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When he rises up from the scuffed storeroom floor, knees already numb from the cold and the northern hardness, a knife wound (one of the knife wounds) on his hip pulls and he winces.
It surprises him, for an instant, that he can still feel physical pain. That the precise unraveling of his plans, all his expectations, the tender optimism of a bright future, could allow enough air around him for something as everyday as a hurt.
He hears more that sees an arrow’s muffled thunk, the brown of the beam and the brown of her hair and the brown from the ale burning up his belly all blurring to one. He turns and leaves, deliberate in the placing of one foot just ahead of the other, trudging back to his cot because it’s too cold to go outside and everywhere else is hers. He pulls off his boots, they thud to the floor like an arrowhead burrowing into wood, and unlaces his clothes with detached, automatic jerks of force.
It feels a bit like the moment before the battle. His mind in a panic so complete nothing felt real.
He’s drunk enough to wish for his mother as the ceiling spins and he lays himself down and he wonders if he should be happier he’s still alive.
*
“You didn’t go with the other men, my lord,” it’s a statement.
He turns quickly, bowing slightly with genuine if not practiced deference, and tosses the hammer back onto his workstation.
“No, your grace,” he’s smart enough to know what Sansa really is and that makes him scowl, worrying about the tangle of other people's titles a game he never intended to play. But if she's going to call him a lord in his forge, he can think her Queen in the North, “Not much of a soldier, anyway.”
She glances to where his war-hammer leans against the wall and quirks one eyebrow silently. It makes him feel exactly and nothing at all like when her sister did the same. Oafish and tongue-tied and bendable as white hot steel.
“Not my fight this time,” he finally manages. He bled for Jon, for the living, and in those last, desperate moments, for one more second to think of Arya. It’ll be funny one day, he decides, that that hope is probably what kept him swinging.
If Sansa finds any meaning in that, is smart as Arya claims, she must, it’s not happiness that it brings her. But his quiet display of loyalty must do something, because she says,
“The Wintertown has asked for more nails. After, go to the library,” she sounds dissatisfied, the first emotion not smoothed away, and he realizes she knows, maybe, enough to itch for more. Just enough to wonder.
“A lord must learn his letters.”
*
He expects Maester Wolkan, or maybe one of the new steward’s sons, but instead he’s paired with Sam Tarly’s wilding woman. Despite their low births, she seems more at home in the library than him, the quill familiar with her rough hands. They’re small and calloused and dirty, like Arya’s had been as she clutched at his biceps, nails leaving stinging trails as his mouth chased a drop of sweat from the hollow of her neck to the dip between her-
He throws the quill down before it snaps in his fingers, digs a fist into the tight ache beside the stitches in his left hip.
“No one gets it right away now,” Tarly simpers from across the room as Gilly glances at the row of letters he’d so painstakingly memorized.
“They’re fine, do it again.”
She’s patient with him, but unsympathetic, rolls her eyes and huffs whenever he’s pulled into a current of self-doubt. She reminds him of the Fleabottom girls, always so unimpressed, shine dulled early by the filth. There were enough rumors of Craster’s from the Northmen that if even half are true, she left all her softness beyond the ruins of the wall.
Where did I leave mine? he wonders. Harrenhal, that twice-damned rowboat, or scattered along the King’s Road, covered in shit and someone’s blood and halfway to starved?
You’re still soft, a voice in his head tells him. He’s too stubborn to admit it sounds like Arya, so he pretends it’s the Hound instead.
“It’s not just letters, is it, though?” he argues hopelessly, “There’s the numbers, too, counting and buying and selling and fuckin’ taxes!” He’s shared enough meals with the queen at the high table to know forks are the least of his troubles, “On top of everything I don’t even know I don’t know.”
“No one gets all of that right away eith-“
“I could be a lord,” Gilly interrupts, face a bit hard and judgmental as both men stare back at her.
“Gilly…” Sam begins indulgently before she cuts him off again.
“I could. It can’t be harder than anything else we’ve done,” she turns back to Gendry, “I’d be fair to my people and keep the advice of folk smarter than me and listen to the women.”
He thinks about how he’ll have a quill in his hand more often than a hammer and it feels like a punishment, “But I don't want it.”
She shrugs, “Gettin’ what you want won’t fill people’s bellies.”
How would you know? he thinks bitterly, I’ve never gotten it before.
*
Sansa finds him at the forge again. Making nails again. Might as well take it as his sigil to fly proudly beside Davos’ onion.
“I’ve set some women to packing things for you, my lord,” her eyes don’t flick to his threadbare clothes and he appreciates that, thinks she’s actually seeing him when she looks, “We leave at dawn for King’s Landing.”
“War’s over then,” he feels like he should try to smile, should want to, “We must’ve won.”
Her eyes narrow and he remembers that this woman is not his friend, even if the steel of her sings a recognizable tone.
“No one won.”
*
He has to wait for Podrick to tell him the whole of it, voice hushed and lips dry over a mug of ale and food he can’t taste. The raven came from Arya, but the relief that slacks his face goes so quickly that the squire misses it in the retelling.
Sleep comes that night in brief, sweaty bursts, his nightmares all crimson and suffocating. In the first, Arya rides him while the Red Woman burns their friends around them. In the second, his mother hoarsely sings as she sinks into rubble. And in the last- he is King’s Landing itself, and as the flames erupt from inside and he collapses, he feels a fury that inches close to madness.
He bloodies Pod’s nose when the squire tries to wake him.
*
It seems natural that Gilly’s at his horse, tying a pack to it’s rear in wane morning light; hopes it at least means some of the clothes will be practical.
“Should’ve let me look at that,” she gestures to his hip as his foot finds the stirrup, swinging into the saddle with a grimace, “It’s probably not healin’ right.”
What is? he might’ve snapped at anyone else.
But he just shrugs and mumbles sourly, “ -‘m fine.”
She tuts so much like one of the Fleabottom girls and pats her belly as the company trots through the gate. No one notices if his eyes blur, his mind on them with their hard mouths and hard hands, rotting in the dust.
