Arya was seated on a high chair in the middle of a small beauty salon. She watched in the mirror as a woman's greasy hands moved through her jet black. She felt as the woman, Osha, pulled up her hair with a rather brutal grip and snipped off the ends with her scissors. She did this numerous times silently. She was so focused on her craft that she didn't look at Arya at all or ask her questions like the beauticians back home did. The only comment was when she had looked Arya's hair over at the very beginning of the appointment, "You have split ends. You need to take care of that."

Arya kept looking admiring herself in the mirror. Back home, she had never spent a moment in front of the giant looking glass in the bathroom she shared with Sansa nor had she taken advantage of the small square in Jon's bathroom. Now, however, she was finally able to gaze upon her reflection and assess her looks as Arianne had recommended when she had asked her for beauty tips.

She wasn't ugly. That was a relief to her, but she wasn't beautiful either. Not for her the striking Tully eyes of her mother or Sansa's long mane of fiery red hair. Her hair was long, black, and the color of coal. Her eyes were dark brown like her father's, but with little specks of yellow here and there. Her nose was straight and her lips full. The overall shape of her face was very round indeed, but it was the roundness of an egg rather than a golden ring.

When Osha asked her to move her head very slight to the left, Arya was able to see her profile. She was struck dumb.

There was an old story that her father liked to tell about his sister, Lyanna, a woman that had died long before Arya. She was very beautiful, Ned said, and had fallen in love with a man named Rhaegar Targaryen. Rhaegar was married at the time and wasn't able to divorce his wife for a reason that was never made explicit. They ran away and carried on their affair together, but certain persons thought that Lyanna had been kidnapped and they went after her and Rhaegar. She died alone, her father said, on a bloody bed and had asked him to make some kind of promise. When she had asked him about the promise, he told her that it wasn't her place to know.

However, she had always been curious about this Aunt Lyanna whom she had never had the chance. She asked Catelyn about her once as the two of them were sitting on the couch watching an episode of "Friday Night Lights" with Sansa, but her mother had pretended that she hadn't heard the question. When Arya had importuned her once more, Catelyn had looked straight into her eyes and said, "Please, do not speak that name in my house."

Whenever her parents were out of the house, Arya would comb through the family albums in her father's study looking for photographs of Aunt Lyanna. She ploughed through volume after leather bound volume until she found her photographs in a dog-eared envelope. On one side, an unknown hand had scrawled – "Lyanna's Private Photographs."

She spent an entire afternoon during the eighth grade sitting on her parents' bed looking intently at the contents. It was clear from the photographs that Lyanna indeed was a beautiful woman. There were several snapshots of her sitting in a car next to a man with silver hair and violet eyes. There was another taken at a dressage event where she wore a crown of bluish roses on her head and the young man was smiling. The final shot consisted of the Starks seated in front of a fireplace: Grandfather and Grandmother were seated in the front and standing clockwise were Brandon, Ned, Lyanna, and Benjen. All of them had rather silly grins plastered on their faces, but the young woman seemed miserable. Was she thinking about that young man with the silver hair and violet eyes or did she hate family photographs? Arya couldn't tell.

When she returned all of the photos to their envelope, she kept one for herself. It showed her aunt in profile seated on a white fence, her eyes fixed on some distant point, her crossed one over the other, and her hands resting on her lap. The sun seemed to be setting and Arya thought she could detect a gust of wind in the waving grass at her feet. On the back the same someone who had addressed the envelope had written – Lyanna. Last Photo.

In the mirror before her, Arya saw that her profile was almost her aunt's. Almost. No wonder that Uncle Benjen sometimes commented within earshot that she looked just like her and that Catelyn was simply unable to look at her for long periods of time. Yet why did people hate her so much that they refused to mention her name? Was she that evil? Was she that stupid?

"Move your head to the right," Osha commanded.

Arya turned her head slightly and watched as long strands of her hair landed on the linoleum floor.

"What are you thinking about?" Ygritte asked her as the two of them walked along Westbury's main street later that afternoon.

"The past."

"Nothing good about the past. It's better to live in the present," the red-head opined.

"But haven't you ever been curious about your family's history?" Arya asked. "Where you come from? That sort of thing?"

"I don't really care about that stuff," the red-head shrugged. "My family has lived in this area since my great-great-grandfather came over from Ireland. That's all I was ever told. Why?"

"Never mind."

"Don't worry your head too much, okay?" the red-head suggested. "We should probably go back home before Gendry shows up."

