CONTACT | on the tranquility

[wont]

— » 003 » 005 QUARTERS | THIRD LEVEL SEAMSTRESS | FIFTH LEVEL PETYR'S LIBARY | FIFTH LEVEL DEVICE, IN-PERSON, BY RAVEN

Comments

( ACTION )

[seem]

[ And herein, the problem: Petyr Baelish has never been satisfied, and never will be. So when she kisses him, quick and chaste, his brow creases, and the line of his mouth thins, and then he moves to claim his prize. The question is never if she will or she will not yield (she has to, says the debt unpaid, says the sway that he knows he holds over her heart and her head), but how; if the tree will fall on its own or be cut down.

No, no a soul in the Seven Kingdoms has seen Petyr this open or this ugly, save her, and no one else ever will. Where he hides one lie, he opens up another for her inspection, and allows her to grasp for whatever justification she needs. It is a luxury he affords no one else, for no one else is so completely a product of his own two hands as she is, and if he is ever brought down, it will be by his own blade, not that of another.

When he kisses her, the gesture is not chaste nor brief, not fatherly in the least. There is no one to see them, no one to judge or to suspect them, only the plants and insects that make up the garden, and there is no one to know the worst of their secrets save each other. ]

( ACTION )

[wont]

[ He kisses her for a long time.

So long, in fact, that Alayne's hands go from loose at her sides to tiny, balled-up fists to lifted in the space that barely exists between them, hovering just shy of Petyr's chest. Palms flat, fingers splayed, arms trembling; another silent bid of reap quickly, reap mercifully, and be satisfied. But despite the urgency that thrums through her forearms, the impulse that tells her to fly (to fight), Alayne does not push, does not pry the mercy from him. All things — even dye, even a song — have their costs. Her agency is no exception, nor is the illusion that she is loved.

Perhaps, Alayne tries to reason, this is the price of salvation. One more figure added to an already hefty sum. How many had died so that I could live? Chief amongst them had been that red-haired girl from Winterfell, that foolish little bird Sansa Stark. Petyr risked his lfe to salvage me from King's Landing. He promised to return Sansa's bones to the lands that birthed her. Is this not worth such a reward?

It is a reasoning that does not spring from the soil of Alayne's mind; instead, it has been placed there by Littlefinger and his smile in the dark. He had said as much on their last night in the Vale — a night which had been frosted with ice and deepened with snow, a night on which he had used both hands to draw Alayne into his lap and tell her the tale of Sansa's re-inheritance. (As for Alayne's on thoughts on the matter, she has none. Simply a blankness inside herself, a well of blindness that she fills with excuses and Littlefinger's songs. Some truths are too terrible to twist to a perfect light, just as some justifications lie too far beyond one's reach.)

She does not shut her eyes. No, they remain open but unwide, their lids drooped and fluttering, revealing more than a sliver's worth of Riverrun blue. (An accusation, perhaps; a plea of some kind.) When finally he releases her, Alayne is breathless and flushed and there is a horrible feeling insider herself, gathered in a tight knot just below her navel.

This is the true cost. Alayne knows. It is the weight of my shame. ]

( ACTION )

[seem]

[ For everything, there is a cost, a price. For loving too much and too fiercely and too far above his station, Petyr paid the price in blood. For that blood spilt, all of Westeros has paid, one way or another, and this is the way in which he chooses to extract it from Sansa. And yes, perhaps it's his fault that that reasoning exists in her head, but it exists, and that is that. (And yes, he would prefer that she return his affections — if they can be called as such — unbidden, that her hands would rest instead of hover, but at the end of the day, the truth is that he doesn't much care. Maybe that's part of the price he'd paid, so long ago, to lose sight of those parts of the means so long as the end was achieved.)

When he lets her go, he still does not back too far away, brushing her hair back from her face with one hand. Less and less often does he couch these actions in flowered words. They do nothing, after all, to lighten the weight. He can still taste something akin to hesitation upon her tongue. But he smiles, now, the line of his lips harsher than it usually is, and if that is a manifestation of Littlefinger's place within him or a trick of the light, who is to say? ]

We will make the best of what we are given, [ he tells her, and whether that is a comment on the moments just past or their former conversation, he leaves to her to puzzle out. As he speaks, he takes her hands in his, pressing that bud back into her palm before letting go, fingers slipping away like the waning of the tide. ]

( ACTION )

[wont]

[ Now, relief finds her as Petyr's (or is it Littlefinger's) shadow slips from her face, her face whose cheeks are still warm and speckled pink with both her own embarrassment and his nearness. The flower is but a whisper of weight in the hollow of her hand but Alayne feels every bit of it threatening to pull her down down into the depths of her shame. Still, despite this sentiment she keeps his gaze; it is the only bravery she knows against Petyr — not to flinch when she is so encumbered, not to cower the way Sansa had with so many of the others. This is the contradiction that lies within her, Alayne's greatest weakness and her saving grace. Her ability to long and to surivive, even in the face of such suffering — to know how to bend and how to yield to such great iniquities, but not to break.

Her fingers close around the bud regiven, forming a pale-barred cage around the bloom, protecting it. She and it are not so different, Alayne thinks: two flowers plucked before their time, removed from the roots that had given them birth, harvested for their beauty. But would Petyr relinquish her as easily as he had given up the blossom which she now carried? No. Alayne is convinced of it. I am dear to him, surely. Why else would he hide me with such care, risking life and limb to whisk me away from the Lannisters' grasp?

At length, she nods, grasping the flower to her breast as if it were a precious gift. ] Yes, father, [ she says, ever dutiful, though her mouth is moist and her eyes are wet. ] We will.