*
He’s got a week caged on the ship south to think about all the things he’ll say to her. Or not say. The first few days of the voyage he’s resolutely set on nothing, determined to return her silence and doggedly calling that self-preservation and not pettiness.
By the second half he’s almost convinced himself he doesn’t even want her at all, skinny rude thing with no meat and no manners, too icy-hearted for a fire-forged man.
But a day out of the capital he recognizes the smell of ash in the air, stands frozen on the bow as a gray smudge on the horizon crystalizes into a city-sized graveyard. He hysterically tries to remember what it looked like before, magnificent and spiraling and beautiful but only from far away.
He’s afraid, for a moment, that he will only ever be able to picture it like this. That recalling his home whole will be like recalling his mother, a thing he knew once and loved, but forgot and still loved anyway.
In his dreams that night, it is Arya that is King’s Landing. And no matter how strong his arms or broad his shoulders or frantically he begs, he can’t stop her from crumbling to gravel and soot, seared to nothing by the cold inferno inside her.
This time Pod manages to duck.
*
He would have sought her out, simply because he hardly knows how to speak to anyone else, given enough time to gather the nerve and pick the words. But they pick a king instead.
She lingers after, skulks into a shadowy corner of the Dragon Pit that’s not quite out of sight, only visible because she chooses to be.
He doesn’t want her goodbye, not at all, but he’s so damned used to not getting what he wants that he goes to her anyway.
She lets him urge her back until they're against the wall and doesn’t gut him when he cups her face, murmuring, “Do you remember what I said?”
Her expression is as blank as her sister’s but her voice is all thorns, “Could hardly forget, could I?”
“Good,” he nods, presses a kiss to her forehead. Despite the days he’d spent agonizing over it, he always knew what he needed to tell her- all the same things he already had, “Promise you won’t.”
That gets a reaction out of her, not that he can read it anymore than words on a page, but he’s willing to let himself believe it’s her softness.
Her tone only gentles a little, “And you remember what I said?” His throat catches when he tries to swallow, she takes one of his hands and kisses the palm, “Promise me you’ll try.”
He wants them whole again, but nothing here is healing right.
“Yes, milady.”
*
The Stormlands are more humid than home, but he likes it. It reminds him of the way water turns to steam when hot metal is cooled, clouding up to his face, condensing and mixing with the droplets of sweat.
True winter has yet to arrive but the older residents tell him the moisture is a constant. The rains will freeze at night and once or twice snow will fall, but he’ll always be able to close his eyes and inhale deeply and imagine a glowing sword meeting cloudy water before him.
Davos would be proud of the optimism, small as it is, if he was beside him.
But it’s Selwyn Tarth, Maester Jurne, and a steward named Merik waiting at the gate.
Gendry had been there, standing awkwardly and totally ignored when the king sent ahead word, emphasizing the need for the untested Lord Paramount of the Stormlands to be installed quickly and without force.
He’s much more uncomfortable now, trailing lost behind strangers in the place called his.
“You look like your father,” the lord of Tarth states matter-of-factly as they wind into the Round Hall, massive doors thrown open for the first time since Renly’s death. He says it as if no one has ever told him before, but that it’s imperative he understand, the keystone to deciphering his fate.
It likely is, he knows, his obvious parentage a death-sentence or a gods-send his whole damned life, depending on who wanted what. He runs his hand over his head, feels the ever-present dampness on the stubby locks, and fights the defensive urge to shrug.
The hall is nearly as ill-equipped as he is, most furniture or decoration either pilfered or hidden away. But he likes that, too, a wide open space, the echo of movement, a starkness that will forever feel northern. It reminds him to heed the lessons Sansa didn’t mean to teach. To really look at someone.
He forces his gaze back to the lord. Selwyn is tall as men go, but not unusually so, about level with him. His hair has lighten with the years but was probably once a brown auburn. Face lined by the long summer in the southern sun, but also from smiling, clothes simple and cheerfully colored.
“Your daughter is the most honorable woman I’ve ever known,” he finally answers, voice echoing faintly in the dim, cavernous room, “And she looks nothing like hers.”
There’s a long pause before Selwyn responds, weighs the words with measured consideration. Gendry recognizes Ser Brienne in that, wonders what has instilled such foreign patience in these people.
Eventually, the older man smiles softly, head dips into a nod, and turns him to the central courtyard, “High praise of her on both counts, my lord.”
*
The Evenstar stays as he resumes his schooling, hires new staff, purchases horseflesh, stocks the larders, gathers the stray orphans, and organizes harvesting one last autumn crop. Everyday they cross items off the list of things he didn’t know he didn’t know.
Together they venture into the village and woods, taking a census of the smallfolk, Gendry scratching their names into a ledger with what is becoming a blocky, deliberate hand- single or married, children or none, but also if there’s elderly in the home or a man hurt in the wars, if their fields looked tended or their animals too skinny.
They all peer at him with curiosity, sometimes paired with fear, resentment, or bald-faced indifference, and mumble milord in the same lowborn color as him. People used to being used. He remembers.
“You can change it if you want,” Selwyn offers, catching him thumbing the stag on his chest with a cloudy look.
He snorts, that childish bull helm instantly rising in his mind, the thought hammered down just as quickly, “You aren’t a man to hold to tradition more than that?”
The face Selwyn gives him is unimpressed, “I’m old and will be dead soon. What do I care what you wear on your coat.”
*
The storms begin in earnest a few months after that, gales of whipping, stinging rain that bites into his fine clothes, tearing saplings from the ground and leveling any crop left unpicked. He hears the thunder in his sleep, great furious claps that worm through the solid walls and into his dreams to become a dragon’s shriek or a giant’s footfalls or his own deafening heartbeat as Arya pulled him inside of her.
He’ll wake thrashing, knuckles catching the wall and dotting blood on the flagstones, hands shaking as they reach out.
Three people in the village die during the worst of one, Gendry’s mouth falling into a hard line as he crosses their names out in the book.
