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“When you come to the edge of all that you know, you must believe one of two things: either there will be ground to stand on, or you will be given wings to fly.”
— The Summer King, O.R. Melling
It’s a stupid thing to be bothered by. It wasn’t like he was daring her or something. And she doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. So what if Gendry’d had that smirk on his face, so what if he’d taken in her ragged breeches and her choppy hair, the smudges of soot on her cheeks and nose from climbing into a fireplace to find out what clogged the flue. So he’d laughed and said she couldn’t be a girl even if she tried. So what. So bloody what.
“I can so,” she says, hours later, finding him in Winterfell’s smithy long after he’s already forgotten what they’d talked about. He spends long hours there, melting down damaged cauldrons to make them anew, forging chains for the gates and hinges for the doors. Long hours and still they’re never quite enough to fix all the damage, to erase the many others who’ve come and gone in the years since she left. Before she came home to a sparsely populated ruin and had been almost unsurprised to find Gendry there waiting for her.
“I can,” she repeats, and he looks up from his hammer and anvil. His brow knits in confusion, and she’s glad. She wants him to be confused. She wants to confuse him the way he confuses her.
“You can what?” he asks with a not-quite-patient sigh, laying his hammer down on the anvil gently enough that it makes no sound. His gentleness has always confused her, provoked her. Comforted her. Gentleness is something she’d never found to be of much use, and most men she’s known have found even less use for it than she. Maybe it’s that scarcity that’s always drawn her to it in other men. Jon had been gentle. Her father. And Gendry.
“I can be a girl.”
He looks at her blankly until he seems to remember their earlier conversation, understanding dawning on his face. She sets her chin and glares at him, defiant, mutinous. Why this matters to her, she doesn’t fully understand. She only knows that he’d always known she was a girl before, and that it meant something to her, and that maybe she needs it to mean more now.
“All right,” he says, too agreeably. It makes her angry. No one should be so agreeable.
“Shut up,” she snaps.
“I agreed with you!” he says in protest, raising his hands as if to show his innocence.
“I know, and I want you to shut up!” she says, taking three long steps towards him until she’s close enough to poke his chest with her finger. It hurts, his chest is so solid, which does nothing to help her temper. The longer she’s back in Winterfell with him, the more she forgets the girl she was across the sea, the faceless girl who learned patience and stillness and how to become someone else. She’s still not sure whether to miss that girl or not.
“Would you rather I disagreed with you?” he asks, a quirk at the corner of his mouth belying his amusement.
“Maybe,” she says, then she studies his face. He’s taller now than he was, broader. There’s a worn quality to his face that makes him…handsome, really, she realizes. But then she thinks he was probably always handsome, it’s only that she never thought to notice such things before. “That girl at the Peach,” she says, after she’s silently studied him long enough to make him fidget. “Do you remember her?”
“Yes,” he says, wary, unsure.
“I could do that. I could be like that. If I wanted to.” He says nothing, just watches her quietly. She feels as if she’s skirting the edge of a cliff, so close to tipping into some unknown abyss, and she doesn’t know whether to be scared or excited. “I could,” she repeats.
“Arya…”
“I could,” she says again, so quietly, almost to herself. Then it’s as if her hands are no longer hers. She watches them reach out, watches them flatten on Gendry’s chest and push him backwards towards the cot set against the wall. His eyes widen in surprise, but he offers no resistance, only allows her to walk him backwards, to push him down onto the cot. Only looks up at her with dark, serious eyes as she stands above him. It’s an easy enough thing to settle on to his lap, to put her knees astride him like sitting a horse. His hands hover over her thighs, as if he’s not sure where to put them, what to touch, whether he’s allowed. She can see them shaking, a fine tremor, and she looks up at him with a scowl.
“Why are you scared?” she asks, not meaning it to sound quite as aggressive as it does.
“Scared?” he echoes, blinking at her in yet more confusion.
“You’re shaking.” She grabs his hand and holds it before his own eyes as proof. “I’m not going to do anything bad to you,” she says, her tone indignant. She has to fight the urge to set her hands on her hips, knowing that it would look ridiculous, straddling his lap as she is.
“I’m not scared,” he mutters, snatching his hand away from her grip.
“Then why are you shaking?” she demands. A dull flush suffuses his cheeks and his eyes shift away from her glare, fixing on some spot on the floor beside her. Then they flick up to hers before dropping to her mouth for a long moment, so long that it makes a queer shiver start up in her stomach. When his gaze lifts back to hers there’s a look on his face she can’t read, a look written in some language she’s never even heard of before.
“I’m not scared,” he repeats, and suddenly the language makes sense. He’s not just tolerating her. He isn’t humoring her. He wants this. He wants her.
“Oh,” she says. The word hangs in the air between them, small and heavy and new. A prickle gathers under her skin, making it feel tight and itchy, like an ill-fitting gown. There’s a sick-sweet ache in her belly, one that spreads out through her limbs and leaves her unsteady. She raises her own hand between them and sees that it’s shaking too. He looks at her hand, then back to her face.
“I’m not scared either,” she tells him quietly, fascinated by the way it makes his eyes darken and burn, how he swallows hard and looks to have trouble breathing. His hands find her waist – strong hands, smith’s hands that catch and snag on her clothing, hands that could lift her as easily as he’d hefted his hammer earlier – and it makes her stomach feel full of frogs.
“Arya,” he whispers, and oh, that’s not fair. It’s not fair at all.
Despite her earlier words, her insistence that she could do this as well as any girl, she finds she has little idea how to start, less idea what to do. Sansa would know, she thinks, and for a moment she misses her sister so profoundly that it’s a physical ache. Impatient, irritated with herself, she shakes her head to dispel her thoughts and goes to what she knows: action. She curls a hand in his shirt and yanks his lips to hers hard enough to hurt except for how it feels good, it feels amazing, it’s better than anything has ever been.
“Arya,” he says again, against her lips. “Arya.” It sounds desperate and deep and she wonders if he thought of her, if he thought of this. If he thought of it the way she did, all those years they were apart. Shivering, she hitches herself closer, tightening her thighs about his and gasping at the almost-painful grip of his hands that’s surely leaving bruises on her hips, a pattern of dark stars where his fingertips are that she’ll have for days to remind her of how this feels. She opens her mouth over his and tastes the heat and salt of his tongue, moves her hips instinctively until the ache in her belly threatens to consume her, until those fingertips tighten even more. Under the haze of feeling in her body she thinks maybe she knows more than she thought, even as she’s learning how much more there is still to know. How very much there is to know with him, always him, only ever him.
“Gendry,” she says, her words a breathy moan, and he licks up into her mouth, makes her feel a little crazy.
“Lovely girl,” he says, rough and needy, “beautiful, sweet girl,” and she smiles against his lips.
“Told you I could do it,” she says, and she swallows his laugh with her kiss.