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“Look, I get it.” Arya says, because she does , really. “You grew up in the city, you don't have the same experience I do with this kind of thing.”
“Your childhood home is a mansion.” Gendry says.
“A mansion in the woods .” She corrects, gently, because she's here to help.
“I just need you to stand by the door with this broom. If the raccoon comes at you-”
“The broom, sure, yes, but you're approaching this wrong. If I'm by the door, the raccoon is going to stay as far away from the door as it possibly can.” Not the best way to evacuate the raccoon, in Arya’s expert opinion.
“Good.” Gendry says. “I'm not trying to get it out the door. You know how hard it was to catch, right? I'm just trying to get it back in the trap.”
He gestures at a big metal contraption in the center of the cabin. Arya had noticed it when she came in, assumed it was part of a broader plan to trap-and-release the large masked rodent on the loose. She was correct about the trapping part, at least, it seems.
“What are you going to do once you get it back in the trap?” She asks.
“Don't worry about it.” Gendry says.
“Nope, I'm worrying. I drove for an hour and a half to get here. Why do you need a captive raccoon?”
Arya hasn't been to the Baratheon hunting cabin before, but she's heard enough from Gendry to have a decent mental image of it. It's more ramshackle in person. She can see the sky through gaps in the roof planks. The raw wood walls have weird dark stains on them. There's no electricity. Just battery-powered lamps. When she makes fun of this place in the future she's going to refer to it as a murder cabin. It has that sort of vibe.
Gendry eventually shakes his head. “It wasn't supposed to be a raccoon. I was trying to catch a skunk.”
“Sure. Lots of skunks in these woods.”
More head shaking. Gendry’s hair is getting long again. It bounces across his forehead in characteristic dark curls. He's inevitably going to turn up with another horrible buzzcut one of these days. “Not as many skunks as you'd think. I've been here all day and all I got was a bunch of squirrels and the one raccoon.”
“What were you using as bait?” Arya asks.
“Frozen fish sticks.”
“Well there's your problem. Skunks aren't going to eat those.”
“Fuck you, skunks are omnivores.” Gendry says, with the misplaced reassurance of someone who definitely learned everything he knows about skunks from Google.
“Skunks eat bugs and stuff. You should've gotten worms. I passed, like, three fishing supply shops on the way here.”
“I'm not gonna buy worms.”
“I'll pitch in the two dollars you need for worms, if you explain what , exactly, your end goal is.”
Gendry rolls his eyes, and Arya can tell she's got him.
“I got disinherited.” He tells her. “Found out last week. Got a courtesy letter, from the Baratheons’ lawyer. I'm out of the will.”
“That sucks.” She says, with genuine sympathy.
“Yeah. So I figured I'd come out here to the cabin one last time before I have to return the key, catch a skunk, and let it loose into their house.”
Arya considers. That seems reasonable, she supposes. Almost sort of poetic.
“I think in terms of induced chaos, a raccoon would probably work about as well as a skunk.” She says.
“That's the conclusion I also arrived at.” Gendry agrees.
It's actually pretty hard to get the raccoon back into the cage. It seems to have memories of the cage, and isn't interested in reliving those memories any time soon. It's in a corner of the cabin’s bedroom, hissing whenever Gendry and Arya try to approach it.
“I think we need to just reach out and grab it.” Gendry says. “I'm sure I'm stronger than a raccoon. You hold the cage open, I’ll muscle the raccoon in.”
“It'll bite you. Then you'll need to get rabies shots.”
“This raccoon is very obviously not rabid.” Gendry says. He gestures at the raccoon. It does, admittedly, seem to have its wits about it.
“You’d still need to get rabies shots. Rabies symptoms take a long time to show up.”
“That's stupid. If this perfectly healthy raccoon bites me, I'm not getting a rabies shot.”
“Okay, idiot, enjoy your rabies. But I'm not helping with this plan.”
“I have gloves in my car.” Gendry says. “What if I wore gloves so it couldn't bite me?”
“It could still bite you.”
“It couldn't. These are the same gloves I use for welding. No way is a raccoon biting through them.”
“Raccoons have razor sharp teeth.”
“They do not . You're just making up shit about raccoons.”
The raccoon hisses at them again. The raccoon would certainly like for them to believe that it has razor sharp teeth.
“I'm telling you, we need to lure it back into the cage.” Arya says.
“It's way too angry for that to work.”
“We need to leave the room for a while, let it calm down. It's getting late. We could have some dinner. You have food?”
“Yeah,” Gendry says. “You want some frozen fish sticks?”
The raccoon is still in the bedroom, cooling its jets. Arya and Gendry are in the kitchen. The kitchen shares a wall with the bedroom, so they can still keep audio tabs on the raccoon in case it gets any big ideas in there.
