thecapitol | we'll all make more mistakes [CLOSED]

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we'll all make more mistakes [CLOSED]

Who| Éowyn and Arya
What| Éowyn has been avoiding Arya. Arya has noticed, and confronts her.
Where| D10 suite
When| A few days after the Arena
Warnings/Notes| TBC

It isn't out of malice that Éowyn has been steering clear of Arya. Truthfully, she doesn't even really notice she's doing it. Since her return from the Arena, she has been in a state of deep depression, fuelled into action only by the anger that boils like a furnace just under her skin. Everything she was holding onto seems to have been taken from her, in one swift blow; her hopes of victory for Arya, her chance to kill Black Tom, and, most of all, her companions from home. Her king, her queen, the Halfling... all dead, and dead for good.

Worst of all is the pervading, agonising feeling that it's her fault. If she had killed Tom. If she had protected her friends. If she had not been there, Arya's two defenders locked in combat, when Arya was killed. If she had found a way to fight back, found some way for them to escape this place...

Such thoughts leave little time for people, and even less time for Arya in particular. She has seen the girl more than once in their shared common area, and turned away, unable to deal with the storm of guilt and anger and resentment that Arya's face stirs up in her. Most of the time, in the week or so since she got back, she has spent either training like a woman possessed, drifting around in the small stables under the Center, or in her own room, fighting the urge to cry. She eats little, sleeps little, and talks less. She feels once again as trapped and as lost as she did when she first arrived... but this time it is worse, because she knows too much to even rage and rail against it. Instead, she has to bite it back, and when she does cry, it is quietly, into her pillow.

When Arya comes to find her, Éowyn is sitting on her bed, cross-legged. She's started a piece of tapestry work - never her favourite thing to do, but something she can do alone that feels less like wasting time - and is embroidering the mane of Rohan's white horse, her hands clumsy and bandaged from the hours upon hours she's spent training, until even her well-calloused hands are worn down to blisters. Her heart clearly isn't in her work, though. She's barely looking at it, ignoring the times she stabs her fingers with the blunt tapestry needle. When the knock comes on the door, her hands still, and she falls silent for a long moment before calling out "I am working! Can it not wait?"

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It had taken a lot for Arya to swallow her own pride at feeling that one of the few people she really trusts and looks up to here was deliberately giving her the cold shoulder, and to go and see what was wrong instead of ignoring her right back in her childish spite. So when she hears such a dismissive reply it really stings, and her instinct is to storm off and hide in the mess of blankets she's set up in a corner of her room and has been sleeping in instead of her bed. Instead she finds her lips pursed into a thin, angry line, and bangs even harder, as though she's trying to knock the door from its hinges.

Éowyn hesitates a moment, then groans quietly - a sound that is not simply irritated, but deeply weary and rather resigned - and shoves the tapestry needle into her work, throwing it down on the bed beside her and going to answer the door. "I shall take that as a no," she mutters, and unlocks the door, yanking it open.

She still holds herself with some grace, but otherwise, there is little of the lady about her. Her hair is plaited back roughly, messy enough that it's clear she's slept on it; she also looks as if she might have slept in her practice gear, which is crumpled and sweat-stained and smells strongly of horse. It's been a while since she last cried, but she's pale and thin, and the dark circles under her eyes speak of sleepless nights. When she sees Arya in front of her, the look of irritation melts away, replaced by a deep-etched look of guilt.

"Arya," she says aloud. "Did something happen?"

Arya looks deeply wounded that it's apparently so much of an inconvenience to Éowyn to come and talk to her. It's difficult for her to form deep bonds these days, with everyone she loves repeatedly taken away from her, and feeling that she's being brushed off like this cuts her to the core.

When Éowyn opens the door, however, she looks completely taken aback at the woman's dishevelled appearance, her expression changing to one of concern and curiosity. "I could ask you the same."

Éowyn looks away, stepping aside and holding the door open in a wordless invitation. It's a long moment before she speaks, though, and when she does, her voice is low and hushed. "Many things happened," she says, and runs her hands down her face. "None of them good."

