A/N: I own nothing related to Game of Thrones or the included lyrics. I'm just a person who wanted a deeper exploration of the reunion between Arya and Sansa, and figured I would probably have to write that myself. I hope you all enjoy my take!
SISTER OF MINE
"Does your arm reach?
Where there's blood there's always bone
You say you won't harm me
Where there's loss there's always home."
- Losing our Control, The Naked and Famous
She slipped soundlessly through the darkness, a shadow more phantom than physical, skirting the edge of the flickering light cast by the flame in her sister's hand. The Weirwood was silent, disturbed only by the faintest of wind, and outside the small circumference of the torch it was dark enough that the world may have disappeared without their notice. Sansa knelt on furs at the base of the crimson-branched tree, and if Arya hadn't known better, she would have sworn the older girl was praying.
But she wasn't. The gods abandoned them long ago.
Arya watched for a while, comfortable in the darkness, unsure of whether she would be welcome. It was only happenstance that found her here anyway - a late night walk across the grounds, a fleeting glimpse of her sister slipping out the doors alone, a ghostly hook that moved her to follow. To understand. To protect.
Sansa was different now. They all were, of course - barely the same people they once were at all, more different from their younger selves than they were alike. The world had broken them countless times and assembled them back together with questionable glue and wax, pieces moved and flipped and lost altogether, leaving behind a shell that was only moderately convincing. Arya had expected nothing else. But the changes in her sister shocked her more than those in Bran, and she wasn't sure why.
"You can come out."
Arya jolted and went still. Who else had arrived? How had she missed them? Her hand fell to Needle as she glanced around herself cautiously, ready to strike.
No one appeared.
"Arya, I know you're there."
Frowning in the darkness, Arya allowed her body to relax despite being deeply irritated. Hesitating a moment, she slowly moved forward to enter the far edge of the torch's illumination, crossing the sharp line in the snow that divided the light from the darkness.
"How did you know?" Arya demanded.
Sansa didn't turn around, but acknowledged the question with a single bemused laugh. "You're not the only one capable of stealth."
There it was again, Arya realized - that unsettled feeling. She had a well-developed image of her sister, a picture she had revisited frequently over the years: young, girlish, romantic, well put-together. All the stereotypes of a "lady," all the qualities Arya shirked and derided. She wouldn't have called her older sister weak, but nor would strong have been in the top ten words ever used to describe her. Watching her now, Arya suspected that Sansa was far more dangerous than she seemed, more iron than lace.
Sansa turned her head slightly. "Come on, then. There's plenty of room if you want to join."
As Sansa scooted over on the furs, Arya made her way over to sit upon the island in the snow. She ran her hands along the fur, course and soft at the same time, and was reminded of Nymeria. Of Lady. Of Ghost and Grey Wind and Summer and Shaggydog. Of Father and Mother and Robb. Of what home once meant and never would again.
"Couldn't sleep?" asked Arya quietly, gazing up at the wicked face of the ancient tree.
"Are you still able to?"
"No."
The sisters were quiet again. There was so much to say that it felt impossible to say anything at all.
"Father always loved this place," Sansa went on after a time. "I remember him coming out here to think. To pray. To center himself. I never understood it - it was always just a dirty stand of trees to me. Sitting out here was boring."
Arya had a vision of her sister: younger, face twisted in disgust at the suggestion of playing outdoors. She was always in a pristine dress, always so easy to poke fun at when Arya felt compelled - which she had, every day.
"When we left, I realized I missed it. It's peaceful here. It's ours. It feels safe in a way that nothing else has since we left Winterfell." She paused for a moment, staring determinedly forward, refusing to make eye contact with Arya, and when she spoke again, her voice was hesitant in a way the younger girl hadn't heard from her yet. "I keep hoping that if I come out here like Father did, I'll find the wisdom he always seemed to. But all I've found are trees."
Sansa's voice was barely above a whisper, a dissipating sigh filled with exhaustion. Her shoulders seemed to drop with the acknowledgment of her fruitless search, her eyes underlined by sharp circles.
Arya studied her sister's profile in the shifting light. "You're Lady of Winterfell. You don't seem to be doing too badly."
Sansa snorted again and looked down with a sad smile. "I'd forgotten how dumb you are."
