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Her shoes crunched heavily through the leaves on the sidewalk, and Arya carefully navigated the scattered jack-o-lanterns on the steps, their candles fluttering as she passed. She ducked under a curtain of artificial spiderweb and pressed the doorbell, which thankfully was just a regular old bell and not some novelty monster sound.
She wasn’t even sure why she’d decided to come, other than a depressing lack of anything else to do and getting tired of keeping herself up all night marathoning bad slasher films.
She hadn’t decided until the last minute and hadn’t had any time to find a costume, and Margaery’s frown when she came to the door was very disappointed. “Sansa, your sister isn’t following the rules.” she complained loudly over her shoulder, and when Sansa popped up beside her the two exchanged excited smirks. Margaery was dressed as the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, and the heart shape she’d drawn over her lips cracked into a predatory smile at the sight of Arya’s jeans and t-shirt.
“She never does,” opined Sansa, her wing nearly upsetting Margaery’s towering crown.
“It’s a good thing we planned, then.”
Arya decided that maybe the beer and chocolate might not have been worth it if she was going to have to suffer through one of Margaery and Sansa’s plans.
“The invitations were very specific, Arya.” lectured Sansa. “You have to wear a costume.”
“I don’t have a costume,” Arya protested. “And I never got an invitation. Who even sends invitations?”
But neither of them was paying any attention to her, and she got shuffled to the side as both of them rushed to open the door to admit the next guest on their list. Arya glanced up at the target of their overly enthusiastic welcoming and a lot of things began making sense to her very quickly.
She could feel the blush creeping up her neck to her cheeks and she wished she had come in costume so she might have a mask or something to hide behind.
Because it was him. Tall, attractive, dark haired, with a shy smile that did funny things to her stomach and seemed to steal the words off her lips. He’d started showing up at Margaery’s parties after Renly and Loras started dating but she forgot how they were related at the moment (she had also forgotten how to spell her own name) and she’d noticed him from the first time she’d walked into a room and seen him in it.
And the fact that she’d been a bit hammered at the time hadn’t helped any. “Who’s he?” she’d asked Dacey, who had looked down at her, amused.
“Who?”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Dacey? Who do you think?” she’d asked incredulously, glancing sideways pointedly, where he stood all attractive and smiling and sipping his beer with his hand shoved into his pocket like he was in a damn magazine ad.
“That’s Gendry.”
“What about him?” said Margaery, coming up beside them, an opened bottle of champagne in her hand.
“Arya wanted to know who he was,” Dacey explained.
“Which he?” demanded Sansa, taking a sip out of Margaery’s bottle of champagne and looking at Arya suspiciously.
“Gendry.”
“Ohhhh… yeah.” Said Sansa, a dangerous, delighted smile on her face. “Gendry! Oh, it’s perfect. Why didn’t we think of it before?” she exclaimed to Margaery.
“I can hear you, you know.” Arya reminded her grumpily.
“You should go and talk to him,” prompted Margaery. “He’s nice. Shy, but nice.”
“I just asked who he was,” she’d protested. “I don’t want to talk to him, I just want to… you know… look. A little.”
She’d looked a lot, and had almost forgotten the whole incident when she woke in the morning with a pounding headache and champagne spilled on her shirt. But then she’d seen him at the next party, and then the one after that, never quite drunk enough to actually talk to him but always just drunk enough to think about it very, very seriously.
Arya knew how to recognize months of Margaery and Sansa’s plotting at work when she saw it.
“Oh look, Sansa, Gendry’s forgotten to wear a costume too. Are you sure you remembered to put it on the invitations?”
“What invitation?” Gendry asked with a frown. “I never got an—“
“I thought I did. Oh well. Everyone knows costumes are mandatory on Halloween.”
When Margaery and Sansa plotted together the consequences were always tremendous, and the looks on their faces now put a little flicker of fear into Arya. As they closed in on them she found herself pressed into the foyer next to Gendry, who still looked painfully confused. “I’m sure Renly said I didn’t need a costume, actually.”
“Well you do, it’s the rules.”
He shrugged. “All right, then. I’m dressed as a designated driver.”
“And I’m a rebellious nudist.” Arya chimed. Nudist. Why had that been the only thing she’d been able to come up with? She was mortified.
It didn’t meet the dress code, apparently. “That doesn’t count. Sansa, I think they’re going to have to go to costume purgatory.” said Margaery sadly.