They marched home in double time. They made themselves comfortable on the couch. Sam was watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 on his miniature television upstairs at full volume. It was his Saturday ritual. While other people played golf or watches Saturday morning cartoons, Sam would sit in his pajamas and watch the sage of the young wizard at Hogwarts over and over again. This was the first time in Arya's stay that he had managed to go through the complete saga, but it was the fifth for Ygritte and Jon and, by the annoyed look on Ygritte's rather ruddy face, it was taking its toll.

The red-head took a cigarette out of a secret drawer in the coffee table and lit it as the front door opened. Jon was wiping his boots against the floor. He hung his coat on one of the hangers, sat down on the couch next to Ygritte, placed his hand on her thigh, and leaned in for a kiss. Arya heard the light smacking sound and then another one that was slightly harder. She thought about moving away, but she heard a slight coughing noise to find that Jon's black Stark eyes were fixated on her

"I got my hair done today," Arya tossed it from one side to the other. "Do you like it, Jon?"

Jon blushed in embarrassment.

"Come on," Ygritte ribbed him with her elbow. "Tell her, she looks good."

"You look lovely," Jon spat quickly. "Where's Gendry?"

"I thought he was supposed to be here," Arya said looking at her watch. "You told him to come at four thirty, didn't you, Jon?"

"Yes."

The three of them sat for an interminable amount of time on the couch. Jon stuck his fingers in Ygritte's hair and began to twist. The red-head leaned on him and laid a kiss on his lips. This was followed by a second and then a third. By the time Arya retrieved her cell phone from her purse, he was kissing her neck and they were well on their way towards a home run. No wonder Ygritte was impatient, Arya thought as she stomped out to the front porch with her phone in her hand, she just wanted to jump him and kiss inch of his body.

The old wicker armchair was empty and Arya sat down on it. She dialed Gendry's number and waited. A light breeze played through her hair. In one of the neighbors' yards, she could see two children playing hide and go seek near some birch trees. "One hundred, ninety nine, ninety eight," one of the children counted as Gendry's phone rang interminable in Arya's ear. After the one hundredth ring, she hung up and dialed him again thinking that he was on another line talking to someone else. Once again the other line rang for what seemed like hours without anyone picking up on the other end. She called a third time and waited. Now, the kids had found and each other had traded places. The little girl, who had chased her brother around the front yard, was standing by the birch counting backwards from one hundred.

After she hung up once again, Arya leaned back in the chair and waited. She had never been very good at waiting. When the teacher at her elementary school would tell the girls to take out their silent reading books and read them for ten minutes, Arya would read one page, raise her hand, and ask if the time was up yet. The teacher always responded with a kindly look in her brown eyes. "No, Arya, you still have nine minutes to go" and, so, she would sit there for the next nine minutes trying to read, but completely unable to concentrate on the text before her. Her patience being tested to the point where she would just place her head on the desk and wait for the teacher to ring her bell. The bell that indicated that she didn't have to read anymore.

She waited in that cold winter evening with a pale blue sweater covering the black dress that Arianne had bought her two days before. With every car that passed by, she would look inside to see if there was a gangly young man behind the wheel. Yet all of those vehicles were filled with every body type imaginable except for the person that she was waiting for. He didn't telephone her either. She waited for two hours and then, finally, went inside with a defeated look on her face. "He's not coming," she announced to Jon and Ygritte who were lying right next to each other on the couch. "Not that either of you care, anyway."

She angrily stomped up the stairs and padded down the oriental rug. She made a sharp to the right and opened the door without knocking. Sam was sitting on the bed surrounded by a large mountain of tissues. She cleared off some of the tissues and sat down beside him. In the small bedroom, she noticed the books that were piled in small mountains everywhere. Some of them had ribbed leather bindings and gilded edges. There were some others that were contemporary paperbacks. There were also some jars that were placed haphazardly. In the darkness, she couldn't be entirely sure what they were.

She turned towards Sam. His eyes were red from crying, but there was a smile on his face. He made a motion for her to move closer to him, but she stayed where she was. She didn't want to have her dress ruined by his tears.

"What brings you up here?" Sam asked as he got up and poured her a glass of Pepsi.

"I got stood up," Arya's voice was hard and matter-of-fact.

"I'm sorry," Sam said as he handed her the cup. "Ron was rejected, too, you know."

"I know," Arya laughed as she took a long gulp.

"Do you want to talk to me about it?" He was lying on his stomach and had propped up his head one of his hands.

"Not much to tell," Arya shrugged. "He, Jon, Ygritte, and I were supposed to go to The Red Winery and he didn't show."

"That sucks," Sam shook his head. "Did you like him?"

"He was the best thing that ever happened to me."

