Based off the prompt "Honestly, the worst thing you can do is stare". Set when the Starks are reunited at Winterfell and have begun preparing for the War with the Night King.

"Honestly, the worst thing you can do is stare."

Winter was in his blood. He was a Stark of Winterfell, even if he was a Snow. But Sansa had learned to step so silently that Jon Snow slipped and had to grip the wooden railings to keep his feet when she spoke from behind him.

"Sansa," he breathed, his breath a cloud in front of him. "You nearly killed me."

"Only because you're feeling guilty." She stepped to his side. "She knows when you do it."

He briefly contemplated denying the whole thing, but he'd always struggled getting anything past his sisters. Instead, he valiantly fought a blush and followed Sansa's eyes to the ground below them.

Arya, as usual, was prancing around the ground she'd claimed for training their troops alongside Ser Brienne. Except she wasn't correcting the minutiae of some new recruit's stance or soundly thrashing Podrick again. No. Today, she was giving training her everything. Leaping in arcs and rolling on the floor to avoid her opponent's blows. Gaining ground and losing it and laughing with unbridled glee, and gnashing her teeth and growling.

Today, she was training with Gendry. Today, she was training with Gendry and his war hammer.

Jon wasn't too proud to admit he was brooding. At least to himself. "I can't help it," he said out loud and petulant.

But truly he couldn't. Not since the very moment he'd seen their eyes meet when Davos had returned to Winterfell with Gendry in tow. Arya had stalked down the steps, surefooted as if there weren't three layers of eye rendering the wood slippery and treacherous, her eyes focused like Ghost when he'd found his supper traipsing around in the woods. And Gendry - the idiot - had just stood there and let her come for him when a smarter man would have fled. He'd opened his mouth and said something Jon couldn't hear and Arya had thrown herself at him and shoved him into the snow, face first. She'd straddled his back and poked Needle into the back of his neck. He'd laughed - loud and booming - and stood with Arya still on his back. Thoughtlessly, he'd grabbed her legs and turned to see her over his shoulder, so close their noses were almost touching. She'd half crawled over him and he'd half-dragged her and then they were embracing. His face was buried in her shoulder and her hands were white, clutching him so hard.

Davos had to cough three times before they'd sprung apart. Arya had bared her teeth in that awful grin she had now and Gendry had blushed and stared at the floor until Jon had let him escape to the forge.

"They do make quite a spectacle."

Jon huffed and had to agree. Gendry wasn't holding back, making Arya work to best him. But although he was impossibly graceful with a hammer, she was always quicker, always more agile. On the battlefield they would each be the other's weakness. Gendry's the slighter, faster opponents and Arya's those great hulking beasts against which Needle could do little.

"Yes. They do. We're not the only audience they have."

Everyone around them had stopped to watch them battle it out. There was a bet, he'd heard, and a tally. Even from here he could see more than one man and woman exchanging slips and taking notes.

"Does that bother you?" Her tone was careful and Jon couldn't interpret it.

"Does it bother you?"

Only then did she take her eyes off their sister and their smith. "When did you last hear her laugh like that, before Ser Davos delivered him to our gates?"

When he'd given her Needle.

"You wouldn't have said that once upon a time."

She laughed, happily he was surprised to hear. "No. I would have called him a bastard. A dirty smith who shouldn't be looking at ladies, let alone swinging a war hammer at them or carrying them on his back or letting them swan into the forge as they please. But then, there was a time I would have sworn I didn't love my sister. Or you. How stupid I was."

"We were children."

"All the same. I don't miss that girl."

A great shout drew their attention back to the training yard and Gendry was on his back, his hammer a foot away from him and Arya was kneeling on his shoulders, holding Needle at a strange angle behind her. Jon did not want to look too closely to see where exactly she held it against the defeated man. A man, he noted, who didn't look displeased at all.

"They missed each other," he said, mostly to himself. "Do you know their story - how they met? What happened to them?"

Sansa shook her head. "Only that they met after father was murdered. She hasn't told me anything else."

Now that the crowds were dispersing and Arya was hauling all of Gendry's bulk to his feet, Sansa turned to him. "People talk about them though. Arya is still seen as a valuable little prize to some of our Lords. Will you separate them?"

A challenge. Women might be a mystery to him, but he knew a challenge when he was given one.

"No." He said once and firmly. "Sansa, I won't make either of you do anything you don't want to. I won't make you marry. I won't sell you. There are other ways to work out the line of succession."

One nod, A genuine smile and a pat on the hand before she let him take her arm. She was pleased. He let himself breathe.

"You are a good brother Jon Snow."