a/n: I've decided to take the tiniest detour from canon starting with this chapter. I'm not the world's biggest fan of the Lady Stoneheart storyline (to put it mildly), and so I've decided to just pretend Lady Stoneheart never happened. Because why not. Going forward, I guess this story would technically be considered AU (but only just).

Thank you so much for reading. :)


Given her physical condition and the deep snow that blankets everything, it takes Arya more than fifteen minutes to travel the short distance from Winterfell's front gates to its forge. That's where the man they call The Commander had told her she'll find Gendry.

"And I'm sure he'll be glad to see ye', m'lady," the older man had said with a grin and a wink.

Arya knows Gendry is probably sleeping. But she's been asleep for days now, and she's restless. And she is not much in the mood to hear anything else from Sansa's bedchamber tonight.

Might as well get this over with now.

When she finally gets to the forge she raps as loudly as she can on the front door. She only has to wait a few moments before Gendry opens it, carrying a large stick in one hand and wearing what Arya assumes must be his sleeping clothes. His thick black hair sticks up comically in all directions, confirming her earlier suspicion that he was asleep when she arrived.

He looks so funny that Arya has to bite the inside of her cheek to stifle a giggle.

Gendry's eyes are blurry with sleep. But they snap into focus right away when he sees who's standing at the door.

"Arya?" he asks incredulously. He tosses the stick to the side. "What in the seven hells are you doing here?"

She brushes past him and walks into the front room of Winterfell's forge.

"I want to talk to you," she answers quietly, trying to ignore the nerves coiling tightly in the pit of her belly now that she's here. Her voice is returning but speaking above a low murmur is still uncomfortable.

But it's trembling all the same.

She hasn't been inside Winterfell's forge since she was a very small child and her father introduced her to Sol, the old blacksmith who used to live and work here. The room she and Gendry are in now is spare, with a work table in the center piled high with what looks to be a lot of black glass daggers, and a workbench in front of that. The large furnace where Winterfell's blacksmith has traditionally worked his craft takes up most of the rest of the room.

There's a small wooden chair off to one side, and Arya pulls it out and gingerly sits down. The walk here exhausted her; she will not be able to have this conversation standing.

"All right…" Gendry says, cautiously. He sits down on the workbench. "Let's talk. Here, in the forge. In the middle of the night," he says, stifling a yawn. He sounds more than a little annoyed. Arya supposes she can hardly blame him.

He looks pointedly at her, waiting for her to begin. Now that she's here, though, she finds she doesn't know what to say.

"Erm…" she begins, then trails off. Suddenly she isn't certain she can do this, or even of what, specifically, she'd hoped to accomplish by coming here. She pulls her coat more tightly around her body and shifts anxiously in her seat, wondering if this was a mistake.

After another long moment of silence, Gendry rolls his eyes.

"Look, Arya," he says, sounding even more annoyed than before. "I'm really happy you're feeling well enough to be walking around outside late at night. Even though you know everyone wants you to stay in bed until you're fully recovered." He stands up and makes to head to the back room of the forge, where Sol used to sleep when he was still at Winterfell.

"But I have a lot to do tomorrow," he says, clearly agitated now. He gestures to the daggers on the table. "And I need to sleep. So if you don't mind-"

"I liked kissing you," Arya blurts out, putting as little thought into the words as she had into initiating the kiss itself.

Gendry stops walking towards the back room. He slowly pivots on one foot to face her.

"What?" he asks, his voice toneless.

"I said," she begins, coughing a little into her hand to clear her throat. "I said, I liked kissing you. And I… just wanted you to know that."

Gendry's eyes go wide. "You wanted me to know that in the middle of the night?" he asks weakly.

Arya shrugs. "I've been sleeping for days. I woke up and just couldn't sleep anymore." She doesn't tell him what she overheard from Sansa's bedchamber earlier tonight. Somehow, telling Gendry about it would feel like a betrayal. "I didn't tell you how I felt earlier, and I… I just wanted you to know."

Gendry's eyes are still wide. He doesn't speak for a long moment.

When he finally does say something it isn't what Arya expects.

"Why'd you hit me the other day?" he asks quietly. He walks slowly back towards the workbench. He sits down again and leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together in front of him.

Arya fidgets in her chair, unnerved by the question. "I apologized for that," she mumbles to the floor.

