Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Elain Waters is ready to dismiss her new mother entirely.

Not because of who she is or what she does – Amelia still thinks she's too young to realise what all the men coming and going from her room means – but because she just can't do this again.

So she puts up walls, to protect herself.

Amelia doesn't as much tear down these walls as she ignores them completely.

Elain is two when Amelia catches her learning – reminding herself – how to read. She expects derision. Suspicion. Or, at the very least, questions of a 'where did you get that book?' variety.

Instead, Amelia practically glomps her 'little genus' as she gives her the brightest grin she's seen in a longs time. It's not the usual placid smile she sends towards her customers. It's real and ecstatic and just so full of love that Elain can't help but love her back.

"Mum!" she yelps, before she catches herself because that's who she is to her.

Mum.

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Years go by and Elain still can't look at the Baratheon sigil without smiling. Deer will always hold happy memories for her.

Some of those memories, Elain decides, should accompany her home. Some of those memories do not, strictly speaking, accompany her with their owners' explicit consent.

'Little fawn' her mother calls her, snickering as Elain plasters the crest across her room.

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Training in King's Landing is difficult without chakra, but not impossible.

It starts with mostly running and stretching. Not fun without metaphysical super-energy backing her up, but she's done it before and she'll do it again.

Mobility goes... less smoothly, which is a nice way of saying she'd nearly killed herself trying for a jump she could've easily made as Shikako.

And, when it comes to sparring, the boys down at Sister Dolly's are always looking for a scrap. Some of them are even kind of impressive in a 'just won't go down' sort of way.

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Elain is twelve and riding high on a particularly devastating victory when arrives home to two Goldcloaks standing over her mother's broken body.

"Kill the bitch."

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"Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow."

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The two of them stand there over her mother's bloody corpse. One is young, the other old. Neither of them, Elain thinks, are leaving this house alive.

She is twelve, her body taught and wired, hidden under a raggedy tunic that's far too big for her. Convenient when it comes to hiding things like, for example, the knife at her waste.

"Kill the bitch" one of them – Old – says, with all of the enthusiasm of a man scraping the shit off his shoe.

Young – his subordinate? – draws his sword and moves towards her, almost casually, as if killing children didn't bother him in the slightest. Only his eyes give him away, dead and broken. The rest of him will follow.

Elain ducks inside his swing and slits his throat on the spot.

Old swears and tries for his own blade. Too late, he realises, as she cleaves the hand from its wrist.

He's panicking now, no longer quite so sure of himself. She expects begging. Pleas and bargains of the 'I'll make you rich' variety.

What she gets is, quite frankly, embarrassing.

"You little whore." He snarls, even as he backs himself into a corner, literally and figuratively. "You can't do this to me! I have friends – powerful friends! Kill me and they'll hunt you to your last breath!"

"That's nice." She edges closer to him. Inch by inch. The man still has one good arm and there's no way she's buying that that was his only blade.

Sure enough, out comes a dagger, already covered in blood which is just… lovely.

Faster than I'd have guessed, Elain thinks as she skirts past a desperate lunge, planting her own knife into his chest.

"But… I am a Lord" he rasps out, as if this somehow constituted an immunity to sharp objects.

Fun fact. It does not.

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Elain closes her eyes and takes a moment. Allows herself to feel like a twelve year old girl who just lost her mother. To cry a little. 

Then, she listens.

She listens to the voice. The one that sounds like the girl who killed three Genin because it was the most efficient way to survive. Like the woman who blew a man's face off with her last scrap of chakra. She doesn't cry. She talks a low, calm voice. In a language Elain no longer speaks.

Listen, she says.

She does.

Screaming. Men, women and children. Pain, fear and grief. The city guard slaughters at random and the people scream.

Nothing is random, Shikako says.

From the rooftops, she sees. The brothels are hit hardest, with smatterings of guards here and there making house calls. The famously promiscuous King Robert dies. Stark is executed for asserting that the new king is no king at all, but an incestuous pretender. And then, escorts and their children start dropping like flies.

