#Wolfwood dies any% becoming reality

[dbphantom]

I'm SO upset elendira has been five years old for TWENTY YEARS

So no actual good redesign? FUCK

[amoirsetpacis]

"Hey, c'mere." He reaches out, taking hold of Vash's right wrist and tugging him closer. They're seat on a bench in a park, bundled up in their coats and scarves. The cold is making Vash's ears and nose turn red; Wolfwood thinks it's cute. "I got somethin' for ya.'

Wolfwood slips his hand into his pocket and pulls out a thin, black box. When he pops it open, there are two identical bracelets sitting among dark velvet lining. They're simple things, two silver box chains with a single small red gemstone imbedded in each.

He pulls one of the bracelets out and tugs Vash's sleeve down for him, exposing a sliver of skin to the cold. Wolfwood carefully wraps the bracelet around his wrist and clips it—it fits closely, but not too tight. It won't slide off, that's for sure.

"One for both of us." The other bracelet is pulled out. "They're supposed to... uh, let us know if the other guy's in danger or if he's all right. Figured it'd be useful."

...And having matching bracelets is kind of nice. Thinking that at all baffles him, but he's learned not to question it.

He wiggles his own sleeve down. "Can ya help me put this on?"

It's not as though there had been far for Vash to be tugged, the two of them shoulder to shoulder, warmth bleeding through to one another through the fabric. The bench hadn't even been that cold beneath them to begin with either; what had been a light dusting of snow had only turned into more substantial flakes once they'd stopped, the promise of big, fat, wet ones perfect for clumping together becoming all the more present. It gathers across shoulders and catches in strands of hair, slow as it is to fall; they'll have to leave their spot soon, probably, unless they want to be steadily coated as well.

Still, Vash hums in interest as his limb gets gently manhandled; it's an easy tug back into reality, instead of letting his thoughts meander. There's a knee-jerk reaction to pull for some lightly teasing remark, but it dies in his throat as the dark-coloured box comes out of its hiding spot; it's quickly followed by swallowing the words that want to come up automatically-- that Wolfwood didn't need to get anything for him. Regardless of whether or not showing care for one another in these sorts of ways had become so much easier now, it was still a sentiment Vash often times has to keep locked away behind his teeth.

At first he doesn't say anything, just a quiet 'oh' as his wrist is exposed and the metal looped around it. The cold seeps into his skin, though the silver warms up quickly against it, and once the clasp is closed he jiggles his wrist around a bit to check the fit. Dull light bounces off the gemstone despite the overcast weather as it moves. The metal's undertones match those of the ring that sits on the same hand.

There's something to be said about it, somewhere-- about the more delicate jewelry sitting on skin as marred as his own, having been through such rough and tumble treatment for nearly its entire existence. He'll get stuck in his own head again if he thinks about it for too long, though, so most of the time he tries not to.

Wolfwood's explanation makes Vash look back up as the other bracelet is pulled out, sleeve falling back into place as he does so. It's... not as though it's unwarranted. Sticking together is a lesson that still hasn't managed to entirely stick, despite said lesson being such a vicious one with each and every one of its appearances. The fact that the both of the keep managing to terrify the other so thoroughly is proof enough of that; neither of them is free from blame, in that regard. Snow falling like so much confetti feels so much softer without heartache, no matter how it had a tendency nudge those memories to the surface with gentle but painful hands-- not so potent with yet another small barrier. Another reminder that they do, in fact, work better as a team. Grief may be a common guest, but that does not mean it is a welcome one-- that any sort of blockade isn't, in turn.

Just like their rings, pressed against one another when they hold hands, Vash takes the other bracelet and slips it around the opposite one to his own. It's... nice, that they're matching. Another little symbol, regardless of whether or not it's needed. HIs smile is soft when he tangles their fingers together, when they both finally glance back up.

"Aw, hopefully we won't need 'em for that," he laughs quietly, nudging Wolfwood with his shoulder. A moment later and there are lips against the other's cheek, quick to follow. "Thank you, though. I'd love anything you give me."