"I know," Gendry says, not unkindly, all trace of annoyance in his voice gone. "And it's all right. I'm sure I deserved getting hit for something," he adds, smiling a little. "But I'd still like to know why you did it."

Arya stares at her hands, twisting them in front of her.

"I am – was, rather – I don't know. Angry, with you. For staying with the Brotherhood. When we were children."

"Arya," Gendry says, sounding pained. Arya looks up at him. He's buried his face in his hands, and the sight of it tugs at her heart. "I can't tell you how many times I've wished over the years that I'd chosen differently then."

After a long pause, Arya asks, quietly, "Did you stay with them long, Gendry? After I left?"

Gendry runs his hands through his hair and rubs his eyes.

"I stayed with them a while, I guess." He looks directly at her and smiles sadly. "After about a year I decided Dondarrion and that red priest were little more than a mummer's farce. But I didn't have anywhere else to go. And no reason to be anywhere else, either."

He looks down at his hands.

"Not with you gone," he adds. Gendry's voice is little above a whisper now, but his words are enough to tighten the coil of nerves in Arya's belly.

She decides to ignore her nerves for now. She slowly walks over to him and sits down next to him on his bench. She takes one of his large hands in hers and squeezes it. His eyes flutter closed.

"My life was… so hard, Gendry. For years," Arya says quietly. He doesn't need to know what happened in Braavos. That can wait for another time, or perhaps forever. And he's distraught enough as it is. "When I first saw you here at Winterfell all I could think was that you'd somehow been partially responsible for it all by leaving me."

Gendry pulls his hand from hers and buries his face in both hands again. "Arya… I'm just… so sorry. I don't –"

"But none of it was your fault," she cuts in, as sharply as she can. "It was war, and my family and I were Starks. We were targets, all six of us. And you and I were both children." She coughs quietly into her hand; this much talking is starting to strain her voice. But she wants him to hear this.

"Children," she says again, as emphatically as she can. "I didn't even have a name for what it was I felt for you then. You couldn't have known what your leaving would do to me."

Gendry takes his hands away from his face and looks right at her.

"And now?" he asks, so quietly Arya can barely hear him. "Now that you're a woman grown, do you know what it was you felt for me?" The look on his face is intense, pleading.

It's too much for her. Arya looks away and down at the floor.

"I don't know what it was," she says. Even though she realizes, just as the words are leaving her lips, that that's not entirely true anymore. "All I know is that I liked kissing you. A lot. I didn't want you to stop kissing me when you did. And… I want to kiss you again, Gendry."

She glances up at him.

"You do?" Gendry asks, eyes wide and unbelieving.

Arya turns her body towards his on the bench and positions her feet so that the tips of their boots are touching.

"I do," she whispers. And it's the truth. She leans forward a little and lightly places both of her palms flat on his broad chest. She looks up at him with half-lidded eyes.

It's apparently the only invitation Gendry needs to close the narrow gap between their bodies and press his lips to hers.

Whether it's due to the very late hour or to their recent conversation, Gendry is much less tentative than he was last time. When she opens her mouth for him he doesn't hesitate, eagerly touching the tip of his tongue to hers. She wraps her arms around him as tightly as she can as he tastes her, as he traces gentle patterns on the roof of her mouth, her teeth, and her gums.

When she begins caressing his tongue with her own he sighs helplessly into her mouth. He wraps her up tightly in his own arms, and she smiles against his lips.

As they kiss, and as their tongues begin to tangle together needfully in her mouth, in his mouth, and in both, Arya tries to make the space between their bodies as small as possible. But no matter how much she moves towards him on the bench, no matter how much she tries to pull him into her, she can't get close enough. Her entire body is overcome by a heady warmth that has nothing to do with the low fire still burning in the furnace, and she's flooded with a sudden rush of memories of Gendry's steadiness and loyalty.

She feels safer now, in Gendry's arms, kissing him in the middle of the night, than she has in recent memory.

After a long moment Gendry pulls back from her. He's breathing heavily now, and begins trailing an agonizingly slow line of kisses across her jaw, over to her ear, and then down the delicate slope of her neck.

"We can't do this, Arya," he whispers huskily to the sensitive juncture of her neck and shoulder before lathing the spot with his tongue, as if he doesn't believe his words himself. It feels like every nerve in her body is concentrated in the spot where he's lavishing her with attention, and she's awash in sensation, incapable of speech.

She digs her fingertips into Gendry's back as he slowly kisses his way back up her neck. She has to bite her lip to keep from crying out.