He spends that night in the forge, sending Lucas the smith to sleep in a storeroom behind the kitchen. When he shows up to help bury the dead the next morning, he’s lugging along two buckets of nails.
*
“You don’t have to do that!” he groans and rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, genuinely torn between crying and grunting out a laugh. “Get up, man, before this kills me.”
Davos smiles widely but finishes the oath, swearing his loyalty, his men, and his life to Gendry Baratheon. His joints creak as he rises afterwards, but couldn’t look more pleased.
He’d grown immune to the scene in the previous weeks, grown men trickling into the barren Round Hall after nearly a year of absence, bending onto one knee and pretending to give two shits about him. The initial few came in the days before Selwyn departed, a loss the entire keep felt keenly, whatever confidence they had in their new liege lord stemming directly from the older man’s undeniable competence.
The other lords blamed the weather or a slow recovery or awaiting word from the king for the delay. All lies, he knows, granted he can’t really blame them for taking the time to see if he’d get murdered or another war would break out.
But seeing Davos, his equal and, he realizes with a pang of melancholy, only friend left, call himself his servant makes the whole thing, his whole life, sing more absurd than ever.
*
“I met your Lord Kellington in the capital,” Davos tells him over bread and cheese in his solar, beating rain transforming the room into a drum. “He’ll be here next moon turn to say his words.”
Gendry nods, chewing slowly as he thinks back to the houses Podrick had drilled him on the entire ride to White Harbor. Kellington, from Bitterbridge, black book on a blue field.
Davos picks up his ale and takes a careful sip, gaze suspiciously drawn to his lap, “I met his daughter too.”
The bread turns to spoil on his tongue, wall-eyed bull inside bucking with panic. He swallows thickly and glances down to his hands, knuckles still scabbed from his last night terror, palms permanently calloused. They keep blindsiding him, these moments of inescapable transition.
“And you seem quite settled here,” the man continues.
He can’t blame Davos for what he doesn’t know, unaware of the winding trail of Gendry’s blood leading from the keep to the frozen north, the last thing he’d ever selfishly want as out of reach as the summer sun.
“She seems a good lady, level-headed, with a solid spirit. I wouldn’t say anything otherwise.”
He’s not ready, with Arya he never would. He’d always want more. More time to hold, more time to miss, more time to keep his heart hers alone.
He’ll have to go back to King’s Landing soon, say his words to her brother again before court. Will the king know about the oath he already made to his sister, the one he hates her for now?
He exhales heavily through clenched teeth. Keeps his promise. Tries.
“What color is her hair?”
Davos looks surprised by the question, “Yellow.”
His mother had yellow hair.
*
He takes the Kellington girl for a walk on the curtain wall, wrapped tight in layer upon layer, during a break from the sleeting rains. He guesses this is what he has gardens for but he goes there so infrequently he’d end up getting them lost.
She wears her hair neatly, two small braids holding half back, the length of it hidden in her cloak hood. She’s of average height but carries it confidently, the self-assured way she matches his strides and his stare giving off the sense that she’s taller.
She tells him of how she spent the past years, how after Renly died her father sent his children to her step-mother’s distant cousin, a fierce old dowager who took several highborns into her forest estate, somewhat safer for being out of sight.
She and her pack of other youngsters spent the tail-end of the long summer tramping about the Stormlands, no etiquette lessons or elegant feasts or much supervision at all. They’d disappear into the woods, falling asleep in the stables, setting crude snares, and swimming races in the rivers. The freedom, the ambling innocence, it could almost be an idealized version of his time on the King’s Road.
“It sounds a nice way to come up,” he tells her honestly, noticing that her hair gleams a touch red in the sunlight.
“It was, nicer than most,” she smiles and nods, chewing thoughtfully at her lip. There’s a beat of silence and, as if against her will, she goes on, “We still had our share of nights afraid. Lost plenty of people. It was still war, my lord.”
She sounds a little regretful, like she’d rather have said something cheerful but is used to being realistic instead.
“I can understand that, milady,” he answers.
“Please, no need for titles,” she tucks her wind-blown hair behind her ears, round face open, “Coryne.”
She doesn’t have to tell him again.
*
He can only guess what highborn men are meant to do before their wedding, probably get drunk and bed whores. But he’s never paid a woman before and certainly won’t start today. And just now drink only tastes of brown northern ale, prompts thoughts of brown northern hair. He asks someone to fetch Davos and a pair of shears instead.
“Makes sense if you’re a smith, I suppose,” Davos’ brogue vibrates behind him. In his periphery he sees the first strands of hair fall to his shoulders, “Fire and all.”
He shrugs carefully, counting off the rhythmic snips, “I kept it short because I was hiding. To hide how black it is.”
There’s a rattling sigh, the one that makes him feel like Davos shoulders every ounce of his heavy past, too.
“You’re not hidin’ anymore, lad.”
He can remember now exactly how King’s Landing looked the day his rowboat finally hit shore, rising like a trap and a haven in the distance. He knows he’ll never truly forget it, same as the feel of her raised scars under his thumb or the words she pressed in with a kiss- the permanent monuments on his horizon.
“Just like being reminded.”
If anyone can understand that, it’s a man who carried his own bones around his neck.
*
There’s no blood on the bedding afterwards and Coryne doesn’t look particularly surprised. He finds it an odd relief, hopes that one day they can trust each other with those kind of stories, have an honest sort of friendship.
He presses a kiss to her knuckles, bids her goodnight, and thinks that it all went better than he could have expected.
He goes to find Pod anyway, forces the king's representative away from wooing Flora the kitchenmaid, needing to drink down the unexplainable dread clutching in his stomach.
*
He realizes that marriage is like learning to read, you don’t get it all at once.
In many ways, wedded life is not much different than before. Most of his time is still with a quill in hand, agonizing over numbers, settling petty grievances, and repeating the same orders over and over.
He’s long used to sharing his space with women, following their lead and direction, but he takes an unfamiliar comfort in seeing Coryne at dinner every night, knowing that the end of someone’s day leads to him.