Arya was sure she’d been in Halloween party hell long enough to skip purgatory, but she had feeling that wasn’t going to matter anymore than their lame excuses had. Maybe she’d watched Scream one too many times in the past month, but she found herself contemplating if there was any way she could ‘accidentally’ lock Sansa and Margaery in the garage for the rest of the night.
She glanced up at Gendry hesitantly, sure she was still blushing, and he only shrugged at her with a little nervous smile. “Whatever, I guess. Is there candy in purgatory?”
Sansa grabbed a ceramic pumpkin off of a chair next to the front door and shoved it into his hands before shepherding both of them down the hall toward the kitchen. “There is now, but you have to share. Arya gets cranky when she’s hungry.”
“I really don’t think that this is how I want to spend my night—“ she insisted helplessly, as her sister shoved her into the kitchen.
“It’ll be fine. You have candy and there’s beer in the fridge and you can’t come out until you’re in costumes.”
“Where are we supposed to get costumes?”
Margaery pulled open a drawer next to the stove and handed its contents to Arya and Gendry generously, like she was giving them some great gift. “Be creative!”
“You should make Sansa stay too. She looks like a chicken.” Arya grumbled, but her sister only smiled, and with one last completely evil grin the doors had closed and she and Gendry were left standing in the kitchen with nothing but a glue stick and a pair of dull scissors.
She sighed, and caught hold of her courage before it left her completely. “Well, I could really use a beer. You want one?”
Was he blushing too, or was it just the lighting? “Sure.”
She rooted around in the fridge for a moment longer than necessary, hoping the cold air would help her compose herself. “They have light, stout, and a couple hard ciders.”
“Which sounds the best?”
“I think I’m going with a cider.”
“Then I’ll have one of those.”
She pulled two out and took them to the table, popping the caps off with its edge and not caring if the table was mahogany. Stupid Tyrell table, anyway.
“So… how do you know Margaery and Loras?”
“The chicken is my sister.” she said derisively, taking a cautious sip of the cider. It was surprisingly good, and her second was much more appreciative. Sansa was actually a beautiful swan with wings and feathers and the whole thing, but Arya found the idea of her sister as a chicken far more satisfying at the moment. “She’s stuck to Margaery like an exceptionally persistent fungus most of the time.”
“Oh. Renly is my uncle.” he offered. “He isn’t particularly fungal that I know of.”
“You’d think we would have known to avoid another holiday get together with our families, huh?”
“Yeah, you really would.” he agreed. “It seems like a pretty obvious indication that we’re not going to have any fun.”
“I should have stayed home. I was going to watch The Exorcist.”
“I was going for The Shining.”
“Fair choice,” she admitted. “The book’s creepier, though.”
“Topiaries?”
“Fucking topiaries,” she agreed with a shudder. “It doesn’t even make sense. It shouldn’t be scary, but I couldn’t walk past a bush for a week afterwards.”
“Did you see any lettuce in the refrigerator? Maybe we could improvise, you know. Lettuce topiaries are pretty scary.”
“We’d look more like wilty side salads than creepy topiaries, though.”
He frowned in consideration, and pursed his lips thoughtfully. It was quite a nice look, she thought. It might even still be attractive if he did decide to go as a side salad. “You’re probably right.”
“We might have to be salads. What are we supposed to make costumes out of in a kitchen?” Arya asked, looking around at the immaculate (and barren) granite countertops.
“Do you think they’ll care if we go through the cabinets?” Gendry asked, running his fingers through his hair and leaving it sticking up in the front. “It seems sort of rude.”
“Rude is keeping your guests in the kitchen. You go high, I’ll go low?”
She emerged from a cabinet a moment later with a strainer in her hands. “Well, if you want to wear cookware on your head I’ve found you a hat.”
“No way,” he told her. “If I wear a colander you have to wear one too.”
“They’ve only got one.”
“Keep looking. You want a chip?” he asked, grabbing a handful for himself and offering her the bag he’d apparently found in an overhead cabinet.
She sat on the tile floor eating barbecue chips by the handful and enjoying the way his flannel shirt raised ever so slightly while he reached and rummaged around.
“I thought you were supposed to be looking.” he accused, apparently noticing she’d stopped clanging through the pots and pans.
“I am,” she said thoughtlessly. “There’s, uh, nothing down here.”
“I’ve got a paper sack and a roll of aluminum foil.”
