I'm so sorry it's been so long since the last update but loads of stressful stuff has happened since then with my family, and then when I'd almost finished the chapter George released a new Arya chapter from the Winds of Winter so I changed it to fit with that. So sorry for the wait, but I've finished college now, the stressful situations are hopefully going to get a lot better soon and know where the plot of this is going so regular updates should resume :) Thank you for all the messages saying how much you love the story, as it really helped me write this :)

Chapter Fourteen.

Mercy was dead and gone, her giggles distant echoes but her successor still lovingly recalled the sight of her victim bleeding out like a pig before her. Ooh how her arms had ached as she'd rolled and dragged him down the stairs and kicked him into the canal to never been seen again, the black ripples hiding his very existence. Arya Stark had come out to play to Mercy's delight, and as she skipped back to her shabby room with the blood soaked floorboards she gave not a fleeting thought to what a Kindly Man would say, how the Sealord of Braavos would be terribly troubled.

Mercy had had to die because of that, but Faith was all too happy to take her place.

Faith was a dour faced perfectionist, stern with her penance and icy cold with her punishment. A vigorous righter of wrongs, passionately in love with the faith whose fate she was aligned with. Her God had many faces and she was his mortal representative, stalking the streets at night with a name on her lips and a death to follow. She stank of the putrefying scent of flesh, whiffs of copper blood swirling around her ankles, but she welcomed its presence around her, on the very pores of her skin for they were old friends and recent lovers. Faith's upper lip twisted into a wolf's snarl as she spotted her destination, blending into the shadows she was half made of.

She peered through the window and saw the unmoving lump in the bed. Easy, pathetically so, and she wanted a challenge.She rolled fluently on the balls of her feet before jumping, sliding without a sound to press her back against the wall of the house that had seen better days. The target went on snoring, and Faith stalked forward eyes narrowed, the taste of blood thick and heady on her tongue. She straddled the man for a moment contemplatively, lithe thighs barely indenting the sagging bed as she stroked the tassels of a pillow clearly stolen before pressing it over his face. The victim jerked and Faith pressed down harder, and his body writhed underneath her, eyes popping open and arms flinging out with a futile attempt to grab her.

He deserved to die. He wasn't a good man, Faith had watched him rape and beat the poor girls, the poor girls who had come to the Temple with broken bodies and dead eyes and asked them to deliver the gift. A girl, they had said. A beautiful but cold girl, and they had smiled then with beautiful bloodlust thrumming in their smiles.

Faith had been picked, and Faith was a perfectionist.

Until the man's fat fingers groped at her skin and shoved, and Faith tumbled to the floor momentarily stunned.

She stared up at the huge fat creature writhing above her, sucking in lungfuls of air with watery eyes and fisted hands, and rolled onto her feet once more. Every muscle tense, ready to move. He shifted his weight and she hers, and they stood watching each other.

His brow furrowed, his mouth opened to ask a question she wouldn't answer, and Faith wheeled around with a snarl for the door. Just as she predicted his heavy hand clamped down on her pointed shoulder and twisted her. Faith looked up guileless, a rabbit staring down an arrowhead, and the man dragged her close-

She slithered from his grasp in one smooth undiluted movement and his curses rang through the household like war cries, and they danced together in time. Co-ordinated, but he was clumsy and careless in his need to extinguish her solo, and she swerved and dipped around the house with no thoughts in her mind except the rattle of her breath in her windpipe and the cold floor on her bare feet, and through the window moonlight illuminated his heavy jowls and wide set eyes, his paunch and ripples of fat grotesque as his face twisted with anger at his wilful prize.

Faith smiled with her eyes, cold eyes, eyes that were a dispassionate observer in their battle. Eyes that watched with the faintest boredom and the hasty need to get the job finished before someone nearby heard. Faith swung her hips sinfully as she ventured into shadows, and the man followed with lust, licking dry lips in the anticipation-

And he stepped right into the rope she'd prepared earlier. His body swung up to the rafters and the wood creaked, his legs kicking out, and Faith stared up with a smile at the hanging man with his neck bulging against the noose. Suicide was a foolish and weak man's way out, a stupid-Faith shook her head to stop the thoughts of a girl long ago, and watched her work with a critical eye and pursed lips until the man was merely a corpse.

Faith stares at the unseeing eyes glazed over, the veins sticking out under his blue skin, and wonders as she slips outside who will be the first to loosen their lips come morning and start the inevitable gossip. Strange, but not suspicious, because after all Faith was a perfectionist.

Faith had stopped counting the moons she had stayed in the temple, stayed without a letter, and the thoughts of a girl named Arya were more distant every day, the revenge she vowed still strong but unable to find its target in this city with the ever-watching Faceless. She spent days being taught by the Waif, refining her skills, and although she was nowhere near finished in her service she had more skills in the art of murder than any man in Westeros. She needed to leave, she wanted to leave, but Faith was a dour faced perfectionist, and Faith stayed and never strayed.

