A/N: starts with GOT s1e2. crossposted from AO3 and tumblr.

Arya listens to the guards grow closer and closer. Yelling, armor clamoring. If she turned around, she'd probably see the lights from their torches.

She doesn't turn around. Instead, she stares in growing desperation at Nymeria, who refuses to leave her side. Arya knows what will happen to her if they're caught. She tries everything but yelling, because that will only draw the guards closer: pushing, shoving, angry words. Eventually she starts throwing rocks at Nymeria, trying to force her to run away, to follow her instincts.

'She's just a wolf', Arya thinks, close to tears as she can make out the individual words the guards are calling out. Any moment one of them will get close enough to spot them. And then they will cut Nymeria in half and give her carcass to the butcher. Who knows what the king will do to her; he was supposedly her father's friend, but Arya knows that father didn't want to go to King's Landing, yet here they are, so friendship can't matter all that much to him.

There is also the fact that she is a child; she is cold and tired and scared and she didn't mean to hurt the Prince but he had attacked her friend! What was she supposed to do, stand aside and let him? Like Sansa did?

So Arya looks at Nymeria, who is still sitting there, refusing to leave her side, refusing to run and save herself. Arya who is cold and tired and scared, who doesn't know what is going to happen to her, looks down at this dire wolf who protected her when her sister didn't, looks into Nymeria's eyes and sees a plea there:

'Come with me.'

When the guards come upon the spot she and Nymeria had been hiding in, they are long gone. Arya went with Nymeria, she ran and she ran and she ran, her wolf racing alongside her. I won't say she never looked back, because she did. But she never once stopped.

Needle was abandoned at the campsite, buried in Arya's packs. Her father finds it weeks later, and when he does he throws his head back and laughs and laughs and laughs, because of course she would.

Arya never meets Syrio Forel; there is no trainer to help her learn to fight with a sword. And that would be pointless anyway, because she no longer has one. He cannot teach her to be agile, or swift, or cunning, or stealthy, but that doesn't mean she doesn't learn these things.

She learns from Nymeria, and from the wilderness around her. She has to be agile to make it through the woods. She has to be swift and stealthy to catch her food, though Nymeria does most of the work in the beginning. Arya has to be stealthy as well as cunning to avoid the men who travel through the woods: Mercenaries, guards, merchants, soldiers.

Arya also has to be stealthy in order to steal clothes from villages nearby, because her plainclothes weren't meant to stand up to this kind of abuse. Breaking into places is hard, but she does it, getting food until she learns how to properly cook the things Nymeria brings her, and eventually, how to hunt all on her own.

She's almost caught quite a few times, in the beginning. But Nymeria is always there, waiting to defend her and help her escape. The people start to tell stories about the wild girl who lives in the woods with a wolf as her protector, like some sort of wildling.

Before long, Arya realized that hunting would be much easier if she had a bow, like the one her brothers had trained with back at Winterfell. So the next time a group of soldier camp out in the woods she calls home, she sneaks into their camp, long after most of them have gone to sleep, and steals a bow, and a quiver full of arrows.

She would have taken one from one of the nearby villages, but, well, most people didn't carry weapons. Most people couldn't afford them.

The bow wasn't perfect. It was too large for her, and the strength required to draw it was almost too much. But it was better than nothing. She spent almost two weeks practicing with it before she could hit anything more than a few yards away, and even then, she missed almost as much as she hit.

Sometimes she wished she were a wolf, like Nymeria was. Then she wouldn't need weapons; she could just hunt with her teeth and her claws, could track with her nose. Arya even had dreams about it sometimes, ones that were so convincing she almost believed she was a wolf, until she woke.

Arya tore into the rabbit she'd just pulled off the fire; the last two days her and Nymeria's hunts had turned up almost nothing, and she was ravenous. She was so focused on her food she didn't notice the shapes creeping up on her camp until it was too late.

Her eyesight, dimmed by the fire, could just make out one, two, three… six of them, creeping foreword, towards her and Nymeria.

It took her a moment to recognize the figures in front of her: wolves. An entire pack of them, from the looks of it. Arya hadn't ever seen any wolves besides Nymeria; the ones in front of her looked unusually small, until she remembers that Nymeria was a direwolf. She was already a good six inches taller than the ones padding towards them.

Arya inched her hand slowly towards her bow, not sure how the wolves would react to the sudden movement. It didn't seem to faze them at all, though; they were almost within spitting distance at this point, and their eyes were darting between her and Nymeria, who still lay on the ground next to her.

"Nymeria," she whispered out of the corner of her mouth, her voice cracking from disuse. She let out a huff that Arya almost labeled a sigh before pushing to her feet, a low growl creeping from her chest. Arya could almost feel it through the ground.

The wolves halted in their tracks, their eyes all on Nymeria now. One of the wolves tensed, its lips peeling back from its teeth in a snarl, but Nymeria simply growled louder and it stopped, its ears pushing back against its skull. The other wolves hung their heads and rolled them to the side, baring their necks.

The challenger (because Arya could recognize that snarl for what it was; she'd had surprisingly similar conversations with her mother) crept foreword until it was right next to Nymeria, who was still growling, and licked her muzzle. Suddenly her growling stopped, and the resulting silence was jarring.

