do you know what your fate is, and are you trying to shake it

[kissed_byfire]

WHO: Ygritte
WHERE: Bungalow #50, around the Village and at the Inn
WHEN: November 18th, throughout
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: None at this time
STATUS: Open

---

Front of Bungalow 50

It was quite early in the morning and though the wildling had been warmly surrounded by Jon's arms, Ygritte was wide awake after a nightmare had jarred her out of sleep. It was of her last moments and the words exchanged between the two of them, only it wasn't at Castle Black where she died.

They were there in the Village.

She remained only long enough until she was calm again, the slow rise and fall of Jon's chest as he breathed helped. Going back to sleep wasn't going to happen so out of bed she slipped and dressed before wandering through the house and out to sit on the front step. It was quiet and the Free Woman decided she had at least a couple hours before the other townspeople started to wake and go about their day.

Around the Village/At the Inn

Ygritte didn't care if she was approachable. But today, for some odd reason, she put herself where the people were. Or as much as she could. Jon was off busy doing something, no doubt with his family, and sitting at their home wasn't engaging enough of an activity.

She wandered through, into the trees and back out along the river and up to the Inn where she sat and watched people come and go from a corner in the pub.

Comments

Inn

[booklegging]

"Hey. It's Ygritte, right?"

One step into the attached room that served as the inn's pub and meeting area, and Ygritte's red hair was instantly noticeable, a candle flame attached to the pale wick of a neck. Jess, having come in from outside to consult the hand-drawn map (some snow and mythological monsters weren't about to keep him from checking out the Grecian ruins, no sir), paused a little ways past the door once he spotted her sitting at the table in the periphery of his vision.

He shifted his gaze to her. There were a couple of redheads in town--Jess saw some more than others when they frequented the inn or their duties overlapped, but Ygritte stood out from the others, not only because of her accent and mannerisms. He still remembered her from her first day, wandering out of the park in wet scrubs.

In all that time, she hadn't seemed like the type of social butterfly who waited around for company for company's sake. It was partly out of wondering how she'd been doing, and partly out of curiosity at her presence that he decided to speak up, veering toward her table instead of the map.

[kissed_byfire]

Ygritte had been staring off in such thought that she almost didn't hear Jesse when he spoke directly to her. Her head turned and she immediately recognized the approaching person, remembering his name and everything.

Giving a smile in greeting, she nodded with a snort. "Must have made quite the impression on you. Can't say many people want to remember someone like me."

Which was totally okay with her.

[booklegging]

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how Ygritte viewed the attentions of those who'd never heard of Westeros before coming here, Jess had a good memory for names and faces, and he exercised that talent regularly here, taking mental roll calls as best he could. With how quickly people could get lost or fall off the face of the earth, it was necessary to keep tabs on who was still kicking around. That included Ygritte.

He tilted his head slightly. "You mean slugging Margaery?"

... And yeah, it was also true Ygritte had left an impression the month prior. He'd heard about the upset over the dead sheep--seen the end result, too, in the puffy welt on the other woman's face.

Jess' held no judgement or reproach, though. How the women knew each other and what they were quarrelling about was none of his business, and he knew perfectly well that sometimes actions were more effective than words.

[kissed_byfire]

Ygritte's expression turned to one of amusement before quickly fading into indifference over the situation that had her punching the Southroner in the eye. There would be no apology - ever - from her, but as far as the wildling was concerned, it was all water under the bridge now.

"No," she answered, lingering a moment. "Where I'm from, my race of people aren't exactly looked at with any kind of respect. Not from anyone south of the Wall. We're all bad."

[booklegging]

"Bad?" he echoed questioningly. Jon had mentioned a Wall, hadn't he?

If Ygritte's hope was to stave off conversation, saying something like that was guaranteed to have the opposite effect. Racial tensions weren't unheard of where he was from, either; Jess' curiosity was piqued at the possibility that they had emerged here, in this giant petri dish where they were already divided by scrub color and skill level.

"Why is that?"

[kissed_byfire]

Ygritte gave a little snort that paired with an expression that might as well been of equal parts pride and defiance. The Free Folk didn't speak kindly of the people south of the Wall, and vice versa and that much was obvious then and there.

"Ah," she sounded, as if thrilled she'd engaged him enough to ask. "Well that's a long story. One that goes back longer than I've been around."

But it was one she'd tell, at least to put everything into perspective for him.

"Way back, the kneelers built a wall as high as a mountain to keep somethin' far worse than us Free Folk out. We call 'em the Others, or White Walkers. An' After a time, anyone south of the Wall forgot why it was built and the Others became a story all on its own. Each time we tried to pass to ensure our survival, the Crows were there to make sure it didn't happen. To them, we're no different than the Others."

Despite the ignorance and the fact none of it made any difference there, it still made Ygritte angry. It's the reason she punched Margaery. That and the woman pointed her finger at her one too many times.

[booklegging]

"Fortunate that I like history. Long stories are fine by me. I'm not busy doing much else if you feel like telling some of it." Another thing about long stories--they usually meant a person had to settle in and get comfortable to hear it, and so Jess did, pulling out a chair to seat himself.

He tried to avoid getting too personal with people here, not one to share his life's story and expect one in return, but he'd be lying if he said he wasn't interested in hearing about other places. Other worlds. The more comfortable he got with that particular concept, the more fascinating the array of possible universes became.

"We have a saying--history is written by the victors. Margaery's people did the writing on the south side, you're a part of these Free Folk on the north?" It could've been a page taken out of a book on the Roman Empire versus the Britons... aside from the 'wall as high as a mountain' part. Hyperbole? Hard to tell. "What's so bad about these 'White Walkers' it takes a feat of engineering to barricade them out long enough to turn them into an old wives' tale?"