In the morning, Sansa gets up and puts on her makeup. But it does nothing to hide the black-blue bruise that is blooming over her cheekbone. She irons her clothes to perfection, taking care to get the pleated skirt just right, and braids her hair, not a strand out of place. Sansa has always been beautiful, but today she strives for perfection. It's not an act of revenge. It's an act of submission.

She's angry with me, and she hardly speaks a word at breakfast. She's afraid I'll tell someone, that my suspicions will make the shallow excuse she feeds to Dad and Robb even less convincing. My throat burns, the acidity of knowing that Joffrey did this to her blistering somewhere near my vocal cords. But I have no proof, and can't give voice to that accusation without doing more harm than good.

Sansa lies for him. She lies through her teeth, even to me, and I go along with it because there is nothing else I can do.


When we were younger, I was always labeled the aggressor. I wasn't afraid to get dirty, to give as good as I got. Sansa was the peacemaker. She wanted stability and order and she played by the rules. I got onto fights on the playground; she gave up her swing the moment she saw another kid waiting for it. It's no different with relationships. I'm not afraid to fight, even with people I love. I have a brain and a tongue, and sometimes I use them to say cruel, horrible things. And like last night, I usually regret them. Sansa is the pacifist, the one who holds her tongue and body in check.

It serves her purpose now. She holds her head high when she ascends the steps of Winterfell, Joffrey waiting for her by the stone pillars as he does every morning. I want to kill him.

He kisses her as though he's done nothing, as though everything is the same between them, and I wonder how long this has been going on. I watch Sansa carefully, and she shows no outward signs of distance from him. Her smile, her laugh, her arm around his waist are all familiar gestures of affection. She accepts his touch easily, giving no indication that Joffrey's cruelty extends beyond words.

"Morning," Gendry says to me when I reach the top of the steps, as if he'd been waiting for me. He must catch me staring at Sansa and Joffrey, because his voice betrays a note of concern. "You okay?"

"No," I tell him, truthfully.

"Anything I can do?"

Yes, I think. You're doing it already. "What are you doing after school?" I ask him instead.

"Nothing," he says. "Homework, maybe. Starting in the middle of the semester sucks. Forel's told me I need to read the entire Anthology of Modern Poetry by Monday to catch up."

I smile for the first time today. "What if I told you I had a way to get on his good side, and get the reading done?"


Syrio Forel doesn't like many students. I am an exception.

It's not that he's biased. But Forel doesn't put up with bullshit answers. The problem is, he teaches a class on modern literature and poetry, so there are plenty of bullshit answers.

Today, we are dealing with a poem by Langston Hughes:

The gold moth did not love him

So, gorgeous, she flew away.

But the grey moth circled the flame

Until the break of day.

And then, with wings like a dead desire,

She fell, fire-caught, into the flame.

And everyone goes on about how the gray moth dies because she was in love with the flame. For the most part, I block out their comments, wishing that Gendry didn't sit all the way in the back. Then I'd have some distraction other than my own thoughts and my classmates shallow interpretations. I don't know what the poem means, but I know Syrio well enough to know that whatever it looks like on the surface, it probably isn't. I stare at the words blankly; poetry means nothing to me, it's just a bunch of random words made to sound nice together. And with last night's fight with Sansa still on my mind, I'm in no mood to invest effort trying to decode the abstract words on the page before me.

"I think it means, like, that the gold moth thought she was too beautiful for him, you know? Like she was self-absorbed. But the gray moth falls in love, and it destroys her."

"Yeah, it's representing two girls. One beautiful, one not. And the ugly one gets burned up because she loved something dangerous."

I scribble on the edge of my book.

"Look harder! The words are on the page, and at first glance you might think their meaning is obvious. Do we take them as they are, or do we dig deeper? The seeing, the true seeing, that is the heart of it," says Syrio, pacing the front of the class, his warm accent trickling through. He is notorious for this kind of cryptic teaching, impossible to understand until you've learned the lesson firsthand. "Because words lie. They are deceptive by their very nature, only giving up the truth after a hard-fought battle."

Then his eyes light on Gendry, and I see the glint in them. "Mr. Waters. You are very quiet, sitting there in the back of the class. You must be thinking grand things in your head. Share them with us."

"The grey moth doesn't love the flame," Gendry says simply. I turn around. He's relaxed at his desk, eyes expectant.

Syrio smiles. "Go on."

"It was obsessed, at first, infatuated. It desired the flame, maybe even loved it at first. But it stayed there too long, until it's wings gave out, until whatever desire or infatuation kept it alive failed. It's a dead desire, a old love that keeps getting rehashed because she can't let go."

"What does it mean?" Syrio asks him.

"It means that desire is temporary, and if you stay with someone you don't love for too long, it will burn you up."

"How so?"

Gendry falters. "I don't know."

Syrio's eyes light up at his honesty. "Good answer. But the beauty of poetry is that it's not the only answer. For homework, we will look at the difference between desire and love, if one can be found, and you will all I'm sure come to very different conclusions. But everyone must seek out the truth in the poetry of Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi, who once said: The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along. Desire, longing, passion, love! Mr. Waters has posited that there is a difference between them. Let's find out if he's right."


Syrio's class is the first of the day, and it's the only one that Gendry and I share. A year younger than him, most of our classes don't coincide. But I catch glimpses of him in the hallway. I try to focus on what Dany's saying at lunch, even though I'm fascinated by the way he laughs with his whole body whenever Sandor says something ingenious. I want to stand up and walk to the far corner of the cafeteria where the two of them have isolated themselves and find out what made the corners of his eyes crinkle like that.

So when the last phone stops ringing at 3:16, I escape to the hallway, shoving books into my locker. I grab my coat, pulling it on as I rush out of the school, eager to have this part of the day over with. Sansa is sitting alone on the steps, but when she sees me she immediately stands up and walks over to Margaery Tyrell. Safety in numbers. I try to force down the uneasy sense that this situation may have, perhaps permanently, driven a wedge between myself and my sister.

I think about the gold moth, and wish Sansa would have the good sense to know she's beautiful, that Joffrey doesn't love her. To fly away from the things that are harmful to her.


Please Read & Review! 読んで、レビューを書いてください!(Sorry this chapter's a little short, I had a Japanese midterm!)

AN: Okay, more canon character description problems. I haven't read GoT in ages, and I've been basing everything off of my thoughts of them from the show (which is why I immediately wanted to change Gendry and Arya so that they match the show and book). But with Joffrey, I'm just not sure: he has blue eyes in the show, and apparently green in the book? So here's the question I need people to answer: do fanfic writers here go by book!description or tv!description? (And will anyone be really unhappy if I use the show's version of Syrio, because that's pretty much where I'm headed...) You can PM me or just throw it in with the review if you feel strongly one way or the other. Canon problems. Can't write fanfic without 'em, but thanks for drawing them to my attention (also, I might actually go back and read all the books this time as a result)! :)