[7deadlycinderellas]

If the summer of our lives could just come again, ch11

AO3 link

 On the Kingsroad

Just as she feared, Sansa is black and blue at the end of each day’s riding. They’re not even going very fast, but every time she climbs out of the saddle she feels like it’s become part of her.

When they stop to eat in the evening, Ned mentions,

“I’m surprised you chose to ride.”

“I didn’t last time,” Sansa admits, “And I feel like I missed out, like there’s so much of Westeros I haven’t really seen. Every other time we’ve traveled, it’s been under duress, so I couldn’t appreciate it.”

Traveling at peace, she’s grown to appreciate the landscape. Everything is green, at its peak of growth, not yet touched by the winds of autumn, though they are on the cusp of it.

There’s a special sort of pain that comes to linger in Sansa’s gut caused by traveling alone with her father.

Once, when watching him speak to some of the men, she feels a sob crawl it’s way out of her throat.

When Ned looks at her, alarmed, her words spill out.

“The last thing I said to you before...you died thinking I hated you.”

Ned freezes, and then hugs her. He tries to assure her,

“There comes a point where as a parent, you accept that your children won’t stay little and perfectly adoring of you forever. I know you don’t hate me, and whatever it was over I’m sure I wouldn’t have held it against you.”

Sansa sniffs.

“Gods, I must have been an awful child to deal with.”

Ned laughs.

“You had your moments, all of you did. Some days we would have you swooning, Robb grandstanding, Jon sulking in the corner, Arya yelling and running away from the septa and Bran climbing something he shouldn’t all in one day. Rickon could do all of those in a single day himself, save maybe the swooning.”

When they pass through the Neck, it begins to rain lightly. The chill it brings puts Sansa’s mind back into her worst place. When they’re huddled under the covers of the tents one night, Sansa finally asks.

“The Boltons are really gone?”

Ned looks at her gently. None of them had been forthcoming about how Sansa, in particular, seemed so threatened by the Boltons. And after what he had seen at the Dreadfort, he feels he really doesn’t need to know.

“I swung the sword myself.”

Sansa lets out a breath, and leans forward to hug her knees.

“You should make sure to keep an eye on Ice,” she says, changing the subject rapidly, “Valyrian steel works on white walkers as well.”

“Not too many of those left in Westeros,” Ned comments. Sansa doesn’t tell him what became of it after his death.

“The recipe for making more was found,” Sansa admits, “and Gendry knows how to do it, but it requires dragon’s fire.”

Dragons. It should shock Ned more than it does.  

He stares off into the woods a lot that night. Dragons on his mind.

When they finally reach King’s Landing, the smell assaults them both like a slap. Sansa steels herself, and walks to her place with dignity.

The keep is as it was, huge and full of historical lore, but also intimidating and sitting atop a city crawling with unrest.

The king too, is as he was. Fat, drunk and thoughtless. Thankfully he doesn’t give Sansa much notice. She looks out of the corner of her eye at him on occasion, seeing the resemblance to her good brother in what seems a near mockery. Sansa watches as he drinks and hunts his way throughout his days, laying all of his work on her Father and the council. Why did he even want to be king at all? Sansa thought, he fought a whole war, so many people died for it. What did any of this mean to him?

Cersei and Joffrey are much as they were too. Joffrey doesn’t pay her any mind, and Cersei only takes a moment to hold her chin in her fingers, nails sharpened to a point, and ask her if she had reconsidered the idea of marrying her eldest son.

“Oh, no, “ Sansa assures her, “Joffrey is a prince, and I belong in the north. I simply did not wish my father to have to make this journey alone. “

After that, Sansa tries hard to steer clear of her. If she can escape the queen’s notice, it will be easier to escape her wrath. It’s much easier than cutting and running every time she spies Lord Baelish on the premises. She feels her stomach tighten every time, and Lady follows her when she walks the halls alone.

