Cuts deeper than swords.

[lonewolflives]

She'd come very close to cutting off her hair that morning, to simply hacking it all off with a knife. She'd been growing it for years, had only started growing it to prove a point to Lyanna. Why she'd kept it up after Lyanna had disappeared, she didn't know. What she did was that know the damn stuff went past the small of her back and took far

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[giftless]

Those discs still unnerved Edmund. He watched Arya take them down from the relative safety of the treeline with his heart in his throat. He knew she could do it. He had seen her do so a couple times before. But low chances of injury and death still represented a chance.

The disc now safely lodged in the tree that he had been standing next to (and then promptly dashed away from when he saw what was happening), Edmund ventured closer. "Good day, then?" he guessed dryly. Little of that "calm as still water" nonsense today, apparently.

[lonewolflives]

"Just fucking great," she said, tossing her head slightly to flip her braid over her shoulder so that she could make sure it came out unscathed. "Who could be in a bad mood when it's so warm and lovely."

A Stark who was born for colder weather than this, for one.

[giftless]

It was almost funny, and only because Edmund knew with a surety that he personally had not done anything to upset Arya. Not recently and not yet anyway. He knew to tread a bit carefully and kept his grin slight.

"Did you just wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning or do you have a reason to be cross?"

[lonewolflives]

She tossed her braid back and picked up Romance, wiping it clean of any sand or detritus it might have picked up.

"Cross? No, of course not," she said, slamming the sword home in its scabbard and picking up Needle, "I just go around getting pissed off for no reason."

[giftless]

It was less funny now, suddenly, because, in Edmund's mind, Arya wouldn't have hinted at any actual thing being wrong if she were in control of herself enough to avoid it. That was either a slip or part of her wanted Edmund to know. Both possibilities pointed to something serious.

"Do you want to tell me?" he asked, trying the straight-forward approach with no sarcasm or jokes of his own now.

[lonewolflives]

She stopped, in the process of moving to pick up the discs, and considered Edmund. It was on her mind to snap something regarding the fact that nothing about this place seemed to care what she wanted, what any of them wanted, but she found herself saying, "Duo," instead.

[giftless]

He wasn't clear on what she meant for a moment; sometimes your mind just takes up the commoner meaning of a word, not what it really means in a context. But Edmund was smart enough to make the connection. He had ferried everyone across to the second island and the portal himself, after all.

"I didn't realize you knew him," Edmund said. "I'm sorry."

[lonewolflives]

"Five years," she said, straightening and kicking one of the discs in lieu of picking it up. "Five fucking years I knew him. As close as anyone. And then he just fucking leaves."

[giftless]

Edmund frowned slightly, feeling that was a bit unfair. "He sacrificed himself, Arya. He didn't just leave. He did what he had to to keep you and everyone else safe."

[lonewolflives]

"He still left," Arya snapped, because that was the rub; he'd had good reasons. It was a better exit, if you believed in that sort of thing.

The problem was, she didn't entirely. Dead was dead, and gone was gone. "Out of all the people up there, it had to be him?" Part of the anger had leeched out of her voice. She tried to reel it back.

[giftless]

"Maybe it did," Edmund said. But the truth was that he didn't know. All he knew was the story told in the paper, and words could never sum up everything in a moment. "Would you rather it have been someone else? Some other good person have to feel what you're feeling right now?"

[lonewolflives]

"Yes!" Arya said, having picked up another disc and now hurling at the same tree. The blades had retracted, though, and it just bounced off. "I've been doing this for five fucking years. Longer!"

Some small part of her might have even meant it, but most of her recognized it didn't work like that, that it didn't work at all. She still said it, just to say it.

[giftless]

"And you're going to have to keep on doing it, your whole life," Edmund countered with as calm of a voice as he could manage without sounding like he was patronizing her. Because he wasn't, of course; not now at least. It was a difficult lesson to learn and one that needed constant refreshing it seemed, for everyone.

"That's the way it works. Here and back home. People leave. At least he got to chose and at least it helped other people."

[lonewolflives]

"I get it!" Arya shouted, rounding on him. "Valar fucking morghulis. But so many? No one's even trying to kill us, and still there's nobody left!"

Her mouth worked, curling and uncurling, opening, before she added a quiet, but still angry, "Nearly."

[giftless]

His brows jumped up at that, the display of anger and the statement. If Edmund hadn't known exactly where it was coming from, and sympathized with it, he would have been frightened of it.

"So you start over," he answered, holding his ground but not advancing. "New people show up every day. You take what you can get and you hold onto them. We're still here, Arya. There are people left. You just have to let them in again."

[lonewolflives]

"For who knows how long," she said, pressing her hands to the side of her head. "Just keep doing it again, and again, and again?"

While the hole inside just got deeper and deeper.