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

Comments

[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.

[giftless]

"That's life, Arya," he said. Though he was concerned, it was true, he knew Arya not to be the type to take to comforting. She had never reached out to him except in an attack, so Edmund didn't reach out to her now when he surely would have with anyone else. "What else are you going to do?"

[lonewolflives]

"I don't fucking know," she snapped, wavering on the spot. "Not let them in again. I survived fine on my own before. Everyone left me then, too. I don't know why I ever convinced myself this was different."

[giftless]

"Because everyone hasn't left you now, Arya." Edmund stepped forward then, daring to reach out to place a hand on Arya's shoulder. "You survived fine, maybe, but think of how much better life is, the good times, when you have people who care about you. Don't just lose that because you're scared."

[lonewolflives]

She very nearly shrugged the hand off, even relaxed the muscles in her back in preparation, but didn't. She wasn't sure why.

"I'm not scared," she said. "I'm sensible. Better for a while, maybe, and then it's bad all over again. And every time it's worse."

[giftless]

She almost sounded like Susan once had, justifying herself like that. Sensible, smart, careful.

"Sensible is doing things in moderation," Edmund argued calmly. "Knowing what you're getting into and preparing for it. Running the other way entirely isn't necessarily sensible, it's running. It's not going to save your life. It's going to make your life boring and empty."

[lonewolflives]

"Running's saved my life plenty of times," Arya muttered, eyes fixing on random patches of sand. "What, you're saying boring is better than not boring but painful?"

[giftless]

"No, I'm saying it's not a life if you cut people out," he said, the corners of his mouth tugging downwards. "Yes, it hurts, but what's the point of living it if you don't feel anything. And you can't have one without the other."