Work Text:
It was late at night: past the time she said her prayers, past the time the fire died even. He’s warm against her. It’s odd, she thinks. Her parents would probably disapprove. Jon wouldn’t, he’d understand the need to stay warm when the night gets so cold. She thinks of Sansa back in Kings Landing where she left her and wonders what she would think. Perhaps she’d think it a song, but life was no song. Even Arya knew that.
He’s singing. The words are familiar and it sends a chill through her bones: Brave Danny Flint. Jon had sung the song to her once when she asked if she could join him on the wall someday. No further explanation was required and she never asked again.
But here she was like brave Danny Flint: disguised as a boy headed to the wall. Her fingers tighten around Needle. She would not be raped. She would not be murdered.
Gendry’s touch is gentle against her arms though. She turns to face him, but his eyelids are closed. Soon enough his song is done. Soon enough he is asleep. Arya says her prayers again. Just one more time she tells herself.
And then she joins him.
XXX
He’s singing it again. She has half the nerve to smack him. It stings but he does not stop. And once he does he places a soft kiss on her reddened palm, “sleep, Arry. There’ll be more walking tomorrow. I’m sure of it.”
Arya didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to cry. She wanted to be home with her family. She wants things to be as they were before. She looks at where his dark lashes fall against his cheeks. They’re still illuminated by the fire.
Not quite as they were before, she decides. How could she simply write Gendry out of her song now that he was in it?
Arya wanted other things as well. She wanted to be called Arya for one, by him at least, in the dark where no one else would have to know. And she wanted that song to go away or to never have existed at all.
She pitied Danny, but she would not be her. She was many things, but never that.
XXX
“No,” she says angrily as his lips move to stare. There’s a fury in her eyes that could rival the words which he did not yet know belonged to him.
His mouth twists into something a kin to a smile, “no?”
“I won’t hear that wretched song anymore,” she commands fully expecting for him to bend to her whims as he often did.
“Why,” he asks, “I let you say your names.”
“It frightens me,” she admits. It’s more than she wishes to share and she cannot look him in the eyes when does so.
“Aye,” he breaths, “scares me too.”
She expects that to be the end of it. It isn’t till after he thinks she’s sleeping he resumes his ritual. Arya hears it anyways.
XXX
She dreams of Danny. They’re horrifying dreams. Sometimes Jon’s there. Sometimes Gendry’s there too. Sometimes she’s Arry, and she has to watch knowing what could become of her. Other times… other times she’s Danny.
Gendry rouses her from her slumber, “hey, hey, none of that. Men don’t cry you know.”
“My brothers cried all the time,” she denies rubbing her face fiercely, “or are you saying they weren’t men?”
He gives her a sad smile, “I’m sure they’re great men. They’ll be very pleased to see you again. I’ll be sure to tell your brother Jon hi for you when I get to the wall.”
“You’re not going to the wall stupid,” she rolls her eyes and he gives her a funny look.
“Aren’t I?”
She meant to say no. It was on the tip of her tongue, as sharp as a blade. But the words died on her tongue.
XXX
“Why do you keep singing it,” she asks one day when they’re down by some creek pissing and getting water.
There are no sad smiles today, “I mustn’t forget, my lady.”
“Forget what,” her brow furrows in confusion.
He swallows and looks away, “what becomes of little girls like Danny Flint if they’re not careful.”
“But I’m not-”
“She was brave, and willful, and honorable and kind,” he cuts her off; “she died all the same though, didn’t she? How many? How do you make it stop?”
It reminded her of what her father had said about her aunt, “I- I don’t know.”
“Then I must remember,” he nods resolute, “lest I forget to when I need to most.”
XXX
She loves him, she thinks. It’s not the love of songs. Nor is it the love of her parents. It’s not the love for her siblings either. But he’s warm. And he’s alive.
He’s brave, and willful, and honorable and kind too, she thinks with his arm slung around her. Should she fear for him as he did for her?
No, she shakes her head. He’s built like a bull. Bulls do not need wolves to keep them safe, he will do fine on him own. And when she sees Rob again he will pardon him.
Gendry can live at Winterfell. He’d have to sleep in Jon’s old room. She’s not so sure she could bear the thought of sleeping alone anymore. She wonders how she’d ever done it.
She says her list and he hums his tune. And for just a moment the world is at piece.
XXX
Peace is a lie. This world was chaos. Arya Stark was terrified.
She did not wish to go to Harenhal. She knew no songs for that place. No tales of what horrors would befall her there.
She looked to Gendry. He didn’t look well.
Her feet hurt. She was tiered. If she stopped walking would they kill her?
