thecapitol | so don't turn away now

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so don't turn away now

Who| Sansa and Arya
What| Sisterly reunion
Where| The gym
When| A few days after Sansa's arrival
Warnings/Notes| Discussion of violence, abuse, etc. ASoIaF/GoT spoilers.

Sansa has taken some time to adjust to the Capitol, but probably less than expected. Truth be told, now that the shock has passed, now that she knows what's happening, she's just relieved to be here. However much of a prison it may be, the Capitol offers her more freedom, more safety, than King's Landing ever did. The things that frighten most new arrivals - the surveillance, the threat of violence, being forced to act and put out the impression other people tell you to - have so long been part of Sansa's life now that she doesn't even register them. And the new freedoms that come with being one of many, no more hated or guarded than the rest... she thanks the old gods and the new, every day, for delivering her to this place, this safe haven from all that's happened.

But the Games are still there, a looming spectre, and even if she has no expectation of winning them, part of the cost of this new relief is that she has to play. She gives herself a couple of days to luxuriate in the new freedom (no guards at her door, no violent mobs in the town streets, no summons to see those who wish her dead, and a room all her own without the Imp anywhere to be found), then heads to the training gym. If she is here, if she is going to win the audience, she has to at least appear to be training.

That's what brings her down to the gym twice daily. She gives up quickly on swords and spears, knowing she doesn't have the strength to wield them. But knives and poisons, she thinks to herself, are women's weapons. She can fight with those.

She's at the survival station, apparently checking what plants she can eat but actually considering poison methods, when she sees someone out of the corner of her eye. Just like Arya, she thinks with a stab of bittersweet grief, as the child stabs and slashes with a sword. And then she turns and looks properly, and it is Arya, Arya to the life, even with the short hair and the sharper lines it's Arya, and the basin Sansa is holding falls out of her suddenly nerveless hands, falling with a loud clatter onto the hard floor.

"Arya..."

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Joffrey ... Cersei ... Walder Frey ... The Mountain ... Meryn Trant ... The Hound ... Ilyn Payne ... Coriolanus Snow ... Plutarch Heavensbee ... She'd gotten used to saying the names in her head now rather than aloud, though it isn't half as satisfying. It was a necessity though, with the Capitolite names on the list now, but she also didn't want the media to draw attention to it and rake her past all over the television again. The slow, rhythmic thwack! of the training sword comes in the spaces between the names, as Arya strikes blows on every part of the metal dummy, a blank canvas on which to imagine her foes.

She's become capable of tuning out the entire world when she's like this. It's one of the few ways she has of coping here, the one space she can go to indulge her rage and her desperate need for vengeance. It's not until she hears her name, then, that she realises she's not alone.

The voice is very familiar to her, and yet strange at the same time, as it's one that shouldn't be here. She's tempted to think it's some sort of trick - she'd heard the mockingjays calling and screaming in her sister's voice in the first Arena she'd been in, after all. Slowly she turns, gripping the handle of the sword tight enough to turn her knuckles a ghastly white.

Her face falls as she sees Sansa before her, partly because she knows there can be only one reason for it: that she'll have to fight in the Arena too, something that Arya could deal with but that she knew her sister wasn't suited for in the slightest, and partly out of a childish, selfish, bitter disappointment that out of all of the family left to her they had to send Sansa.

All of that is quickly replaced by a sense of relief that washes through her, seeing her alive. Her first impulse is to run up and hug her, but she knows she'd die of embarrassment if she tried, and if Sansa even let her. Instead she just stands there awkwardly.

"When did you get here?"

"Three days ago." Sansa is still staring, looking as though she's seen a ghost. She can feel herself starting to tear up, though, her voice thick to her ears. She lets it happen. It can't do any harm for the Capitol to see her moved, if they really are watching. When she tries to say something more, though - tell Arya everything that's happened, say how glad she is to see her, anything to get out that tight knot of emotion in her throat - what she ends up blurting out is "Gods be good, Arya, what have you done to your hair?"

And then she starts crying. She does try not to, for Arya's sake, knowing how her little sister hates shows of emotion, but she can't help it. Arya's alive, and here, and safe. The Lannisters can't catch them here, they aren't traitors here, everything might be all right after all. At the same time, seeing Arya punches her in the gut with the memory of those family members she'll never see again, and there's grief as well as heartfelt relief in those tears. She scrubs at her tears with her sleeve, trying to pull herself together and failing.

Arya grits her teeth when she sees Sansa begin to cry, her mouth thinning into a tight line. "Stop it." That was one weakness she couldn't allow herself, one she'd never felt the need to do until she arrived in the Capitol and only indulged herself in once - still to her shame.

She frowns, her eyes darting to the side to look at her hair. It's longer than it's been in a long time, but still far shorter than it ought to be as the daughter of a Great House, the ends ragged around her shoulders, making her look even more like some wild creature. "I had to. It was easier to travel as a boy." Her tone sounds a little petulant, but it's only because she has no idea what to say to her sister. She vascillated between missing her and knowing she needed to save her on the one hand, and hating her for standing with the Lannisters on the other. She was the last person she expected to show up here, and she's not at all prepared to face her.