"Not was," the Tarly corrected her gently. "Is."

"What?"

"He is the best thing that ever happened to you."

"That makes no sense," Arya screwed up her face.

Sam got out of the bed and walked towards one of the bookshelves. Arya watched as he squatted down on his haunches next to one of the shelves. He was digging for something in his DVD collection. She watched as the boxes began to scatter everywhere. Some landed on the floor, while others crashed onto the bed. One of the cases even hit her on the knees with a resounding crash. Finally, he strolled towards her and handed her the holy grail of his endeavors. The cover showed Nicolas Cage's face on a smashed pot.

"I don't understand."

"When you have found your flower," Sam knocked against the plastic cover, "you can't let anything get in the way."

"What?"

"You like this guy, right?"

"Yeah," Arya nodded.

"And he likes you, right?"

"Yes."

"When you love something," he leaned back against the pillows, "you shouldn't give up on it. You should do everything in your power to keep that love alive. If you really love this guy, Arya, you shouldn't allow this to get in your way."

The words echoed in her head on the following Monday morning as she marched into Bear Island. Without even greeting the waitress, she placed her bag on the floor and sat down at her usual place. Gendry was there wiping the bar as usual. He marched over to her nonchalantly whistling some off color song that she had heard the Dothraki men singing from time to time. Something about two guitars and a man who got dumped for a gypsy.

As soon as he placed his hands on the bar, Arya pulled him close to her with one of her hands and snarled in his face. "You stood me up."

"I'm sorry," Gendry wrenched himself free and handed her a menu. "Something came up."

"You didn't call," Arya continued her abuse. "You didn't so much as text me."

"You're making a scene," Gendry whispered to her.

"I don't care!" Arya shouted. "You left me sitting on that porch waiting for you while Jon and Ygritte were macking in the living room and Sam was bawling his eyes out watching Harry Potter."

"I told you," he repeated. "Something came up."

"I don't care if something came up. You don't invite someone out on a date and not show up."

"It was important."

"I don't give a fuck how important it was," Arya cursed. "I got my hair done. I got a dress. I put makeup on my face."

"You bought a new dress?" Gendry's eyebrows rose in disbelief. "You hate dresses."

"I know," she wiped off a tear. "I did it for you."

"For me?"

"Yes, Gendry. For you. Is that so difficult for you to understand?"

"I liked you just the way you were. You didn't have to go out of your way."

"But I did. I wanted to. I asked a friend to buy it for me because my allowance hadn't come through yet."

"A friend?"

"Yes. A friend. Someone, unlike you, who doesn't speak in code every time she wants to convey a message."

Gendry winced. He poured her a beer from the tap and slid it towards her.

"I'm sorry," he said not even bothering to even look at her. "Something came up."

She didn't go back to Bear Island for days. Every afternoon after school, Arya went to Sunspear Imports where she and Arianne would sit on the second floor eating pomegranates together. She poured her heart out to the Arab woman. "I was so stupid," Arya berated herself. "I was so stupid. I bought a dress. I did my hair just like you told me to and he didn't come. Why did I have to agree to go out with him? Why?"

"I didn't say that it was going to be easy," Arianne smiled as she split one of the fruits in half. She gave half to Aryan and kept the rest for herself. "Did you honestly expect him not to stand you up on your first date?"

"Most guys don't," she sighed. "Most guys would come up, pick me up, and take me somewhere. Most guys would text me or call me or call my brother, but he didn't do anything like that. He just didn't come."

"There's other men in Westbury," Arianne shrugged. "Maybe, you could ask your brother to help you find another one."

Arya turned her away from Arianne and turned her gaze towards the first floor of Sunspear. She looked at the glazed fruits and Turkish delights on their golden platters, the hookahs standing against the walls, the lemons, oranges, and tangerines in their ornate bowls. All of it was beautiful. Too beautiful. At this moment, however, she did not feel like the woman who had stared at herself in that mirror days ago. She was broken, humiliated, and humbled.

Yet there was something inside her that kept pulling her towards Gendry. She was drawn to him by magnetism that she couldn't put into words. Every time she walked into Bear Island, she felt his presence so keenly that everybody else seemed to melt away. When he spoke to her, she only heard his voice. She knew that she was attracted to him, but what was it that she was attracted to? His exterior was nothing to write home about. He may have a handsome face, but is that enough to make a woman go hot and cold for him? Is that enough for a person like Gendry to engrave himself on the retina of her memory so that he became the only person that she ever thought about.

