AUTHOR: 372259
STORY TITLE: Purple Figs
STORY SUMMARY: "I'm not asking you to love him, Arya. I'm asking you to use his love for you, to protect your people and your home." -x- Choices have consequences. Gendry x Arya {-gendrya-}{-mostly dark-}{-some light at the end-}
PAIRINGS: AryaxGendry, but there will be much angst and dark before you see a speck of light.
OTHER CHARACTERS: Some Sansa Stark (who's a bit of a villain, sorry). Some OC's at the tail end. Remote Davos.
DISCLAIMER: Recognizable characters, plots, and settings are property of GRRM. I, unfortunately for my crescive student load debts, make no profit off of this. All I get in return is sleep deprivation and anxiety over whether readers will like it enough to review/ hate it enough to flame ;)
PIC CREDIT: Photo for story is Purple Figs and Lilacs, a painting by Nersel zur Muehlen
WARNINGS: Dark content, including mentions (but not explicit descriptions) of abortion and dub con. Happy ending (sort of). Also, swearing.
-/x\-
-o-o-o- Purple Figs -o-o-o-
-\x/-
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.
I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.
And, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Sansa frowns, gripping Arya's shoulders firmly. "I'm not asking you to love him, Arya. I'm asking you to use his love for you. You have a duty to protect your people, and your home–"
"Don't you dare." Arya scowls. "I would die for this family. I would kill for our people–"
"But you will not marry for them?"
Arya sighs, Sansa smiles. Two can play at interrupting.
"You really love your word games now, don't you, Little Bird?" Arya mocks.
Sansa keeps her face placid. Two can play at heart-twisting.
"Worry not over your gown or the decor. I'll take care of all the arrangements, Arry."
-o-o-o-
At the end of all the wars, the Stormlands come out as one of the stronger, more stable kingdoms. Since Stannis's defeat during the War of Five Kings, they've spent their time rebuilding and largely avoiding the War of Queens. The Stormlanders have resources that the war-weary North needs.
-o-o-o-
Even before Arya steps foot on the northern coast of Shipbreaker Bay, the Storm's End castellan hates her. "I warned Lord Gendry that the agreement with the North benefited them more than us."
-o-o-o-
Arya puts on a mask easily.
She kisses him, whispers into his ear, lets his hot breath drag across her neck. But it becomes hard to keep up the mask. She feels so caged, living the life she never wanted. A lady. A wife. A showpiece.
'We could be sailing the Summer Sea, climbing the Bone Mountains, or even exploring west of Westeros.'
Instead of new wonders, she faces old-minded men.
"Lord Baratheon has insisted I no longer give you Moon Tea, My Lady." The Maester pauses his long-winded speech, then gives her a stern look. "And if I am to be blunt, I agree with him. It's more than about time you did your duty to this house." He tags on a my lady at the end, but Arya learned long ago that titles don't go hand-in-hand with respect.
A lady. A wife. A showpiece.
A womb.
-o-o-o-
She storms into his solar, seething, how dare he?
But when she slams open the doors, he surprises her with a fury that is tenfold hers.
He drags her back to their room.
The Lord and Lady of Storm's End.
-o-o-o-
He all but throws her onto the bed, face down. He climbs atop of her roughly.
She tries to smell ale or wine but there's none on his breath. Then she rolls her eyes as he pulls on her shirt. "You've changed," she notes, dryly.
"Men tend to change when the woman they love spends months pretending to love them back." His scowl is easy to feel against the curve of her ear. "There's a term for that isn't there?" He hisses. "A woman who sells herself to man?
-o-o-o-
When they're finished, they're both bruised and even a little bloody.
He straightens his clothes, but breaks the silence before he leaves the room. "Clearly, our marriage was a trade. I was naive to think otherwise."
'Fool.' Arya thinks, numbly, as she buries her face into sheets wet with sweat and tears (not hers). 'He thinks he's angry, but he's really heartbroken.'
"I did my end…"
'Why are you still speaking,' Arya viciously turns herself on the bed, now facing his towering form. 'Just leave. You've always been so good at that.'