Gendry tugs her along. He’s not ready to find out. She wonders if he’ll sing to her tonight. He’s not a great singer, but it’s a small comfort she longs for.
They have a long walk ahead of them though. Her names will have to wait as well.
XXX
They lie in a pen. Her head is in his lap. His hands are in her hair. Sansa had shown her a picture like that once in one of their books back at Winterfell.
Gendry looked like he belonged in that sort of story. His eyes were soft and his hands were hard. She fancied him some long forgotten prince, a war torn knight, or a valiant outlaw.
But she was nothing like the girls in those stories. No, their perfumed pages reeked of Sansa: beautiful maidens, with beautiful faces and beautiful hair, sitting in beautiful silks, looking the picture of love and innocence.
Arya was a blade. She was hot metal. She was course and dirty and hardened. No one would mistake her for a beautiful maiden… even lying in Gendry’s arms as she did.
He hums a few songs, mostly tasteless one; a blush almost constantly across his face, a stutter in his words.
Eventually he settles on the familiar tune she knows too well by now.
She whispers quietly to him, “I’ll be brave, as brave as I can.”
“I know you will… they always are.”
XXX
Then men scream. The women scream. The boys scream, and so do the girls. Does it matter anymore? She’d be eaten by rats as Arry and raped as Arya. What was the difference?
Gendry’s eyes told her there was a world of difference, “you haven’t seen, there’s many ways for the world to be unkind.”
She doesn’t want to die.
She wonders if her father thought that as well as the sword came down and lobbed his head off.
Today they’re safe. But in the night he reminds her: she is never truly safe.
XXX
She wakes and he’s still sleeping. The morning light is on his face and she wonders who made him: the mother or the Smith.
How does he sleep sitting up like that?
His hand is still tangled in her hair. It’s grown back a bit she realizes. She wonders if he’ll ever see her look like a real proper lady.
She wonders if they’ll live that long.
She plays with his free hand and almost laughs. Arya has the hands of a Blacksmith. That she did.
She places a kiss upon one of his finger tips and feels almost stupid for doing it.
He smiles but hides it quickly before she can see. There was no reason to ruin a perfectly good morning after all.
XXX
She’s a proper girl now. He doesn’t have to sing the song anymore. So he stops.
She misses it almost instantly, misses him.
“Sing it to me,” she hums a smidge to close to the hearth for his comfort.
He shakes his head, “the forge is no place for little girls, and you’ll get overheated.”
“Then I’ll stand outside and you can sing it to me,” she says defiantly.
He shakes his head, “not now Arry I’m busy.”
“I’m not Arry,” the moment she says it she regrets it.
She doesn’t know the look he gives her. She doesn’t like it.
He sighs, “no, you’re not. I’m sorry, m’lady. Please excuse me.”
XXX
She cries that night. She goes to him like that: all snot nose and red faced.
She remembers doing that at Winterfell. Fighting with Jon and then crying till he forgave her or caved or it went away. Not once had he seen her crying and turned her away. Gendry, it appeared, was much the same.
“Arry,” he sighs and she holds him tight, “come on then.”
“Sing me a song,” she asks in a tone that he’d probably define as sweet if he didn’t know Arya so well.
“The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” he teases and she laughs, “no, I suppose that won’t do. I don’t know any songs about cup bearers.”
“Any song,” she whispers, “even the gross ones.”
He can feel the way her face scrunches up against him and laughs, “fine then silly, complain about my singing then complain about me not singing.”
He has to sing quietly, a whisper she thinks, soft against her ear. He doesn’t sleep right away. His eyes are distant and troubled, “your turn. Say your stupid list already so we can get some shut eye.”
XXX
Arya is not a woman grown. She thinks things though. She thinks them often.
Gendry has no shirt on. It’s a hot day and she supposed to be fetching more to drink. But how is anyone supposed to do anything around here when he doesn’t have a shirt on?
He knows. She’s not subtle. At first it was the cause of a lot of blushing. But today was hot and he was feeling humorous.
A simple bit of flexing and a wink had Arya a brilliant shade of scarlet. And as she rushed away she could hear his booming laugh behind her.
She wanted to be mad, but it was a pleasant sound. Different than his late night whispers. Casting a fleeting glace over her shoulder she wonders if she’ll ever be able to hear him sing in such a carefree way.
She doesn’t know. Nothing is certain. Nothing is promised.
XXX
He wonders if Jaquen sings. He hates the man… and he doesn’t. If he knew any songs of warning about Faceless Men he’d sing them to her. He doesn’t though, so he can’t. Doesn’t make him like the man any more. After all, dead men sing no songs.
