i only live in this city

Entry tags:

{arya stark}

i only live in this city

WHO: Mal & Arya
WHAT: Mal is ~~hassling~~ training Arya and they are ~~bonding~~ getting on each other's nerves.
WHERE: CES.
WHEN: Tuesday, 4/15, forward dated.
WARNINGS/NOTES: Nothing?!?! For once. Will warn in subject headers etc. if anything comes up.

Without warning, Mal throws an acorn at Arya's head.

She's sitting under a tree, smoking. In the distance, great icy mountains rise; they continually catch her eye, glittering against the dull, bloodred sun that beats down upon them. Though she doesn't sweat, her eyes half-close against the heat and dust. Her projectile is shrivelled, the tree above them half-bare, and Arya . . .

Arya is as devoid of mercy as the tree is denuded of leaves. That is, mostly.

"Duck," she says belatedly, her voice oozing out into the air like hot tar. Then she grins. She likes Arya. She likes working with her. In a way, she's grateful to her.

But she also likes pushing her. A mark of respect, perhaps, or of her intrinsic cruelty - who knows. The only thing that's unequivocally true in this moment is that she has an absolute handful of these things.

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It hits her in the side of the head, and she lets out a surprised, "Ow!" as she looks first up, as if the tree was at fault. Of course it was not, and she turns to glare at Mal instead. She bus the spot, devoid of more hair than peach fuzz to protect her head. She hasn't bothered to shave her scalp again; Izembaro would be angry, but Izzembaro is not here. And Mercy has no role to play.

"What was that for?"

She doesn't make a show of it, but she scans the ground around her from the corners of her eyes. She needs ammunition.

Mal raises her eyebrows, raising both (empty) hands innocently.

"What was what for, lad?" she asks, cocking her eyebrows mischievously. "Must've been a very rude squirrel."

Never mind that squirrels don't live in the CES. Unless they're literally the stupidest squirrels in existence.

"You could dodge better," she adds. "Just a friendly tip."

"And you make a poor squirrel. Just a friendly tip." She makes a face at Mal, and looks back down at the dirt in front of her, digging idly with her stick, making nonsense patterns. But now, from the corner of her eye, she watches. She'll be ready next time.

Bring it.

She catches Arya looking, once or twice, but acts as though she doesn't, grinning up at the sky and tossing a pebble from hand to hand. She's going to throw it eventually, but there's no point in letting Arya dodge it easily.

"Rude to your elders, aren't you?"

"Don't feel bad. I'm rude to everyone."

She watches that pebble rise and fall, keeps up her digging in the dirt. Right up until she twists and tosses her stick at Mal. Her aim is good, usually, and she definitely aims right at Mal's face.

"I didn't feel bad."

Leaning back on her hands, she blinks into the sun - then ducks under the stick quicker than a blink, sliding away from the projectile. When she lands on her back in the dirt, she slings the pebble Arya's way hard and fast.

Arya throws herself to the side, much less gracefully than Mal, and not quite as fast: the pebble brushes past her cheekbone, not quite sharp enough to cut or direct enough to bruise. She rubs a hand over it all the same, as if she'd notice dirt.

She doesn't say a word, just jumps to her feet and dives at Mal for the tackle.

A tackle is, in Mal's opinion, the best fighting tactic of all time. Maybe a part of this reasoning is that she was so heavily discouraged from tackling people in her own childhood, maybe it's that dirt basically doesn't stick to her - but either way, she receives the heavy blow of Arya's body with a yelp and a grin and rolls sideways, trying to shake her off.

Grappling does not work well when you're small, but being small and bony helps for hitting and running. She tries to jam her elbow somewhere fleshy before Mal escapes, and she rolls the opposite way with a grin on her face.

Arya's elbow digs into her shoulder, and Mal grunts and rolls away. She's not grinning, at least not with her mouth, but her eyes shine when she hops upright and dusts herself off.

"Is that how royalty fights where you're from?"

She hates all the stupid floods for all the stupid things they reveal. But she hates it in the distant kind of way that lets her shrug nonchalantly. "Where I'm from, princes cry to their mother when you hit them."

That makes Mal laugh out loud, a big broad laugh like a lord's. Not so dissimilar, her home or what there is of it and Arya's home or what's left of it. She grins and grins.

"Where I'm from," she confesses secretively, "little girls kick princes in the fork and make them fold in half and cry. Princes aren't much."

Arya lets herself smile, lets it grow as Mal's does, grow wider at her confession.

"I wish I'd done that. He'd have cried and cried, and everyone would have called him a baby." And he'd have deserved every second of humiliation, though she knows deep down that maybe that would have only made things worse. "I threw his sword in the river instead."

Her smile fades in favor of curiosity. "Are you royalty?"

"Sounds good enough. Swords aren't good for much unless you know how to use them and use them right." And from the sound of it, this boy didn't know the first thing about it. He was probably Prince Heinrich from an alternate dimension.

Mal raises her eyebrows at the question and shrugs dismissively. "I was a duchess. I'm not anymore. Got sort of disowned."

"What for?" She's not completely sure what a duchess is: in Westeros, there are kings and queens, princes and princesses, lords and ladies and wardens of every direction on a compass, but they are distinctly lacking in dukes. That doesn't matter, though: what's more interesting is how you lose a title like that.

"For not drinking blood, and for going to war."

Well, it was significantly more complicated than that, of course. Everything is. In a way, she chose to drop the title as much as it was taken from her - inasmuch as you can choose your life, that is. Choose not to kill, choose to be a little more human. Choose to fight, or at least to look for something to fight.

Either way, she's not a duchess anymore.

Arya's still not sure about this whole blood drinking thing. It sounds like something out of Old Nan's tales, but she's heard worse things since leaving Winterfell. She finds an acorn, rolls it in her fingers like she rolls the thought around.

"What was the war about?"

"Borders. Rulers. Fighting for the sake of fighting."

She shrugs, and uses finger quotes, which she's now learned the use of.

"'Progress'. Whatever that really means. Mostly it was a lot of petty people being petty to each other. Everyone in charge needed a good kick. So they got one."

"Did you give it to them?"

She doesn't like war stories. They don't seem real, anymore, not now that she's walked though a country ravaged by it. There are no good sides. Everyone does awful things, no matter who they swear allegiance to.

She grins crookedly.

"Polly did."

Mal was, at best, a background figure. Which is fine with her. She's decided she doesn't want to be a hero of any kind, much less a war hero. Just being an extremely exquisite person is enough.

Slowly, her smile twists to match Mal. She likes Polly; she's liked most of her wardens, despite herself, because they've never really pushed her or forced her into talking, or - well, okay, she didn't like Arthur much at all, to begin with, and she's maybe still a little cross with him for leaving, but - in the end, she likes Polly, because she takes no one's shit, and does as she pleases.

And she kicks kings' asses.

"Good. She should. The people who need their arses kicked never get it."

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i only live in this city

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