samwpmarleau:

50. “I still think you’re beautiful.”

Her childhood seems like a lifetime ago. Winterfell seems like a lifetime ago. The Winterfell she used to know, that is. She can scarcely believe it was only a couple years ago she was calling Arya names and fantasizing about her future husband with Sansa. It all seems so frivolous now, so stupid.

They had both been so sure their husbands would be good men, handsome ones, that they’d live their lives happy with a dozen children. What fools they were. She has Ramsay, and Sansa…well, no one knows where Sansa is anymore. Probably dead like everyone else.

It is strange, what she remembers from then, what sticks with her. So many memories have faded away now. She can hardly even remember Sansa’s face. Gods only know why she remembers that one day with Theon, a meaningless blip of a conversation so long ago, but she does. She had been upset that one of the boys in the yard had called her hair ugly, of all things; she’d thought that was the worst insult the world could hurl at her, a boy saying he didn’t like her hair.

But it had mattered at the time, and a drunken Theon had found her weeping on one of the staircases and she’d told him what happened. And then he’d told her he thought she was beautiful. He’d promptly thrown up and stumbled off to his chambers, and she doubts he remembers it and certainly knows he wasn’t serious, but for some reason it’s stuck with her through all the pain and despair. Theon had called her pretty, once. She’s not so anymore, if ever she was. Yet still, somehow, she holds onto that night like a tether. That stupid, childish, meaningless night, the last vestige of her innocence.