Oh.

See? Says the Shinobi. That wasn't so hard to figure out, was it?

Except, if they were killing Baratheon bastards, then that would make her-

-Oh. Oh.

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It turns out she really had killed a Lord, and there really are people out for her blood because of it. Hell, they might have even caught her if they had any idea what she looked like.

Or if they knew that she actually was alone and not under someone else's protection because little girls do not kill 'valiant' Lord Commanders.

Or if she had any known associates whatsoever.

They don't catch her.

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They keep on not catching her until, one day, the Commander is someone else and the city guard loses its interest in killing children as quickly as they'd acquired it.

She likes him already.

There's something strangely liberating about her situation, Elain thinks. Or Shikako does. It doesn't really matter at this point. Nobody knows either of those names here.

Elain's mother is dead, and with her goes the last pretense of childhood.

Where she began stealing to survive, she continues in earnest. No more stag imagery – god, why didn't I just save time and paint a fucking target on my back? – Just gold and other valuables that she can move fast and fence faster.

She is appallingly good at it.

Where she once skirted around some of the most dangerous and supernaturally gifted killers on the continent, she now steals from pompous nobles, so oblivious she can't help but wonder if she shouldn't whistle a tune or something, just to give them a fighting chance.

She doesn't, obviously. Honour as a concept is even more ludicrous here than it was in the elemental nations.

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Months slip by and she has a bounty now. No face, no name. Not even a description. Just a moniker and a list crimes they think she committed.

'The Shadow' they call her.

She laughs so hard there are tears in her eyes.

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Her fence, a stocky man by the name of Marcus, smiles whenever she walks in his door – I always has something has worth selling, after all. He looks over her goods, hands her an appropriately discounted pouch of money and then she leaves. From time to time he'll make a joke about this or that item he sold back to its original owner – 'an exact replica Milord, just as you asked!' – but to this day, he's never asked a single question about her. She likes that about him.

Then, siege of the Blackwater comes and goes, along with the majority of her contemporaries. Marcus loses most of his income and decides to diversify his merchandise.

"Information" he says. "I give you a location and a list of names. You go there and eavesdrop. Simple."

Elain's smile has a few too many teeth. "It'll cost you."

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The secrets come pouring in. Frauds, conspiracies and – of course – affairs.

So many affairs.

They make each other rich.

Right up until they don't.

When along comes a Spider.

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Chapter Text

"Any fool with a bit of luck can find himself born into power. But earning it for yourself? That takes work."

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In a way, this is my fault.

She'd been passing information left and right. Intercepted letters here. Whispers in private spaces there. Passionate screams from in beds people shouldn't be in everywhere.

Should've payed more attention to his side of things

In Marcus had gotten greedy. He was so engrossed in figuring out how to sell every scrap of information she passed him that he never stopped to consider whether some secrets were best kept that way.

Now his silence is bought and payed for in a much more permanent sense.

The cutthroats – Stone Cloaks by the look of them – died by her hand, just as he died to theirs.

The first two fall to throwing knifes, too stupid to take a fourteen year old girl walking into this – of all places – seriously.

The others are trickier. Three and Four slash and lunge at her with shorts swords, amateurish and unprepared for a real fight. She'd have killed them outright if it wasn't for the Five, wielding a Morning Star like he'd been born with it in his hand.

For a moment it's almost… well, not a challenge, but maybe something that could be mistaken for one. At a distance.

Then, three overextends so outrageously that she almost mistakes it for a trap before her tantō leaves him bleeding out of his femoral artery as he desperately – futilely – attempts to stop the bleeding.

Moments later and Five's head is cleaved from his shoulders as he desperately tries to wretch his mace from Four's skull.

Elain, casts the blood from her blade as she stands, alone, in a room littered with corpses.

I'm so tired.

