By the fourth day of the royal visit, the workshop had become Peter's most dangerous habit.
Not because of the tools.
Not because Elara Flint had enough sharp metal within arm's reach to reconstruct a small war if properly motivated, though that was also true.
Because the workshop was the one room in Winterfell where Peter stopped feeling like an error in the castle's calculations.
Everywhere else he was under interpretation.
In the hall, he was Lord Stark's contained anomaly. In corridors, he was the strange prisoner-guest with the wrong accent and the wrong instincts about who moved aside for whom. In the yard, he was a story people had already started telling in versions that would no doubt get worse with every retelling.
In the workshop he was useful.
That should have been simpler than it was.
It wasn't.
The room itself had become more familiar in small, disorienting ways. Peter now knew which floorboard near the bench flexed under too much weight. Which drawer held wire, which held brass pins, which held scraps too valuable to discard and too misshapen to classify. He knew Elara's filing rhythm when she was irritated versus when she was thinking. He knew the smell of her lamp oil was different from the rest of the castle's because she mixed beeswax into it to make the light steadier for fine work.
That was the dangerous part.
Noticing without trying.
He was at the bench before noon with his sleeves rolled and his thumb wrapped in a fresh strip of cloth after cutting himself on an edge he absolutely should have seen coming. Elara had looked at the blood, handed him linen, and said, "Remarkable. You do bleed after all."
He had replied, "I like to keep some mystery."
She had not laughed, but the corner of her mouth had shifted, and Peter had filed that away against his own better judgment.
The left web-shooter sat between them now in a state that was no longer ruin and not yet repair. Rebuilt spring housing. Local steel replacement components. Pressure chamber reinforced with an ugly little collar Elara had designed overnight after deciding Peter's original balance between durability and weight was "the work of someone who expects materials to obey theory out of admiration."
"That's unfair," Peter said now, peering at the modified housing.
"It's accurate."
"It's rude and accurate."
"Then it should be familiar."
That one got him.
He looked up.
Elara was bent over a second page of charcoal diagrams, braid sliding over one shoulder, one hand blackened at the fingertips from graphite and soot. Her eyes stayed on the page while she spoke, the words coming in that same flat, dry cadence that somehow carried more humor because she refused to announce it as humor first.
He grinned despite himself and went back to the mechanism.
Today's problem was pressure.
Not in the metaphorical Winterfell-is-full-of-lions sense, though Peter had enough of that elsewhere. Actual pressure. The local materials could mimic portions of the web-shooter's structure, but they could not survive the original fluid's full output without eventually warping or shearing. Which meant compromise. Lower pressure. Smaller bursts. Reduced range and tensile integrity.
Peter hated compromise on principle.
Elara hated pretending compromise was not part of engineering.
So they argued.
"You're overcorrecting," Peter said, tapping the side of the replacement regulator with a small file. "If you choke the chamber that much, the line velocity drops and the web won't anchor before gravity wins."
Elara did not look up from the spring she was holding against the light. "And if I don't choke it that much, the housing splits and takes your hand with it. I prefer my solutions with fewer detached hands."
"I can reinforce the outer casing."
"With what. Hope."
"With resin."
She looked up then. "Resin."
"Tree resin. Reduced with ash, maybe layered with wax. Not inside the chamber, outside. A secondary seal to absorb stress."
Elara stared at him for one beat too long.
Then she set the spring down and reached for another sheet.
"Draw it."
He did.
Not because she told him to. Because she'd already made space for the argument in charcoal.
He sketched fast, hand moving on instinct, cross-section first, then the resin collar layered over the housing with points of flex marked in quick slashes. Elara leaned over his shoulder without apology and added three lines of her own where his proportions were off relative to the steel she'd actually made, not the idealized shape in his head.
Their hands brushed once over the page.
Neither of them acknowledged it.
"That angle is wrong," she said.
"It's not wrong if the resin holds."
"It won't hold there."
"It could if you score the housing before applying."
"You'd lose sealing integrity."
"Not if I move the score here."
"That puts stress on the trigger seat."
He looked at the web-shooter. Then the drawing. Then at her.
"Okay. Wait."
The thing he loved and hated about working with someone truly sharp was how fast his own brain had to move to deserve staying in the room. Elara did not flatter bad ideas by handling them gently. She met them at full speed and expected the same back.
Peter redrew the angle. Shifted the score marks. Moved the resin collar's thickest point farther back from the trigger seat.
