When One Goes Missing

Chapter One

ARYA

No One sat up on her cot with a sudden jerk, which tore her from the realm of sleep.

No One took a few deep breaths and like every day before, she forgot Someone.

No One then proceeded to go about her day.

She went out into the world and learned more than three new things. There hadn't been a sighting of Others in Westeros for a year. The Salt Wife had been found murdered in her sleep.

And a deserter of the Nightswatch sat two barstools away.

She wore no false face when she followed him to his room and drove Needle down his throat. He made a loud gurgling sheath, but she didn't retract her sharpened gift until the blood stopped flowing and began to dry on her fingers.

She sat in her cell cleaning her fingernails, trying to forget Someone. She scraped the brown flecks and ground them into the stone with the heel of her boot. She tried to remember that she was No One.

This wasn't the first of the Nightswatch to escape to Braavos. It was a port on the way to the Free Cities and the laws of Westeros did not apply there. This man was neither the first to escape nor the first of which she'd killed. There had been at least twelve, increasing in number every year.

No One was not Ned Stark's daughter. She wasn't the person meant to enforce the laws of the north. She knew no Old Gods, or their ways. She cared for no laws of men. Only the God of Many Faces and the gift she'd been chosen to give. And yet she killed the deserters all the same.

No One should have no loyalties or affiliations to anyone else, and yet the knife came down again and again all the same.

Angry with herself, she smashed the cup of water against the wall. A hollow clang echoed out into the corridor and down the dark, dank hall. She seethed and raged, kicking at the cot and the walls, wishing she didn't know why this one was different.

The man she'd killed was younger than her. Enough years had passed that 'men' of the Nightswatch, the men responsible for the protection of the Seven Kingdoms were able to be her junior. Old enough to have joined and run away.

And here she was hiding.

Growing up had been a nebulous concept to Arya Stark all her life. It was a wispy gossamer maybe-one-day leaking in the fog of the future. It was something to be left to later, when she had time.

She was a woman grown now, flowered.

It has been ten long years since Arya Stark has been allowed to own to that name. She has been many things since then: Arry, Weasel, Nymeria, Salty, Cat of the Canals, Beth the Beggar Girl, Ugliness personified in and out, acolyte, taker-of-life, giver-of-death. She has worn a hundred faces, stretched taught over the skin she was born with, covering it up, hiding it beneath truer masks.

Eventually she learned to change her features at will, no longer must she wear the lives of those long dead, whose faces were stripped from bodies whose gift had been received. No longer must she feel their pain.

No longer must she feel.

But she does nonetheless, though she knows she must not. The kindly man who always seemed to see right through her as a child either grew lax, or she had feared his wisdom naively.

The older she grows, the more she realizes how little the men around her know.

The kindly man could see her no better than Gendry, Sansa or anyone else.

Arya reclaims herself in secret. She takes her name and keeps it close to her chest, writing it in her heart and etching it in her mind, because it could be so very easy to forget again.

She knows that she must find her way home.

And so Arya Underfoot learned everything she could, accumulating knowledge in much the same way beggars collect groats and pennies. Except no one could steal her knowledge once taken. Knowledge can only be misplaced with carelessness.

Once, she had blindly learned to see without eyes; deafly she learned to hear without ears. She learned to speak in the languages of the isles, in the Old Tongues long disused, in the clunky lingo of Summerland slavers. She learned to move through shadows.

She learned to disappear.

One day she disappears from the House of Black and White, when they have nothing left to teach her.

On her last night in the temple the kindly man says to her, "Who are you?" He hasn't asked in years, so she thinks maybe he must know. Maybe he has always known. Maybe she had not been mistaken in thinking that this man who served all gods and men could see right through to her shriveled deadened core; to the angry black hole of fury, fire and cold that took the place of her heart once upon a horseback as she was carried away from a Wedding-made-Funeral. Or perhaps it was as she clung to a pillar watching her father's head roll across the floor that it dropped out of her chest and fell down in the dirt at her feet.

Maybe it's selfish to leave. She's taken things from them; their time and knowledge. Two things they can never steal back. But Arya Stark stopped caring about anyone but herself a very long time ago.

It takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, it is said. She spent 87,600 or so hours with the god of many faces, but she's spent her life learning ferocity and anonymity.

