Chapter Text
It's five minutes to midnight.
In five minutes that year would end and Arya was on a mission, a mission of vital importance, one that will define many things in her life going forward.
In five minutes, she must kiss Gendry.
Gendry is her best friend, the only person she would trust with her life, the only one who has been there through the good and the bad, and who is capable of making her forget her insecurities with just a few words and a smile.
The two met when she was only eleven and he was fifteen.
At that time, she had temporarily moved with her father and sister to King's Landing, because Robert Baratheon had asked Ned to be his advisor in the process of restructuring his family's company, which had fallen into decline after the mismanagement of the previous administrator, a dude called Petyr Baelish, who upon being caught was sent to jail for tax evasion and illicit enrichment.
Gendry was Robert's eldest son, the product of a drunken night during his college years, of which he had to take care after his mother died of cancer when he was eleven years old, since it would be very bad publicity for him and for his company if he let his son (of which he knew quite well) end up in the system.
At first, she didn't like him, he was always too quiet, too surly, more focused on his camera than on socializing. For the first few months that she lived in King's Landing, she tried to chat with him, and all she got was to get him to leave her talking to herself, and that bothered her.
But then one night during a dinner invitation to the Baratheon house, her sister and Joffrey Baratheon started teasing her, telling her that she was ugly and that she was never going to get someone to love her for it, going so far as to call her Arya Horse-face. She had asked them to stop, to leave her alone, but they went on and on until Gendry appeared behind his half-brother, with his brow furrowed and arms crossed, telling him that if he didn't stop he was going to make him sing with his fists.
Both his brother and her sister left immediately, the former telling him that he was going to tell his mother that he had threatened him, but Gendry ignored him and instead asked if Arya was okay.
Since then they had become inseparable, ‘thick as thieves’ her father would say, spending as much time as they could together, which made it even harder when a couple of years later the Starks returned to Winterfell after Ned finished his task at bringing back Baratheon Enterprises back from the death.
After that, years went by without them seeing each other, but their friendship continued through long phone calls (which always got her in trouble) and text messages.
They told each other everything.
He told her about Robert's divorce from Cersei after learning that Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen weren't really his, and how all of the man's expectations (that were previously placed on his supposed first-born son with his now ex-wife) had fallen on him, so instead of going to the School of Visual Arts, as he had planned, Gendry would have to enroll in Business School… and he hated that, but he did not dare to tell his father, for fear of causing him a second cardiac arrest.
The first was when he received the paternity tests.
She told him about her brother Bran's riding accident, after which he had lost the function of his legs, and about the many fights she had with her mother for not behaving like a 'lady' her age. She told him how much she missed her cousin, who had enlisted in the navy and was stationed at the Eastwatch base, and about her dream of going to study dance in Braavos with the House of Black and White, an academy from which several world-renowned dancers had emerged.
She had done it, she had entered said academy, but once inside she had realized that their methods were anything but safe, so after calling her father crying in the middle of the night, she had returned home.
And that's how she returned to King's Landing, managing to enter one of the most exclusive arts academies in Westeros, and getting to be in the same building with her best friend who, thanks to his cousin’s advice, had been able to speak with his father and explain to him that he wanted to pursue photography instead of business.
Robert had taken it better than he had thought.
Now, she had been there for a year and a half, and her routine consists of attending her classes during the day, and then meeting Gendry (in his apartment or hers, depending on their roommates’ presence or willingness to have visitors), to watch movies, play video games or simply chat, until it was time for everyone to go to sleep.
It has been the best year and a half of her life.
But, here’s the thing, she and Gendry were no longer eleven and fifteen years old, and therefore some things had changed, or at least on her side.
At first, she didn't realize she was beginning to feel something else.
They were friends, BEST friends, but suddenly she started to gawk at him every time he walked around without a shirt... something that, in her opinion, he loved doing way too much lately. Then, it was the contact of their skins sending electric jolts throughout her whole body while, back then, they could even wrestle like free-folk kids in the Baratheon’s garden and she would feel nothing.
Nothing at all.
Well, not anymore.
And then, there was his smell! She had become completely addicted to it, searching it on the cushions of her sofa after they would have spent the whole afternoon watching movies and he had to leave, or stealing his shirts to use as pajamas and sleep surrounded by his scent, making it look like it was by mistake.
She had denied it to herself, saying that she simply had her hormones raging from the lack of sex, but the times she went out with other people she kept imagining being with Gendry instead, him being the one kissing her, and then she had no choice but to accept it: she was madly in love with her best friend.
So, what to do now?
She didn’t know.
She had been observing him since then, trying to see if there was even the slightest chance that he felt the same way about her, asking Dani, her roommate, what she thought about her chances, and getting (after ten minutes of ‘I knew it!’) a full read about why she thought her feelings were reciprocated, which included the fact that just the week before he had dropped out of one of his classes to help her fix a water leak in their place.
And that's how she concluded that the only way to know for sure was by doing something about it, something drastic, and so she came up with a plan: she would kiss him at the twelve chimes of the new year, that way… if she felt in that kiss that he did not reciprocate her feelings, she would joke and tell him that she had only done it so that they could both kiss someone at midnight.
And then, when she was alone in her flat, she would take care of drowning her sorrow in an ice cream bucket.
It was five minutes to twelve.
She had stayed in King's Landing instead of traveling to Winterfell for the holidays, under the excuse that she was going to be part of Professor Forell's workshop in early January, and therefore had been invited to the party that Renly Baratheon organized for every New Year's Eve, where a large number of the city's Elite got reunited to do the countdown.
Gendry hadn't wanted to go at first, saying they might as well celebrate it in his apartment, but she had convinced him by telling him that Shireen and other people that he liked would be there.
And now it was five minutes to twelve, and as she stood next to him looking at the clock, her nerves were beginning to take over.
Could she kiss him at midnight?