He sings though. It’s hard to sing the sweet ones. He seldom heard them in flea bottom. Sometimes she talks about her sister. There’s a certain pain there he doesn’t understand, a certain distance.
Arya smiles up at him. There’s something painful about that too. He doesn’t know what to call it, so he doesn’t call it anything.
Arya sings to him sometimes. She always apologizes afterwards.
The fear returns.
Someday Arya wouldn’t look like a little girl any more.
XXX
They’re on the road again. The air is fresh and cool. Hot Pie doesn’t like Gendry’s singing. Gendry doesn’t like Hot Pie’s snoring. Arya doesn’t like the uncertainty.
“Robb shouldn’t be much farther,” she says one night and can feel how he tenses beside her, “he’s been making his way south. We have to be close.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he says unsure, “Arya?”
It’s strange to hear him say her name. It’s strange to think he know has the freedom to say it, “yeah?”
“Do you think they’ll write songs about you,” he sounds like a boy she thinks.
“No,” she shakes her head, “I wouldn’t want them to anyways.”
He frowns, “your brother then?”
She doesn’t answer, doesn’t know how.
XXX
The brotherhood sang a lot. Gendry sang less. She didn’t understand it, but he seemed to shy away, bleed into the background.
Her hands found his and her head found his shoulder, “we’ll be home soon.”
“Maybe,” he starts but doesn’t finish his thought. His eyes are distant and troubled. They’re that way more often than not these days, “stay close to me, alright? You don’t know what these men could do.”
“They’re good men,” she denies before giving him a sheepish look, “they’re okay.”
“For now,” he agrees quietly.
“Sing me Brave Danny Flint,” she wonders how she ever hated the song.
“No,” he says sternly, “we’re not going to the wall anymore… you’d never have passed for a boy anyways.”
“But I did,” she says and the look he gives her tells her she most certainly did not.
He sighs, “you have tits. No boy I know has tits.”
“Hot Pie has tits,” she’s being stubborn.
He chuckles a bit, “perhaps Hot Pies a girl too.”
She laughs at that as well.
XXX
The other men hear. Or at the very least someone tells them. She rouses from Gendry’s arms to hear their laughter.
“Ay Lady Stark,” one calls nearly falling out of his seat, “it true that bastard boy sings for you?”
She bristles at the term, “jealous? No one want to get close enough to sing to you.”
“Fraid not, have to sing to myself,” he laughs a hard note.
She about to walk away when another one calls after her, “you sing for him too, little wolf? All high and airy like?”
“No, but I’m going to make you sing,” Gendry’s next to her, his fist clenched and his eyes hard. He looks like a man she thinks.
All laughter died though. She almost feels bad, “Gendry.”
He sings Brave Danny Flint for her that night. The message is clear: you are not a boy and those men aren’t your friends.
XXX
She wonders if he knows. He’s no longer a boy. She can still see him there, clinging to his current self like a ghost. She wonders if he still sees Arry when he looks at her. Sometimes his eyes are so soft she thinks he must.
“Sing me the one about Wenda,” she asks softly as she watches him work.
“Why,” he teasing she knows, “you planning on us running away together?”
“No,” her face is hot she knows and she hates it, “never mind it’s stupid.”
“I’m the only one who gets to be stupid around here,” he says sitting next to her, “sounds like one of my ideas though. Where would we go?”
“The wall maybe, or to Robb,” it’s the sensible answer she knows worrying her lip, “but maybe afterwards…”
“After you’ve made it home once,” he asks and she nods.
“Bravos and Myr,” she starts, “then maybe Dorne. People say nice things of the Jade sea too.”
“Like it drives men mad?”
“Men are always mad,” she huffs.
He blinks at her in a weird fluttering sort of way before hopping up, “I suppose they are. It’d be nice…. then again I’d go anywhere with you.”
She believes him.
XXX
She tells him of her friend the butcher boy. Gendry sympathizes with the poor soul, but shakes his head, “I wouldn’t have ran.”
“They would have killed you,” she huffs as if he’s being stupid.
Gendry shrugs, “he died anyway, didn’t he?”
She doesn’t know wat to say to that, so she says nothing and settles for tucking her head beneath his chin instead. Gendry was warm and he smelt of fire and steal and home.
“I wouldn’t run,” he says again this time to himself, “I’d of finished that whiny excuse for a bastard off. Like you said, I’d be dead anyways… but you- you’d be home I think.”
She doesn’t know what to think of that. She knows he could have done it, maybe he could have finished off the hound too… but no.