“Sounds like a start,” she decided, wiping her fingers on her jeans and reaching for the hand he offered to pull her up. His hands were big and warm, his fingers roughened slightly with callus.
God, even his hands were nice. “I’m going to look in Margaery’s drawers.”
He snorted. “Really?”
“Shut up. Here, see, I found a marker.”
They stood surveying their bounty and drinking their cider for a moment. They had one paper bag, foil, scissors, a glue stick and a marker.
Arya glanced at him. “How are you with arts and crafts?”
“Not bad. You?”
“Useless.”
He unfolded the paper sack and smoothed it flat, his fingers making the crisp brown paper crackle. “That’s all right. I’ll make you something, and you can think of something to make out of foil for me.”
She supposed she was thinking, but mostly she was watching the way his hands worked, the precise and considerate way he slit the bag up the side and cut a circle out of the bottom. His brows furrowed with concentration, and when he stopped to check his work he’d grab a piece of candy from the pumpkin and unwrap it slowly. He favored chocolate and the hot cinnamon jaw breakers, she’d noticed.
Finally, with one last Kit-Kat and a snip of his scissors he seemed satisfied. “All right, come here and let me see.”
He dressed her carefully, making sure the paper didn’t tear.
“Gendry?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you just put a paper bag over my head?”
He grinned, and gave it a careful tug to situate it on her shoulders. “No. I put a… well, I don’t know what it is, but it fits, right?”
Arya looked down at the upside down paper sack she wore. “It’s sort of scratchy around the neck.”
“Stand still, I’ll fix it.” he told her, carefully enlarging the hole he’d made for her head, the blade of the scissors cold against her neck and making her shiver. “Don’t fidget; I don’t want to cut you.”
“I can’t help it, it tickles.” she complained, but he freed the strip of paper he’d cut and looked at her with a satisfied expression.
“Better?”
“Yeah.”
“It suits you.”
“I’m square, Gendry.”
“I think it’s a rectangle, technically.”
“So what’s my costume? Geometry?”
“You could be groceries.”
“Groceries aren’t scary,” she argued.
“You didn’t say you wanted to be scary. Maybe I can draw something on it.”
“Like what?”
“I’m pretty good at trees,” he offered. “You’d make a nice tree.”
“Well, I guess I’m already kind of a tree. Paper counts as trees, right?”
“Sure. We can always say you’re just a withered topiary, if you want to be scary.”
“Put it on the back.” she told him, handing him the marker.
Gendry set his empty bottle on the table and pulled out a chair, and she turned her back to him and let him draw on the bag, delicately tracing out the branches and limbs of a tree.
Her shoulders started to cramp from hunching them to give him a flat surface to work on and she realized it would have made more sense to take the 'costume' off, but when he reached up to hold it in place and she felt the warmth of his skin she decided that it would be worth it even if the marker bled through and onto her clothes.
“Sorry,” he told her, his fingers sliding down her spine and the point of the marker following them downwards. “This marker is almost dried out.”
“S’okay.” she mumbled, as he lightly held onto her hip and steadied her so he could scribble on her costume. He could keep his hand there until Christmas as far as she was concerned, ugly paper sack and all.
“Okay, I’m done.” he announced, and she attempted, stupidly, to look at his handiwork over her shoulder.
“You did draw a tree, didn’t you? I don’t have like a giant cock on my back or ‘KICK ME’ or anything?”
“Both, actually. Is that not what you wanted?” he asked innocently, reaching her the dead marker and starting to stand.
Her hand darted out and pressed him back into the chair, and she wasn’t sure which one of them was more startled. “It’s your turn.” she mumbled.
“Oh. Yeah, right.” he said, and Arya realized her hand was still on his shoulder. She jerked it away quickly and reached for the roll of foil and opened the box to keep her hands off of poor Gendry, who sat looking a bit anxious.
She went for it a bit too eagerly and the roll of foil came tumbling out of the box, landed on the table and then the floor, unrolling and coming to a stop halfway across the kitchen with about ten feet of foil trailing behind it. She chased after it, finally managing to wrangle it into a manageable, if untidy armful. “I hope they don’t need this for leftovers or anything.” she told him, carefully draping the foil over his chest.
“Do you think the Tyrells even know what leftovers are?” he asked, looking up at her with those deep blue eyes.
“Probably not,” she admitted. “I’m surprised they even keep normal people things in their kitchen.”