"I'm trying!" Sansa snaps back through her tears, irritated despite herself. "And I don't mean... oh, never mind!" Blowing her nose, she manages, over a few moments, to stop crying - or at least to get to a point where she's only sniffling, rather than the full-on sobs from before. She's always wept easily, but this is different. It's been so long since she had something to be happy about that such spikes of relief and joy keep taking her by surprise, making her cry in a totally different way from usual.

Weirdest of all is finding that even being aggravated by Arya has a kind of bittersweet joy to it. She's never realised until now, she thinks with a start, just how much she missed her sister's stupid temper and tomboyish ways and embarrassing stubbornness. If she didn't think she'd be slapped for her trouble, she'd hug Arya. As it is, she just wrings her hands together nervously, twisting her handkerchief between her fingers.

"...I didn't believe them," she says at last, awkwardly, her voice still rather thick. "When they said you were dead. They lied about everything else. But then... I mean, nobody knew where you were..." And they weren't lying about Robb.

Maybe she's not as gullible as Arya took her for, she reluctantly considers. She'd assumed that Sansa would have taken her for dead and never bothered to give her another thought as soon as Joffrey or the Queen suggested the idea. "They couldn't kill me," she says, intending it to be a boast but instead just sounding weary. "They were looking for me, but I was too clever for them."

"That was what I hoped," Sansa says quietly. "I thought maybe you'd have gone to the Wall, to be with Jon. Or back to Winterfell. Only they were looking in both those places, and I knew if they killed you they'd want everyone to know." She bites her lip. "Especially me. So I... I hoped..."

Hoped against hope, for the most part. She hadn't thought Arya had the wit to survive, if she was brutally honest with herself. She'd known nearly for sure the Lannisters hadn't got her, but that didn't mean much... there were bandits and Boltons, and the soldiers wouldn't have had to know who Arya was to kill her. Sansa won't say so, but she'd quietly convinced herself, in the watches of the night, that Arya was dead, dead in a ditch with maggots crawling on her the way they'd crawled on the displayed head of Eddard Stark.

"I was trying to get to the Wall." She says it quietly, the memories of the many setbacks she'd had even trying to get out of the Riverlands creeping up to the surface. Most of them she thinks Sansa could go without hearing about, particularly the torture she'd borne witness to in Harrenhal, but there was one thing that she felt her sister deserved to know. She looks up with serious, sorrowful eyes. "I made it as far as the Twins. Only then..." The screams of men, stench of blood, Stark banners burning in the back of her vision, Grey Wind's helpless yelps silenced, all mix around in her head and she pales a little as she continues. "I was there. I was too late."

Oh, gods... The tears spring to Sansa's eyes again despite herself. She bites back on them, catching her lip in her teeth and biting down until the skin goes white. She can imagine all too well what Arya saw, has seen it in her mind's eye a thousand times, but to actually be there...

"I'm sorry," she says, her voice thick. "Gods be good, Arya, I'm so sorry."

Arya's lips thin into a barely perceptible line as she sees the tears in Sansa's eyes, less at irritation at her than at knowing that she can't succumb to that weakness herself. She stares at her sister with her resentment clear on her face, jealous that she'd been shielded from such horrors as the Red Wedding while simultaneously incredulous that she'd chosen to support the Lannisters over her own family.

She's not sure what to say, so she just shrugs. "It's made everything here seem less awful in comparison, at least."

"It doesn't seem awful at all," Sansa says, without thinking, then sighs, closing her eyes. Of course, this is Arya, and she probably doesn't understand what Sansa means by that. "I mean, of course not everything here is perfect. But it's no worse than King's Landing. I'd rather fight in a thousand Arenas than go back there."

Her face contorts with disgust. "You didn't seem so eager to leave King's Landing before."

Sansa flinches, as if she's been slapped, and goes white as suddenly as flicking off a switch. It's a moment before she trusts herself to speak, and when she does, despite her best efforts to keep herself calm and steady, her voice is shaking.

"Joffrey took me up onto the wall to see Father's head," she hears herself say, as if from a distance. And she wants to stop herself, because this isn't fair, not on either of them, but she can't help it. "To see the maggots crawling on his face and the blood black on the pike. And he laughed. When they killed Bran and Rickon and burned Winterfell, when they killed Robb and Mother, he laughed, and I hated him. I hated him more than anything. Hated all of them. I never thought I could hate before." She isn't crying now. She's past crying. "I've had him paw and mock at me, I've had a mob baying for my blood, I've woken with the Hound standing over me, I've been married to the Imp and dreaded every night in case he touched me again... so hate me if you like. Blame me if you like. I can't ever, ever take it back and I wish I could, Arya, every night and day I do..." She takes a deep breath, bites her lip, and draws herself up to her full height. "Hate me if you like," she repeats. "You can't ever hate me more than that place made me hate myself."