She looked over at Arianne who will was placing pomegranate seeds in her mouth. She placed them gingerly on her tongue without dropping them. She closed her lips ever so slowly and then, seemingly without chewing, swallowed the fruit. She did all of this in such a graceful way that Arya couldn't look away. She wasn't clumsy at all. If she was working at a bar like Gendry, she would pour everything slowly, measuring her ingredients precisely to the last drop, and counting the shaker as she moved it up and down in her hands.

She knew that grace like Arianne's was not something that a person learned. It was something that was inherited. Passed down through the bloodline for countless generations and polished like an expensive jewel. The Starks and the Tullys had their own elegance, of course, but it was nothing like Arianne's. It was a part of her culture. A notion that lurked within the very sands from which her ancestors had come.

It was then that Arianne remembered the story of Scheherezade. The sultan had killed off all of his wives after spending a night with them. Each one of them except for one and she had held his attention through her stories of brass cities, genies emerging from bottles found on the sea shore, and young men discovering unimaginable wealth in distant desert caves. There must be something, Arya thought, that she could do to keep Gendry as her friend. Something to keep his attention on her so that he would never stand her up again.

She thought about all of the ways that women tried to change themselves and to augment their appearance. There were breast implants, nose jobs, lips blown to proportions that would make Mick Jagger shudder. However, there could be subtler ways that didn't involve a physical transformation, but an interior one. One that could metamorphose a piece of starch and sugar into a Turkish delight or a rough hewn tomboy like Arya Stark into a lady.

"I won't give up on him," Arya's voice bespoke her resolution. "I can't."

"What are you going to do then?" Arianne asked as she leaned her head against her fist and smiled.

"I have to seduce him."

"Seduce him?" The woman's laughter echoed through the halls. "How on earth are you going to manage that?

"I don't know," Arya shrugged, "but I was thinking that you could teach me. I mean you told me to wear my hair differently and I did it. You told me to go with him if he asked me out. Maybe, I can make him even more interested in me."

"What do you want then?" The woman's interest grew with the pupils in her eyes.

"I want him to look at me and love me. I want him to never abandon me again."

"Perhaps," Arianne pressed a finger to her lips. "There is a way I can help you."

"Not just hair and makeup, please."

"No," the older woman shook her head. "No. This time it will be very different."

XOXO

Sansa was standing in the vestibule of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Synergy was hosting one of its annual parties and she was obligated to attend on behalf of her father. She always found the parties her father's company hosted to be lifeless affairs that lasted well into the early morning hours when most of the attendees were drunk. Young people were rarely invited and it was their parents and grandparents who made up most of the attendees. Of these each and every last one of them was either an employee of her father, one of his friends, or a colleague that he had invited to discuss important affairs.

The part of the party which Sansa always hated the most was the receiving line. Before Robb, Jon, and Arya left home, the four of them always stood next to Ned and Catelyn. They shook the hands of the editors, software engineers, magazine publishers, professional musicians, actors, actresses, businessmen, and politicians. Most of the time, the greetings were greetings and the guests moved on towards the hors d'oeuvres or a table where they could sit and chatter with their friends. If there was some conversation, it was always stiff and formal. Sometimes, someone complimented Sansa's hair or congratulated Jon and Robb on their joint acceptance at Yale. Those occasions, however, were extremely rare.

Tonight, Sansa stood next to Catelyn completely alone. She shook hands with all of the guests that came towards her. After half an hour of making pointless chit chat that never seemed to go anywhere, she asked her mother if she could be excused to wander around the portions of the museum that were open to the guests. Her mother gave her consent. "Do come back for dinner," she cautioned, "and remember, Sansa, no running!"

With the cold wind from the front doors whipping her back, she slowly walked up the marble staircase. As one of the world's premier attractions, this particular staircase had always been crowded during the day. Sometimes, Sansa had to jostle her way to get to her favorite gallery. Tonight, however, everything was completely calm and still. The only light beyond the reception area were beams of moonlight coming from a sky light high above Sansa's head.

The red-head walked further and further into the darkness of the museum's hallways. She passed Egyptian sarcophagi, Greek and Roman statuary, and modern American paintings. Every once in a while, she stopped and listened to the party taking place on the other side of the dark corridor: laughter, big band jazz, and the clinking of glasses. There was nothing here. Only an eternal silence that was silence interrupted by the clicking of her heels against the marble floors.

She made a right turn at the end of the hallway and passed a security who nodded her on. She was standing in an exhibition space. The walls were bare. Here and there, if she screwed up her eyes enough, she was able to make out tiny marks were nails had been placed and slightly larger holes above them for various paintings. In the center was a sleek Steinway piano and plastic chairs that had been arranged in a circle. Someone had given a performance here, Sansa thought, or they had given one when the exhibition finally closed.