Crossing the sea is easy work when one's face changes with the tides. She can be anything. And while once she had wished the gods had made her a man, she feels a sort of satisfaction that these days she can make it so. There is a sense of accomplishment at cheating them at their own game of creation.

She steps off the gangway into what was once Lannisport.

It has been ten years, Winter has come and gone, but then again, Winter is always coming. There is no one left to know her face and so she wears her own and no one else's. She tries to remember to be glad of that- there is yet work to be done-but she finds that's harder than it should be.

Arya Stark finds the world very different than when she stepped out of it. She'd left the Seven Kingdoms as they were being torn apart and asunder.

She returns to a world of peace.

Daenerys Targaryen sits upon the Iron Throne, dragons rule the skies; dark shrouds of shadow upon the land, reminders of darker times.

Ser Ilyn Ser Meryn Ser Dunsen Raff the Sweetling Queen Cersei

All dead, while Arya had waited half a lifetime to deal the blows.

She thinks it a little unfair and wonders how she could have expected any different. Satisfaction has been something denied to her since childhood, why should her ultimate absolution be any different.

She had waited so long…

SANSA

There must always be a Stark in Winterfell, but the woman whose seat it is, is no Stark at all. She is many things, but not that. Thrice married, twice to the same man, Sansa has been countless things in the intervening years but not one of them has been a Stark, and not one of them has ever been happy.

Daenerys Targaryen is an impressive woman. She is what Sansa thinks her sister might have been if she'd lived: fierce and fiery, quick to anger, but not witless. The older she gets the more she can see what Arya once knew to be Truth; there is no god but death, no master but oneself, no destiny but what one makes for herself. Sansa spends her twilights among the heart trees nonetheless. She is a friend to the beautiful queen, as much a friend as any queen may ever really have. As much a friend as any Lannister may be.

For that is what she is these days. Lady Sansa Lannister of Casterly Rock and Winterfell; though in name only. For she has not been to her family's seat for a long time. Her place is with her husband, and a Hand's place is beside his sovereign.

It is the other Hand she worries for these days.

Jon Snow is Dany's Left and is more Stark than she, though the name can never belong to him. He is Blood and Fire and Ice through and through. Rheagal's lord and master. The Third Head.

Jon Targaryen is the unfamiliar name he now bears. A scion of two houses, only one of which can claim him.

Sansa would have given anything not to be the last, to give over the lordship, to have a brother once again; for she had not had one in so long that she'd forgotten what it was like. It was what her father would have wanted.

But Daenerys Targaryen is not someone who can be denied.

So Sansa does not call him brother, though she wishes she could. She'd taken great pain in her childhood to correct people who thought otherwise. He was her half brother. And now he was not even that. She regrets it all very much now. She regrets a great deal these days.

Sansa is the last. The only.

And there are no Starks left in Winterfell.

JON

Jon loves many people. He loves his queen, he loves Maester Samwell, and he even loves the gruff Bear who is his old Lord's son and Lord Commander of the Queensguard. He loves his sister-who-is-not-his-sister.

Sometimes there is so much relief that bubbles up in Jon that he can't breathe and his lungs never seem to run out of air to exhale.

Other times he remembers.

He remembers his brothers upon the wall who betrayed him and died when it crumbled about their ears.

He remembers his father who died leading the best example he could.

He remembers Bran and Rickon, who died too early.

He remembers Robb and how he died and what he died for. And sometimes he misses him most of all.

That is, until he remembers that Arya could be anywhere in the world.

More than all his other siblings Arya Underfoot understood him best. She too felt outcast from the rest, in skin that belonged not to her, in circumstances too contrary to her spirit. Life had teased him with not-quite glimpses of her. None true.

"Where is my sister?!"

And maybe his decision had been made then, when he stopped valuing his brothers above one little girl who turned out not to be of his blood at all. And yet it mattered not, his vows mattered less. Importance was placed highest on a child he'd handed a sword as a parting gift.

A child he had been waiting to be returned to him ever since their parting.

And maybe he was still waiting. Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to give up.

Jon would wait forever, and whenever she returned it would not be as a child. So he mourned what she was and waited with forever-baited breath for what she must now be.