"You need to go back home," he whispers into her ear, right before he sucks the lobe into his mouth and begins worrying it with his teeth.

She wants to protest, to call him an idiot. But when she opens her mouth all that comes out is a quiet moan.

The sound she makes both inflames and stops him. He takes his lips away from her body and pulls her into a crushing hug, his breath coming very fast now.

"I want you so badly, Arya," he whimpers into her ear. Her heart leaps into her throat at the admission. "I have for… for forever. But I can't have you…"

His words jar her. Because they make no sense.

"What in the seven hells are you talking about?" she asks him.

Gendry pulls back from their embrace. He looks directly into her eyes, his black pupils fat inside blue irises. He gently cradles her face in his hands.

"You know what I am. What I've always been," he tells her mournfully. "A bastard. And you, Arya… you're Arya Stark." He shakes his head and closes his eyes again. "I have nothing to give you. Not even a name…"

Arya slaps him across the face, hard.

"Ow!" he cries out, in surprise and what sounds like legitimate pain.

"You idiot," she spits at him. "Do you really think I care about that? Do you really think any of that matters to me? That that sort of thing has ever mattered to me?"

Gendry shakes his head. "Arya, I'm not worthy of you. Your parents would have wanted you married to a highborn Lord, or at the very least to a real knight –"

"My parents are dead, Gendry," Arya reminds him, her voice cold, all of the heat from a few moments ago gone. "It doesn't matter what they would have wanted."

She laughs a little, but it's a bitter laugh, lacking any trace of humor.

"It wouldn't have mattered to me what they wanted even if they were still alive."

But Gendry persists. "Other highborn lords and ladies would have expected you to marry well. They still will, despite what's happened in Westeros and to your family. I won't let you ruin yourself for me."

Arya almost laughs again, right at him this time. She almost tells him she was "ruined" years ago. But she doesn't.

Instead, she stands up from the bench and storms to the door of the forge.

"I don't care what other people expect me to do, you stupid idiot. I never have." She opens the door and takes a step outside.

"And if you don't know that about me, Gendry," she tells the night sky. "Well. Then I guess you've never really known me at all."

Before leaving for Winterfell she glances behind her once more. Gendry's still sitting on the bench, looking stricken and miserable.

"I want you too, Gendry." She shakes her head at him. "And to answer your earlier question – I wanted you when we were children as well. I was just too young at the time to know it."

And without another word, Arya slams the forge door shut behind her.

Furious, she walks as quickly as she can to the castle, the frigid nighttime air already settling into her bones.


To Arya's surprise, when she enters Winterfell's Great Hall the fire in the hearth is roaring.

Their recent practice has been to put out the fire after supper and keep the coals banked overnight. It's enough to keep the room warm for the men sheltering here (or so they've assured her), and it helps conserve their dwindling firewood supply.

When Arya looks up from the hearth to the adjacent room, she immediately understands why the fire is blazing. Somebody's awake.

At the sight of the man seated at the small table, frowning and hunched over a large sheet of parchment, she nearly falls to the ground in shock and relief.

"Jon," she whimpers.

At the sound of his name, Jon Snow looks up from his reading. When he sees Arya he grins broadly. His eyes light up.

"Arya," he says, sounding happier than she can ever remember Jon sounding.

She wants to run to him, but her traitor legs won't carry her quickly enough. She stumbles towards him instead, and he meets her in the middle of the Great Hall. When they reach each other Jon picks her up and swings her around and around. And she giggles like a little girl as he does it. As if hours, rather than several lifetimes, are all that have passed since they've last seen each other. As though they were still both children living together under Winterfell's big roof.

"My sweet Arya Underfoot," he murmurs into her ear, before laughing, apparently delighted at his cleverness. She punches his arm playfully for calling her by that old, hated nickname.

"Ow!" Jon says in mock pain. He sets her back down on the ground and rubs the spot where she hit him.

Taking pity on the men still sleeping on the floor around them, they walk quietly into the next room, where Jon's parchment is still spread out on the table.

"What are you doing awake at this hour?" she asks him.

He laughs at her. "I might ask you the same thing."

Arya blushes. Because he raises a fair point.

"It's… it's so good to see you," she says. Partially to change the subject, but also because it's true. "You have no idea how much I've missed you, Jon."

He smiles sadly at her. He runs his right hand through his hair and rubs his eyes. Arya notices, for the first time, that his dark hair is completely shot through with grey.

