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“I think you’re taking it a little too seriously,” Gendry snorts.
“And I think you’re being traditional,” Arya yawns.
They’re standing in the main entrance of the hall. The light switches don’t work, but the realtor insists that that’s because the old power lines haven’t been repaired since no one has lived here since the war. The room is dim, but Arya doesn’t need illumination to see what it looks like. Acorn Hall blossomed in her memory the moment she and Gendry had crossed the threshold.
“Then come out and say it like that, don’t say something like all romances end at marriage. Since when have you cared about a bloody romance?”
“Fine. I don’t want marriage because the second we get married is the second everyone assumes that we’re not who we are anymore.” The words hang in the air between them and she is wholly unsurprised when Gendry rolls his eyes, and pulls her towards him, and presses a kiss to her temple.
“That’s wildly stupid.”
“The second we get married is the second everyone asks when we’re having children. At least this way, they’ll always ask when we are getting married and I can just say that marriage is a weapon of patriarchy and they’ll never ask again.”
“You do have a habit of making them shut up when you do that,” Gendry says dryly.
“Still hasn’t got you to stop asking me.”
“Yeah, because then you’d have your way and can’t have that.”
“Yes we can.”
“As my lady commands.”
“Shut up.”
The words echo through the empty old house and for a split second, Arya is living in memory.
She remembers it from rainy autumn days in the riverlands, the way the rain drip drip dripped off the leaves, a softer, gentler pattering than the sound of Lannister gunfire. She’d worn a dress here, and Gendry had told her she looked like an oak tree because he was stupid like that, but she’d always looked at oak trees fondly after that.
“I wonder what happened to them,” she murmurs, taking his hand. She remembers Ravella Smallwood, but her hall is empty now. The wood is falling apart and the upholstery on the furniture smells rotten.
“Do you?” Gendry asks quietly. His voice has changed, as has hers. The bickering is over and this is Gendry. Her Gendry. The one she’d found quite by accident but who is always steady at her side when the feelings come bubbling up in her breast and tears threaten her peace of mind once again.
The hall is up for sale. That’s why they are here. It’s not exactly close to Winterfell, but Winterfell seems so much closer than it ever did now that the roads are open and she can drive her own car without fear of being pulled over and captured. At ten years old, she’d already been as good as driving as Gendry, so long as she sat at the very edge of the seat. Backroads only, and Gendry snoring in the seat next to her because he couldn’t drive all the time.
It’d be two days to Winterfell now by car. Eight hours if they caught the train at Riverrun instead.
“Needs a lot of work,” Gendry says quietly as they look around. There’s fire damage, and water damage, and Arya knows what war can be and she hopes that Lady Smallwood made it out ok before she died. Because if she were alive, the house wouldn’t be for sale. If she were alive, it would be her selling the old manor and not the county.
Her hand tightens in Gendry’s. “Some work’s worth it,” she replies, looking up at him. It had been worth it for Winterfell, it had been worth it for King’s Landing, castles and cities and homes and families destroyed and brought back to life again with the spring. Why not Acorn Hall?
“I still think we should get married,” he says.
“And what if I want you to woo me for the rest of my life?” she says, turning to face him. He bends his head and brushes a kiss to her lips.
“I am wooing you,” he tells her. “You never wanted flowers and songs. You wanted steadfast, and that’s what I’m giving you. Marriage is as steadfast as you could possibly get.”
“Nice try,” Arya says, and for the first time, she feels her heart stutter as the image of Gendry tying a cloak around her neck before a heart tree fills her mind.
“If I stop asking you, then the romance dies, but if I marry you, it doesn’t,” Gendry says, shrugging. “Not all romance ends at marriage. And certainly not ours.” She looks up at him—here of all places, this corner of the world where he’d first implied without saying in so many words that he thought she was pretty. That they’re really back here after all these years, safe and sound and alive—it feels like a dream. “And besides. Marrying me isn’t going to mean you stop being you. What sort of idiotic thought is that? As if you’d do that. As if I’d let you do that. What are you really afraid of?”
Arya looks up at him.
“I’m not afraid.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Shut up.”
He grins. He’s got her, and she knows it and he knows she knows it and he’s going to lord it over her for the rest of time, especially—
“I’m afraid of not being afraid, ok?” she snaps. “If I’m afraid, then I can be brave. But marrying you, house,” she gestures at the remains of Acorn Hall, “even maybe one day kids—none of that frightens me. So I’m afraid, ok? It feels like a trap.”
“I’m not a trap,” Gendry tells her.
“I know that,” she says, rolling her eyes. Of course he’d be stupid about it. She’s being stupid about it.
“You deserve some peace,” he tells her softly. “We both do. We’ve spent years fighting and for what? Don’t be afraid of peace.”
“I can’t not be afraid of peace. Peace killed my father.”
Gendry looks down at her, his eyes soft. “You’re so afraid of losing it all that you won’t let yourself have it?”
“That’s not it, you don’t understand,” she protests.
“Don’t I?” he asks and there it is, that Gendry steadiness, that derision wrapped around love that keeps her honest, keeps her sane. “You think I’m not afraid of losing you too?” He presses a kiss to her forehead and turns away, looking around the dim hall. “Gods we were so young.”
“We were,” Arya agrees. He hasn’t let go of her hand; she hasn’t let go of his.
She remembers him getting captured by Lannisters, and even if he was stupid, she had to get him back. She remembers him shouting after her in the rain when she’d fled the Brotherhood. She remembers seeing him again in that inn, as though he’d been waiting for her the whole bloody time, and she didn’t have to say a word to him, because he was Gendry, they understood each other in ways that only the luckiest—or the unluckiest—ever understand.
She shivers.
Gendry shrugs his jacket off and—
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You’re cold.”
“ You’re cold, you stupid southron flower.”
He laughs but his jacket is on her shoulders, and she feels warm again. Warm and safe. That’s always been Gendry. Hot coals that have burned for hours and are hotter than any flame—a deep even heat that never seems to die.
Her parents had had that heat, she thinks. Maybe. She doesn’t quite remember. They’d died when she’d been so young. But she has it with Gendry.
She wraps an arm around his waist and looks around again. “I say we fix it up,” she says.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
She doesn’t tell him she’s thinking about it. He’ll get all dumb and I told you so about it, and she wants to be sure when she tells him. But his coat is so warm, and this empty shell of a house isn’t full of ghosts, somehow, just memory and life, and rebirth and slowly, with a shaky breath, Arya Stark admits to herself that she is unafraid.