title: called out in the dark
summary: the night is dark and full of terrors. arya stark is one of them
dedication: to my babeh sista. please stop passing out at concerts. my heart can't take it.
called out in the dark
The murmured prayer that tumbles from his lips goes unheard.
In the Hollow, his companions have changed, regressed somehow in this ritual of fire and blood, death and justice. The Hound's face is a twisted monstrosity, but the madness around him is far more frightening.
"Guilty," the crowd chants, and he thinks of the cages back in Stony Sept, the crows that swept between the bars and pecked mens eyes out their sockets while they were still alive. "Guilty, guilty, guilty."
Arya is chanting too. Her voice is drowned out by the sounds of swords clashing, and shields burning and blood spurting, but Gendry hears her. He's heard her muttering names in her sleep too, night after night. He remembers lying awake under the stars before the gold cloaks came and killed Yoren, tucked up in his blankets, his bulls head helm lying on the ground beside him. A small, dark shape curled up a little further away.
Cersei. Joffrey. The Hound. Ilyn Payne…
It hadn't made sense to him then, back when she was Arry and as normal as the rest of them. Just a boy on his way to the wall.
But since that night, there's been Harrenhal and the Tickler – a hundred death screams tearing the air apart. Lommy dying in the dirt. Heads mounted on a pike. A skinny girl who slit a man's throat without hesitation and returned with blood on her shoes.
He'd always been unhappy with that. It didn't seem right somehow, to let her get caught up in all the horrible things that happened in the world without some form of protection.
Gendry knows why he got caught back at the village. It's the same reason he left the smithy at Harrenhal behind.
He'd looked at her – this fierce, little thing with big grey eyes – and seen a little girl that needed looking after.
Now he is beginning to see something else.
"There's a ghost in Harrenhal," Hot Pie said. "It killed Chiswyck. And Weese."
"Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing as ghosts."
Gendry and Hot Pie had argued for a little while, and Arya stole a lemon tart from Hot Pie's tray.
"You'll get him in trouble for that."
She bit into the tart anyway, eyes far away for a moment.
"Arry?" Hot Pie asked, noticing it too.
"Nan," Gendry reminded him, and then she was back, a secret smile playing around her lips.
"Better watch yourselves," she said, and it wasn't Arry or Nan speaking then, but someone else, someone Gendry didn't know at all. "Don't you know? Anyone can be killed."
"You killed Mycah," she screams when it's all over, the dagger clutched so tight in her hand that Gendry can see the bones about ready to snap. "Tell them. You did. You did."
The smell of searing flesh is pungent and unbearable, makes his eyes water uncontrollably, but Arya doesn't notice, or maybe she just doesn't care. The Hound's ruined face glares up at her.
"I did," he snarls, and it is guttural. "I rode him down and cut him in half, and laughed. I watched them beat your sister bloody too, watched them cut your father's head off."
What happens next is more confused in his head than the whole fight between Clegane and Beric Dondarrian. There is screaming, and Lem moving forwards, hands lashing out, a dagger gleaming in the firelight.
Gendry had forgotten that Arya has a sister. Most of the time, he forgets that she is a highborn lady, too, but that's been changing recently. The acorn dress started it; clean and with her hair brushed for the first time in weeks, she'd looked so different from how she really was that he laughed. Laughed so hard he exhaled the wine he'd been drinking.
"You look so different now," he'd told her, sniffing her hair. "Like a proper little girl."
Arya hadn't liked that one bit. She'd fought and scratched and writhed, trying to shake that identity off in the muck of the stables.
A wild little thing, he'd laughed to himself afterwards. But wild things cannot be tamed, and they do not need protecting.
"You go to hell, Hound! You just go to hell!"
It's not just names she mutters in her sleep anymore. There's always two words. Valar Morghulis.
"They let him go," she says stiffly, as Gendry bandages her bloody hands. She fought too hard to keep that dagger – the thing left shallow cuts on the palms of her hands. He thinks of the Hound's barking laughter, the words that jolted both of them
The little sister. Don't you know you're dead?
"Who was Mycah?" he asks quietly, but it's not the question he wants to ask. There are so many and he doesn't know where to start, or if he even wants to hear her answers.
For a moment, Arya doesn't answer. "A boy," she says at last. "My friend. He – I made him play at sword fighting with me on the way to Kings Landing."
"And the Hound killed him?"
She presses her lips together, eyes dark and hard. He wonders if she'd be this upset if the Hound murdered him, too.
"The Lannisters did. My direwolf…it was all lies. They ruined everything."
Direwolf? he wonders, and it dawns on him that he, who has stuck by her side for so long now, knows nothing of the north. He knows nothing of Stark and Winterfell and the old gods, with the Heart Trees.
You never talk about them, he thinks, but doesn't say. Not your home, or what happened to your father. You never mention your sister, or your Lady mother.
Taking in the angry cast of her grey eyes, he has an idea why she doesn't. Maybe life would have been kinder if King Robert had never asked Lord Stark to be the Hand.
But then he would never have met her.
"You shouldn't listen to what he told you," is all he can think to tell her. "Clegane. He's just…"
"He's going to die," Arya said, ignoring him, and clenching her injured hands into fists. "One day. They all are."
And Gendry shivers because he knows, deep in his bones, that it's not a wish but a promise.
The thing that stays in his mind for years afterwards is the look in her eyes as Lem yanks her back from the Hound. Her eyes are dark and wild and full of rage, lips caught in a feral snarl. Rage enough to make the world burn, if someone would only give her a flame.
Gendry's heart stops dead.
As the dagger falls from her bloody hands, he sees not a girl who needs protection, but what is really there.
Not a little lady, but a wolf-girl baying for blood. The ghost of Harrenhal with her list of names.
She's worn so many different names since he met her, but the Hound changes everything. The Hound brings a girl who escaped Kings Landing. The Hound brings a girl whose brother is a King and whose sister is a hostage. The Hound brings memories that cannot be buried.
"The night is dark and full of terrors," the priest echoes and Gendry swallows, mouth dry.
When the Hound is captured, he brings out the worst in everyone.
Gendry knows who she is, but it's the first time he really sees Arya of House Stark.
notes: this did not come out how i wanted it to at all
notes2: first time writing aSoIaF. when i read this scene in a storm of swords i had to write this, but i think my ear is probably infected and i can barely think around the feeling that there is a swelling balloon inside it, so…
notes3: so not what i should be working on right now