Another long moment before she finds it in her to explain a little more. "My king died in the Arena, and his lady, and the Halfling. So did others whom I swore to protect... you high among them," she adds, looking away again, and closes her eyes, hating her weakness, forcing herself to admit to it. Arya's concern is clear. Éowyn refuses to answer it with dishonesty. "But those three did not return. I did not even find them in that place, could not stand between them and their deaths. Could not even try. It is a bitter thing to learn, so fresh from my own defeat."

It all makes sense to her now: she was mourning. She regards her a little oddly, as though she's something to be studied, knowing how differently she'd dealt with her own grief - or not dealt with it, really. There hadn't been the time and space to do so, she'd had to hide her identity and keep one step ahead of death or capture the whole time. Instead of feeling sympathy for Éowyn - and she knows she ought to - she just feels jealous.

...That is until she considers it from another perspective. Éowyn had people here from her home, and now she was alone. Arya understood that loneliness better than anyone. She's never been particularly good at comforting others, has forgotten how to do it perhaps, along the road, or maybe it was part of being a genteel lady that was in her mother and Sansa to their core but had passed over her entirely. Words fail her, so she just stands there with her arms outstretched, offering comfort if Éowyn wishes to take it.

Éowyn looks at Arya for a long moment, feeling shamed by needing comfort, feeling guilty for resting any of the burden on someone she's already failed to protect. In the end, though, the need for contact, for forgiveness, outweighs her pride, and she drops to one knee to bring her closer to Arya's level, accepting the wordless offer with a tight, almost desperate embrace. Despite herself, she finds tears springing to her eyes, and she wipes at them with the heel of her hand as she pulls away, angry at her weakness.

"You must think me feeble indeed," she says quietly. "One solid blow, and I come apart at the seams. All I can say is that I am sorry."

Arya just shakes her head, reflecting that there's a time not long ago when she would indeed have thought her weak for this. "You saw me cry. You're the only one who's seen that ever since I was a baby. Here or in my world."

Éowyn clears her throat, running her hands down her face. "Then we are even," she says, trying and largely failing to make her tone light. "Though I ought still to seek your pardon. I tried to save you in the Arena, and all I did was rob you of your protector when you most needed him." It's sour in her mouth to even think of Tom as a protector - he who betrayed her king, who smiled as she burned, whose hateful face is etched on her mind - but she knows it's true. In this case, it would have been true.

If anything she just shakes her head even more vigorously. "Tom's my friend. I don't need a protector. Especially if I'm going to get killed by a girl even younger than me, that was just embarrassing. I need to be stronger on my own." Especially now Tom and Molotov wouldn't be in the Arenas with her any more. Despite her saying she didn't need a protector, she knew that's just what they were. She hated feeling as though she was cast out on her own yet again.

Éowyn looks long and hard at the smaller girl, scrubbing at her tears with her sleeve. At last, she says slowly, "You're right. You need allies, not guards. I wish I had seen that sooner; come to see you as a warrior before seeing you as a child." That's an apology in itself, for underestimating Arya, for thinking of her in a way Éowyn would have resented being seen herself.

She's quiet for another moment. Then, with a deep breath, she says, "Train with me. We both have much to learn. Perhaps we can learn it from one another. You can teach me with a bow, a knife, the light swords you favour; I with a shield, a spear, a longsword. You are right. You need to be stronger. And so do I."

"I haven't been able to think of myself as a child for a long time. Far longer than I've been here." It's a painful admission, but she knows she needs to lay things out plainly here. "I've been surviving this long, and anyone who tried to protect me is dead and gone. I don't want anyone to put me before themselves here." Especially because she didn't intend to put them before herself, either.

She looks excitedly at the idea of training together, especially as there's specific knowledge that she can pass on too. "I'm probably a little too short for a spear. But I want to learn to use one."

Éowyn half-smiles, rather bitterly. "Putting family before myself is a hard habit to break," she says, clasping Arya's shoulder for a moment. "And, to tell the truth, that is how I have begun to see you. The sister I was never granted." It's the first time she's said it aloud - frankly, the first time she's let herself think it - and considering that, it comes out with almost frightening ease. After all, if men can find brothers in battle, why should it be strange for her to find a sister?