The rest of the pack of wolves moved forward and Nymeria padded among them, nuzzling their flanks while they circled around her, until one by one all of them sunk to the ground. Nymeria laid down next to them, seemingly content, and then turned to stare at Arya expectantly.

Arya stared back uncertainly, not sure what she was supposed to do now, or even what had just happened. Nymeria kept staring at her for a few moments before tilting her head at the open space to the left of her. Did…was she supposed to go lie down with them?

Just as slowly as she had picked it up, Arya set her bow down, and walked slowly over towards the pile of wolves whom Nymeria had just accepted for reasons Arya couldn't wrap her head around. As she settled down next to Nymeria like she did every night, some of the other wolves flicked their ears towards her in acknowledgement but otherwise did nothing.

Arya's eyes slowly slipped shut from the warmth emanating from Nymeria and the other wolves, rabbit forgotten; her last coherent thought was that it felt oddly nice, having a pack again, even if it wasn't really hers.

Arya woke up the following morning thinking it had all been a dream, and was surprised to find herself in the middle of the pack that had crept up on them last night.

She was even more surprised when it kept happening.

Every few nights a new group of wolves would appear, go through the same motions as the first, and then settle with them. Soon it seemed as though dozens of wolves were following her and Nymeria through the woods as they hunted for food, and for a new campsite.

There were so many of them that they didn't even all stay with them; some of the wolves simply prowled around their sites, sleeping in groups almost a third of a league away. But when they started moving again, the entre pack moved with them.

Whenever Arya hunted alone through the woods, Nymeria having run off to follow a different scent, she would catch glimpses of them moving through the trees around her. Sometimes, they would drive prey her way, so she could hit it with one of her arrows and bring it down. They even left some of it for her, so she could haul it back to the fire and cook it.

Her aim had gotten much better, over the weeks since the other wolves had started finding her and Nymeria. She could hit a rabbit at nearly fifty paces now, while it was running. The bigger animals, like deer, were harder to find but easier to hit. She started to pick up tracking as well, recognizing the paw prints of all the different animals and the signs of their movements through the brush.

It took a while to get used to the howling. The wolves that were furthest away would start it, and then the calls would echo closer and closer until Nymeria herself started howling. It would go on for almost an hour, sometimes.

They called out about fresh kills, too, and if they got lost. At least, Arya thought it was when they got lost; a lone wolf would call out and the rest of them would answer, and then the lone wolf got closer and closer until they burst through the trees and the others came up to surround them.

Sometimes Arya wanted to howl with them. Come find me, I'm right here!she wanted to call out. But she knew that her family wasn't coming for her. They would never find her here. So she stayed silent, and listened to the wolves around her.

The only wolf Arya could really recognize was the one from the first pack that had joined them, the one that had challenged Nymeria.

His fur was a russet color, almost like Robb's hair had been, with streaks of black along its spine and shoulders. His eyes were an unsettling shade of yellow, so bright they seemed to glow in the dark.

Nymeria seemed to like him, at least. They laid down, their flanks pressed together, silently watching the comings and goings of the rest of the pack, and Arya wondered if maybe he was Nymeria's mate.

One night, she sat next to them as she finished off the second little squirrel she'd caught earlier, and talked with them. Arya would say at them, because obviously they didn't talk back, but something about the way they glanced at her made her feel like they were really listening.

"You know, you should probably have a name. You're always sitting around here, and I can't really just keep referring to you as 'that one wolf that sort of looks like Robb', even if its only in my head." Arya dropped the bones next to her and started to lick her fingers clean, looking at the wolf thoughtfully all the while.

"Ooh, I could just call you Robb," she said, but as soon as the words left her mouth she dismissed them. It sent a pang of sadness through her every time she said one of her brothers' names.

"Aegon, maybe? I mean, Nymeria was a queen who conquered Dorne, maybe you should be a conqueror, too." The name had merit, but it didn't quite fit in Arya's mind.

She thought back to the night he had first appeared and another idea struck her. "I know; Torrhen! The king who knelt. It's a northern name, which fits better 'cause you're a wolf, and you sort of knelt to Nymeria when you first met her."

Torrhen, newly christened, and Nymeria both glanced at her, but they didn't really seem to have an opinion one way or another, so Arya took that as assent.

Arya crept through the woods, almost as silent as Nymeria, tracking the hoof prints of the doe that had been eluding her for four days now. She'd almost had it yesterday, but then one of the wolves had raced right behind her knees and thrown off her shot.

She usually didn't go this far from the center of the pack, but it had made her frustrated enough to follow the deer until she brought it down, and the deer had wisely left the woods where the wolves were currently prowling.

The prints were becoming softer and softer, meaning the doe had to be close. Arya quietly slipped her bow off her back and strung it, then pulled an arrow from her quiver and nocked it.

The brush in front of her rustled slightly and she smirked, knowing she'd finally caught it, and slowly walked foreword. Suddenly the doe burst from the leaves, racing towards her so fast she didn't have time to do anything but roll out of the way.

