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Arya didn’t need anyone.
She was alive at seven-and-ten because she could catch a pigeon and eat it raw, kill a boy twice her size, say a word and watch men die. And because when she found herself alone again she never broke, no matter the circumstance.
She hadn’t gotten there by herself, to be sure. Her family, the small folk at Wintefell, Syrio, Yoren, Jaqen, and even Hot Pie and Gendry had taught her what she needed to survive. When they had left her, she carried on. That’s what her life was.
When the cold came she thought of her brothers and her sister, her family dead in the ground now, the friends she had made and lost. She thought of Winterfell. Winterfell would always mean safety, home, family.
Except that it hadn’t. She had stood in the rubble and realized there was no danger there, but no haven to be found, either, and it was about that time she realized what being safe really meant. When she had broken Gendry had picked her up again. He had put her back on her horse and made her go on when she knew if he hadn’t been there she might have climbed down to the crypts and found her place there and not moved until her bones had turned to dust.
The icy feeling in her chest wouldn’t give way and sometimes it was a cold terror that made her wake up screaming and clawing. Sometimes it made her feel sick; like there was a wrongness in the world that couldn’t be fixed and it had spread to her. When she was slumped over in her saddle and shivering Gendry would stop and cup her hands in his and warm them with his breath so she wouldn’t get frostbite. And at night he built their fire high against the darkness, forced her to eat whatever he had killed and then he’d pull her into his lap to keep her from freezing and he’d tell her they were going to keep going, no matter what, and that they would survive. She never believed him, but he was right.
The Wall did not mean safety. The Wall was an illusion, a towering lie. She knew that now. She had seen the wights claw at the ice until their frozen fingers snapped off and then she had seen them keep going, until someone managed to land an arrow in the center of the mass, and slowly, like kindling, the flames had spread and leapt from corpse to corpse. With the tunneling white walkers and the heat of the fire both, it hadn’t made more than a depression in the sheet of ice but she had been afraid all the same.
There was no keep and no castle that could make Arya feel secure.
Safety was Jon, Bran, Rickon, Sansa and the Reeds all asleep in a pile of furs in front of the fire in Jon’s chamber with Gendry pressed solid and alive against Arya’s side. It was when you had to kill the last of the horses for food and yours wasn’t the only knife at its neck; it was looking on the dead faces of those you once knew with someone at your back, at your side. It was barring the doors and knowing that if they failed, at least you wouldn’t die alone.
Jon’s sad smile and the way it made the scars on his cheeks crinkle, Sansa’s beautiful lady’s hands with dirt under the nail and calloused from holding a sword; Bran’s wisdom and Rickon’s raucous laugh even when nothing was funny and there was nothing left in the world to be happy about except one another; the way Gendry’s eyes softened when he’d look at her in the morning, the way his lips felt on hers in the darkness when they didn’t know if they’d get to see each other in the sunlight again- that was real, that was being safe when the long night had come.
When the Wall wept and the birds came back again they had left together, to go south and south until it was spring, somewhere, and Arya had not been afraid.