**The premise of this fic is based on the HBO show of the same name, but will not follow the same story line.**
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+44 345-555-5309:
RUN.
The blue bubble was bright against the white background.
She didn't know the number. But she knew who it was from. It had been over a year since they'd spoken, but it took all of her composure to stare at the screen and not throw the phone down as if it had burned her.
It was absurd. It had been a drunken pact. A drunken promise of two people who knew so little about how the world worked. Two people who wanted to believe in freedom and adventure. In themselves. Blindly. The way only young people could.
She was a different person now. Maybe. Mostly.
She was freshly showered from the gym. Her duffel bag in the passenger seat beside her.
She looked into her own eyes in the rearview mirror and scrunched up her brows.
Was she stupid enough to answer? They always said they could ignore the call. It wasn't a distress signal. It was an invitation. But still...
She had a life now. One she was contented in. Happy, maybe. Sometimes bored. But content. A life she'd built for herself. Even after all the turmoil of the past 10 years. She'd barely even thought about him in the past few months.
Except that wasn't true. She hadn't thought about them in months. Them together. But she did think about him.
She thought about him whenever certain songs came on shuffle in the gym, or while she studied. She thought about him when the sky was particularly clear and she could see the stars from the fire escape while she smoked a rare cigarette. She thought about him when she had to solve a particularly difficult statistical data set. One he would have found simple.
But she didn't think about them together very much anymore
It had taken years to get to that point, though. Years to not think about what they had once been. About the relationship that could have been, but just wasn't right.
When she had thought of them together, she felt guilty. She felt like a naive little girl, and she was neither naive nor a little girl anymore. Life had wrung that out of her with force.
But even back then she hadn't been naive enough to believe they would have worked out. She wasn't like Sansa, pining away for a lost love like in sappy love songs. And she felt guilty and weak when she thought about "what ifs".
What if they had tried long distance? What if she had put more effort in to staying in touch? What if he'd tried harder to stay in contact, too? What if she had taken that full ride offer from the University of Storms End instead of staying in King's Landing for her PhD? What if, what if, what if...
She wasn't even sure where the idea came from. It was too flighty and soft for either of them. Neither were the type to think of something so... romantic. But somehow they had. While sitting in their favorite pub, in her second semester of freshman year. They had been seeing each other for a few months when they came up with it, but hadn't put a label on it. They'd never put a label on it, actually.
Calling him her boyfriend wasn't important, and didn't change anything. But it didn't stop other people from calling him that. Her sister and Jon and sometimes, mockingly, Theon, would call him her boyfriend. But she never had. And he never called her his girlfriend. At least not for her to hear.
They knew even then that it wouldn't last. Not in a fatalistic way that marred the way they acted or treated each other. They were never sad or jaded by it. They just knew that the logistics were off. She was a freshman, and he was in his fifth year senior in his engineering program, a common occurrence for engineering students at King's Landing University. He already had a job lined up after three straight years of internships with the same firm in Storm End. He'd already signed the contract before they'd even met.
He was a close friend of Jon's. And Jon didn't have many of those. She'd learn later that Gendry didn't have many of those, either. Close friends were far and few between. He was quiet. Jaded. He kept to himself. But when he was close to someone, he loved and felt fiercely. He wasn't close to people because he didn't know how to let that many people in. He didn't know how to keep them all in his heart the way that others did.
She wasn't sure how she broke down his walls, or how he broke down hers, but they had. They had become something she never expected. Never wanted to believe in. He became her best friend, and she thought she became his, too.
And that's why she was considering it. Why she hadn't just thrown her phone down and continued along with her day as usual.
She could have started her car up. She could have slowly angled it on to the dark street and headed home. Home, to her dog and her books and the happy little life she had for herself.
She scrunched up her face one last time, not looking at herself this time. She pursed her lips and then licked them, feeling how dry her mouth had become after a long night at the gym.
And without thinking too much about it, without thinking of the consequences or that she didn't have a travel bag or a phone charger, without confirming she didn't have a class in the morning, she typed three letters, deliberately and in all caps.
RUN.