She wasn’t an air head. Even Beric hadn’t been able to finish off the Hound. Some day she would though, someday.
XXX
Gendry didn’t last long on the featherbed. He was halfway through the song when he blinked to slow and lost himself to sleep.
Her fingers traced his lips hesitantly. They were still slightly parted as if they knew their song had been cut short. She pressed a soft kiss to them. He didn’t stir and for that she was glad.
She didn’t know this was the end. She didn’t know that silence would meet her in the many nights to follow.
She kissed him again one more time her eyelashes dusting his. There was reasons boys and girls weren’t supposed to lie together. She had had heard many songs warning of them. But no one had ever quite warned her of this one.
She didn’t know what to call it. She didn’t know what it was. No songs would be written about it nor would it bore any children. It wouldn’t even make a good a story later on she thought with pity.
But she did love him, in a way she was sure wasn’t allowed. She always was very good at doing what she was not supposed to.
XXX
There’s silence on the road with the Hound. He does not sing and she does not ask him too. No songs would be written for him either.
But he had his own song: it’s grumbling and snoring and cussing. He calls her a Lady too and he laughs. But the remarks lack any of the softness they would have had if they had come from Gendry’s lips.
When Robb dies she hears them singing.
She never wants to hear anyone sing again. She wants to stab them in their fucking throats and watch them try to sing as they gagged on their own blood.
She tells the hound this a few days later. He thinks she’s joking. He thinks she’ll grow into being her sister. She’s not and she won’t.
XXX
She sings, on occasion, poorly and never happy little tunes like the ones Sansa promised. Not a little bird, even though her laughter in the mountains may have been lovely enough to fool a stranger. No, the wolf-bitch was not sweet.
Nightly she swore to murder him. He often wondered if she’d do it, if she’d really do it. The longer they travel the less he wonders. She says his name a little less harshly and she learns to kill a little better. Someday she’d be able to kill him… but maybe someday she wouldn’t want to.
He sings for her once. It truly was a terrible thing. The only songs he knows are crass ones. She doesn’t blush though, she knows them too.
Upon request, she once sings to him too. It’s a haunting sad song. He doesn’t ask where she learned it. Dressed as a boy he wondered if a small part of herself fancied she was like the main character of the song. But no, Danny is raped and beaten and dead.
They’ll write songs of her sisters beauty he thinks, but perhaps, they’d write songs of her too. He snorts, songs of the lost she-wolf princess who whispers of her revenge in the night and fights with a sword by the day. Little girls would love that one, their fathers not so much.
XXX
Arya leaves him there and there’s silence again. She doesn’t know how one steals a song, she doesn’t ask.
She misses Gendry something fierce. She has to kill him in her mind though. Going back isn’t an option. She thinks of Sansa in Kings Landing and wonders if she’s happy now, happy now that Arya was gone. She imagined her silks and her feather beds and her baths. Did Sansa even miss her? Oh, and Jon, her beloved brother Jon. What, she wonders, has become of him?
She doesn’t dare think of the rest. Winterfell is gone. Father is gone. Robb is gone. Bran, Rickon, Sansa, Jon, Theon, Gendry, all gone. It was just her now.
But she hears it, low and sweet and calling to her, the songs of Bravos. The music of the Water Dancers.
XXX
A girl has many songs. There are many songs of a girl as well. A girl dreams of snow. A girl dreams of wolves. A girl dreams of heads and men that rise from the dead. And sometimes a girl dreams of whispers, soft and sweet.
A girl can hear them cross the water if she’s not careful. A girl is never careful- or at least never careful enough. They call her, she thinks, but no not her- they call Lady Arya Stark.
Even when a girl cannot see she hears them. A man asks what she hears and she replies, “only silence.”
“A girl is not listening hard enough.”
A girl does not wish to.
XXX
Arya Stark is going home, but she does not quite know where that is. For a moment she’s home as she watches the blood poor from Walder Frey’s neck and paint the stone beneath them. But home is fleeting, and now there are fewer names on her list.
She’s traveling across the Riverlands when she hears it: soft and sweet and low. She doesn’t see the men with him. Or rather she sees them, but doesn’t. She remembers how Gendry was warm and gentle and smelt like fire and metal. Her hands clench and unclench.
He looks like a Lord. It’s a funny thought. He looks like a Lord and she looks like bastard.
He’s singing though, all be it softly.
A girl hears. A girl listens. And for the first time in a long time a girl sleeps soundly.
XXX
She sees her brother who is not her brother, the Queen who is not the Queen, her lady sister’s husband who was not her lady sisters husband, and her Gendry… who was not her Gendry.