Tommen and Myrcella both have changed some in the last not quite a year since she’s seen them, having grown taller and more into themselves. Sansa hadn’t paid Myrcella much attention before, being so blinded by the attentions of her older brother, but she now finds the girl a bright-eyed and willing companion.

“None of the servants have daughters my age, and Mother likely wouldn’t let me play with them anyway. Joffrey won’t let me join him and Tommen in anything they get up to either.”

Sansa looks at Myrcella, the girl having gotten close to hitting a growth spurt and already becoming lovely. Sansa reaches in her mind for any memory she has of what became of her once she’d been sent away to Dorne. All she remembers is that it hadn’t ended well.

But for now, she thinks the both of them could use a friend.’

“Do you know how to play cyvasse?” Sansa asks, recalling one of Gendry’s suggestions of past times.  

Myrcella’s eyes light up.

“My uncle Tyrion has been teaching me, I’m sure he could teach you too!”

It’s strange to admit that Sansa has found herself avoiding Tyrion too. He’s back to the man she first met, and while she isn’t repulsed by him like she had been, she has to admit her feelings are mixed.

He doesn’t mention anything about what she told him before he left Winterfell, or of the letter, but she can feel him watching her, like he wants to ask but can’t find the words. She knows the feeling.

Myrcella convinces him one day after breakfast. They sit at a table in one of the gardens, over the board. After describing the movements of each of the pieces, Tyrion sits back to watch the two of them.

“Remember, the goal for all the pieces is to protect the king from being killed.”

Sansa picks up one piece, the dragon, examining it. The set they’re using is made of up of ivory and jade, lovely craftsmanship.

“Strange how the whole game is about protecting the king,” she comments, “But he’s not even the most powerful piece on the board.”

There’s so much reality to her comment, she thinks as Myrcella nods, and they begin to play.

She watches the board, and their hands moving the pieces around the board, fighting for the death of an imaginary monarch. What did all of that even mean to them?

She sighs, play stupid games, she thinks, win stupid prizes.

 At Winterfell

Gendry has been getting into the rhythm of the days at Winterfell. He eats in the Great Hall with all the others, then he works. It’s usually in the afternoon, after the bulk of the rest of the work is done, when him, and usually Meera, and sometimes one or two of the others, will continue on the stockpile of dragonglass weapons.

The other girl didn’t pay him too much attention. She would chatter sometimes, idly, while they were working, but she seemed to focus on her work. The chip and whittle method she uses is time consuming, but her work always comes out well.

One day, she surprises him by asking if he could make her some metal fish hooks.

“I asked Arya if she wanted to go fishing with me in the Wolfwood in a few days,” she explains.

It is odd, Gendry thinks, seeing them together. The morning that they choose to leave, Arya asks him if he wants to come with them.

“That’s alright,” he says, never having really been a fan of nature. There’s something else too.

“It’s nice seeing you with friends. Not sure if you ever had those, aside from us. And let’s be honest, Hot Pie wasn’t so much a friend as he was dead weight that occasionally produced delicious food.”

Arya leaves him off with just a hug, and he adds,

“Be careful out there though.”

Meera had pulled down the pair of ash branches the day before and whittled them down. They were strapped to her back when she unsteadily joined Arya on their horse and left Winterfell through the hunter’s gate.

Arya feels Meera shifting uncomfortably in front of her.

“Still not quite steady?” she asks.

Meera shakes her head, tight lipped.

“I’m used to stepping carefully, for marshes and quicksand and unstable ground. It feels like I’m not quite in control up here.”

Arya pats the dappled gelding on the rump.

“You will eventually get used to it. Horses aren’t the smartest of beasts, but they’re very predictable.”

It’s a short ride though, the stream isn’t far from the keep. It’s fairly deep, but not too wide. As children, the Starks used to dare each other to try and jump over it. Only Robb was ever brave enough to try, and he got soaked for his bravery.

“What’s out right now?” Arya asks her, while she’s digging in the bank for worms for bait.

“Trout mostly.”