Her stomach sinks. Jon is not an old man yet. He's only seen twenty-one name days. What have his responsibilities as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch done to him?

"Actually, Arya, I think I do have some idea," he corrects her, very quietly. "Because I've missed you more than I thought it possible to miss someone."

Despite the fact that they have years to catch up on, Arya Stark and Jon Snow are nothing if not pragmatic. There are important issues to discuss, and so they quickly move on from small talk to matters of greater import.

"I take it everyone here is eating?" Arya asks him. "When I… well. When I had my accident, we were still waiting on a supply delivery."

"Yes. I heard all about your accident," Jon says, shaking his head at her. It's not clear whether he disapproves of her actions that led up to the accident, or simply the fact that she's traipsing about in the middle of the night so shortly after it happened. Either way, it's clear from the firm set of his jaw that he disapproves of something she's done.

The realization makes her feel like a girl of nine again. She is overcome by a dizzying sense of déjà vu.

Thankfully, he doesn't press the issue. "And yes, everyone is eating. Before I left the Wall, Queen Daenerys Targaryen outfitted me with plenty of provisions for everybody here, in addition to the obsidian daggers."

Arya wonders if those daggers were what she saw on the work table in the forge. In her nervous and excited state she never thought to ask Gendry what they were. Or even what, in fact, he was doing in Winterfell's forge in the first place.

But these are petty details. She doesn't want to get into all that with Jon.

"How bad is it up there?" Arya asks instead. "Beyond the Wall I mean. Give me the truth of it."

Jon chews on his bottom lip and looks as though he cannot decide whether to give her the information she's asking for or not.

At length, he sighs. "It's bad," he finally tells her, his voice grim. "I didn't know whether Sansa could bear to hear the truth given her. . . condition," he says, blushing a little. So he knows about the baby, Arya thinks to herself. "But you should know, Arya, that wights have been spotted as far south as halfway between here and the Wall."

He pauses a moment and takes a sip from a large mug of something that rests on the table. "And the situation is so dire north of the Wall, if it hadn't been absolutely imperative that the men here be armed before heading north, the Queen would have never agreed to let me leave," he adds.

"Is there any chance of us actually winning this war?" Arya asks bluntly. It's the question that's been plaguing her ever since she received that first raven from the Queen, outlining Winterfell's, and Arya's, role in this war.

Jon closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before answering.

"No," he says simply. Without warning, an image of Jon, and of Gendry, helplessly crushed beneath an army of undead wights flashes before Arya's eyes. Her face crumples, and unbidden tears fill her eyes.

The look on Arya's face must alarm Jon because he hastily tries to soften his words. "At… at least, I don't think we can win. But maybe there's a way? One of the men here – Waters, his name is – is in the forge right now, trying to modify the weapons we use to kill the White Walkers. He's apparently a skilled blacksmith and says he can turn the daggers into spears. They'll be a lot more useful to our cause in that form, no question."

Jon shakes his head sadly, though, even as he says the words. He doesn't seem to be aware that he's doing it, and Arya wonders if it's a reflexive motion for him. Either way, it tells Arya at once that their cause is truly a hopeless one.

"There isn't much I'm grateful for anymore, Arya," he continues. His voice sounds ancient now, as though his soul were as old as old Maester Luwin's had been. And his face looks so weary. "But neither you, nor your sister, nor your brother has ever seen these monstrous creatures and what they can do. And if there's nothing else I'm grateful for, I'm grateful for that."

Arya stretches her arm across the table and takes his hand in hers.

"When you leave with these men, Jon. . . will we ever see you again?" She cannot bear the thought of losing Jon forever, so soon after finally getting him back.

"I don't know, Arya. I just don't know, even if we win the war." He closes his eyes again and squeezes her hand. "I don't think you will," he whispers. "Win or lose, I doubt the Queen will allow me to leave her side a second time."

This doesn't make sense to Arya. "Not even if we win the war? Why?"

"Well…" Jon begins slowly. He scratches his chin. "How do I put this?"

"Start at the beginning," Arya advises, although she's not altogether certain what they're talking about now.

"That's not really possible," Jon says, cryptically. "But I can tell you this. It would appear that Eddard Stark lied to us all. I'm not actually his bastard son."

He looks Arya in the eye before continuing. He smiles sadly.

"I'm actually the Queen's nephew. And her only living kin."