Arya smirked at the familiar insult. "And you're so smart, princess?"
Sansa's smile faded, and Arya felt the breath leave her lungs as she realized that the once-innocent taunt held far too many demons now.
"That's the crux of it, isn't it?" Sansa observed slowly, brow tightening with thought. "I've been a Princess of the Seven Kingdoms and a Lady of Winterfell, and I was more helpless under those lofty names than any other time in my life. Titles mean nothing without power to back them up."
"Is that your goal now? To gain power?" Arya's tone was neutral, tinged with curiosity rather than judgment.
Sansa stiffened at the question, and Arya thought she might not answer. "I refuse to be helpless again," she whispered at last, her voice a knife, vulnerability gone. "Joffrey, Ramsay, Littlefinger, so many others . . . I refuse. I would rather burn them all down then allow them to control me again."
The girls sat quietly in the wake of Sansa's honesty. The wind flung their hair around their heads as winter's chill bit into their skin.
"I was in the crowd that day. When Father was killed."
Sansa turned to look directly at her sister for the first time.
"I saw you up there," the younger girl said softly. "I remember your screams when Joffrey turned on you and ordered it done." It was Arya who now stared determinedly forward, refusing to look in Sansa's direction.
Sansa closed her eyes as the words surfaced a memory she had long tried to bury. It was still painfully vivid: the cold sunshine on her face, the restraint of metal-clad arms, the jeering of the bloodthirsty crowd, the impossibly thunderous thud of the axe as it split flesh and entered wood. She could still feel it reverberating through her bones.
"That was where my list began," Arya went on tonelessly, as if reciting facts from a history text. "Joffrey. Cersei. Illyn Payne. The Hound. More and more names as the days went on. I recited them over and over, fell asleep to them at night, woke to them in the morning. That list has been my prayer, the only thing that's kept me going."
"You never tried to come home?"
"Of course I tried," Arya said matter-of-factly. "I spent years trying - passed from one group to another, everyone promising me I'd make it back to Winterfell, or to Jon at the Wall, but I never quite seemed to get there. And then one night, I actually found Mother and Robb."
Sansa sat up straighter, picturing Arya reuniting with their mother. The thought filled her with an unreasonable joy - the possibility that her sister might have found the thing Sansa once wanted most in the world.
"It was at the Twins. The night of Robb's wedding." Arya's voice edged beyond toneless into something different altogether, her eyes staring through the bark of the Weirwood tree, looking almost as dead as the face in the wood.
The joy vanished. A soft pained noise cut the night, and Sansa realized with a shock that it had come from her. "Arya . . ."
"I was in the courtyard when the Freys murdered our guards. I watched them kill Grey Wind. I tried to rush in, but the Hound dragged me away."
"The Hound?"
"He wasn't quick enough to keep me from seeing," Arya went on as though Sansa hadn't spoken. "They decapitated Robb and Grey Wind both. They mounted Grey Wind's head on Robb's body and paraded him through the courtyard."
Sansa felt a shudder run through her, a heave almost like a gag, a visceral response that left her shaken even as Arya remained inhumanly stoic.
"My list got longer that night. Everything else faded away. They will all pay for what they've done, every last one of them." Arya paused for a moment. "What power is to you, vengeance is to me."
Sansa felt a chill as her blood turned to ice, knowing the younger girl meant every word. It shook her on a deep level - the feisty tomboy that drove her crazy throughout childhood, the sister she spent years believing was dead, somehow alive and changed into a ruthless killer.
But how could she expect any less after the things she'd seen?
Could Sansa herself claim to be any nobler?
She hesitated to ask the next question, afraid of the answer. "Have you started on this list?"
Arya turned to glance at Sansa, and the two made eye contact for the first time. They each studied the other, appraising and sizing up. "I'm not sure you want to know the answer to that."
Sansa nodded slowly, weighing her words, contemplating this version of her sister that felt at once both frightening and sympathetic, strange and familiar.
"I'm not sure how much you know of Ramsay Bolton," she offered slowly after a long moment of consideration. "I knew nothing before I was given to him as a present, placed with him for my protection. But his cruelty was unmatched. The things he did to me . . . " Sansa felt her breath catch as her voice became unsteady, pushed away images she refused to acknowledge. She closed her eyes, steadied herself, and continued. "There were days I wished for Joffrey."