"…I sent men, money, supplies, and food to the North. It's time for the North to fulfil their end."
"You want an heir, my lord?" She simpers mockingly, cruelly. 'Is that what you want, now?' Arya smirks. 'A passive little doll with my face.'
"I just want what I've always wanted. I want a family. And since I won't ever get one with you, I'll make one with our children. I can raise them without you; and you'll be free to run off to wherever the fuck you want. Go back North. Go back to Essos. Go to the fucking Nightlands. I don't care anymore."
'Oh, but you do.' She knows. 'You still want me to be the girl I was before the Night King. The girl I was before Cersei. The girl I was before I flushed your first child from my womb.' She pulls the damp sheet over her head, ignores the slamming door. 'Stupid bull. There's a reason you want your children to be mine.'
-o-o-o-
He is sleeping. His arms cage her to his chest, his breaths puff softly against her neck.
Arya rolls her eyes. "If you're going to pretend you don't care," Arya whispers into the night, once she knows her husband will not hear. "Stop pulling me towards you every night." He doesn't stir. "Stop clinging to me like some maid after every time you fuck me." She says, while moving her hand so lays over his.
It would be so easy to kill him. She knows, and he probably does too. 'But she had loved him once, and could not being herself to kill him. Not now, not ever.'
Hurt, easily. But never kill.
-o-o-o-
He catches her before she can set sail, a loud storm crashing in the background as she rabidly claws at his face.
"I've given you your precious heir!" She screams, violently wrenching herself out of his grip. She escapes, for a moment, only for Gendry to cage her once more.
"I need a spare, too." His hair sticks to his face, damp with the weeping of the sky. "If you leave now, Arya, any support I gave to the North leaves with you."
-o-o-o-
Sansa and her stupid letters.
'We still struggle, Arya. We need more. Won't you make this one small sacrifice for your home? For your family?'
-o-o-o-
Gendry raises two sons and a daughter on his own. He lives for them; his heir and his twins.
He has Ser Davos to help for a while, but only a while.
("I've lived a long life. I managed to get to a ripe old age that most from Flea Bottom never see. Don't you dare waste a tear on me, lad.")
The famous Onion Knight passes on calmly in his sleep. The Lord of Storm's End grips his cold hand for hours after the older man's last breath, crying silent tears and shaking with grief. Ser Davos Seaworth joins his wife and son only two years after the birth of the Baratheon twins (two years after the Lady of Storm's End vanishes).
("Don't worry, lad. She'll come back to you. I know she will.")
-o-o-o-
Every time Gendry looks into the grey eyes of his second son, his heart wrenches. The boy is the oldest of the twins, and is entirely Stark in look, if not in manner. Davos Baratheon smiles too widely and laughs to easily to ever be called a Stark. Yet, Davos inherits his Northern mother's fighting skill. He wins tourney after tourney, crowning his twin sister until her room is filled with rows upon rows of crowns proclaiming her an uncontested Queen of Love and Beauty.
Well, that is, Davos crowns his sister with every tourney he wins… until he meets the non-traditional Princess Elyria Dayne. The girl is the granddaughter of Doran Martell, and eldest daughter of the current ruler of Dorne. Politically, it's a brilliant match. Their marriage will heal many wounds that have spanned generations, so both families readily approve. But then, a moon's turn before the much-anticipated wedding, both the bride and groom run.
Lord Dayne and Gendry don't bother sending knights to find them.
Elyria never wanted a life as a Lady or a princess, and Davos – true to his namesake – smuggled her away to give that to her.
-o-o-o-
When his daughter bleeds for the first time, Gendry fumbles through an explanation for the blood on her bedsheets, because her mother isn't there to do it.
Shireen Baratheon is polite, courtly, and prefers sewing and dancing to any form of weaponry. His daughter is the epitome of a lady, and Gendry suspects it is solely to spite her mother.
-o-o-o-
Despite being Davos's twin, it is Gendry's eldest son, Steffon, who is irrationally overprotective of Shireen. Steffon spends hours in Gendry's solar, demanding she wed within the Stormlands. He urges Gendry to refuse the other offers for her hand. Even the Tarly one, which would place Shireen has Lady of High Garden.