He’s less used to visiting her bed, only does so when Maester Jurne says it’s an opportune time. But he thinks they both find pleasure in it, even if it’s not some great passion. There’s something to be said for being close to another’s warmth after so many years of cold bodies.
He notices it more, that he has a wife now, as she finds her footing. Starts to join him when he surveys the larder, helps spell a particularly hard word, and when a lightning strike outside the village damages a barn, she carries out a bucket of nails herself.
He has no idea if this is the life he was asking Arya to share with him, but he thinks he can be satisfied with it regardless.
*
They’ve been married just more than half a year when Coryne's bleeding stops. A few weeks after the maester confirms her suspicions. She looks expectantly at him from across her chamber, both hands clasped before her stomach as if to protect it.
Of all the upending inevitabilities his life has prepared him for, this is the one that he’s struggled longest to reconcile. A babe that is not a bastard. A child born with name and two parents and the opportunity for the slightest scrap of luck. But only, and here is where he falters, because every single member of its father’s family is dead.
“You’re pleased?” He hates the insecurity that has creeped into her voice, but doesn’t blame her. He’s asked her to venture into a dangerous land with someone who is mostly still stranger, their understanding earnest but brand new.
He nods quickly, lets a reassuring smile pin up his cheeks. They’ll have the rest of their lives to learn each other’s shadowed places.
He crosses the physical distance to rest his hands on her shoulders, “Of course. Of course, as long as you are.”
She sighs and lets her hands fall open, “I am, husband.”
*
Flora tells him it’s normal when Coryne misses dinner the next week. That it’ll pass, milord.
He goes to check on her when she’s absent the next two. Her face is pale but she otherwise seems fine in her chair by the fire. There’s a bowl of broth on the table.
Her hand feels clammy when she takes his but he tells himself that means nothing, “It’s the same for all women, Gendry. Leave me to my misery for now.”
Her ladies are harder to get past a few days after where he finds her abed, unkempt hair and face the same wane yellow. It’s honeyed-water this time, she can’t even keep down the bone broth, but her smile is as forthright as the day they met, “Troublesome babe already.”
The maester may promise she will improve but he was raised to trust people and not titles. After another week passes and Coryne still fades, he writes to Sam although they both know who he really wants.
“I saw it once before,” Gilly whispers as they huddle outside Coryne’s door. She is her version of sincerely sorry, the one where facts prevail over sympathy, “Her body doesn’t want the babe.”
“Is it too late for the tea?” he asks desperately.
“Gendry-“ Tarly begins to protest but neither have the patience for sentimentality.
“There’s still the hook,” Gilly assures him, both defiantly ignoring the other man. He glances at her hard mouth, imagines it’s a twin to the grim line of his. Two people born thousands of leagues apart, but somehow arriving to adulthood nearly the same. More worn and honest than the rest and not sorry for it. People raised on not getting what they want.
Coryne throws up the tea, refuses the hook, and dies four days later.
*
Her coffin hitting the dirt makes the same sound as an arrowhead colliding with wood. It seems to echo continuously throughout the keep, driving him mad.
Sam won’t let him into the forge so he grabs as many sacks of wine as he can hold and bars himself in his chamber.
*
The pulling in his hip hasn't been this terrible since Winterfell and he curses unevenly as he rises from bed. He forces it to bear weight as he dresses, a tight and deep knot to go with the one in his gut.
The stablehands and guardsmen bow as he limps through the courtyard, weaving around the normal activity. The kitchen is also business as usual, Grety the ancient cook passing him a hand-pie without a word. He thinks to ask how long it’s been since the funeral but decides against it. It won’t feel right whatever the answer.
He’s eventually pointed to the library by one of the Merik’s daughters. Gilly still seems to fit right in there, surrounded by ledgers baring her chicken-scratch and a pile of parchment. She absently hands him one, a condolence letter with the royal seal. He stuffs it into his pocket.
“Where’s Sam?” he asks, voice hoarse.
She waves a hand distractedly, “Duties, left a few days past.”
He takes a jerky step to the cup of watered ale at her side, drinks without permission, “Who’s been watchin’ over things.”
She finally glances up and it’s been forever since someone’s looked at him like he’s the stupidest man to ever live, “I have.”
*
Gilly was right, in the end, she would’ve made a fine lord. But she’s already a mother and some kind of wife and, Gendry is confident, a voice that makes itself heard in the Capital. She must return to that, leaving Storm’s End to emptier larders but fatter orphans and a staff of women who speak a bit louder to their lord.
He’s not quite lonely, not quite sad, not quite anything. But it almost seems as if he’s lost the urge to talk to people who’ve never seen a dragon.
He finds himself visiting the graves of the first of his people he buried, thoughts on his mother. Had she felt hopeful when the king smiled at her, favored her, gave her his babe? Did she think luck was blooming for one of the scuffed Fleabottom girls, pray life could be kinder without proof that was even possible?
It makes him hate his father with the rage that he gave him, for leaving both him and his mother with burdens they weren’t built to carry. But he can’t get at the dead, fat king now, so instead he gives the village a feast in Coryne’s name where he only drinks water.
*
Rumor has made it to the island that you sometimes sleep in the forge, Selwyn writes on what would have been his wedding anniversary, I know better than to ask a question I will not like the answer to.
It’s true, so he can’t fault his people for gossiping, even if it’s only when the occasion calls for it and there’s no company to see. When the dark of his windowless tower creeps into bed with him, the air he pants in somehow dry and cold. He flees to the hot embers, the heat a match to his past, a steady glow casting shadows everywhere.
He’s abed there again weeks later, trying not to imagine a child’s first squall, when a giant northern raven shakes raindrops from oil-slick wings and delivers a tightly wrapped parcel.
The scroll that initially emerges is a neat, polite display in an unfamiliar hand, obviously dictated. The Queen in the North offers her condolences again on the passing of his wife, relays her eternal gratitude for his service, and bids him visit whenever he pleases.
A bit deeper he finds a thinner roll, Sansa’s precise, angular script seems to murmur from across the continent
News travels slowly to our friend away
He imagines they must be wedding presents. A delicate chain bracelet for Coryne. And a fork for him, wrought in a strange metal, in the shape of a bull’s head.
