had taken into his bed for a moon or two.  She had been begging her to stop.  We could be happy, the letter had said.  Don't you want him to be happy?  Arya hadn't stopped, because she was selfish.  She overheard a woman at a brothel three countries over cackling about the affair, how it had crumbled and the lady was shacking up with some other lord, now.  The common folk like stories like this, the reminders that their lords and ladies are human, too.)

"Of course I kept them."  He's not looking at her.  He isn't looking at her maps.  He's flipping through a book, just like he had been when she came in, the lines of his shoulders tense and taught under his shirt.  She had scared him when she walked in- other than the slight scraping of the door as she slipped into the room, there had been no sound.  She has still not managed to shake the art of being silent.  "They're from you."  A pause, then, and a long, shaky breath that makes her want to reach out to him.  "I kept everything you ever sent me.  Everyone was waiting for what you would find."

Everyone was.  The citadel, the lords and ladies, her sister, her brothers, Lord Tyrion.  They had found it something of an oddity, at first, something to latch onto with the casual interest that other people show towards the habits of people they had known in their past.  But then she started finding things, and it got a lot more exciting, to be someone who knows her, who might get one of her letters, have her dine in their halls.

She had wanted to be part of the songs, once.

It's rather unexciting, now that she is.

"I missed you.  I thought of coming back."  She takes a step forward.  He had held her, once, in this room, back when they were saying good bye.  "I didn't think it would be fair."