She see’s dragons too. There’s a hazy memory of her childhood. She used to love the stories of Aegon and his sisters, now she hates them.
He’s sleeping she notices as she slips through the shadows. She should say something. She should go see Jon. She should leave before they ever knew she was here.
Softly she press a kiss to his lips as she did when she was child. Even now, he doesn’t stir. She longs to laugh. She longs to cry.
His hands are rougher than she remembers, more calloused more bitten. It hurts some cold but not quite dead part of her heart. She presses a kiss into his palm.
“Arya,” he whispers. His eyes are bluer than she remembered- kinder than she remembered.
She should leave. She slides beneath his arm, “sing to me, please. Just this once.”
“Anything,” he says with awe in his voice and in his face. He’d promised her anywhere once… that had been a lie.
She’s gone in the morning. He wonders if she was ever there at all.
XXX
“You’re sullen today,” Jon laughs but Gendry does not grant him a smile.
“I dreamt of your sister, a woman grown,” those words from anyone else may as well have been fighting words; “she disappeared like smoke in my fingers. If she was poison I’d drink her just the same. There’d be worse things than to die by her hands.”
“Death is so permanent though,” the imp says smiling as if he’s told an old joke, “but I’m sure it’d make a great song.”
It was Jon who laughed again, “Sansa would be green with envy.”
Gendry did not smile though, he seldom did.
XXX
It’s Jon who sees her first. Her eyes so focused on Gendry’s sleeping figure that she thought herself invisible.
“You there,” he calls, “what are you doing?”
“Watching,” she speaks in foreign tongue so as to confuse him, “apparently, not very well.”
“Watching what,” it’s the Dragon Queen who speaks this time, “perhaps it’d be easier for you to answer in your native tongue.”
“Simply watching,” she answers, “a girl does not know what she will or will not see.”
Her face is familiar to Jon, “A- Arya?”
“It was Needle that gave me away,” she smiles sadly wondering, “I couldn’t bring myself to part with it.”
And like that Jon was holding her, “Arya, you’re alive.”
She doesn’t know how to respond to that so she doesn’t.
“Why? Why are you hiding,” he asks but she doesn’t know how to answer that either.
Common might be her native tongue, but it was one which had long died against her lips.
Jon frowns, “say something.”
She chances a look at Gendry and then at the others, “I don’t know what to say.”
XXX
She’s a quiet woman, the Imp decides. Her sister had described her as a never ceasing sound maker prone to pranks; he did not see that girl now.
She wouldn’t go around too many people, though he supposes years on the run would make someone warry. And her eyes rarely strayed from their traveling companion for long.
“He used to sing to me,” she says softly, “sad things, scary things. I hated it. I didn’t. Does he still?”
“Sing,” Jon asks casting a glance at the man, “not that I’ve heard.”
“Shame,” she says softly and thinks that even if she threw herself into the fire the heat still wouldn’t reach her aching bones, “I’ve missed you.”
“And I you,” he says softly. He’s is not the same boy that left Winterfell and she is not the same girl. It feels as if oceans lie between them now, “you missed him too.”
She doesn’t know how to answer to that, her eyes do though and he knows, “I should go.”
“You should stay,” he smiles and she wonders how he can.
XXX
She doesn’t expect him to follow her, “go away.”
“Sorry my lady,” he says gruffly, “but where you go I follow.”
Her eyes narrowed at him but his just seemed to get a merry glint. She looked for Jon but didn’t see him, “aren’t you needed elsewhere?”
“Where would I be needed more than here,” he asks sincerely as his fingers brush her arm.
She pauses, “I’m going to Winterfell?”
“I expected as much,” he says softly, “to see your sister?”
“To go home,” she corrects and pauses, “it’ll be cold.”
“I know,” he snorts, “you’re the one underdressed.”
It’s not much farther down the road that he begins to hum a merry tune. Arya wonders how she lived without this.
XXX
He always seems to be in her bed singing softly, waiting for her. Sansa doesn’t like it. Sansa doesn’t seem to like much these days.
“Will you marry him,” Sansa asks her tone sharp. The Arya she knew would never marry anyone.
She’s quiet for a long moment. She imagines living without him again. She imagines never hearing him laugh or sing, “I think if he asked I would do anything.”
It’s not the answer Sansa expected.
It’s not the answer she expected either.
But she can’t help but think a truer thing has never been said.
XXX
On the edge of war beneath a Weirwood tree Gendry sings to her.
Even when I’m past and gone,
with you my heart will always lay.
For this my vow and my song:
are yours till my dying day.