Every word from your mouth is a knife in my ear

She arrived at nine fifteen, approximately, two and a half hours late and screaming her head off.

"Who is THAT?" Gendry muttered, just like he had been doing all evening. Jon and Sansa knew all of these people and, having brought him along in an unsuccessful attempt to introduce him to his father, were being forced to explain.

"Oh, no," Sansa whispered as if in physical pain herself.

"Oh, no," Jon exclaimed as if the end of the world had dawned upon them.

"That's her, isn't it?" Gendry stated, finally overcome with epiphany. "That's the mad Arya Stark."

"It was him again," Arya bellowed, but she knew they wouldn't believe her. The stranger and Rickon huddled right outside the doorway; she heard their labored breaths and had seen them follow the group towards a back room, but not enter.

"I think she needs help," Robb's voice said, but it couldn't possibly be the real Robb speaking. "I think one of us needs to stay with her for a while, and I think I'm going to do some research on where she can get some real medical atten -"

"No!" Arya shrieked, feeling like a little kid, tied down to a chair in a dim back room, unable to move but for kicking her legs and pounding her tiny fists. "I'm not crazy! I'm perfectly lucid! My name is Arya Stark. I'm nineteen years old. You are my siblings. Robb, Jon, Sansa, Bran. Rickon is standing outside with that boy - the one that's the son of Robert Baratheon, isn't he? You've been talking about him."

They were quiet.

"I'm sane."

Silence reigned.

"I'm sane!"

"We might be who you think we are," Sansa vaguely replied after a moment, "but you are no Arya Stark. The Arya who is my sister is strong and bold and fearless. You are weak and alone and afraid."

"Fear cuts deeper than swords," came Arya's solemn answer, "and I tell you now, I have been cut to the bone."

"Who is she talking about?"

"Huh?"

Gendry sighed and wondered if the youngest Stark would be any help. An idle hand played in his hair as he looked at the near-grown high schooler, examining him. "She keeps saying 'it was him again'. Who is 'he'?"

"Oh," Rickon mumbled, and both his expression and mood shifted to a darker tone. "She - she has these delusions that a man, a group of men, is out to get her. She calls him the Face, and a whole bunch of them is the Faceless. She gets into these fits. She seriously thinks her life is in danger. She looks around corners before she turns them, she walks the streets like a man on the run. She interrogates everyone and doesn't have friends. We didn't realize why she had dropped out of college until she told us, but we tried to help when she came home, screaming that he'd followed her here."

Gendry felt a shudder pass through him. "It's like a spooky Halloween movie." He paused, trying to figure out if he'd been insensitive. Rickon didn't look offended. "I mean it's just surreal."

"Yeah," Rickon mused, but his eyes looked into some far off land, sharp as an eagle's as if his imagination was true. "Surreal."

The next time he saw her, she had found the spare key to Jon's apartment under the mat and was bawling as she made her way into his living room. She was muttering. "Qui - quick as a sn - quick as a snake, calm as still ..." She trailed off, completing the phrase in the confines of her mind. Waking up from his shirtless position on the couch, he stumbled over to the light switch just so he could raise the dimmer and watch her stumble over to the rug before turning to face him, awestruck ("Swift as a deer,"). The tears and sniffles subsided for a moment.

"Sorry."

"It's alright."

He made his way over to her and leaned awkwardly to the left, letting his hand brush the sofa cushion as she stared at him. "I'm Arya."

"I know."

He fooled himself into thinking he saw her eyes grow the smallest bit bigger, but it was gone as soon as she started the muttering again. "Fierce as a - as a wolverine, fierce as a wolverine, no, no, strong as a bear, fierce as a -"

"Hey, hey, hey," was all he could think to interrupt her with, and he let his hand reside on her shoulder with the purpose of guiding them both down onto the couch. "Hey, it's alright, calm down, shh." Gendry was grateful he'd been briefed on the situation before something like this had happened, or else he would have been the one losing his mind. "Swift as a deer," it came once more, and he suddenly pulled her close, though he'd only just met her. He knew she needed someone, and if she could pretend he was Robb or Jon just for a minute, and if it helped her, it would be worth it.

"... water. Calm as still water."

She fell asleep in his arms, head in his bare chest, but he didn't rest, couldn't, because if she woke up to his unconscious form he knew she'd think the Face had come again.

"I don't fear losing," she tried to explain, but they wouldn't listen. "The man who fears losing is already lost."

"Nobody said you feared losing," Bran said with an arm around her shoulder, which she promptly swatted away as if she could trust no one. Robb sent a glare Sansa's way over Bran's back. Arya didn't miss it.

"The man who fears losing has - the mean who fears losing - the man who - lost - the man who fears -"

"Shh," and his hands were on either side of her face as he shook her gently, noses almost touching, breaths shallow as if afraid of stealing her oxygen. Afraid. He couldn't be afraid, because he was the only one who was rational enough to calm her down, and if he was afraid, then they would come for him, too, and no, no, no. "Fear cuts deeper than swords," she told him, earnestly believing the information would save his life.

He nodded, resolute, as if his life depended on her words. "Fear cuts deeper than swords."

A pause, one that could kill a man. She replied with the nonexistent amount of honor she had left, feeling aged and expendable yet somehow hopeful. "I am no longer afraid."

"That is a lie," he countered, but he could sense a hardness in her eyes that had never been there before, and he felt strangely accomplished.

"Yes," she whispered hoarsely, and her siblings felt like intruders on such intimate a moment. "But just barely."

He figured he'd fallen in love the moment he saw a foreign courage fill her eyes.

"Fear cuts deeper than swords," she said in the mornings when he made her eggs and kept the coffee away from her, now that she slept in his flat. He took the couch. She slept in his bed. The scent of him could keep the Faceless away, she told herself. It rang true.

"Fear cuts deeper than swords," she'd say when a toddler in the nearby park stubbed his toe on a tree root and began to wail. She was lucky he was now well-off and antisocial enough to spend the days and nights alone with her.

"Fear cuts deeper than swords," she would say as she bit into a lunch that reminded her of her childhood when Sansa would berate her for eating like a maniac. She had lost that vigor now, but still absorbed as much food as physically possible and as quickly as she could.

"Fear cuts deeper than swords," she would announce as the football game ended and his team lost to the Packers and half the state was switching off their televisions. It made him feel better and he let her sleep in his signed jersey that night.

"Fear cuts deeper than swords," was how she would explain when he woke in the young of the morning to find her huddling cross-legged in front of his couch staring at him as he slept, "but you don't want to be cut by a sword, either."

She never mentioned the Faceless or their leader again. But nobody said it was forgotten.

"I love you," he told her one day, but it wasn't out of the blue, for she'd been expecting it for too long to let it surprise her. "I just wanted to let you know, cause you know, fear cuts deeper than swords."

"Shut up," she orders him, and she kisses him fiercely - fierce as a wolverine - no. That is done. That is the past. She pushes herself away from him, and he grabs her elbows so she can't get far. "Are you sure, Gendry?"

He is perplexed. "Sure of what?"

No hesitation. "Sure that you love me." She awaits his answer, not scared but wary.

"Why wouldn't I be?" he asks, and she realizes he seriously doesn't understand.

"Because," she says, longing and pity etched into her voice, "the only thing that cuts deeper than fear is me."

Every thought in your head is like poison to hear