"I'm sorry for Arianne and Tyene, those two are partners in crime, you see? Good girls, both of them. They have always been inseparable. I believe you must understand, especially now, that you are alone with your sister in the Capitol" Oberyn stated as he took a seat next to her and threw some sort of berry in the air, having it fall in his mouth. Then, he gallantly smiled at her again.
"Actually, I was always closer to the boys, even though my sister and I are very close" Lilia cleared out, catching Oberyn's attention. When he thought that Lilia Stark didn't have an interesting life before going to the Capitol, he was obviously mistaken. A girl who would rather play with her brothers than her sisters was a different girl from the ones people would usually meet. "My brothers, Robb and Jon, were my true companions. Robb and I were very stubborn and very alike in many things, Jon was a quiet wolf though. He used to tell me he didn't like to be in the spotlight, that being Ned Stark's bastard was enough spotlight for a lifetime. They were both my companions for a very long time since my sister would always spend her time with my mother and our Septa. Then, my father took Theon Greyjoy as his ward and in the last couple of years I started to get along more with Sansa"
"The kind who would wear pants and not dresses, I take it" Oberyn presumed, as the girl shook her head in denial. "Your aunt was that girl, I remember her at the Tourney of Harrenhall. She beat three squires with a stick because they were mocking a northern boy"
"No, I like dresses. Nevertheless, I can not say that wearing pants would bother me either" she cleared out. She had always heard people say how similar she was to Lyanna, but as time went by, she would realize that they couldn't be more wrong about her. Perhaps she did look like the late Lyanna Stark, maybe she would remind everybody of her. However, the more she listened to stories about her, the more she thought they were quite different from one another. "That's my sister, Arya. All she ever wanted was to fight with the boys. She was fascinated by knights, actual knights. Unlike my sister, Sansa, Arya didn't care about the pretty tales about knights and maidens, what she really liked were warriors. She liked them so much that she named her direwolf Nymeria. A true deviation from what my mother thought a Lady should look like, but my father never forbade her from being who she was, he respected it"
"I see, what happened to her? Is she with your brother?" he questioned, letting Lilia to her thoughts. It was an option Lilia hadn't considered. For all she knew, Arya could be with Robb and their mother, Arya could be back at Winterfell, Arya could be alive and well. However, she did have to admit that the false hope those expectations gave her, was still not able to convince her of the fact that all those scenarios were unlikely.
"For all I know, she's probably as good as dead" she stated with sadness. "She escaped King's Landing right after our father was executed. I saw her in the crowd when Ser Illyn Payne came for his head. Ever since then, no one has seen her"
"What about Theon Greyjoy? Why did you stop getting along with your brothers because of him?" he asked as he tried to close the Arya Stark subject. She smiled sadly. She had thought about Theon in the past days, she had been thinking about him a lot, actually. She smiled sadly and nostalgically as Oberyn waited for her to answer.
"He was older than me and had other interests," Lilia said as Oberyn smiled. He knew what those interests were, he knew perfectly well. "We ended up drifting apart and as my brothers started to share those interests..."
"Did you not share the same, or at least, similar interests?" he asked her. He had already figured what had happened. Lilia realized that as she pressed her lips together without knowing very well what to respond.
"It doesn't matter now," she said, confirming what Oberyn suspected. In his youth, he too had loved a girl who never loved him back. She treated him with kindness but she never acted on her feelings, and so he ended up losing her. "I also decided that being with him... and my brothers all the time would never get me to become what I wanted"
"What did you want to become?" she hadn't been asked that question in a very long time, not even by herself. It felt like an eternity since she had been in Winterfell for the last time, the girl who she once was used to dreaming about it every night. The horrible truth now, was that she couldn't even remember what it looked like.
"I wanted to be a proper Lady. I wanted to be as graceful as my sister, I wanted to be like my mother. For a long time, I envied them. They were all I ever wanted to be, true ladies. When I was young, I would often compare myself to them. People said I was a northern beauty, but all I dreamt about was having the auburn hair my sister had gotten from my mother, those beautiful, blue eyes, and the high cheekbones. I had none of those features, neither had I been blessed with half the grace" she replied with a bitter taste of nostalgy in her mouth. God, how she missed her home, how she missed her family, how she missed her life. Not the life of a prisoner that she had been forced to live from the moment where she got to the Capitol. She wanted to be free again, she wanted not to have to worry about anything anymore. "As I grew up, I would go to the godswood and pray to the Old Gods. I would pray to be elsewhere, I would pray to make my family proud, but I would mostly pray to be back home after my safe travels. Gosh, I was stupid!"
Before she could realize, she already had tears in her eyes. Oberyn pushed her closer in order to hold her in his arms, out of comfort. It was the first time she cried about missing her home. She had cried multiple times since her father had been executed. She had cried because she missed them, she had cried because she feared for her brother's life, she had cried because she feared for her mother's life, she had cried because they executed her father, but never for one instant, had she cried because she missed the walls of Winterfell.
One thing she could say, nonetheless. Crying over Winterfell was worse than crying over anything else for it was crying over everything that had happened since she had left at the same time.
After some time, she let herself go and cleaned her tears as she realized how stupid she was being. Crying in a man's arms over her home, a man she barely even knew!
The worst part was that, for some odd and unexplainable reason, Lilia and Oberyn had instantly clicked from the moment they met. He brought her comfort, she felt that she could trust him even if she didn't know much about him.
"I'm sorry" she apologized as she recomposed herself. Oberyn watched the girl and noticed something different from the girls he lived with. Lilia Stark was far more innocent than any of them but her life was also far more tragic.
"You have nothing to apologize for. You know what I think?" he asked as she nodded for him to continue. "You worry too much about what other people think is fit or proper and what isn't instead of living the life you want to live"
His words hit her like a truck as she thought about them. She always wanted to please other people and sometimes she would do things she didn't want to or that she didn't like to begin with just for the sake of other people. All the time.
She couldn't recall the last time she had done something she truly wanted to do without feeling guilty or without feeling that she was disappointing her family. She knew they would accept her, even if she was a disaster, but she didn't want them to have that image of her.
"You've survived this far. You learnt how to survive in King's Landing" he stated as she thought about it herself. She had learnt how to please other people or insult them, outthink them or even defend herself and others, all with the pretty words that she never wanted to say to begin with. However, those words had been her weapon and her way of surviving. "Now, it's time for you to learn how to live"
The question she asked herself was the cliché one. Did she not know how to live? How could someone actually live a life without having to survive it?
YOU ARE READING
The Little Wolf
Fanfiction{Book 2 from the "Rise" saga} After the death of her father, Lilia Stark stays in the Capitol with her younger sister, Sansa. Away from the rest of her family and an outsider in King Joffrey's Court, Lilia starts to realize how life in King's Landin...