She has been, for such a long time now. But as she stares into Marcus's dull, lifeless eyes, she knows that this is it.

She… she cant do this anymore.

This place. This world. Pretending that this time she can survive under the radar. That she can ignore the empty pit in her where – family, friends and purpose – used to be. Not helping. Pretending she can't make a difference.

All of it.

She'd thought she could just adapt. Cast off what was and just be the Shadow. A thief. A spy.

A nobody.

And she can.

But she won't.

Because she's the confused dead woman. Gone before her time and lost in a cosmic improbability that should've driven her mad the moment she saw Kage-Mount-Rushmore.

Because she's a shinobi. The princess of corpses – still mad about that name Ino – who stood tall against end of the world when no less than three bat-shit jutsu gods tried to make it so.

Because she's a bastard heir to the throne that can fuck right off and that's just the start.

And most of all, because she can help, so that's what she's going to do.

Elain closes Marcus's eyes.

"I'll start with whoever did this" she tells him. "You deserve that much."

The door's hinges whine and the new arrival is nearly dead to a throwing knife before he's even through the door.

"That!" he yelps, panicked but also… not? "Should be quite unnecessary, if you please."

A portly man, head clean-shaven, shuffles inside before letting out a breath, disappointed.

"I had hoped to arrive here before the assailants" he says, surveying the corpses, eyes lingering on one in particular. "Oh Marcus. Information can be such a sturdy shield. But only if there's someone left to speak it."

"You're the Master of Whisperers." It's not a question. She knows exactly who this man is.

"And you are the 'Shadow' of King's Landing." He says, looking up at her. "Ours are quite the names to live up to, are they not?"

Her hand twitches, an aborted move towards something deadly. They both pretend not to notice.

"That's quite the assumption." Says Elain . "You should be careful with those". She sweeps her hand out "Maybe your 'Shadow' is lying in a pool of his own blood for crossing the Stone Cloaks."

Varys's expression somehow communicates the entirety of, 'come now, this lie demeans us both'.

"The Stone Cloaks," hey says, as if he's merely speaking about the weather, "in all seventeen of their years, have never once allowed a woman into their ranks". He spares a glance toward the bodies surrounding them. "Their loss, clearly. But perhaps," he says, scarcely missing a beat. "We might put such a tragedy to good use."

"For the good of the realm?" she asks, drawing upon one of the few scraps of memory she has left. A good man, she thinks. But not necessarily a kind one.

Varys's ever-so-slight smile never quite disappears, but it's a close thing. His eyes – it's always the eyes – narrow for a moment as he revaluates her place on the board in his head.

"Quite so."

They both know he didn't come here to save anybody. He allowed whoever it was to give the order, and then he arrived – right on time – to snap up the most valuable pieces of Marcus's organisation.

He's here to recruit her.

"It would appear I'm in the market for a new employer." Elain smiles, just for the look of the thing.

"I do however, have one condition."

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Which is how Elain Waters finds herself with an entire network of spies at her fingertips, all to find out who killed some insignificant fence from King's Landing.

She does.

Bethany Lannister. Originally Bethany Clegane, the long lost – presumed long dead – sister of Sandor and Gregor Clegane. Her resurfacing a few years ago might have caused something of a stir if five kings weren't, at the time, all trying their very best to murder one other. Nobody cared when the beautiful, but politically unimportant, Clegane girl fell in love with a Lannister of equally minor standing.

Their wedding was noted by nobody.

Nobody, Elain realised, except for Marcus, who'd received the news, looked into matters, and had spotted the telltale signs of a fellow grifter.

'Bethany' was from Flea Bottom.

A slum kid with no name, no money and no power who'd prettied herself up and pulled off one of the most daring cons in all the seven kingdoms.

And it worked.

And then, after having Marcus killed for trying to blackmail her, it'd worked some more.

"Holy shit."

"I'll admit" chimed Varys. "My own reaction carried a similar sentiment."

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