She clears her throat, letting go of the younger girl's arm. "But if the best way I can serve you in this is training, well, then we shall both benefit. The spear is not my best weapon, either, but we can see what can be done."

Arya smiles nervously on hearing she thinks of them as family, the outward culmination of the myriad of feelings warring in her. She's lost so much family that she's afraid of attaching herself emotionally to anyone else in that way, but at the same time it's the greatest comfort she could ask for. She doesn't answer, but instead just pulls her back into a tight hug, squeezing her and pressing her face into her ribs.

"I want to show you how to use a bow. I should have in the last Arena, we had one, there just wasn't the time to stop and think."

"There was little time for thinking at all in that Arena," Éowyn agrees, rather sadly. "Yet now we have time in abundance, and it is a skill I should be glad to have. I ought to have taken my husband's advice, and let him teach me."

She hugs Arya back, just as tight, stroking the girl's short-cropped hair and closing her eyes for a moment. It doesn't ease her pain entirely to have Arya here, the Arena's end behind them. Aragorn is still dead, and Arwen, and the Halfling Samwise. She is still imprisoned, while her enemy gains stature and support. But it's something, not to be alone.

Arya resists the petty urge to say that she should have grabbed a weapon that she could actually use, in that case. She knows there was no time to stop and get their bearings at the cornucopia, and it was only due to Éowyn that Arya had emerged alive at all.

"Your husband wanted to teach you?" The idea is entirely strange to Arya, of a man encouraging his wife to learn to fight. Perhaps marriage wouldn't be entirely awful, in that case.

"Knowing I was a warrior," Éowyn agrees, with a little nod, and releases Arya from her embrace. "Thrice he suggested it, and thrice I turned him down. I had intended to change my ways, be a warrior no more but a Healer, and have death no more my companion." With a wry smile and a melancholy look in her eyes, she looks around her. "Though fate conspired against me in that, it seems."

"I wouldn't have," she insists in a way that almost sounds like she's boasting. "Even if I didn't want to kill any more people, I'd still want to learn." For no other reason than she thinks it's cool.

Éowyn's smile has something almost like grief behind it. "Then perhaps you are wiser than I," she says quietly. "I chose rather to turn all my time and efforts into healing, and that has availed me little enough here."

"This isn't a place for healing, it's a place for surviving." She feels almost philosophical saying it, but even so it's her pragmatism speaking. There's no time to heal wounds when even more are opening every day.

She allows that with a little tilt of her head, sighing. "I would that you were wrong. There are so many wounds here, and they run so deep. More of them by the day." With a little smile, she adds quietly, "But can I count the rift between us no longer among those wounds, at least?"

Arya nods, seemingly a little reluctantly, but only because clearing the air like this isn't something that has ever been in her nature.

"I thought you didn't like me any more," she admits. "My real sister hates me enough without losing you too."

"Oh, Arya..." Éowyn sighs quietly, stroking Arya's hair back. "You would have to do me great hurt indeed, ere I would let it sour me against you. I do but grieve, and stew in my own self-pity. You are a sister to me closer than kin. I do not have it in me to lose that."

She's silent for a moment, considering. "How do you grieve?" She realises it's a very personal question, but she hasn't lost that much of her childish tactlessness. "I never really got the chance. But I'm not sure I want to now, if I were able to. It would make the need for revenge go away."

Éowyn shakes her head. "It never goes away," she says, quietly. "It never has." She takes a deep breath, pressing her lips together. "Grief, for all I can see, is only a way of saying that it takes a time to learn to live with it. You never forget. You never forgive. But grief is making scars out of open wounds - the wound never passes out of sight or out of memory, but in time, you can lift a sword and shield again. As for how..." She shakes her head, rather helplessly. "In my case, it seems, by weeping and wondering what else I might have done, and cloistering myself away, and training until I drop that I might prevent it in the future. It is not so simple or so sharp as the poets make it sound."

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we'll all make more mistakes [CLOSED]

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