Just as Sansa had watched Arya with rapt attention, Arya now watched her. They seemed frozen in place by the horror of their stories, instinctually immobile, as if movement or even breath might be too great a disrespect.
"I was with him for what feels like forever, but I finally escaped. I made it to the Wall; I found Jon and we took Winterfell back. And after the battle, we captured him. Alive." Sansa rubbed at her fingernails as she spoke, staring only at her hands. "I tied him to a chair in the stables where he kept his dogs. He'd starved them for days, turned them vicious and desperate - so he could feed them with our bodies, he told us. I left their cages open, left him tied to a chair dripping blood. And I stood outside the gates and watched as they ate him alive."
The dimming torch light made it hard to tell, but Arya could have sworn she saw the faintest of smiles on Sansa's face as she told the end of the tale.
There it was - the iron. The ferocity, the coldness, the character traits so alien to young Sansa, now core to the woman she'd become. Arya didn't know why it unnerved her - she had done as bad or worse, planned to do far more, actually took great pleasure in the thought of her sister's torturer being ripped apart. But it still felt wrong, incorrect, incompatible.
"Good," was all she whispered around the uncertainty. "I hope they ate him slowly."
"Not slowly enough." Sansa shook her hair from her face and looked up from her hands. "Your turn. Your list?"
Arya hesitated. She knew the blood on her hands could fill an ocean, and she felt not the slightest remorse for a drop of it. But she doubted that even the new Sansa would see it the same.
"Walder Frey," she admitted tentatively.
"Good," Sansa echoed back at her without hesitation. "Traitorous bastard."
"And his entire House."
A long pause. Sansa slowly turned to look at Arya again, confused and holding back a horror she could not stop, hoping she had misheard or misunderstood.
"I'm sure you've heard by now. They were found poisoned at their dinner table, every last one of them gathered together for a toast. I did that - brought them together to remind them what a great sin it is to harm a guest in your home. To remind them that such great transgressions can't be erased by time."
The horror was clear on Sansa's face now, an open-mouthed stare that betrayed her steely exterior. "H-how?"
"That's a longer story."
Still the unwavering look of horror. Arya felt her back stiffen.
"Was I wrong?" she challenged. "Can you honestly tell me that you didn't feel satisfied when you heard they'd died?"
"I . . . I don't know," Sansa admitted, even though she knew Arya was right. "You're my baby sister. And you just murdered an entire House. I don't know what I'm supposed to make of that."
"Make of it what you will," Arya shrugged, the defensiveness leaving her, replaced once more with stoic certainty.
The wind was picking up again, howling loud and lonely, knocking down ill-prepared leaves. They fell like drops of blood onto the snow. The storm was worsening, large flakes covering their hair, dampening the furs, obscuring the fresh leaves in a white layer that tried to hide the stain but couldn't fully keep the crimson's depth from showing through.
"And next is Cersei." Sansa did not frame it as a question. "She's not a lazy target like the Freys. She'll kill you in a second."
"Maybe." It wasn't a challenge or a disagreement - just a simple acknowledgement of fact.
Sansa was surprised to feel tears sting at the corners of her eyes as she looked at Arya, sitting cross-legged beside her on the wolf fur, nonchalantly discussing whether she would kill the Queen or be killed trying as if it were a conversation about the weather. She looked so grown up and so small at the same time, a girl playing at adulthood who had already killed more people than most would in a lifetime.
"What will you do when the killing is done?" Sansa pressed softly, still overcome by emotion she couldn't name. "Power can last, sometimes for generations. But vengeance ends with its targets."
Arya cocked her head, furrowed her brow, contemplating. "I don't know. I guess I never pictured myself living long enough to care."
She looked over at Sansa, who stared up into the tree with an expression Arya couldn't identify. "Do I frighten you?" she asked.
Sansa seemed to search for the answer in the leaves. "I'm not sure," she admitted. "Do I frighten you?"
Arya said nothing.
"Arya . . ." Sansa whispered, grasping at words. "Do you ever think back to when we were children?"