He hides them in a chest next to a lock of Coryne’s hair and the short dragonglass dagger he never felt safe enough to discard. Puts away the never wills, the I wants, and every ought to be he’s buried out in the village cemetery.
*
The worst of the winter storms have started to wane when he hears a call from the yard, faint over the pounding that echoes around the forge. A rider in plain clothes but a fine horse trots through his gates.
He has to laugh, the sound rough but distantly familiar, at the Kingsguard’s disheveled hair and lopsided grin, “What are you doing here?”
“Hopefully bedding your kitchenmaid,” Podrick answers seriously.
They drink and speak of the old wounds that still ail them, the nights they should have died, and the ghosts who forever float in the corners, until Gendry passes out in his seat.
He swings blindly as he’s hefted up, catching the knight just barely under an eye. Pod winces and knocks his fists away with a great suffering sigh, “Should’ve known.”
It’s there, dead drunk and mostly asleep and fighting the panic always lurking in his chest, that he realizes the other man came because they’re friends.
*
“We should do this later,” Pod drapes a linen over his shoulders, shears and a straight blade on the table beside them.
They’re both hungover and exhausted, but not really in a bad way. It’s a scrubbed raw feeling, not a sick one- pressing a fingertip to a bruise after too long ignoring it. It reminds him that they’re both young, have years and years of losses ahead.
“No, I can’t.”
Pod says, “Alright,” like it really, somehow, will be.
His streaming tears are as hot as melted steel as Pod cuts, for his dead wife and dead mother and all the dead strangers he smashed to bits in the snow.
Because he lived and still lives and Arya does too, but he has had to try so hard, is so goddamn tired he’d sometimes rather he’d not.
Maybe he hears Pod cry, too, mourning his own version of the same exact things.
*
The Stormlands prosper, their winter stores and brown, wet earth steadfast, but he never let’s the larders grow any fuller. If getting what he wants won’t fill bellies, then better he makes filling bellies what he wants. His orphans are the fattest and smartest in the realm and he uses that as the scale for success, buckets of nails the measure of tragedy.
He didn’t get it all right away, like reading, or marriage, brief time he had of it. But he’s not a bad lord, he’s fair and gets help and holds the women’s word a bit truer than the men’s. It’s impossible to say if it would have meant more with Arya at his side, that short lived fever dream of a different man.
Or if it only means something because she wasn’t.
He asks Merik to prepare a ship.
*
The men grumble that the King’s Road is nearly as quick and much more comfortable, but he has to return like this. He needs to lay an updated image in line with the rest of his memories.
The late winter sun shines on a city he has never seen before, a sprawling tangle of unfamiliar streets swathed in scaffolding. A partially complete sept rises in the wrong place, views unobstructed by the lack of an outer wall, the remade Red Keep shorter and wider and generally starker than the one before it.
He knows it and does not, it’s home and is not. Much like him, he remains lowborn and black-haired with calloused hands but is altogether not the same man.
“Still smells like shit,” someone mutters and he barks out a laugh.
*
He has to keep from glancing at the embarrassingly proud expression on Davos face, holding a half-lowered gaze to the broken king’s unfocused eyes.
“Of course, Lord Baratheon,” the younger man replies, gesturing for Ser Brienne to take up a quill, “We must all mark the change of things.”
It’s a frustratingly ambiguous response to a straightforward question, but he long past prickling at Bran’s strangeness.
“Thank you, your grace. The Starks have always done me great kindness,” he murmurs automatically, truth a bit too on the tip of his tongue.
The king smiles vaguely as Brienne’s quill scrapes across the parchment, “Then you will be glad to see my sister soon.”
At that he does peer over at Davos, the lone soul he’d confessed the rest of his plans to. The men would more than grumble when told they’d sail for White Harbor next. But the older man shakes his head.
“Yes, your grace,” he confirms after a beat, “I look forward to visiting Winterfell again.’
Brienne steps around the table to hand him the scroll with a short bow.
“No,” the king already seems distracted, a thousand leagues away while still in the room, “When my sister visits you.”
*
He continues on regardless of the prediction, the stubborn bull inside refusing to budge from a course he set himself. Besides, he needs to give his mind yet another scene to conjure while he sleeps. Something better than the foul smelling and freezing place he came undone.
But he allows two happy volunteers to turn back home on horseback, baring the king’s word and orders to amend the banners. It would be an easy transition to House Baratheon’s new sigil, the alteration really so minor- a crowned black stag on a field of gold, its antlers wrought of iron nails.
*
A light snow falls on the rebuilt North, silent and monochromatic. It makes the whole keep appear pristine, all the more intimidating for the beauty of it paired with its sternness. The backbone of a country remade.
He takes dinner with the queen in the Great Hall among the other men and ladies, conversation limited to grain harvests or road conditions and he can’t help but frown at how simple it all is. How he used to fear the stupidest things.
But she finds him in the forge afterwards, as she always has, like calling upon a lord in his hall. He’s glad to be reminded.
“She’s written you,” it’s an accusation.
Sansa holds herself perfectly upright, unfailingly regal, “A handful of letters or so.”
Didn’t keep count?
“And you’ve-“
“Obviously she’s received some of mine,” she cuts him off with a hint of impatience.
“Why’d you tell her I married?” he demands.
Sansa’s hands clench and the conversation begins to feel like more of an argument, “Why would I not?”
Because he truly has no idea what Sansa Stark deems important enough to lay down in ink and send across the world. But he’s certain she wouldn’t risk boring her sister with news of a man she cared nothing about. Unless she was checking up on promises kept.
“Did you tell her she’s gone?“
Sansa’s eyes narrow with irritation, but it doesn’t matter now if he’s friends with this woman, not with all the loose, leftover threads of the past tripping them up in the exact same places.
“I think she’s more likely to come home if you are less of a problem.”
It not how he’s ever thought of himself before, but as he looks at Sansa now, he sees the queen, but also a woman who knows her sister too well.