Faith sighed, trailing back the familiar route to her temple and pondered getting the next ship to Westeros like she had almost every night. She liked giving the Gift to wicked men, to let the people who harmed others feel the same before they died, and Faith… Faith had nowhere else to go in the world.

She gave up the thought like she knew she would, and tutted under her breath with stern rebuke, the cowl over her head fluttering in the slight breeze making her way slowly, so slowly…

She whipped around, a slim sword suddenly in her hands before her.

They stared at each other, and Faith squinted uncertainly at the boy before her. Lean and pasty with a face one could call pig like. The moonlight spilling onto him only emphasized his bland looks. Not particularly tall, but taller then her. Unremarkable and plain, with a few spots on his forehead, his clothes loose fitting, hanging off his pinched shoulders. Light eyes, pale and watering and slightly protruding. Hair the undeciding shade between blonde and brown, like the boy himself was afraid to commit to anything.

She had never seen him before, and he certainly never her, and they stood for a suspended moment in time taking the other in.

Faith furrowed her eyebrows together and lifted her sword higher wondering who would be so reckless to approach her. The boy leaned closer, trailing one fat finger along the carvings so delicately it made her shudder.

"A nice sword. What is it's name?" His eyes looking up with an expectant glint, one hand going without fear to knock her hood down as if to confirm. Her hair was shiny onyx in colour, tied so tight in rigid braids her scalp ached.

"Revenge."

And Arya sheathed her sword and wrapped her arms around him.

"I missed you." She said, voice muffled as she attuned herself to the steady beat of his heart. "You were gone ages. Did you get that book?"

"I missed you too, lovely girl." Jaqen played with a lock of her hair. "There were some complications.. but your sword has a grand name. I presume a girl has been practicing well and often?"

"Of course." Arya said affronted, tilting her head up to look at him.

Jaqen smiled, white lips stretching up into a bland smile. She decided she didn't like this face, preferred the black curls of the one before, or his first face with the red hair and white stripe. The Jaqen she had first met him as. Still, it did not matter truly.

Arya stepped back and put a hand on the hilt of the slim sword hanging at her hip and Jaqen nodded in approval.

"Have you heard I'm married?" She blurted it out before she could stop, biting her lip hard to stop the betraying words slip out again. She wasn't Arya Stark, she was Faith, Faith. Faith.

"Arya is married." She rephrased as they walked side by side back to the House. They walked across the harbor and stopped at the water's edge, the water black and reflecting the stars above. Arya knew with a wolves vision she would be able to see the fish that swum between roots growing amongst the cracks in the seabed below.

Jaqen leant on the side of the bridge next to the pair, staring out across the sea. "Who is the lucky husband?"

"I don't know." Arya frowned, eyes flitting to the ship she had looked at every day and thought of Westeros. She could just walk up and in a moons turn she would be back in Westeros, and she could find the people on her list and cross them out. She could go to her brother at the Wall, like the sailor who brought her to Braavos had denied her. A sudden sharp pain of longing pierced her chest and she sighed mournfully fingers brushing over her sword. Revenge.

Dunsen, Polliver, The Tickler and The Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei.

Faith had lost her whole family, she had truly paid the price, and now she had to give them the Gift. Sadness made a lump in her throat, but Faith did not cry. Not anymore. Faith had no brother, or Mother, or Father. She didn't even have a friend in the Faceless Man Jaqen. And she was Faith, not Arya of House Stark-

"We could take a ship, back to Westeros and find out." Arya finally gave voice to her thoughts, turning to her friend.

"You could." Jaqen agreed neutrally. "But you think they will let you go, a little girl that knows all their secrets?" Jaqen put his hands on her arms, piggy eyes boring into her.

"You can come too." Arya added quickly. "With me. We can find them together. And I I can come back to the House of Black and White one day and learn everything. Or you could teach me." She added desperately. "I don't want to waste my time killing men I don't know."

She wants... she wants so many things. To go home, to Winterfell, to see Sansa and her brothers and parents even though most were nothing but dust in the ground now. She wants to feel safe, and she feels safe by Jaqen's side. She wants to see who this 'Arya' is and make her relinquish her title, for this faceless woman was not her truly and did not have the right to marry without her permission. She wants to kill the people who hurt her family.

"You promised you would help me, and you have. You brought me here, you helped me train. Now help me get back home and do what I came here for." She looked up at him with grey eyes, sharp as Valyrian steel.

And Jaqen sighed, giving in like she knew he would. Perhaps deep down the man who was Faceless was remembering his own family and his own words he had spoken to the girl long ago.

And so they interlock hands, and disappear into the night.