Elara watched.
Then nodded once.
"There."
That one word did more to him than praise would have.
Because it was not praise. It was agreement earned at the exact point where the system stopped fighting itself.
He sat back a little.
"That could work."
"It will work until your impossible fluid finds a new way to be offensive."
"My fluid is elegant."
"Your fluid dissolves after two hours because you apparently come from a world where useful things apologize for existing."
He laughed hard enough that Jory, stationed by the door as usual, looked up from the knife he'd been pretending not to sharpen while very much sharpening it.
"Is she always this warm," Peter asked him.
Jory didn't even blink. "By northern standards, she's writing you poetry."
Elara threw a washer at him without looking.
Jory caught it one-handed.
The whole room stilled for a second around that.
Then Peter said, "Okay, no, see, that's not fair. You can't both secretly be funny."
"We're not," Jory said.
"You're really ruining your own argument."
The workshop settled back around them after that, but something had shifted.
Not large. Not dramatic. A fraction. The sort of shift only builders noticed because builders lived by fractions. Until now, Peter and Elara had been circling one another through competence, trading information, measuring if the other was real enough to trust with the next piece of difficult truth.
This was different.
They were building together now.
A shared problem. A shared page. A solution that neither of them would have reached exactly this way alone.
That was intimacy. Not romantic. Not yet. But undeniably intimate in the only language both of them seemed to trust.
Elara moved to the shelves near the back wall and began pulling down jars.
Resin, then. One dark and thick. One pale and nearly translucent. Wax in a wrapped block. A little ceramic pot of ash fine as powder. She set them on the bench one by one with the satisfaction of someone whose world had just gotten more interesting.
"You've done this before," Peter said.
She gave him a side look. "Modified sealants in low heat. Reinforced gear housings. Gate winch weatherproofing. Harbor pulleys in White Harbor rust if you look at them wrong." Her hand moved over the jars without hesitation. "Not for..." She gestured at the web-shooter. "This. But principles travel."
Peter heard White Harbor and felt his brain catch on it again. The name from the map. The point of gold on Atlas projection. The place that had snagged in him before he knew why.
"You miss it," he said before he could stop himself.
Elara's hand paused over the wax.
Not long. Long enough.
Then she resumed as if the interruption had not happened. "It's where my tools are from."
That was not the same answer as no.
Peter let it be enough.
He should have known by now that in Winterfell, and maybe with Elara specifically, asking direct emotional questions got you practical truths in their work clothes. You either learned to hear what was under them or you didn't get invited deeper.
So he listened.
She misses White Harbor because her tools came from there. Because her father did too, maybe. Because work and grief and place were all soldered together in her.
He filed that away carefully with the rest.
Elara began heating the resin mix over a small lamp at the side table. Not forge heat. Delicate warmth. Controlled. The smell changed almost immediately. Pine and sap and beeswax, sharp enough to cut through the usual charcoal and metal air.
Peter watched her work and felt, absurdly, the same kind of calm he got while debugging circuitry at three in the morning with a soldering iron and no deadline except dawn. Not because the problem was easy. Because it had edges.
Jory ruined that by saying, "You smile more in here."
Peter looked up too fast.
Jory was still at the door. Knife in hand. Face giving away nothing except the fact that he'd said the sentence on purpose and intended to leave it there like a trap.
Elara didn't turn around, but Peter saw the line of her shoulders sharpen.
"I do not," Peter said.
"You do."
"I smile lots of places."
"Name one."
Peter opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
Jory made the faintest low sound of satisfaction and went back to his knife.
Elara said, very carefully neutral, "Perhaps it's because this room has things that can be fixed."
The line sat there.
Peter stared at the back of her braid.
And because some species of self-preservation had clearly abandoned him entirely, he answered the truth instead of something safer.
"Yeah," he said.
Silence after that. Thick, but not hostile.
Elara finished stirring the resin and brought it back to the bench. "Hold this."
He took the housing while she applied the mixture with a thin spatula improvised from flattened brass. Her hands were steady. Better than steady. Economical. Nothing wasted in the motion. Peter held the piece exactly where she needed it and did not comment on the way they slipped into that coordination without discussion.
When the first layer set, they tested the seal. Then adjusted. Then added a second reinforcing ridge where the pressure might still bite too hard under cold conditions.
Time disappeared in the way it only did around real work.
One mechanism becoming another. Two minds moving around the same failure point until it gave.