Gendry doesn't have a good way to warm up the frozen fish sticks. Also, they're the Walmart fish sticks that are fairly low in percentage fish content. There's a jar of peanut butter in the cabinet, though, so no one can ever say Gendry isn't a gracious host.
“You think they'd deliver pizza to out here?” Gendry asks, watching Arya eat peanut butter out of the jar. There was only one spoon in the drawer.
“Probably not, but it's worth a try.”
Gendry flicks around at his phone. “The service died.” He says.
“Oh, yeah, because of the storm coming in, probably. I saw that on the drive up.” Arya offers him the peanut butter spoon. He takes it, in weary acknowledgement of the fact that the evening’s primary calorie source is going to be exclusively peanut-based.
“Sorry I turned your friday night into the setup to a horror movie.” Gendry says.
Arya shrugs. When it comes right down to it, there are worse places to sit out a storm, than in the murder cabin with Gendry and an angry raccoon. “What're friends with benefits for, if not helping you wrangle wild animals?”
“I mean…”
“Don’t get cute. Until we get this squared away, the ‘benefits’ are my animal control skills.”
Gendry eats his peanut butter in signaled capitulation. The friends with benefits situation was maybe not Arya’s greatest idea. Like, it beats not having sex with Gendry. But the benefits are quite possibly degrading the quality of the friendship.
When they were friends without benefits it was okay to occasionally get absolutely blindsided by emotional attachment. Arya hadn't been committed to not being emotionally invested, then. So if Gendry was excited about some new car that had rolled into the shop and his eyes lit up when he was telling her about it and Arya found herself thinking wow, I love him so much , that was within her allowed range of emotions.
Thinking things like that aren't allowed with the benefits in effect. So when they're sitting here on the cabin floor eating peanut butter together, Arya doesn't get to picture how nice it'd be if she could lean into Gendry’s side while laughing about some stupid joke. That would generally be okay friend behavior, except Arya can't be trusted not to end up fantasizing or romanticizing it, so it's a no go.
“Also… I know you've been trying to focus less on the vengeance stuff…” Gendry starts again, while Arya sits straight-backed against the cabinets next to him. “So...sorry for that, too. Dragging you into my stupid revenge plan.”
“It's fine.” Arya says. She's been trying to approach her problems with less of an eye-for-an-eye mentality, but she's not on a wagon about it, or anything. She unsubscribed from r/prorevenge, started meditating. She can partake in some well-deserved vengeance from time to time. Gods know the Baratheons deserve it. “I didn't realize the inheritance had mattered so much to you.”
Actually, she sort of recalls Gendry referring to it as fuckin’ dirty money , at one point.
“It didn't, really.” Gendry says.
Arya can't help herself from needling a little bit. “So the raccoon-trapping was more of a passion project, then?”
“Shut up. No, I was just thinking I'd finally be good enough for you.” Gendry says that last part of his sentence sort of fast, like Arya isn't going to immediately dig into it.
“Hm, well, good thing I'm not literally the worst person in the world , so I don't care if you're rich or not.”
“You know that's not what I mean.”
“Sort of sounds like what you mean.”
Gendry pushes his hair back from his forehead. “I know you don't care, I'm just saying, you have to know things would be different between us if I was from a good family , or whatever.”
“Different how. How would things be different.”
“We could...I don't know? We could actually be a couple instead of just fucking around.”
“What the fuck ?” Arya asks.
“Or, like, that's a dumb example, I don't-”
“Are you honestly telling me you think we aren't a couple because of your fucking...societal standing?”
“Okay, no, no, I mean, you just want to keep things casual, and…” Gendry trails off as Arya climbs on top of his legs, so she can look him right in the face. She puts her hands on his shoulders, because it is very very important to her that he absorbs what she is trying to tell him.
“I do not want to keep things casual. I thought you wanted to keep things casual.” She says.
“You were the one who kept saying friends with benefits !”
“I was putting myself out there! I was scared! Oh my Gods, you thought it was because you weren't rich? That would've been so fucked up.”
“I figured you had to know.” Gendry says. Arya looks blankly at him. “You know I love you, right?” He emphasizes. “So much.”
“I love you.” She reiterates back at him, because he's an idiot but so is she. “Dumbass. I'm helping you catch a rabid raccoon in a murder cabin. Obviously I love you.”
“It's not rabid.”
Arya presses her forehead against his, such that her wilderness knowledge of prion diseases will be conveyed to Gendry via osmosis. Gendry correctly misinterprets the gesture as a come-on and angles his head to chase her mouth. It's the most romantic kiss Arya can imagine having, kneeling on a concrete slab floor.
She wishes there wasn't an angry raccoon in the bedroom.