*
It’s a cold afternoon in the very first days of spring. The wind from the bay flaps across the fields to buffet his ears with great deafening shoves, forcing him to shield watering eyes and holler to be heard. The Citadel’s monstrous white raven with its unsettling call and mean eyes may have only just arrived to his rookery, but the Stormlands have been patiently preparing for the season’s shift since word of warmth came up from Sunspear.
He’s glad for it, happy his people’s burdens will lessen and his joints will ache less. But after five years of winter and four years of lordship- of course things would change as soon as he got used to both.
Merik says something about bringing oxen to pull up the larger stumps, gesturing to the northeast extent of the pasture, when a rider on the road catches his eye. They’re mostly a smudge of movement, at half a league off he can’t make out anything except the color of the horse, dark, and the size of the person, small. He sees a couple figures break off from the village to run along side, probably two of the braver children, but he’s much too far and the wind too loud to detect anything that should make him so sure its her.
His pulse starts to gallop like it did in his last life, battle-ready and near insane with anticipation, but it passes quickly. He already recognizes this moment, another of the upending inevitabilities that was always coming.
He tries to ready himself, remember that no matter how familiar she looks or unchanged her manner, this woman will be mostly someone he has never met.
As different as he is. Her old best friend. The half-built city she once knew.
He loses sight of the rider behind a bend in the road and incline in the land, but he feels like he can still sense exactly where she is.
Fool, he chides at himself, the fool Lord Baratheon.
He cuts the survey short with an abrupt gesture and begins the long trek back to the keep.
*
Someone’s shown her to his solar, or maybe she just found it herself, but she’s leaning against the solid wall waiting quietly all the same.
He steps to the side table over the sound of the door closing, reaches first for the wine, but pours water into two cups instead.
She grabs the drink from him gracefully, one finger grazing his battered knuckles. The touch forces him back a step, that rusty self-preservation rearing its head to remind him that this woman can kill him in more ways than the physical.
She's no taller than before, no thicker, the human version of a dagger, sharp-edged and angled. Her hair is relatively short while also being longer than he’s ever seen it, two braids wound together to make a thick rope that hangs over one shoulder. He spots freckles on her nose, ignores the sudden desire to find more. The only scars he sees are the ones on her forehead but he already knows them and they’ve almost faded to nothing anyway. He remembers the scars on her side, wonders if he can get her out of her clothes for a look at those, too.
He catches her eyes as she finishes her inspection of him, swallows a sip of water to keep his hands busy, because her face says she still likes what she finds there.
“I’m sorry my sister did that,” she begins.
It takes a second to suss out her meaning, “Did what? Give me what’s mine?”
“Give you gifts for a dead wife,” Arya says bluntly.
She’s being off-putting on purpose, a ploy he’s seen a hundred times, her version of defensive. Was her act always this clumsy or was it just unnecessary for the woman she’d become, no need for masks on the wide western sea?
“It’s fine,” he shrugs, backs into a chair near the fire, leans into the truth, “I never would have given it to her anyway.”
“Why not?” she snaps, all scrappy alley cat growling, this part of her at least the same girl.
“ ‘Cause I would’ve had to see it, Arya.”
For the hundredth time he wishes his chambers had windows, so he could toss her out of one. He settles for scrubbing a palm over his scalp, “And you say I’m stupid.”
They stare at each other in a silence that has a tone, like she’s sulking, the adult version of her teenage insolence. It stretches for a tense moment, her eyes unreadable but mouth pursed, before she concedes. With the flagon of wine in hand she settles into the seat across from him.
“Your orphans look soft.”
He blows out a long breath and laughs, “Good.”
*
There are chambers prepared for her, but he says nothing when she slips in that night, shifting obediently under the blankets to make a space.
They’re neither exactly the people who once stole each other’s warmth at night, as terrified children and then terrified adults, but if certain things can stay constant, he’s glad it’s this.
She lets him roll her into him, arms round her back and waist, nose in her hair.
He feels the knot in his gut. It doesn’t quite loosen, but he might be more settled with it.
“I tried it your way,” he whispers, lips on her forehead.
She inhales sharply and touches his chest, “I tried it my way, too.”
*
Her story comes out in piecemeal bursts as she spars with his men, pokes around the gloomy forest, and watches him at the forge, her steady gaze thickening the air more than the smoke.
She talks about a grey-green land in rose-gold sunlight, long limbed animals that defy description, a tanned people who speak in a tongue wholly unrelated to theirs. They welcomed her into their great brick houses, shared strange fruits with their gods, and staged their histories, the days never shorter or colder, sun setting and rising with bizarre regularity.
“Do you think you’ll go back?” he asks one night, hands under her loose tunic to pass over the skin there.
She shakes her head, peers up at him with the barest hint of shame, “I burned all the maps we made.”
“Why?” he breathes, when what he really wants to say is what a fucking waste.
She fidgets under the linens but he holds her tight.
“They had never been conquered before. Didn’t even fight each other,” there’s genuine wonder in her voice, all the more profound because she’s survived impossible things, is an impossible thing.
“How could I bring Westeros?”
There’s sad wisdom in her explanation, and he has to keep himself from asking why she came back at all.
*
He jumps and curses when her head appears silently over one shoulder. She lets out a snort, skimming the parchment in front of him, “You write to Podrick Payne? Ser Brienne’s dull squire?”
“You know he’s a knight,” he rolls his eyes but keeps working on the message. “And we…saw many of the same things.”
He watches her flop into the next seat over from the corner of his eye, expression critical and more than a little displeased. She fiddles idly with the laces that run up the center of her vest, tapping one foot lightly against the ground while he pointedly ignores her.
She breaks a moment later, “I can’t believe you replaced me with Podrick Payne.”
He laughs in her face and enjoys her mean-spirited scowl, shaking his head at her in disbelief.
It’s the most ridiculous thing she’s ever said, more than awkwardly claiming to be a boy or asking him to try to love another, things not just out of her control but downright unimaginable.
“As if anyone could, milady.”