When they bait their lines, and throw them out, Arya sits back against the tree they’ve parked by.

“Did you really grow up doing this all the time?”

Meera nods.

“If you were trying to get a bunch at once, to salt or something, it was usually easier to cast a net. Rod fishing was mostly for relaxing on nicer days, and bringing back something to fry just for dinner that day.”

Arya sits back and looks at the sky. It is a nice day, clear and sunny if awfully cold. The leaves on the trees are starting to turn towards golden towards autumn.

“I wish I could have done that,” Arya muses, “Growing up here, everything I wanted to do I was told wasn’t for ladies. If my mother had had her way I would have never even gone outside.”

“There were perks,” Meera agrees, “It’s very different in the Neck, a lot more goes into ensuring our day-to-day survival. There were girls like you’re sister there too, girls who hated hunting and swimming and the like. Girls who probably thought I was insane to still do those things even though I was highborn and likely could have elected to never.”

That is something Arya has come to understand; that there are girls like her everywhere, and girls like Sansa everywhere. She does kind of wish she’d known Meera the first time around, when she was younger. It might have helped to know there were other girls like her at all, that she wasn’t some kind of freak.

They’ve caught three trout that Meera has gutted and strung up when the sun is high in the sky.

“I’m going to go down stream to bury the guts,” she stands and tells Arya, taking the bucket to dump.

When she’s done and goes to return, she feels the hairs on her arms stand up. She’s not sure why, but when she approaches, she, quietly as possible, climbs a nearby tree to get a look.

There’s three of them, she realizes, two men and a woman, dressed in shabby skins and furs. One of them has a knife on Arya, who through some miracle, just looks bored.

Meera clutches the knife she’d used to gut the fish in one hand. She can’t get the drop on three of them, she knows that. She loosens the grip, and reaches out, finding a cluster of acorns, pulling them loose and throwing them across the clearing.

The distraction works, when the man with the knife nods to the woman to check it out, Arya reaches out to grab the knife.

It’s a quick move, and from the yell the man lets out, Meera guesses Arya must have broken at least one of his fingers to get it. She flails out and slashes at him violently, cutting his face deeply before the other man grabs her from behind.

Meera eyes the end of the branch she’s on. It’s just a bit too far, if she could just get a little bit closer, she might be able to jump on top of one of them…

It’s not an issue. Less than five seconds after the other man grabs Arya, there’s a rustling and a fierce howl before the wolf bursts into the clearing and leaps atop the man holding Arya back, and takes a deep bite out of the side of his face.

Meera jumps down carefully into the fray, while she watches Arya, suddenly free, tackle the man she had slashed, who is still clutching his face. In one swift movement, she slashes his throat with his own knife.

Arya is breathing heavily, and when Meera hits the ground and pulls her own knife. There’s still the woman to deal with.

Though with the wolf, it’s muzzle covered in blood, standing beside the two corpses, she’s frozen, seemingly with no desire to try and fight it.

The woman drops her knife, and Meera goes to grab it. She gets a good look at her then, and stops short.

“Osha?”

If Osha is at all disturbed by her calling her by name, it doesn’t show.

“Do what you will with me,” she says, “Just don’t let that thing kill me.”

Meera looks over at Arya, who’s got her hands on both sides of the wolf’s snout, and has her forehead pressed against its own.

“That thing has a name,” Arya insists, “And it’s Nymeria.”

Nymeria was huge, Meera thought, bigger even than Summer had been full grown. She’d heard tell that Arya’s wolf was wilder than others, but it was apparently no less loyal.

“What do we do with her?” she asks Arya, nodding in Osha’s direction.

Arya points to the where they’d tied the horse.

“I have rope in the pack. Tie her hands and we’ll bring her back to Winterfell.”

Meera does what she says, pulling Osha’s hands, which are still raised in surrender, to tie them behind her.

Arya has paused, and is looking at the two corpses.

“We’ll have to come back and burn them,” she comments, taking out her knife again, “but first…”

She takes the knife to the one who’s face she slashed. Meera watches in horror as Arya cuts the man’s face from his skull in one piece.

