Season 8 Fics

all of our aching

They are saying good bye.

She hadn't wanted to, but Sansa talked her into it. You'll regret it, later. I know you want to be something wild, and Arya wanted to protest at that, tell her she didn't want to be wild, she wanted to be something no one had a name for yet, something giant, something free, But someday all that wild will leave. And home will be all you have left. He's part of that. Sansa had looked so sad, and her hands came up to rest on either side of Arya's face. Arya let herself melt into the touch, just a little, the gentleness of it. Arya had long lost the feeling that she needed to hide behind someone bigger for protection, but she thinks that no one is able to quite shake the comfort of this, the feeling of a little girl turning to her older siblings for direction. Maybe more a part of that than we are.

So she goes. She doesn't send a raven, or a warning, but he must have known. Maybe the whispers of the direwolf sigil flying from her sails had made its way to him, or maybe he was just hoping, but either way, he has men waiting on the shore for her, Baratheon banners flying overhead, their heads bobbing in exaggerated bowing and dropping my lady every other word, just often enough that she thinks it was ordered of them.

When she walks into the throne room (is it a throne room, when you are only a lord? She knew the word once and now its gone), he sends his men away. There is nothing but the two of them and all the stone, the distant sound of the waves crashing down on the surf and the cries of the seagulls.

"So." He doesn't stand. She does, perfectly still, perfectly quiet, counting out her breaths in her head. If he thinks he's going to outlast or make her squirm by staring down at her, he's wrong. A throne doesn't make a man, and besides, she has spent more time than this learning how to wait. How to be still. How to be nothing at all. "I didn't expect to see you."

"I came to say good bye." Maybe not good bye. Maybe, I'll see you again, or I'll write to you, something to keep this fraying thread between them from breaking entirely. It feels wrong, to leave him behind. "I didn't get the chance at King's landing."

He doesn't comment on that. Probably for the best. It was a dig at him, anyways, how he never approached her, just snuck looks at her from the corner of his eye while they decided the fate of the six kingdoms of westeros. How he never came to her after, but maybe he didn't think she would want him to. Her brother had been named a king, after all, her sister a queen.

"Where are you going?"

"Away." She won't give the answers she gave to Jon. He deserves more than that. "To find what's west of westeros. Make new maps."

Gendry finally breaks then. "A modern day Nymeria," He says, a ghost of a smile on his face, and the love for her bleeds through the words. She doesn't understand how she had gone so long without seeing it, how long she had known about it and had just assumed that it would always be there. He comes down from his chair, moves close enough to break propriety so he can rest a hand on needle hanging from her hip. She remembers him being so obsessed with what was proper, once. "It suits you."

"Does it?"

"I think so." He shrugs and doesn't move, not closer, not further away. "I don't know. I never knew any other version of you."

They were close enough that they were only whispering. Still, she imagines the people that are listening, the rumors that would be flying.

"That's who I am." She looks him and refuses to look away, even when his gaze skitters over to somewhere beside her head. "That's the only person I've ever been."

"Do you know," He says, and his hands lift up, moving to smooth her hair down, once, twice, a third time, and then his hands just stayed there, resting on her neck. It's such a vulnerable place to be held. She can think of three ways to kill someone with the way his hands are around her neck, and she knows that he knows none of them. "That you're sort of a princess now?" He dips down to her, like he's about to kiss her, and she does not move. If she had moved they might have met in the middle, but as it was he catches himself, sways on his feet and swerves backwards, settling with pressing his forehead down to hers instead. She does not know how that is better, less improper. It feels even more intimate than a kiss would have. "As soon as I go and get myself a castle you jump even further out of your league."