Arya feels terrible for having thrown that at her as soon as the words leave her mouth. She can't really understand how terrible things must have been for Sansa, even as the rage and need to pay Joffrey back for everything he's done to her burns inside her. She can't quite match up the memory of Sansa standing up there with Joffrey and Cersei at Baelor's Sept with the abuse she must have suffered through, and she doesn't understand why she didn't just run away if things were really that terrible.

There's one detail in there that she focuses on though, her face wrinkling up in a childish disgust.

"...You're married? To the Imp?"

"To stop me leaving." Sansa presses her lips together, willing herself not to cry. She can't cry, mustn't. But she expected anything but sympathy from Arya, and the look on her sister's face knocks her right off-balance again. Her voice is quiet and sad. "They didn't tell me. Not until I was in the sept and there were guards at the door, and my... my husband waiting." There's a shudder in her voice. Better Tyrion than Joffrey, but she's never overcome her instinctive loathing for the half-man, certainly not when every thought of him is soaked in wine and wedding nights. "They tried to make me a Lannister lapdog, so I couldn't ever leave. But I'm a direwolf, even if my teeth aren't as sharp as yours."

That bit's more for the Capitol than for Arya, truth be told. A soundbite (not that she knows the word) to hint at the steel under the porcelain, make them think she has potential as a fighter after all.

Sansa Lannister echoes in her head over and over. It makes her feel sick. She'd been determined to take her sister back from the clutches of King's Landing, but she didn't know they had that legal claim over her. Not that it would have stopped Arya.

"I know you are," she says quietly, forcing herself to rise above all of the resentment she'd carried around for Sansa all this time. No matter what had happened, she was still her sister.

"He's dead, you know." Sansa casts around for words, and that's what comes out. "Joffrey. I killed him," she adds - a lie, but a useful one. Let them think her capable of murder. Nobody has to know how sick it made her to watch him die, and see the child he still was. Nobody has to know that her role in his assassination was as small as it was. Besides, everyone in Westeros already thinks her an accessory to regicide. Why not spin on that? "For what he did to Father, and to Robb and Mother. And to me. The North remembers."

Arya's face falls in crushing, bitter disappointment. "He can't be dead. I'm going to kill him." It was all that had kept her going here for a long time, reciting her list over and over, training to become stronger so that she would have no trouble in eliminating every name on there if-- no, when she got back to Westeros.

"What?" Sansa is thrown totally off-balance by that. "What does it matter? He's dead. Don't you understand? He killed Father and Robb and Mother, and now he's dead and he can't kill anyone else, why should it ever matter who killed him?"

"Of course it matters!" Arya is incredulous that Sansa should feel otherwise. "He had Father killed, and Mother and Robb were slaughtered for him, and Bran and Rickon, and Mycah, and Lady, and Grey Wind, and Syrio, and Lommy..." Her fists clench as the bile courses through her, the primal need to enact some sort of vengeance. "Knowing that I'm going to kill him is the only thing that's been keeping me going."

Sansa is quiet for a moment. Then, without any warning, she flares up into a sudden, hot rage that surprises her as much as anyone else. She's not hot-tempered, never has been, and it shocks her to find that she's suddenly almost shouting. "He's dead, Arya! He's dead, and there wasn't anything noble or fine or satisfying about it, he went purple and his eyes bulged and he died just like anyone else does, just like everyone else does, so how on earth can that have been what kept you going? What difference does it make? He died by poison, he died by your sword, he died of a pox, he died at the hands of the mob, who cares? It wouldn't have been noble, and it wouldn't have been brave, and it wouldn't have brought them back!"

Edited 2015-10-29 01:52 (UTC)

She's stunned that Sansa can't see just how important it is, not just to satisfy her own revenge but as a matter of principle, and what little honour they had left. She couldn't just walk away like a whipped dog - she was a wolf with claws and teeth to bite and kill, and the will to fight back.

"You don't understand anything!" she screams, hurling herself at Sansa with her fists clenched, a foolish child just wanting to hurt, wanting to let out what she's had to keep bottled up for so long.

"YOU WEREN'T THERE!" Sansa roars back, and it is a roar - something she didn't know she had in her, that long-hidden wildness under her perfect ladylike exterior. She's crying again, and she knows she shouldn't, but she can't bring herself to care. "Did you want me to wait, Arya? When they married me to the Imp, Joffrey said he'd come to my bed if he wanted! Stripped me to the waist in the Great Hall! Showed me Father's head on a pike, with the maggots crawling in and out, did you want me to wait for the right person to kill him?"

She doesn't fight Arya. Not with fists, anyway. She's never, ever been able to fight with fists, but her words, those she can sharpen to a razor's edge when anger and hurt fuel her. "Don't you dare, Arya, don't you dare tell me I don't understand! What do you understand? You weren't there, you weren't there, so don't you tell me how it was!"

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so don't turn away now

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ahaha did not expect this whoops

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