"Seven hells!" Arya growled under her breath. What in the gods' names could have scared that deer so badly?

"Ah, damn it all. That could have fed almost a third of us tonight!" A man appeared from the same direction the deer had come from, but he froze the second he saw her lying there. In that split second she scrambled to her feet and drew the arrow that by some miracle she hadn't broken when she fell.

The man was almost as quick, once the shock had worn off, and then they were both standing there, arrows pointed at each other, though where she was angry and slightly scared, he was simply bemused.

"Well, what do we have here?"

"Who the hell are you?" They both said at the same time, amusement leaking into his voice while hers was rough with disuse.

Arya scowled at him, her bow arm still taut. "That was my deer you scared off."

He laughed. "Well, it wasn't really your deer, now was it? If it was you'd've killed it."

"I've been tracking that doe for four days!"

He looked like he was about to laugh again, but his eyes flicked behind her for a moment and she remembered that men travel in packs, same a wolves, and that maybe this one hunted in a pack, too. So Arya spun halfway around, keeping the archer in her line of sight and spotting the two other men who'd been creeping up behind her.

Arya swallowed the urge to snarl. These weren't wolves; it wouldn't be seen as a challenge, as a warning to back off. They'd probably just laugh at her again. She couldn't scare them off, they were men grown. Unless…

Arya didn't really want to hurt them. Shooting rabbits and deer and squirrels was a far cry from shooting men. She glanced at the three men again. There. One of the men who'd snuck up behind her. He was standing right in front of a tree, and still enough to make an easy target.

Without warning, she swiveled in his direction and fired, aiming for the loose cloth along his sword arm. Her feet were moving before the arrow even landed, dashing away from the small clearing and through the trees behind her. As she made her escape she heard curses coming from behind her, and soon after the sound of someone scrambling after her.

If she could just make it to the wolves, she would be safe. It wasn't too far; it had only been about thirty minutes since she'd last seen one, and that was going all slow and quiet.

Arya recalled how the wolves found their way back to the pack, but before she could even open her mouth an arrow was driving itself into the tree right next to her head. It startled her so badly she stopped, just for a moment, and then it was all over.

Arya bit and scratched and clawed and growled every step of the way, but soon the three men were dragging her into their camp. Her only source of satisfaction was that the men were almost as unhappy with her as she was with them.

A man walked up to them as they pulled her to a stop. She was still squirming and cursing at them, but after they'd tied her hands up with rope and taken her bow and her quiver, there wasn't much she could do.

"What the hell is this?" The man asked.

"We caught her in the woods, thought we should bring her back."

"The brotherhood without banners isn't in the business of kidnapping little girls," the man said, his displeasure with them clear.

The archer, the one who was currently trying to hold her still, shrugged. "We found her on the hunt, all by her lonesome. It's a dangerous place for little girls, especially given all the wolves we've been hearing around here."

"I'm not a little girl!" She shouted, still struggling.

The archer laughed again. "Really? Then what are you?"

She turned around and glared at him, her eyes sharper than Nymeria's. "I'm a wolf."

His smile slowly slipped away as he studied her face, taking in her haphazard clothing, made up of animal pelts and dirty cloth, and glanced at the bow and arrows the uninjured man was carrying.

"Where are you from, little wolf?" The man who had walked up to them asked.

Arya turned her glare on him, remaining silent.

He crouched down so they were at eye level. "I promise, we mean you no harm. If you tell us where your home is, I can ensure you're taken back there."

Arya stares at his face, her glare fading for a moment.

Home.

She doesn't even know how long it's been since she'd seen Winterfell. Months, certainly. Her mother and her brothers are still there, even if Father and Sansa had gone on to court without her. Suddenly there is nothing she wants more than to walk through those gates again, hear her mother scolding and Theon and Robb laughing and Shaggydog terrorizing everyone while Rickon screeched in delight.

Her eyes water and she pushes the tears away roughly, still staring at the man crouched in front of her. For a moment she hesitates; there was no guarantee they would take her home. But then she sees her brothers and her sister again and she can't get it out fast enough.

"Winterfell. I'm from Winterfell."

One of the men behind her sniggers. "Right. And I'm the King in the North."

The man in front of her doesn't laugh, though, doesn't even take his eyes off her face.

"And what's your name, little wolf?"

"Arya. Arya Stark."

The men behind her aren't laughing anymore. One of them sputters. "Thoros, you can't– you can't seriously believe her? Arya Stark hasn't been seen since before her father was–"

The man–Thoros– cuts him off. "I can see it; she looks just like Ned Stark. Has the same face."

The other one starts to protest again, but then the archer speaks up. "Look at the fletching on her arrows: Stark colors. And she did say she was a wolf."

Arya glances back at her quiver; she hadn't even thought of that, that the arrows could belong to her father's men. It didn't make any sense; why would her father's men be traveling through the south? She shook off the question; it didn't matter, not really, not if these men would take her home.

"So, you'll bring me back to Winterfell?"

The men behind her aren't laughing and Thoros' eyes are sad; the wolf inside of her howls.

A/N: let me know what you think! drop a line on tumblr if you want to discuss GOT.