Chapter 14: Gendry

"You sound glum, darling? Is everything all right?"

"Yeah," Gendry exhaled slowly. "Well, I guess. It's confusing again."

"Your housemate's sister again?" His mum sounded positively gleeful, even though he could tell she was trying to keep it at bay so as to be sympathetic to his need.

"Yes."

"What is it?"

Gendry glanced over his shoulder. He was walking from campus to Mott's, a route that took him by the gym. He really did not want Arya to be strolling behind him. Or Ned Dayne, for that matter.

When convinced that they would not hear his phone conversation, he said, "Oh, the usual."

"She's too young for you? You feel creepy? She should be off limits as your friend's sister?"

"Well yeah, but…"

"But?" his mum prompted. He sighed. "Oh Gendry, you silly boy. Just spit it out."

"I ran into her in the grocery store the other day."

"Don't you see her pretty regularly?"

"Yeah, but she was with a guy this time. Someone on the fencing team with her. Someone who I teach in my damned section."

His mother made a sound of intrigue. "Do you think they're seeing each other?"

"I don't know. I don't care. He'd be a hell of a lot more suitable for her than I am though. He's an undergrad, he's athletic, he's handsome. He's even from a good house—a Dayne of Starfall and I'm…"

"Don't you dare pull the 'I'm a Bastard' card because you know as well as I do that that doesn't matter in things like this. And don't you ever let me hear you saying that someone is handsome is a good reason to think they're better than you. First of all, you are a very attractive young man," Gendry snorted, "second of all, look at Joffrey bloody Baratheon. He's about as handsome and well off as it is possible to get and he seems to be the most horrid little shit imaginable."

Gendry conceded the point, but said, "It still might matter to her. I don't know."

"Has she given you the impression that it matters to her?"

"No, but—"

"Then it shouldn't and it probably doesn't. We don't live in the bloody middle ages, Gendry. People date. People marry for love, regardless of birth. Just because she comes from a good family doesn't mean you're beneath her."

"I'm not saying I'm beneath her," mumbled Gendry.

"Whatever it is, you're trying to talk yourself out of it, and that's not the best route because you'll spend the rest of your life wondering what mighthave happened if you'd only just tried it."

"Are you inserting something from your own life into this conversation?"

It was his mother's turn to sigh. "I loved your father. But he was engaged to about as well-off a woman as you can imagine and I figured it probably was a bad idea to try and convince him to break it off with her. I used all the same reasons you are using now: I'm a poor woman from Flea Bottom, he was from a good old house with a long history. He saw it as having fun and I wanted more, but didn't know how to ask for it. So I didn't and now he's gone."

It was the most he'd ever heard about his father in his entire life.

"Who was he?" he asked tentatively.

"It doesn't matter, Gendry."

And Gendry knew that tone of voice, knew that pushing it wasn't going to work.

He wanted to tell her that it did matter. That he wanted so desperately to know, so that he could either make his father proud or show him up—prove that he was more than just a bastard from Flea Bottom. But he and his mother had argued about it so many times and he knew that she wasn't ever going to budge about it.

He knew enough about genetics to know that's where his black hair came from though. And probably his blue eyes. He wondered sometimes if he looked like his father in other ways, if it caused his mother pain just to look at him and remember what she had once had, and had never been able to attain.

So he asked a different question, one he'd never asked.

"Am I like him at all?"

He heard his mother's breath catch. "Sometimes. You're as tall as he was, and you have his coloring and his smile. But…You're a better man than he could ever have been. I saw to that. You make me so proud, Gendry. So unbelievably proud."

Gendry didn't respond.

"This girl of yours—"

"Arya. And she's not mine."

"Arya then. Is she worth all this? Is she worth making yourself feel like crap all the time? Because if she's not, then stop and find someone else. But if she is, stop your whining and go and win the girl. I raised you better than to be defeated without trying."