I recognize you're a hideous thing inside

[fearcutsdeeperthanswords]

CHARACTERS: Alayne Stone, No-Name Jeyne
LOCATION: Alayne's room
WARNINGS: sad Stark feelings :c run :C
SUMMARY: After letting Jon know she's here but Arya's dead.
NOTES:--


She'd called him a bastard. He hated her. Ghost was angry. He didn't understand.

That was the worst of it; he didn't understand. She still wanted to scream, and rage, to rage at him for being so stupid as to not see, to not see how he'd get himself killed if he stays so honorable, like Robb did, like Bran and Rickon, even if they're all here, alive, now.

He didn't understand.

But Alayne did.

It was night, and most of the sounds of others had been drowned out by the time she pulled herself toward the engine room, where she could listen to whatever made the ship run and pretend to feel that power thrum through her skin. She couldn't take strength form foreign machinery, but she could tell herself she did. She dragged herself away from the hole she'd intended to sleep in, and headed for the passenger compartments. Alayne understood that honor and truth could kill you, even if, maybe, she didn't understand that killing could keep you alive too. Her weapons were all words, and Arya's words had failed.

Comments

[wont]

Alayne was used to visitors, though most came to her during the day. Daytime aboard the Tranquility seemed a very arbitrary thing, given how there were no windows, no sun to rise and fall in the sky, and no rooster's crow to herald the morn. But a pattern had been established long before Alayne's own arrival, and so the passengers adopted to it and kept it as their own. And by the pattern's estimation, it was very late. She felt weary and now that she was alone, Alayne felt she was able to let her shoulder's droop. It was difficult work, keeping secrets, and though she'd been graced with the ability to sing and sing well, it was tiring business that held no promise of relief. So long as Sansa's siblings remained, so long as her father was aboard the ship, there would be twin points that pulled on Alayne's heart, each set at separate poles of a great compass at the very center of her being. And it was her task to navigate between one and the other, trading one face for another, erasing and rewriting the name upon her heart from day to day to day.

In that way, she was truly her sister's sister — Arya who was no longer Arya, Sansa who was no longer Sansa, each the sweet shadow of a dead girl who loved the other more than they'd ever managed to love their sisters.

At this time of night the ship was quiet, save for the hum of distant motors, that constant thrum that never stopped and buzzed always in the back of Alayne's mind, even when held by the deepest throes of sleep. The corridor outside Alayne's bedroom door still and without movement but then Lady, who'd been dozing at the foot of Alayne's bed as she sewed, pricked her ears and turned towards the doorway as if expecting something. Her first reaction was to think it Petyr, for often her father would visit her throughout the day. His trips at night, however, were much different and what happened behind those closed doors was not meant for anyone to know. (More secrets, more whispers, more weights hung around Alayne's shoulders and throat to tug her down, more boldness and bravery —between you and I, Sansa.— lining her skirts and lifting her up.)

In expectation, she stood and smoothed the shoulders of her dress. Atop his gilded cage, Castle flapped his white wings, unsettling and then settling again.