She hadn’t lied when she said she was hopeless with arts and crafts, and the foil was less cooperative than she’d imagined, so she kept wrapping more around him and then trying to pinch it together to make it stay. “This would be easier if they kept some normal people tape someplace.”
“Just smush it together,” he told her, and their hands met at the front, where she’d made a sort of clumsy crisscrossed vest. She pressed against it and the felt the hard flesh of his chest under her hand, the foil warming with his body heat. “See, it’ll stay.” It did, though Arya was sweating a bit in her paper sack when she finally got it to stop sliding around all over him. The foil, not her hand, though that had done a bit of tentative sliding around too.
“What am I supposed to be?” he asked.
“I have no idea.” she admitted. “Robot?”
“A burrito?” he offered.
She took the last bit of foil off the roll and formed it quickly and clumsily and sat it on his head like a hat. “A conspiracy theorist?” It didn’t stay put, and neither of them bothered to retrieve it when it fell.
“Baked potato?”
“No,” she decided, hands on her hips. He was too cute to be a potato. “I think you’re a knight. Just… don’t move your arms; your armor is of really poor craftsmanship.”
He stood as carefully as he could, stiffly and awkwardly, and Arya heard a very troubling metallic screech. “Wait, here, let me.” When he stood he practically towered over her, and she had to reach to repair the seam that had come undone.
“This is really warm,” he said with a grimace. “It’s holding in all my body heat.”
“It’s all right,” she told him. “Hopefully Margaery will let us take these off.” Arya said, suddenly remembering the party they were missing, the faint sounds of the Time Warp and laughter coming through the ornate double doors that were still closed, keeping the outside world outside for just a moment longer, and neither of them moved to break the spell.
“Yeah,” he agreed, and the two of them stood there for a moment in silence, staring at one another awkwardly. There was a mess of candy wrappers and foil and paper scraps on the table, but Arya refused to clean it up since it was all Sansa’s fault anyway.
“So… do you want to go?” he finally asked, and she nodded, but the two of them sort of lingered by the doors uncertainly until she finally pushed one open and held it for him.
He stopped to lean against the doorframe, then swore and remembered his foil outfit, now dented across the shoulders, and he sighed. “I’m—sort of weirdly glad I didn’t wear a costume tonight, Arya.”
“Me too,” she smiled. “I had fun.”
He grinned. “Even if we do look like recycling.”
“We should probably go to the party,” she said reluctantly, and they moved to step through the doors together, but as they did a tiny tissue paper ghost with a surprised expression bumped the top of Gendry’s head, and the two of them dissolved into nervous giggles.
“It’s like Halloween mistletoe,” she observed, reaching up to poke it with her finger and watching it swing from its thread.
Gendry brushed the ghost out of his hair and smoothed it back down anxiously, the shoulder of his costume tearing with the motion. It started to slide down, but neither of them paid it any mind. “I guess it is.”
They both moved at once, all sweaty palms and anticipation and nervousness. When their bodies touched their costumes made a loud rustling sound, and they were both laughing when his lips settled on hers, softly, tasting of cider and cinnamon and the half a bowl of Halloween candy they’d eaten.
He kissed her shyly at first, until her arms wrapped around his neck and she stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him back, pulling him tight against her. His hands came to rest on her waist while Werewolves of London blared in the distance, and her fingers crept under the edge of his ruined costume and shoved it off, her hands exploring the firm planes of his chest through his shirt while he tore the paper off of her and held her closer, his tongue licking at her bottom lip, sucking it until she had to grab his shoulders and shove them both back against the frame of the door to stay upright.
They kissed through three songs before she finally pulled away to catch her breath.
“You know, this party seems pretty boring,” he told her, his hair sticking up in every direction from her fingers and the collar of his shirt crooked. “Do you want to go?”
“We probably should,” she decided. “Margaery always throws the worst parties.”
It was midnight before anyone thought to check on them. The kitchen door stood open, and a pile of discarded paper and foil was the only indication they’d ever been there.
Margaery, Sansa, and Renly stood at the threshold, surveying the damage. The kitchen looked a bit like a horror movie, since half the drawers and cabinets still stood open like a poltergeist had torn through it, but that was to be expected.
“Well, I guess that must have worked.” called Renly, reminding himself to send Gendry a congratulatory text in the morning. “I told him a hundred times to go talk to her.”
Sansa smiled at Margaery, and the two of them shared a moment of triumph, the result of months’ worth of machinations.
“I really do throw the best parties.” said Margaery.