Return of Titus Pullo and Arya Stark (AKA Vegas and a cheap buttery alternative to therapy. Open!)

[runaway-stark.livejournal.com]

She was safe, she was warm, and the whole situation was very much like being asleep. And then with an abrupt pop!, Arya Stark was salty and buttery and very much wide awake.

She was disoriented for several seconds, trying to mesh two distinct memories of where she had just been. The first set was of Braavos, and the House of Black and White, and going to sleep after drinking a cup of bitter milk. The other was of this place, this castle... Hogwarts, she thought, and faces flashed in her mind, at once familiar and alien. Memories of most of her family here, though they were more impressions than images. And memories of some time before, coming back into the school to check in with her temporary guardian Kal, only to find his name on the plaque. It had been the last in a chain of... something... and she had stopped fighting and gone to sleep.

"Welcome back," said a man's voice from somewhere above her. She wiped greasy butter out of her eyes and looked up, seeing a large, burly man in a garishly-colored button-up shirt left open over a white undershirt, a pair of short trousers cut right around the knee, and a pair of worn-looking leather sandals in a style that she'd never seen, not even in Braavos where travelers from all over came. "Nice little pigsticker you've got there, eh, girl?"

Arya looked around her and found a sword--her sword, Needle--next to her and covered in as much butter as she was. She grabbed for it and started to try and wipe it off on the leg of her own cut-off trousers, but it did absolutely no good. The man chuckled. "Here," he said, reaching into a bag that he carried slung over one shoulder and pulling out another brightly-colored shirt. "Good girl," he said approvingly. "You've a good sense of priorities. You know how to properly care for a sword."

"Of course I do," she said irritably, more at the situation than at the man. The shirt was getting soaked with grease, but Needle looked slightly better than before. "I'm going to be a water dancer."

"Is that so?" the man said with the genial blandness of someone who didn't know what she was talking about. "Good for you, then. Name's Titus Pullo."

Arya looked at him warily, considered that she was holding a sword and he wasn't, and remembered vaguely that she was safe at Hogwarts. "Arya Stark."

((Both Arya and Pullo are available in here. Come on in and say hi!))

Comments

[woocha.livejournal.com]

That's harder to clean than human skin. But okay! Butter was still butter, after all. And hey, maybe Wishbone would get it on himself, and THAT'S easier to clean.