With hesitant steps, she walked towards the grand piano and sat down on the stool without a second thought. She lifted the black lid and swept her hang over the keys without depressing them. Except for the security guard who was standing at the entrance, there was no one else to hear her playing. She played the first four notes of a C major scale before she stopped herself. Could she get in trouble? Would she be escorted out by security?

She made a signal to the guard. His tread was heavy on the marble floor. His face was round and unsmiling with a flattened nose.

"Do you mind if I play something?" Sansa asked.

"You can do whatever you want," the guard shrugged and walked away.

She made a slight adjustment to the stool, raising it so that her long legs were flat against the floor. She closed her eyes and placed her hands on the piano's shiny keys.

No musician is ever able to describe that moment when the first note sounds and they become absorbed in the piece before them. It is a moment when they enter into a communion with another being that might no longer be alive. The music in their hands or voices becomes something much more than their feeble instruments can ever make it. It is a conduit that floats through them and then out into the audience. For five minutes, half an hour, or five hours, the music they create envelops the auditorium to such an extent that they may not even be aware of the powerful emotions that their performances are eliciting from the audience.

The only thing that a musician is aware of in that sublime moment of performance is of the music itself. It may be beautiful or ugly, tonal or atonal. Yet for those few moments, it lives inside of them. For that short amount of time that he or she is on the stage, the musician becomes a physical embodiment of the piece that he or she is playing. He swings back and forth on the stool in circular motion, he grunts, he pants. Sometimes, there are nonsensical noises that come out of his mouth. Yet that is what music always has a tendency to do. It possesses the performer and doesn't let him go until the final note has sounded and only then is the musician brought down to earth and, once more, becomes a mortal man living among other mortals.

Sansa played the Sixth Nocturne by Faure that night. It was a piece that she had learned last year. It was not as notoriously difficult as the Liszt rhapsody, but it had its own idisyncracies. Composed in the key of D flat major, Sansa's hands were forced to concentrate almost exclusive on the black keys of the piano. Not only this, but they were forced to jump from the highest keys to the lowest in a matter of ten minutes. Adding to this the minutest dynamics and a melody that sounded as if it came from a song and the challenge was tremendously difficult.

In the darkened hall, however, Sansa Stark rose to it with all of her might. Although she played for herself, she imagined that there were other people seated around her on those plastic chairs. The music sighed, it wept, it sang underneath her fingers. When the climactic section arrived and the piano was turned into a harp, she felt that her rib cage would burst from the beating of her heart. So invested was she that the music left her completely exhausted the moment it ended and she closed the lid.

She recovered herself quickly and turned around. In the shadows was a figure. Whether it was male or female, she could not make out immediately. However, it was leaning against one of the white walls and looking up into the sky high above its head completely absorbed in its own thoughts or daydreams.

Thinking that the figure had come to hear her play, she opened up the piano again. She launched into one of the great Hungarian Dances by Brahms. As soon as she had finished the first iteration of the long, melancholy melody and launched herself into the allegro, she watched as the figure slowly approached the piano with a steady tread. It loomed larger and larger until it was standing right next to her right hand. A male figure, she thought. A vaguely familiar figure, but she could not place him for the life of her.

She gave the little miniature all of the fire that she could muster. She was not as exhausted as she had been by the Faure, but she still needed to catch her breath when the music ended.

"You played very well," the mysterious stranger said.

It was Joffrey's companion from the Starbucks. The one he referred to as Dog.

"Thank you," Sansa blushed.

"Are you Hungarian?" The tall dark haired stranger asked.

"No. Are you?"

The figure nodded silently.

"Why does Joffrey call you Dog?"

"I'll tell you some other time."

He walked out of the gallery before she could speak another word.

She slammed down the piano's lid and followed his distant footsteps wherever they led. As she entered the lobby, however, she lost him completely. He had gone back into the night from which he had come.

"Did we invite any Baratheons tonight?" Sansa asked as she sat down next to her mother at one of the tables later that evening.

"Robert was here. Why?" Ned cocked an eyebrow.

"Never mind," the red-head brushed the thought away. "I just thought…"

"You'll see the children some other time," Ned assured her sweetly. "Maybe, sooner than you think."

"Why is that?" Sansa queried.

"He's my business partner," Ned explained. "We'll have a party at Synergy next Thursday."

AN: Thank you to everyone who has alerted and favorited the story so far. I would really appreciate any feedback that you can give me via review. If you want to talk, you can visit me on tumblr (breakfast-at-kings-landing). Thanks again for your support and expect the next chapter soon!