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Gendry Waters was not his father.
He'd never wanted to be. In fact, long before he knew who the man was, he defined himself by trying to be all the things he knew his father wasn't.
He wouldn't use anyone else for his own ends. He would care about others more than his own pleasure. He would never walk away from his responsibilities, whatever they might be. Whoever his father was, he'd thought, he was going to make sure that he became a very different sort of man.
He'd clung to that idea fiercely as a lad, telling himself that it didn't matter who his father was anyway. And it didn't...most of the time. But, though he would have denied it, whenever he caught his reflection in polished metal, on the rare occasions he let himself think of it, he wondered if his father's features were staring back.
Later...he'd gotten his answer.
Over and over again, he'd gotten his answer.
He was his father's mirror image, Robert Baratheon reborn, the black-haired, blue-eyed embodiment of the man he'd never met.
The hammer that had always felt so right in Gendry's hand...that had been his father's too, once, though he'd beaten men instead of steel. The temper that burned in Gendry's breast, the fury in his heart, the strength in his arms...they were all echoes of the Baratheon blood he'd never known about.
Gendry hated that knowledge and loved it in equal measure because it was proof that he was bound to the man whose absence had shaped his entire existence, and it meant that his life was forfeit too, or at least as good as. He'd suffered for it so many times already, in ways that would haunt him as long as there was breath in his lungs.
But, in part, it was also the reason he'd met a certain gray-eyed girl whose name had become too painful to think about after he'd heard tell of the Red Wedding. (He wouldn't have traded that meeting for anything, though, despite the sharp ache it caused now.) And beyond that, the knowledge of his birth, both terrible and wonderful by turns, meant that he wasn't alone, that he was part of something bigger and greater than himself, tied to it all in some inexplicable way, even if he was a Waters by name.
He'd thought about that often when he returned to King's Landing, hiding in plain sight. He thought about it the first time he ran a razor over his head, shearing off the dark, distinctive locks that marked him as a member of his father's house, by blood if nothing else, hoping that it would offer at least some measure of protection. He'd thought about it as he pounded steel in the forge, in the middle of the lion's den, and he'd thought about it as he crafted a war hammer for himself with a stag's head on it, the antlers bright, Baratheon gold.
He'd been told for years to mind his place, told for years that he was wasn't worthy, and the part of his heart that had heeded those words screamed that he had no right to the Baratheon legacy – it wasn't for someone like him. But the boy he'd been...the lonely, sullen boy, who'd wanted so desperately to have a place to belong...he reveled in that connection just the same.
Maybe that was why he'd burst out with the declaration of his heritage the moment he'd met John Snow.
Foolish as it had been, he reveled in that too, because he'd been thinking about something else as he forged weapons for the Lannisters: Robert Baratheon was everything Gendry had always thought he was and worse. (If Robert had been anything different once, if he'd ever been something approaching a good man, Gendry didn't know, and there were few people left that he could ask, fewer still that he was likely to ever meet.)
But, whether the king had lost his way or never cared to find it to begin with, in the end, Robert Baratheon had made his own choices. He had not been the sum total of his forefathers, just like Gendry wasn't him.
Blood did not determine everything.
Yet, something – whatever it was that made a man who he was – linked Gendry to his father and all those who came before him, and Gendry could never deny that completely...not without denying parts of his own nature.
That was alright, though, he'd decided. It was alright because, if the Baratheons had claim on him, well, then he had a claim on them, too.
And if he knew one thing, he knew this: he could take whatever it was they'd left him with, however little it may be, and make it his own.
Fin