Work Text:
The smoke burned his throat and made his eyes water, but it must have been a thousand times worse for her as the flames exploded under her fingertips and engulfed the barn. “We have to go,” he shouted over the screams, the crackle of the fire, the noise of splitting beams as the roof threatened to collapse over their heads. “Now!”
The heat is too much, and he turns and runs for the exit, praying to whatever god that would listen that Arya was following. Hot Pie was waiting at the edge of the woods, face grim; beside him, Lommy looked pale and drawn. “Time to go!” Gendry scooped up the little girl between them in his arms and took off, sprinting blindly into the night.
The flames were far in the distance when someone called, “Gendry, wait,” behind him, and he stopped. His lungs burned with ash, and he doubled over coughing, letting the girl slide to the ground and grab hold of his leg. When he looked up, relief washed over him; Arya had followed them after all.
Her short hair was singed, her face and one arm red from the heat, and she looked as exhausted as he felt. There were tear tracks down her face; he knew her too well to think they were from anything but the heat they had left behind.
“Lommy’s hurt,” she rasped. “We have to stop, Gen.”
“We aren’t far enough away,” he choked back.
“We don’t have a choice. We won’t make it much further like this,” she argued, and he knew she was right.
Hot Pie emerged from the shadows behind her, Lommy leaning heavily on his shoulder. There was blood crusted around the blond boy’s leg, and Gendry’s stomach sank as he realized what had happened.
“We’ll camp here,” he announced shortly. “I’ll take first watch. No fires.” Hot Pie dropped Lommy on the ground beside the little girl and bent to catch his breath. Gendry went to set up their perimeter, and Arya followed, throwing her water bottle at the boys before she left.
“Lommy-” she started.
“I know.” He replied, turning to face her. There were burns up the side of her arm, but he knew she wouldn’t let them be treated until they had helped everyone else first.
“What are we going to do?”
He shrugged, exhausted to the bone. “What is there to do?” They both knew the reality – there was only one thing they could do if he’d been bitten.
They worked in silence for a long time, piling twigs and leaves together; anything to make noise when it was stepped on, to give them a few seconds of warning. They were almost done when Arya came and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his worn-out shirt.
“There were people still in there when I set the fire,” she said quietly, and he winced at the raw pain in her voice. “I heard them screaming when I ran away.”
“You didn’t have a choice. We were all going to die in there. We couldn’t fight them off.” He held her closer, waiting for her breathing to steady.
She looked up at him, still nestled against his chest. She wasn’t crying – none of them had done that in weeks, except the little girl. Not since King’s Landing had fallen. “I thought we could save people,” she said.
“I know.” They stood together, breathing in the cold night air, always a touch too alert even in each other’s arms. “Go get some sleep,” he told her. She nodded, detangling herself from his arms and pressing a kiss to his cheek before she walked back towards the others. “Arry,” he called after her, keeping his voice down. “Let me take care of Lommy, okay?”
She nodded, and pretended to sleep.
* * *
They didn’t bury Lommy. He only allowed himself the slightest pang of guilt over that – digging a grave would take precious hours they didn’t have, and he wasn’t willing to risk their lives for somebody who was already dead. So they left his body, and kept going.
Hot Pie was tired, and complained constantly. The little girl had stopped crying three days ago. Lommy had called her Weasel. Gendry called her a liability, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave her behind, and Arya certainly wouldn’t allow it. They had discussed it once, the day after Lommy died.
“We should leave them behind,” he told her. “They’re slow, and loud, and they’re going to get us killed.”
“We can’t leave them,” Arya had said resolutely.
“They would leave us,” he had pointed out, but they had both known they wouldn’t really do it.
They did lose Weasel eventually. They were ambushed in the night, a small pack of biters they should have heard far earlier than they did. The fight was short and ugly, and he and Arya fought like they always did; back-to-back, moving together, drawing the creatures away from Hot Pie and Weasel and cutting everything far too close for comfort. By the time they were done, Weasel had run off, terrified by the gore and the shouts and the apocalypse. He and Arya never talked about it. They didn’t cry.
Hot Pie stayed behind at a safe house that neither of them thought was very safe, and then it was the two of them. It was the way it was always going to be, Gendry thought grimly. They were the fighters, the survivors. A pair. They’d both known it, ever since she’d joined the group fleeing the ruins of King’s Landing. Eventually it was just going to be the two of them, fighting for the rest of their lives.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, curled up in his arms in a cabin they would stay a week in and then burn.
“What we always do,” he replied. Her sword gleamed against the wall in the sparse candlelight; his hammer was laid across the nightstand.
“We’ll protect each other.”