going out to hunt and then back to feast

[bloodycrescents]

The first time my dad took me hunting, I was a kid, still a few years off from double digits. It's not like I didn't know where meat came from, but I guess back then I still figured even the stuff my dad brought home was pretty much the same as the packaged meat my mom got at the store in its pink styrofoam and cling wrap. I knew it came from

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[lonewolflives]

This marked the first time she'd gone with a light courseload, and she wasn't sure how she felt about it; it meant learning less, in a sense. But in another it meant she could be out and around more, and so she could learn more, learn different things, things that weren't in rooms and books.

She just wasn't sure what they were, or what she was meant to be learning, or what she was learning it for. Today all she'd learned was that Colette was good at hunting fowl, and she'd already known that.

There was a new person in the kitchen, though. Another shared face, but new all the same, she could tell, even just stepping in with a brace of the birds slung over her shoulder and a single sword on her hip.

"How is it today?" she said.

[bloodycrescents]

I've met a guy who has a dragon, I hear there are dinosaurs a few miles off, and things appear out of nowhere. The sword, though, takes me by surprise all the same, and for a moment, all I can think is how fucking glad I am Misty never got her hands on something like that. But then, I think she's always preferred the distance of a rifle.

"It's good," I tell her, because it is, even if the thought pulsing over it is that my dad'd probably think she's more of a man than I am, too. Hell, she probably is, in spite of the curves and the unmistakably female sway of her hips. She can't be much older than Amber, but she seems it, maybe because she's not covered in the thousand glosses, powders, glazes and smudges of other teenage girls. "You caught them?"

[lonewolflives]

Arya slapped the birds down on the counter, not angrily or confrontationally, just with a singular lack of delicacy. She hopped up beside them, pulling one free of the set.

"Colette did most of the work," she said. "She's a falcon. But I'm the one she hunts for."

Back at Winterfell, it would have been the only kind of hunting she'd have been allowed. She'd nearly been inclined to be against it, solely for that, but she couldn't deny the joy of watching a hunting bird on the wing.

[bloodycrescents]

I think of that fall morning and my dad with a gun in his hand. I think of Misty on the porch, gun turned on me. By accident or design, I still don't know. I don't want to know. I want to pull ignorance over my head like a coat, live in the Hub, drink beer and try my luck with the women here, forget everything that came before. They're all out of my league, but sooner or later, surely one of them will give.

Compared to a falcon, guns are a mess. They leave you picking shot out of your kill. I've never seen anyone hunt with a falcon before, but I guess if it's properly trained, it's a lot cleaner. Those birds look it, anyway.

"I didn't know there were falcons in the jungle," I say, chasing it with a drink of water. "Did you train her yourself?"

[lonewolflives]

"There aren't, really," Arya said, with a shrug, eyes momentarily shuttering as she heard the question, continuing on the original thread before addressing it.

Except in her head, where she was once again reminded that for every new person, there was someone who wasn't here any more. Maybe more. "But there's a lot of things in the jungle that wouldn't usually be there."

She started plucking feathers, with a slight degree more force than was strictly necessary. "A friend of mine trained her, but I look after her, now."

[bloodycrescents]

It's not really an explanation, just an obvious truth, but every question I have about the place is met by the equally intense determination not to ask. Sometimes the question wins. As many answers as I still don't have, I don't know that I really want more. Getting them hasn't done me much good yet, not at home and not here either. I picked up what I need to know to get by, but when I don't even know if this place is a refuge or a prison yet, I don't think I want to know more.

It makes me wonder sometimes if I was a little too hard on Mom for leaving us like that. The difference is, I didn't choose this.

"Why'd your friend give her up?" I ask, then wince. "Oh." You'd think it'd be easier to accept the idea of people just disappearing, but I keep forgetting.

[lonewolflives]

"Just so," Arya said, pausing for a moment to give him a steady look as he caught on, and then returning to her plucking. Stretching out a leg to hook a bin and drag it over to her so she could toss the feathers in it, she added, "There's more stray animals around here than anyone knows what to do with. This place has as many cats as a castle."

That wasn't entirely true; the Red Keep had had a lot of cats (and she'd caught them all). But the compound had its fair share.