In fact, that letter sends Steffon near frothing at the mouth. He barges into his father's solar, loudly deriding him for daring to even consider betrothing Shireen to the son of a wildling.
'Too northern for him.' Gendry pinpoints the source of Steffon's discontent easily. He recalls the rather creatively insulting letter the ink-haired, blue-eyed boy penned to his 'Aunt' Sansa after he read her request that he foster in Winterfell.
-o-o-o-
The idea of his nephews and nieces having northern blood physically repulses Steffon.
(Steffon disowned his own long ago)
See, Steffon despises the North and despises the Starks. He blames them for his mother. And he blames his mother for hurting his father… for abandoning his family.
'Did you think of us at all when you left?' Steffon recalls all the tales he knows of Arya Stark the Dawn-Bringer. 'No, of course not. You love your adventures more than you could have ever loved us.'
-o-o-o-
Gendry looks at the letter in disbelief. "Davos… he and Lady Elyria…" Gendry sits down heavily, unable to process that yet another member of his family is gone. "Davos ran."
Steffon keels over from laughing so hard.
Steffon meets Gendry's affronted look with a belligerent, "well, what did you expect, father?" Steffon sneers, then he grabs the ink well from Gendry's desk and throws it onto the family portrait on the wall behind Gendry's desk. The glass bottle shatters, and dark ink bleeds over the smiling face of seven-year-old Davos. "He had Stark eyes."
-o-o-o-
Steffon grows into the most dutiful man Gendry knows (which is saying something, as Gendry knows Brienne of Tarth). So when Steffon announces he plans to never marry, Gendry tilts his head in confusion. Because Steffon will be Lord of Storm's End, and Lords need heirs. (Sansa told him so, all those years ago…)
Gendry tells Steffon of this expectation, and Steffon sneers. "The last thing I want is a wife who will just leave my family. My children will never know such abandonment."
Steffon claims he will eventually take on one of Shireen's future sons as his heir.
-o-o-o-
Gendry gives Steffon the helm of Lordship early. Steffon was born to be a Lord, Gendry was not. And Gendry is tired. So, so, tired. Sometimes, he wants nothing more than to retire to a remote smithy where can hammer his grey-eyed ghost away. Instead, he stays in this large castle by Durran's point, this castle tainted by memories of the screaming matches between himself and his wife, to counsel his son.
"Thank you," whispers Steffon, in a voice much quieter than Gendry's ever heard from him.
Gendry lifts a brow. "Whatever for?"
Steffon's fists clench.
"For staying."
-o-o-o-
In the end, Shireen falls for Rickon Hardyng at a tourney in King's Landing. The Eyrie Lord gallantly lays a crown of yellow and white roses on her lap, gives her a boyish grin, and loudly annonuces her to be the smartest woman he has ever known.
This lands House Baratheon in a rather uncomfortable debacle. After Davos smuggling away his future bride (and Dornish princess) last year, and now Shireen falling for the future Lord of the Vale (despite being openly courted by multiple Storm Lords), the Stormlanders hunger for at least one of their beloved Liege Lord's children to wed within the Stormlands.
They demand it.
-o-o-o-
Steffon loves his sister, wishes for her happiness above all. So, even though Gendry knows it breaks his eldest son's heart to send her away, Steffon does. Because he knows it is what she wants more than anything. But to do so, to give his sister a chance at her happily ever after, Steffon concedes to marry a Stormlord's daughter.
"Which Lady do—"
"I don't care."
-o-o-o-
Steffon marries a Stormlord's daughter, but he treats the poor girl coldly for years.
Gendry does his due diligence. He warns her – repeatedly – before they wed. He knows how it feels to wed someone who never wanted to marry, and does not wish to curse the sweet girl with his fate. The girl nods at Gendry's words, but turns to gaze at Steffon with soft, naïve, besotted eyes.
'Did I look so foolish once?' Gendry wonders, before shaking away the brown-haired ghost smirking on his shoulder. His abrupt action returns his future goddaughter's attention back towards him. She smiles, and says brightly, "I'll change his mind."