Her glare sharpens and she shoves his shoulder as she strides out.
When she crawls into bed that night, he’s certain she’s still cross with him until she presses a half-tender kiss to his lips in the darkness, small hand carding the hair at his neck, and then another to one cheek.
*
The maids are too lazy to keep arranging a room no one sleeps in, and he’s too honest with them to care when the bed gets stripped and never remade. He's not sure if it counts as gossip, since every soul in the keep knew within a day, hiding Arya something that never crossed his mind. But he gets no disapproving missives from Selwyn and for that he is grateful to them.
“She’s a bit scary, isn’t she, milord,” Lucas tells him while they shoe one of the horses, “That’s why the womenfolk like her.”
Even odds it’s one of them who leaves a pouch of moon tea on the side table. Arya picks it up silently, crams it with a blank face to the back of the drawer she'd claimed.
They haven’t needed it yet, and although he’d rather not go to bed every night hard and lightheaded, he doesn’t mind waiting. He’s made peace with how the last time went, that she chose him because of his familiar face and willing prick and not much more. When it happens again it has to be because she wants him with the same sure, unwavering fervor he’s spent years wanting her.
So he let’s her ease in after dark, kiss him deep and biting, and hook their ankles together as she drifts off.
He remembers her list, how he heard it so many times it turned into white noise, meaningless sounds that had ceased to be words lulling him to sleep.
This nighttime ritual is better.
*
The orchard is budding delicately colored blossoms when she begins to tell him the real story, the one that counts.
They were endless months together at sea, a dozen and a half men and women in the beginning, four less when they returned. Jerel, her first mate forever shrouded in pipe smoke, Darla from Oldtown who taught her the knots, Mathos the cook with his ugly face and ugly wife and ugly past. Them and the rest her only company for years, the entire span of the universe - the ship and the never-ending sea.
“They were decent, though. Not all nice or brave or smart, but decent,” she unsheathes her Valyrian steel dagger, slices a wispy ribbon of bark from a tree branch to reveal the green damp inside, “I had no reason to fear anyone, at least while we were on the water.”
A tiny island, isolated and secure, free of pain and treachery and the kind of evils man alone can do.
“Where are they now?” he wonders, hoping the answer isn’t up the coast, waiting.
She returns the blade home and says smugly, “Wherever they want, I hope. I paid them enough.”
He raises his eyebrows at that, savoring the advantage of height as he leans closer, “You did, did you?”
Her mouth quirks into an odd shape, “Well, someone did.”
The fact that she doesn’t care enough to remember which royal sibling paid her crew pleases him more than he can explain.
“Such a rich girl,” he grins down at her.
Arya’s face reads annoyed but he doesn’t believe it for a second. She stretches up to kiss him regardless.
*
He holds an arm out as she pulls the covers back, reaching to tuck her against his chest with comfortable muscle memory.
But tonight she stops his hands with hers on his ribs, gnaws at her lip before he can drift down to it, “I need to speak with my brother.”
Her tone is too serious to mean Bran, King’s Landing hardly an entire week away how she travels.
He tries to hide his somber face in her neck, squeezing tight, pressing into every inch he can get at. He’d seen it coming of course, fooled himself into thinking he was ready for it, the cyclical devastation of loving her. But losing Arya will always be his version of the battles his father fought.
“Let me lend you a ship.”
He feels her shake her head, hands stroking through the hair at the back of his head, “No, I’d rather take the road.” It’s longer but who is he to say what new scenes she needs to lay beside old ones.
She tugs lightly at his hair until he leans back and looks at her.
“Half a year. That’s how long it would take,” she tangles their legs as if closeness can mitigate the blow, “To see Jon.”
It doesn’t sound like a goodbye, not as heartrending and final as her last one. He has yet to figure out why she came back in the first place, so a second time can’t be anymore unlikely. He allows himself to stare at her, memorizing, combing fingers through the lengths of hair he’s not yet used to. Her eyes are resolute but also uncharacteristically gentle.
They’ve been parted before in worse condition and he survived, he can let her go again, “I think you just can’t stand that I’ve been over the wall and you haven’t.”
She rolls away to hide an affectionate smile, “Stupid.”
*
There’s a bit of a hesitance in the keep, as if everyone has paused and held their breath to see how he reacts. And when he simply carries on as usual, his people carry on as well, curious but unconcerned, remarkably confident in their lord.
He gets a letter from Davos after she passes through King’s Landing, the tone pleased if not a little confused, message clearly be smart, boy.
Sansa writes two moon turns later, after the animals have been let loose in the pastures, goats and cattle lowing happily under a lukewarm sun. She doesn’t bother coming up with an excuse, merely dates Arya’s passage through. Notes that she seemed well.
He’s kept busy without consciously meaning to. There’s land to clear, homes to repair, another census, collecting taxes. He learns the names of the new babes, pens them respectfully into his ledger, additions and subtractions, proud of each one as if it were his own.
The quill is more familiar in his hand now than a hammer, but they both give him the same relief. It’s easy to lose himself in either’s rhythm, simplify everything down to the job he’s determined to do well. It makes it less difficult when one of his thousand ghosts floats through his periphery- his mother, Coryne, the face of a long dead Fleabottom girl calling upon their old compatriot.
That’s how he knows she’ll return, sure with the same bone deep certainty of any inevitable thing. She comes back when he’s remembered how to live without her.
*
The sun grows brighter everyday, night coming a sliver later. The land around him seems to exhale, shake itself off from a restless sleep and stretch. Late spring storms tumble in without the drama of winter, rain falling in a soothing staccato, thunder a pleasant hum in the back of his head. He doesn’t sleep as well as he did with Arya, but he sleeps better than he used to. He has to count back months to last time he awoke grasping at shadows.
He pokes at the old knot in his gut, thumbs the scar on his hip. They might feel looser, too.
*
He wakes to her lighting a couple candles, the numb dead weight in his limbs betraying how late it must be.
“Don’t get up,” she waves a hand casually, as if it’s any normal night, strips down to nothing and washes briefly at the table while he watches in a stupor. He tallies the days, just shy of six months, as she slips into one of the nightshirts still stuffed in her drawer.