[bloodycrescents]

I'm grateful when that piercing gaze drops away, mostly because that when she stretches out her leg and I wind up tracing the line of it with my eyes. She's not the kind of girl you want to catch you checking her out. With that much self-possession, that graceful confidence - a girl who goes out hunting doesn't hesitate to let you know when you've crossed a line. It makes me wary with thoughts of Misty, but I like her for it, too, if only because she's nothing like Ashlee and her slutty giggling friends at the mall.

"I don't think I've ever heard that one before," I tell her absently, wondering if that means there's a dog around in need of a home. "Didn't know castles had a lot of cats."

[lonewolflives]

Arya considered for a moment.

"Depends on the castle, I guess," she said, turning the bird over, dropping another handful of feathers into the bin. She could have used them for fletching, she supposed, but she had more arrows than she knew what to do with. She wasn't as good an archer as she was a swordswoman. "Some castles have ghosts, not cats. But castles with a lot of people, a lot of scraps... they get cats."

[bloodycrescents]

She seems too old, too self-assured, to be telling the kind of fairy stories Jody babbles out in the car when I have to drive her somewhere. Then I remember where I am again and that she might not be making it up. Even with all the people around here who look like movie stars or something, even ones I recognize, and the time travel and the different world and shit, I keep forgetting. It's too much. Just being here's crazy enough.

"There's no such thing as ghosts," I tell her reflexively. I think I'm mostly trying to convince myself. Or to forget that, around here, the ghosts are all alive. That he could turn up with nothing to show for the damage but a bullet hole in his chest and an incomplete story of what happened because he had his back to Misty when she pulled the trigger. He never saw it coming. "So, what, you grew up in a castle?"

[lonewolflives]

I was a ghost, once. I was the ghost in Harrenhal.

"Maybe you just never met any," she said, eyes flicking up at him without raising her head, a slight, strange smile briefly settling on her face.

"I grew up in a castle called Winterfell, in the North. Of Westeros. You've probably never heard of it."

[bloodycrescents]

My blood gets ten degrees hotter. I wonder what would happen if I took this plate and threw it at her now, scalding hot food and shattering glass searing her tan skin. I don't flatter myself I'd manage more than that, that I could pick up one of the shards and shut her up with it. She's long and lithe, athletic in a way I've never managed to be. She could outrun me. She could hurt faster, harder, and I hate her a little for it and for that smile that says there are things I don't know, never will know. For the words that tell me the same. For the ones that make me think of the way, around here, people don't stay dead.

I don't know what I'd do if it happened. I don't know what the punishment is for failing that badly. Failing him, failing Misty. Failing Mom. For being that blind. I just know I never learned to take it like a man.

"No, I haven't," I answer her, shaking my head calmly. Amber pulls that superior shit all the time. This girl, though, she's just stating a fact. "We don't have any castles where I'm from. Not in my country,

[lonewolflives]

"I always thought that was weird," she said. "What happens when there's a war?" She shook her head. She knew they had guns, and explosives, but a wall was a wall, and walls seemed to stop bullets just fine. She couldn't imagine anyone managing to blow up Harrenhal with big fireworks.

Then again, Harrenhal hadn't been so secure. It had barely been finished before the Targaryens proved that walls didn't matter when you had dragons.

"Which country is that?"

[bloodycrescents]

I can't completely get used to that. I guess it's not like I've been here long, even if all the free time makes it feel like it's been forever. It's just really weird still to think about other worlds and universes and whatever. It's weird to know I'm not in my own town or state or even country. Not even the right year, though I don't know where they came up with the one they're using. No one I ask seems to know either. It seems like there's a lot here people don't know.

"America," I say. "And I guess mostly wars just don't happen in our country. We fight them somewhere else."

[lonewolflives]

"We get a lot of people from America," Arya said, holding up the fowl to consider her work, turning it this way and that to find stray feathers. "I guess it makes sense. Then all the damage and awful things get done to someone else's country."

People in Westeros didn't seem to even care if innocent people from their own home got caught up and hurt by these things, she was sure they wouldn't give a passing thought to things happening well away from them.

[bloodycrescents]

"I think that's the idea." It's selfish and cruel, but I think war in general usually is. It's always easier to swallow when it's happening in someone else's yard. "Make someone else clean up your mess."

The thought of Misty and Mom hits hard, and I bite the inside of my cheek hard. I'll regret that later when every time I close my mouth, I'll scrape it again, but I don't want to let it show too much. I don't know if it's the idea itself of someone else fixing up what you left behind and I always would have thought about that or if it's just that it's on my mind even more now I'm away from all of that, but it jars me more than it should.