Osha curses loudly, and starts muttering about witches. Meera understands.

“What on earth are you-”

Not even looking up, Arya quietly asks,

“Have you ever heard of the Faceless men?”

Meera’s stomach goes cold. There had been muttering about how Arya had spent her years missing before, but...

“You’re not-”

Arya laughs.

“Not officially, but they did teach me a thing or two. A wildling face could prove very useful, even if it’s all cut and scarred.“

Once she’s done, she takes the rope Meera’s holding and pulls Osha back towards the horse.

“You’ll walk.”

 At the Wall

It had been, truly, for Jon to keep up his training at the Wall under the knowledge that his siblings had dropped upon him. The most effective route, he had discovered, was simply to try and forget he had learned any of it at all.

Sometimes this was harder than other times.

It’s hard enough when he’s getting mocked by the others, for his birth (which he now wants to throw back in their faces) or the burgeoning friendship he’s developed with Sam.

The worst is whenever he overhears some of the senior night’s watchmen speak of the intelligence they’ve gathered from over the wall. The wildling villages being abandoned, the burning of some keep that Jon has never heard of, the movements of a group of wildlings that they cannot assign a motive to. These are when the words of his siblings echo in his head.

He wishes uncle Benjen had stayed at Castle Black, just so he could see a familiar face.

But then they find the bodies of the other two rangers, and the corpses rise, and attack Lord Commander Mormont, just like the younger Stark’s had said they would.

Jon, in the moment, does not think. His training and instinct take over. When Mormont presents him with the sword, Longclaw, afterwards, he finds that he tries not to accept it.

When the older man pushes it on him anyway, he wonders about the certainty of what else they had told him.

And so, one night, he seeks out Maester Aemon.

After the older man offers him a chair, Jon cuts to the chase.

“You never talk about yourself, where did you grow up? And why the Night’s Watch?”

Aemon chuckles, and comments,

“First real brush with danger making you question your life choices? Well, if there’s nothing else that could…”

The old man tells him of his youth, growing up in King’s Landing.

“I knew wealth, and women. I could have even been king…”

Jon’s stomach seizes.

“You- your…” his mind reaches out into his history lessons, guessing at the man’s age. “You’re Aemon Targaryan.”

The old man chuckles. The rest of the words he tells Jon are a mess. Jon doesn’t even have the presence of mind to ask him about the Others like he had intended.

When he wanders back to the barracks, he realizes, that if the old Maester is in fact who he told him, then Jon is his blood family, who may be the only family the old man knows he has left.

 Over the Wall

Henneh was the one they had sent out to blend in. She hadn’t bled yet, and would have been the old man’s next wife. Young enough to not be considered a viable threat.

Gilly clutches the baby and waits for her to return. She finally does at sunset.

“Is it true?” they ask her when she does.

Henneh nods.

“It’s true, the rumors. Mance Rayder is seeking the Horn of Winter, he wants to use it to bargain with the crows, to threaten to bring down the whole wall.”

“We can’t allow that,” a raspy voice interrupts. The woman who spoke it was old, though no larger than Henneh. Her skin was still gray and the leaves growing from her head were beginning to droop. She had told them that her name was Rowan, and she was the last remaining of the Children of the Forest. She had come to them one night, whispering the stories of the deaths of the rest of her people, and how she was trying to put into motion a plan that might save the rest of the realm.

“My magic can keep the illusion on the cave as long as we need, it’s small magic. But if the Wall comes down our plans with shatter. “

“Do you even have enough magic left for the plan?”

Rowan smiles.

“Most of its long gone. Opening the rift back here took a lot out of me, but it was necessary. Very little magic is involved in the plan we made, but we will need help. We must get to Castle Black before Mance Rayder, and before he can even think to bring down the wall.”

All of the women nod.

Before they leave that night, Gilly rocks her baby to sleep, wondering what they will call this little group after the fact.