Chapter 9: Arya

October

Sansa was crying. It was around noon, and she had gone to sleep (Arya imagined) around six that morning. Arya had been up to go to lifts at the gym, and Sansa had stumbled upstairs, hardly walking straight she was so tired.

Ordinarily, Arya did not come right back to the house from Ornithology. She usually went to Hot Pie's to work on Semantics, or found a nook in the library where she could lie on the floor and read. Maybe, if it was nice out, she would sprawl on the ground of the main quad. When she did that, Syntax Waif would always appear out of nowhere, pull out a cigarette, or maybe some weed, and smoke next to her, without saying anything.

But it was raining today, and Hot Pie and his roommate Lommy were being abnormally stupid. She knew that, in the rain, everyone would be in the library, and she wouldn't have sprawl-space, so she had made her way home.

Syntax Waif had caught up with her about halfway there, smoking quietly. She said nothing, and Arya didn't feel much like talking.

When they had stopped outside Arya's house, Syntax Waif had finally said, "She's not doing better."

Arya hadn't known how Syntax Waif could know, but it was true. She had grimaced, and gone into the house. When she deposited her bookbag on her desk chair, she heard Sansa.

At first, it was almost to quiet to hear, but it got louder and louder. Then, there had been the moans. "No…no…Joff, please…I didn't…no."

Arya stood in the doorway, unsure of what to do. Roslin wasn't home, and Jon was probably teaching or sleeping—the things he did during the day.

Arya steeled herself, then opened Sansa's door.

Her sister was twisted in her blankets and sheets, which she had tugged so forcefully in her sleep that they were no longer tucked in.

Arya crossed the room, and began shaking Sansa.

"Sansa, please wake up. Please."

Sansa tried to knock her hands away, whimpering.

"Sansa, please, please, please wake up. It's just a dream. You're fine, you're here. I'm Arya, not Joff."

Sansa's eyes jerked open, unfocused. When she saw Arya, she began to cry harder. She was trembling, and for a moment, Arya wanted to reach out and hug her. But she and Sansa didn't hug. They had never had that kind of a relationship, and so Arya watched.

"Hey, it's ok. You're fine," said Arya lamely.

A minute or so later, Sansa was perfectly composed.

"Thank you," she murmured.

"Are you all right?" whispered Arya.

Sansa smiled, the shadow smile that Arya saw so often these days. "Completely fine. It's just a nightmare."

She looked so tired.

Arya swallowed. "All right," whispered Arya. "I'll let you get back to sleep then."

She helped straighten Sansa's blankets, and her sister was asleep before she had even finished.

She quietly closed the door.

An hour later Sansa was crying again.

Arya grabbed a rain jacket and left the house, moving across the backyard.

As she walked she imagined running Joffrey Baratheon through with the most blunt sabre in the weapon's rack. Repeatedly.

She climbed through the thin line of trees and hopped over the brook, crossing into Jon's backyard. She unlocked the backdoor to the Bastard House and slipped inside.

Daemon, Aurane, and Gendry were sitting in the living room.

"You look like hell," commented Daemon.

Arya dropped into a chair.

She didn't know either Daemon or Aurane very well. They were so rarely around when she was over at the house. Daemon, it seemed, lived at his chemistry lab, and Aurane (according to Jon) spent most of his time at some girl's place on most nights. It had always seemed to her that they were closer to each other than their new housemates, and so they always seemed to be on the periphery of her experience there. But they, more than Jon and Gendry, were the ones that she wanted to talk to now.

She looked at Daemon. "What happened last year when Sansa was…you know."

Daemon glanced at Aurane.

"How much do you already know?" asked Aurane.

"I know that something bad happened. I don't know what. And I don't know what kind of treatment she got."

Aurane sighed, then glanced at Daemon.

"Robb didn't talk about it much. It was in the spring, and he was going through all his shit with Law School and Roslin and Jeyne. I think he was too overwhelmed to really talk about everything. I mean," Aurane ran his hands through his hair, "We know what happened. Everyone did. It was in the news and everything. But I don't know what kind of treatment she got or anything. She was out of school for a while. And then she was back."

"As for what happened…should we be the ones telling you?" asked Daemon uncomfortably.

"Mum and dad won't talk about it. Robb's tight-lipped and Sansa pretends it didn't happen. If Jon knows more than I do, he's also very tight-lipped about it. I get trying to keep Sansa's private life private. But…" Arya reached for words. It was Gendry who supplied them.

"If you don't know, you can't be what she needs you to be right now."

Arya nodded.

Daemon sighed. "All right then." He leaned back in his chair, and his eyes darted to the ceiling, as though he were trying to remember a complicated equation. The corner of his mouth dragged sideways and then he looked at her again. "So, you know that Sansa and Joffrey," his voice tightened when he said the boy's name, "dated for most of the last two years, yes?"

"Yes." Arya remembered distinctly the extreme frustration she felt every time that Sansa came home and gushed about how perfect her blond boyfriend was, giggling to Jeyne Poole about everything imaginable (and unimaginable).

"Well, sometime last year, things turned ugly. We don't really know how or why, but we do know that one night Joffrey was arrested for…well…" Daemon glanced at Aurane. "He had these friends, right? These goons, who basically did his bidding. And they all three of them got arrested because they had basically stripped her down in a park at night and started beating her. I don't think there was rape involved? But who can know. They don't tend to report that quite as publically—they could just hide it under the label of sexual assault, since that's what happened. Anyway, one of the Campus Policemen turned them in. He heard her crying and begging while on his way home from work and went to investigate."

"She wasn't going to submit a campus report," said Aurane quickly, "I remember Robb trying to convince her to. But then Lannister brought up plagiarism charges up and it was clear that he was going to be suspended for at least a year. And I think that gave her the courage to submit her charge. And they kicked him out as fast as they could. No one gave a damn who his mother was. He was out."

"I guess that explains the scar on her back," muttered Arya to herself.

"Yeah. Clegane's report was that they had beaten her so badly he was surprised there wasn't spinal damage. They definitely broke the skin. I think one of them was using a belt…"

Arya rested her head in her hands and closed her eyes. Sansa beaten and bloodied filled her mind, and she felt sick. When she opened them, she looked at Gendry. He was watching her. She had never realized how blue his eyes were. They weren't the same blue that ran in her family though. That was more of a sky blue. Gendry's were darker, electric.

"You ok?" he asked quietly.

She jerked her head up and down. Gendry didn't look convinced.

She was surprised at how glad she was at that.

That night, when she pulled out her binoculars to watch the Westerosi White Ravens nesting in the naked elm tree in the back yard, she looked at Gendry's eyes as much as the rest of him. They were clouded, lost in thought, and there was a slight crease in his brow. He took a sip of his coffee, then turned away from the window.