A hint of a smile tugged at Arya's lips. "Sometimes."
"I remember you running around with your toy swords, poking at me, refusing to even pretend to be a lady. You drove me absolutely crazy." Sansa's laugh was almost happy this time. "I remember asking Mother to take you back and get me a new sister."
Arya felt a tug of nostalgia. "I used to beg Father to send you away or marry you off. Then he reminded me that if you left, I'd have to be the lady of the house, so I stopped begging."
"We were pretty awful to each other," Sansa laughed, smiling at the memories that had once driven them both mad with fury.
"You were worse," Arya jabbed lightly, her face straight with the barest hint of a smile.
"Probably," Sansa agreed. Her smile faded and she turned her whole body to face Arya, making it difficult for the younger girl to avoid her eyes. "There have been so many moments over the years that I thought of you. You just vanished, and they said you were dead, and I knew you probably were. But you were always such a fighter, and they never found your body . . . I always hoped you were out there somewhere. Sometimes I would dream that my crazy sister with her tiny sword would come barging in to rescue me. It always comforted me a little."
Arya studied Sansa, noticed the melting of her icy demeanor. It struck Arya that both of them had been presenting their armor to each other - the faces they showed the world, the guises of power that sometimes masked only emptiness.
Had they ever showed each other anything different? Even in childhood, had they ever truly seen what the other was made of?
The torch was burning low, the flames nearing the surface of the snowbank. It was getting harder to see the expressions on their faces.
"Joffrey and Cersei are on my list because of Father. But they're also there because of you," Arya said slowly. "Because of what they did to you. I heard your name a lot over the years. I thought about trying to find you, but after Mother and Robb -"
"It's okay," Sansa cut her off.
After a long pause, Arya continued. "It's odd, if you think about it," she whispered, watching the flame. "We both kind of got what we always wanted. You always wanted to be the Lady of a great House. I always wanted to be a fierce swordsman. And here we are."
Sansa ran her hands along the wet fur, grounded by the rough and cold sensation. "Not quite what we thought, is it?"
Arya felt a powerful swell of emotion, strong enough to force the air from her lungs. It was a touch of everything all at once: grief, shame, companionship, hope, fury. Too many things to name or control, too jumbled to express in any valuable way. This happened every so often, and she always squashed it quickly. She had turned her back on her vow to be No One, but she still found solace in the lack of emotion that role afforded her.
It was harder to push away this time, though.
"I'm glad you're home, Arya." Sansa's voice was weary, but genuine - like she had found something solid at the end of a long journey.
"I don't know how long I'll stay," Arya warned quickly; it was instinct now to shield against expectation. "Cersei still sits on that throne. And I've been reciting her name for too long to give up now."
Sansa had a vision of waking up in the morning, bleary-eyed from another restless night, finding Arya gone as if she had never returned at all. She hated the thought, but also knew it was probably a realistic one. Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly not far off.
"Wait for Jon, at least," Sansa said slowly and strategically, more saddened by the thought than she would have expected. "You can't leave without seeing him."
Arya's face softened at the thought of Jon, her favorite sibling, the person she had once been closest to in the world. The bubble of emotion tried to simmer up once again, but she shoved it aside. "I'll give him a few days."
A gust of wind dashed from the forest, slammed into them like a wall, pushed them sideways and caused their eyes to water and skin to sting. The torch was extinguished in an instant, leaving them awash in a blackness so deep they couldn't even see each other where they sat inches apart.
"I can get us back," Arya offered calmly as the wind died away. "I don't need the light."
"I trust you," Sansa said easily.
But it was a long time before either of them moved. The wind had pushed Arya against Sansa's side, pressing their arms together from elbow to shoulder, bridging the distance they had cautiously maintained. As they sat silently in the darkness, having spent all the words they could grab hold of, they made no motion to move apart. There was a mutual comfort in the contact, a safety in the familial bond that they had both presumed lost, a connection they both yearned for but resisted initiating in the light of day.
Would it exist when the sun rose and the torch was re-lit? When they resumed their searches for power and vengeance? When they were forced to see what they had truly become?
Had it ever really existed at all?
Both girls sat grappling with the same thoughts, both too cautious to dare speak them aloud.
They had it here. And for now, that was enough.