OPEN; how could anything bad ever happen to you?

[clothed]

Who: Sansa and others
What: test drive catch-all and may event threads
When: throughout may for the event
Where: all over!

Content Warnings: Will add as things progress!

We all have a hunger.

It's easy to fall back into rhythm with Lady. The direwolf is a miracle, even though Sansa's stopped believing in things like miracles; she knows it is her, and Lady remembers her. During her first few nights in Milton Sansa slept with the wolf curled against her body, the two of them nested together like they used to do back in Winterfell.

Warmth, especially body warmth, can spell the difference between life or death during winter.

These days Sansa finds herself in something of a routine: she wakes early, lets Lady out to do her business and stretch her legs, and then says a quiet prayer to both the Old Gods and the Seven. For her father, and her mother, and her brothers and sister and everyone else who have died.

Then she goes through what reading material is available at the community center. She'll run out eventually; it's a lot like studying, only without a septa or a maester guiding her, but she'll make do.

Sansa's easy to find like this: either walking with Lady as the direwolf maps out the town, sitting by a window and reading, or trying to help with something. Anything.

Just try not to come up from behind when approaching her; she always has her knife with her.

[ Happy to write a closed starter for the event! Send me a journal PM or ping me on plurk (weirwood) to plot something out. Also moving test drive threads here just to keep things neat. ]

Comments

[clothed]

"Thank you for your generosity," Sansa replies with a little bit of attitude, if only because—well, she was going to do it, but now she almost doesn't want to.

Her desire to be polite is far stronger than her desire to act like a child, though, and Sansa dutifully wipes her shoes on the laid-out mat, careful to check that her skirt isn't dragging in any mud or snow sludge too. Lady, meanwhile, is all too happy to have a man waiting on her paws, cheerily proffering her front paws to be wiped, though it takes a bit of maneuvering to get her to turn and offer her hind paws to the man.

When the man is done - and upon a closer look, there are lines on his face that may mean he's not so young as Sansa first judged him to be - Sansa nods at him politely and thanks him for attending to Lady.

It's almost a bow; the man is rather short. Not as short as Tyrion, but still short.

"Have you been cleaning all day?" She asks with no small amount of bemusement. "Is... is it entertaining for you to clean?"

[wingbound]

He's used to attitude. If he does notice, it seems to roll off of him like water from a duck. At least the (what he considers a) dog is well-behaved, and while it does take some gentle wrestling to wipe down her back paws, it's overall pretty quick and painless. He gives Lady an awkward pat on the withers and stands back up, stepping out of the way so she can trot inside.

The almost-bow seems to make him uncomfortable, or maybe a bit confused. He's earned respect among plenty of people but nobody was bowing to him, he didn't even care much about the salutes. But this girl is treating him like the Queen. Why?

"Yes," he admits, frowning a little at the idea of it being entertaining. It's not quite the word he would choose, but it's not necessarily wrong either. "Something like that. I find it calming. A lot of weird shit has happened."

Like waking up in a world of snow that's apparently called Canada, for one. He's never even heard of such a place.

[clothed]

“I understand,” Sansa answers, not understanding, but she is accepting of the answer all the same. It makes sense, she supposes, that something so repetitive as cleaning would feel calming. Like embroidery, she thinks, or knitting, or any of the crafts skills she knows to knows to do.

“We didn’t mean to interrupt your cleaning,” she continues, sincere in her explanation of things. She hadn’t, truly, and she also had every intention of cleaning up after Lady once they were settled from their morning trek. Sansa didn’t expect to have been out for as long as they had, or for someone to take over cleaning duties in the interim.

She nudges at Lady to trot over to where Sansa had set down a bowl for her, for water and for chopped bits of meat when she’s not out hunting. She’s been fastidious in cleaning the bowl, so it’s quick work to excuse herself for a moment and pour fresh water into the thing.

Still holding a pitcher, Sansa returns to the man with a cup in hand. “Water? You seem to have been at it a while. You must take a moment to rest, too.”

“I’m Lyanna, as well. Thank you for attending to Lady; you didn’t have to extend us the courtesy.”

[wingbound]

Perhaps she should teach him knitting sometime. He'd probably take well to it.

"You're not interrupting," he mutters, feeling increasingly awkward. It hadn't been his intention to make the girl or her maybe-dog feel unwelcome; he'd simply seen a potential issue and solved it before it could evolve into something that annoyed him. But maybe they took it in a different way. "It's no trouble."

Frankly, they owe him nothing. He would have done it whether or not anyone else shared the space; he can't even claim it's for the community. He just needed something therapeutic and this was that.

He still sort of just stands there before finally remembering to pick up and put away the broom and the bucket, but before he can get to it, he's having a cup offered to him. He'd rather have tea, but it's pretty scarce around here, so he accepts it, taking the cup in a slightly odd manner by the rim.

"Thank you," he grouses, "but really, I'm fine. We all live here."

Only makes sense they would all do their part in making the space inhabitable. For a few moments, it seems that he's chosen to ignore her introduction completely, but after taking a sip of water and frowning at the cup for a few moments longer, he offers just his name in return;

"...Levi."