“You came back,” he sighs into her mouth, fingertips tracing her ribs, cupping her throat to feel her pulse, “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” her smile is honest but her eyes read confused, like she didn’t expect to say it, is surprised to find that it’s true. She nods slightly, kisses him again, “I think it’s time we try it your way.”
*
They marry a few weeks later in the Godswood, waiting only long enough for someone to stitch together a Stark cloak and for Selwyn to sail over from Tarth. Most of his people come, Lucas and Grety and the gaggle of village orphans who whoop exuberantly throughout the serious parts, making her chuckle.
He trembles as they kiss. This isn’t what he envisioned when he’d asked her all those years ago, when he only felt barely alive beside her. He hadn’t been thinking about springtime or sunshine or keeping a kingdom fed. What kind of man he’d be rebuilt as. He loves her more this time around, if that’s even possible, smart-mouthed, resilient, and remade, sees them as equals beyond something as simple as titles.
“It is a very nice sigil, my lord,” she whispers teasingly as the group parades back to the Round Hall, fingertips tracing the antlers on his cloak.
Flora tuts and looks unimpressed when he yanks his new wife’s braid.
*
There isn’t really a bedding, a couple garbled cheers ring out from the crowd before Selwyn shoots up, shooing the pair away with his ever-present smile.
They ready for sleep as always, her nighttime patterns set, but when he leans in to kiss her, she hooks her calf around his to pull him atop her, night shirt riding up her flat stomach. He tries to take the time to touch her, but she’ll forever remain much too impatient, intent on sprinting ahead, getting to the good part.
Thrusting inside her, hands tangled in her undone hair, feels like remembering something he forgot he’d forgotten, recognizes the sound of his breath mingling with hers like a song he once knew by heart. His eyes blur when her legs wrap around him and she bites back a gasp, overwhelmed by how thankful he is that she lived, that he did too. Grateful she left while he had to stay, that they were forced to try so very hard, lose so damn much, because they ended up here.
She catches his lip in her teeth and flips them over, sheds the nightshirt. He rasps out a curse when she lowers again, a buoyant laugh bubbling out of her. It turns into a moan as she grinds against him and he instinctively reaches out to steady her hips. His thumb brushes over her scars there, still raised, still tight, but he can hardly spare them a thought. They’re just another unchanged thing, like how beautiful she is.
*
She eyes him brightly afterwards, stretching lazily before draping one arm across his shoulders and chest, “I know you want to ask.”
He groans and throws an arm over his eyes, “I really don’t, Arya.”
She giggles and pokes at his shin with her foot, “Three.”
*
He brings up the idea of children once, after he’s marshaled the courage to snoop in her drawer and finds the sack of tealeaves untouched.
She simply shrugs and picks at her hair, “There aren’t many things left I haven’t done.”
*
She never joins him to inventory the larders, groans with boredom at the mere mention of seed rationing. Rarely goes to the library either, and even then it’s to harass him, not help with the numbers. She still likes the look of him in the forge best, and Lucas has learned to excuse himself when she visits.
Without mentioning it (he hardly thinks she would ask), she takes over their defense, retrains the guardsmen. She lets the village children follow her into the forest to set snares and gather plants, cuts practice swords out of dead branches so the older ones can swing at each other. When the side of a stable boy’s thigh is torn open under a drays’ hoof, she’s the one with hands steady and strong enough to help the maester sew him closed.
She leaves sometimes. Not often but more often than he would like. Runs off to King's Landing to do a favor for the king or across the sea to Braavos on unexplained business. Once, she insists that Hot Pie must be checked in on, lifting flour and salt from the cellars as tithe, only to disappear after into the Clegane lands further west.
"Interesting people," is all she tells him, frustratingly vague as she strides from the kitchens with one of Grety's biscuits in hand. But she's smiling, laughs and pinches his side when he tries to steal a bite.
She’s not a lady in the way his people have seen before, but they were already used to a lord whose nails hold half the keep together. And while Arya has no patience for slogging through petitions beside him, Flora tells him that she often sits a while at the village tavern, speaking to those who need the kind of help that’s given privately.
*
There’s movement at the tree line as he’s just cleared the village, watches as his wife emerges and attempts to straighten herself out, leggings dirty and braids barely holding on.
She waves to him as he pulls the mare to a halt, casually waits for her to lope the two dozen paces to the road, “Give your woman a ride?”
He clicks his tongue at her and grasps her forearms, still strong enough to effortlessly pull her astride in front of him.
She settles against his chest, the whole of her fitting easily in the space between his arms, form relaxed and calm. She weaves her fingers into the horse’s mane and makes a low sound at the chaste kiss he drops on her crown, their breathes falling into the same effortless rhythm.
She speaks when they reach the bend in the road where he once lost sight of her.
“I kept the promise you made me make, you know,” he glances down at her, "To never forget what you said in Winterfell."
It's in moments like these that the remade parts of her are most apparent. No softer than before, just more willing to show the glimpses of it.
"I used to think it to myself before I slept at night."
"Like your list?" he murmurs into the shell of her ear.
She shivers, slants her face into the hollow of his collarbone, "Like anything worth remembering."
*
He watches a wagon of hay as it wobbles through the courtyard, tiny puffs of dust rippling up from the wheels, blowing gently through blinding rays of summer sun. He can just make out the sound of hammering below the dozen or so voices moving about, loose hounds barking, the constant clatter of a place being well lived in.
Merik’s girls squeal at something on the curtain wall, their high-pitched laughter twining with the call of gulls as they fight the wind overhead. He takes a deep breath and smells the salt from the bay, feels the constant, relieving humidity.
He dutifully straightens on the low stool when he senses Arya behind him, her swollen belly brushing against his shoulders and he has to keep himself from turning to kiss it.
She runs her nails over his scalp and sighs, tugging hard enough that he fidgets embarrassingly, “You know I like it better long.”
He grins as he passes her the shears, and looks ahead, “It’ll grow back.”