'No,' Gendry bemoans. 'You won't.'
She tries to gain his son's favour, again and again. But Steffon never exceeds cordial, and Gendry catches the poor girl sobbing in her room more than once.
'You don't understand. You trying to change him will only make it worse. It's a lesson I learned the hard way.'
The girl dies in the birthing bed after giving Gendry his second grandson. Steffon doesn't shed a tear, only makes some blithe comment about how he had an heir and a spare, and so would appreciate not having to go through the 'charade' of marriage again.
With that comment, Gendry suspects Steffon may be the most like his mother of them all.
'He's got as cold a heart as you, Arya. Are you proud?'
-o-o-o-
A part of Gendry – like Steffon's wife – had thought kids would fix them. Gendry thought the joy of having their own children would keep Arya with him. He hoped it would, over time, soften her back into the fire-lit girl in a cave who begged him to be her family.
But the month after the twins were born, she had left in the dead of night, and had never come back.
He really thought she would have come back, and his heart never recovers from the fact that she didn't.
-o-o-o-
He gets multiple letters from Sansa over the years, demanding to see her nephews and niece. He sends each one into the flames of the hearth, except the request for fostering. That one he lets Steffon respond to just to sink a blade into Sansa's heart.
(Because Gendry knows exactly who poisoned Arya against him.)
-o-o-o-
The sad truth behind this sad tale, is Arya Stark planned to come back.
See, she started to open her heart to her young children, and even to the man who sired them. She started picturing a future as a mother and with a family. She almost embraced it... but then Arya got a message from a place with a Black and White door.
'Remember what happened to the last Stark who failed to pay their toll?'
So, after kissing the foreheads of her young children and staring at the sleeping form of her husband for entirely too long, she boards a small ship. She's just about to leave port, when Davos Seaworth finds her.
"Oh, lass. Please don't do this. If you leave, you'll break their hearts forever."
"I'm coming back."
Davos gives her the sort of look that suggests he doesn't believe her, and it twists her gut. "I will," she says, firmer this time. "But," she hesitates. "You'll take care of them in the mean time, won't you?"
"Aye, My Lady. It's what grandparents do."
Davos's eyes are light as he sends her off.
She travels to Essos to pay a debt.
-o-o-o-
Arya died risking her life to save her family's future. She died on foreign soil wearing a face that wasn't her own, despairing over her children that would grow up without a mother. 'At least they'll have their father,' she thinks, vision fading. 'Sorry Gendry. I meant to come back. I promise, I did.'
The guild carves out her face and tosses her body into the sea.
Like mother, like daughter.
-o-o-o-
It could have been different.
In another world, where different choices were made, Gendry Waters realizes he never needed a lordship to be worthy of Arya Stark.
(In that world, Gendry Waters ignores the whispers of Sansa Stark.)
He tells Arya he'll wait for her.
"Smiths are good stock in times of construction. I'll help rebuild Winterfell, while you finish your list," he offers. "And when you come back to me, we'll travel the world."
In that world they don't ever marry. They don't have kids (she tells him about the child she didn't want, and he grieves for it, but understands that was never going to be her). They don't rule a castle by the sea. But, they live every moment together, completely and utterly in love with each other. It takes longer for the North to rebuild, and every time they visit Winterfell to see Bran and their nieces and nephews, Sansa makes some snide comment aout it.
In that world, Arya and Gendry aren't Lady and Lord of Storm's End. He doesn't meet Steffon, Davos, or Shireen. But Gendry lives every moment by his love's side, laughing and smiling and exploring.
In that world, they die of old age, smiles on their faces.
-o-o-o-
Hmm bittersweet ending. I kind of wanted to somehow include Steffon, Davos, and Shireen in their 'other' ending as well, but felt it kind of went against the Arya I portrayed in this fic? Still kind of regret it as my personal happily ever after for gendrya is them at Storm's End, with Davos acting as a cool grandpa to their many kiddos ;)
If you enjoyed this fic, please give my other gendrya fics a shot (they're happier - mostly - LOL).
Would love if you would take the time to leave a review with your thoughts on this :)