At some point Arya appeared in the doorway, watched for a full minute in silence, then announced, "You both look awful."
Elara didn't look up. "Good afternoon, my lady."
Peter said, "Thanks, I worked really hard on it."
Arya stepped into the room and looked at the spread of parts and diagrams with open interest. "Is it a weapon."
Jory said, "No."
Peter and Elara said, at the same time, "Sort of."
Arya's eyes brightened instantly.
Jory pinched the bridge of his nose.
"It is not for you," Elara said.
Arya ignored that and pointed at the web fluid canister Peter had been made to explain the chemistry of three separate times despite the fact that no one here had the infrastructure to replicate it.
"What's in that."
Peter thought about saying polymer base, bioadhesive compound, stabilized carrier solution, and all the other truths that would mean absolutely nothing in this century.
Instead he said, "Bad decisions and pressure."
Arya accepted this with more grace than most adults would have.
She wandered the room for another minute, touching nothing because apparently even Arya Stark had enough sense not to test Elara's patience by grabbing tools, then disappeared as fast as she'd arrived.
The workshop breathed out.
Elara looked at Peter across the bench. "She's going to ask you to show her how it works."
"Absolutely not."
"Good."
"That was immediate."
"She's nine and addicted to terrible ideas."
Peter considered this. "I kind of respect that."
"I know."
The word came out so dry he almost missed what was under it.
Not judgment. Recognition.
They finished the second reinforcement before dusk.
Not fully complete. Not field-tested. But enough that Elara could reassemble the left web-shooter around the modified housing and hand it to Peter with the kind of caution surgeons used when returning a patient to consciousness after major work.
He took it.
The weight sat right and wrong at once. Familiar frame. Altered balance. A home object translated through another world's metallurgy and another person's hands.
He fitted it to his wrist.
The room had gone very still.
Jory at the door.
Elara at the bench, chin lifted by half a degree.
Peter flexed his hand. Trigger feel. Travel. Tension. He loaded one canister, attached the housing, and very deliberately did not aim at anything alive.
"Should we be standing farther back," Jory asked.
"Probably," Peter said.
No one moved.
He fired once into the far wall where an old target board had been propped for reasons that now felt providential.
Thwip.
The line shot clean.
Shorter range than home. A little heavier in release. But it stuck.
All three of them looked at the target.
Then at the line.
Then at Peter.
The web held for three full seconds before beginning the slow process of sagging.
Not ideal.
Still.
Working.
Peter exhaled a laugh he hadn't been expecting.
"It works."
Elara didn't smile.
But there was something in her face more dangerous than a smile. Satisfaction earned and shared. The look of someone whose mind had just met another mind at full speed and not had to brake.
"Told you," she said.
"You absolutely did not."
"I thought it very loudly."
Jory walked over to the target board as if disbelieving his own eyes might change the object under inspection. He touched the webbing with one finger and made a face when it stuck to the glove.
"What in seven hells."
"Movement," Peter said. "Distance. Binding. Rescue, mostly."
Jory looked back at him. "Mostly."
Elara reached over and, with all the gravity of a smith returning a repaired blade, detached the web-shooter from Peter's wrist before he could be sentimental about it.
"Not yours yet."
"What."
"It held three seconds. I want five before I trust it not to shame me."
That was so perfectly her that Peter didn't even argue properly.
"You're impossible."
"Yes."
She placed the web-shooter carefully back on the bench among the diagrams and resin and tools.
The room settled around that fact. Not finished. Better.
Outside, Winterfell groaned under lions and kings and southern pressure. Politics still stretched across every hall like wire under strain. The node still failed in the north. The roots still whispered damage beneath the castle. Nothing truly important had become simpler.
But the left web-shooter had fired in a medieval workshop under a northern castle because two builders refused to let impossibility stop being a solvable shape.
That mattered.
Peter looked at Elara.
At the charcoal on her fingers. The scar on her arm. The stubborn precision of the room she'd built around herself in a world that probably rewarded blunt force more often than delicacy.
Workshop as refuge, yes.
Workshop as danger too.
Because in this room he did not have to pretend to be less than he was.
And she did not either.
The thought landed and stayed.
Elara met his gaze just long enough to know he'd had it.
Then she looked back at the bench and said, "Tomorrow we fix the right one."
Peter felt something warm and sharp move through his chest.
Not attraction. Not yet. Something earlier and maybe harder to survive.
Anticipation.
"Tomorrow," he said.
And wanted the word more than he should have.
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