I know it's not really how all of you wanted it to go, but, to be realistic, did you really think that Ned and everyone else was going to be like, "oh yay! You're dating a 22-year-old man!"? I got some rare free time today, so I wrote out this chapter, which was a nice change from staying up until 1 am in the morning, which I'll probably end up doing for the next chapter anyway. Ehh, whatever. I've really enjoyed writing this, and all your lovely reviews make it that much more enjoyable!

Summary: In which Hot Pie pays Arya a visit and Ned has a change of heart

Winter came early that year.

A few weeks after Arya came home from the Forge, her head bent down and her make-up smudged, the cold winds blew in and took summer with them. The warmth that had hung in the air vanished, replaced by cold chills and frost covered grass. And then the snow came, alarmingly early, covering everything in a pale, empty white, draining all the color and vibrance of summer away.

"It's really weird," Sansa had said, before the snow had set in, as she packed up for university, folding her clothes neatly. Arya didn't respond, she merely gazed out the window at the darkened world, the clouds washed over the sky in a deep, wary grey. It would rain soon, she thought. "Winter has never come this early. And it's going to be a long one too. I can feel it."

Arya picked a bit of white paint off of Sansa's window sill. It flaked off, taking a bit of her nail polish with it.

"Arya?"

Arya looked up at Sansa, who was giving her a concerned look. Everyone had been giving her concerned looks lately, but at least they had stopped trying to talk to her about it. For the first few days, they had all been at her, trying to pull her out of her funk, to raise her spirits, to do anything, but Arya would have none of it. As soon as they so much as uttered a single word, she would be out of the room, or out of the house, away from all their false promises that this was for the best, that she would feel better, that talking about it was a good idea. It was all bullshit.

"So," Sansa said awkwardly. "It's going to be weird, leaving home. I haven't left Winterfell since we went a stayed at King's Landing, do you remember? When Dad first got the job and Joffrey and I started to get together?"

Arya did remember. That was around the time when she had met Gendry.

"But Aunt Lysa lives down in the Vale, and she'll sort me out if I need her too, even if she is a bit odd," Sansa prattled on, as if she couldn't bare the silence. Then again, she probably couldn't. Arya was sort of getting used to one-way conversations. "And it'll be nice, you know? To get away for a little bit. Find out who I really am, especially since I broke up with Joffrey. To be out on my own."

Arya picked at the window again as rain drops began to splatter across the glass. She had been right. It had looked like rain.

"You can come down and visit if you like," Sansa offered. "I bet my roommate wouldn't mind. You could bring a sleeping bag and sleep on the floor, or we could try to share the bed, though I doubt that'd work, to be honest. The dorm rooms are tiny."

Another flake of paint came free, and Arya felt a sharp pinch as a splinter of wood bit into her thumb. She let out an involuntary hiss of pain and brought her thumb up sharply, inspecting the tiny wound.

"Arya! What are you doing?" Sansa gasped, rushing towards her and snatching her hand. "Have you been picking paint off my window sill? Ugh, Arya! Now it'll have to be repainted!"

"I got it," Arya snapped, wrenching her hand away from Sansa's grasp and leaving her sister there to look regretfully after her.

It didn't matter how sorry Sansa felt about the whole thing. She left soon anyway, in a fit of simpering tears and goodbye hugs, making Arya promise almost a thousand times to call her every day. The promises were empty. Arya never called, and for a time Sansa called, but then, she started calling less and less, and soon it was not at all.

School started again, and if Arya's parents had hoped that that would lift her spirits, they had been woefully mistaken. They tried asking her questions about her day at the dinner table, but Arya hardly remembered what happened during the time she rotated from one desk to another, and the things she did remember were not worth rehashing.

The school counselor had called her in a few times, on the bequest of her teachers, and, Arya had a dull suspicion, her parents.

"The concern has been risen that you're depressed," the counselor had said, glaring at Arya through her purple glasses. Arya stared at her.

"Yeah," she said. "That's because I am."

The counselor wrote something down on her computer and then sighed, giving Arya another annoyed look.

"Your grades have taken a significant drop, and your teachers say there's a serious lack of participation from you in their classes," she said. "I also hear there have been concerns at home as well."

Arya picked the nail polish off her nails.

"We just want what's best for you-"

But the counselors false statement of empathy was cut off as Arya stood abruptly and left, leaving the large and fairly unattractive woman to squawk after her. After that, Arya ditched school more than she attended.

Her parents, in an effort to battle her worsening state, attempted to provide a united front, using their force of parental power to convince her that they were there for her. But that failed too, because Stag Industries hit a bit of a financial crisis, and on top of that, it looked like Robert and his wife Cersei were facing a divorce, one that would cost him millions because Stag Industries was practically made of Lannister money.

As a result, Ned was forced to spend most of his time in King's Landing, trying to sort everything out. Alone, Arya's mother was practically helpless. They had never understood each other, or been very close, and though Catelyn tried her best, Arya remained unreachable.

To make matters worse, her brothers seemed to melt away from her life as well. Rickon was too young to really care about the whole Gendry thing, and Bran had been absent during the entire summer, and had missed most of what had happened, and so was very unsympathetic about the whole thing.

"Thank god you broke up with him," he had said heartlessly. "Really, Arya, that's just weird."

And from then on, they didn't really speak about it, which was to say, they really didn't speak at all. Which was what happened with Robb and Jon as well.

Robb was slightly more forgiving than Jon had been. He, at least, didn't threaten to rip Gendry's balls off, but he had looked incredibly disappointed in Arya, and admitted he felt a betrayal of trust from Gendry, who had apparently promised do to exactly the opposite of what they had done. He might have talked Arya around, had it not been for the fact that Jeyne had her baby, and subsequently the entire world outside their child did not exist.

Jon, on the other hand, found his career taking off. As manager of Beyond the Wall, as well as a photographer, he was constantly flying to exotic, freezing places, like Iceland and the Himalayas. Unlike Robb, he not only felt betrayed by Gendry, but Arya as well. The pain of loosing Jon as well as Gendry had been sharp, and Arya couldn't help but feel incredibly isolated.

She had never felt so alone. It wasn't just that she had lost her boyfriend, or the guy she loved, or anything of that. She had lost her best friend. The person who she could confide nearly anything too. The person who, when everyone else was leaving, was there. Gendry had never failed to show up for her. He had always been there for her.

And now he wasn't here at all. Now he hated her.

And it was all her fault.

To make matters worse, everything seemed to be working out so nicely for everyone else. Robb and Jeyne had a healthy baby boy named after their father, Ned, and Bran seemed to have a special girl he was interested in, and Sansa, it would seem, had a boyfriend as well.

She never talked about it to Arya, Sansa was nothing but polite. She would never be that unconscious or cruel, but that didn't mean that the fact that Sansa was happy when Arya was so obviously not, didn't hurt like a knife. Sansa might have never mentioned it, but she didn't need to. There were pictures up on the internet of them happily walking hand in hand, reminding Arya painfully of how she and Gendry once were. It seemed, to Arya, cruelly unfair.

To escape her mother, Arya found herself spending most of her time in her room, and when that wasn't safe, she went out and walked for hours in the freezing cold, taking in the sunken feeling of every thing, the dark chill settling under her skin and into her bones, staying there for hours long after she had returned home.

Mostly, she preferred the warm, dark solitude of her room.

It was one of those such days that someone had come to see her. To her disbelief, Arya heard Hot Pie's voice at the door, talking with her mother. Normally, Arya would have stayed in her filthy state, having not taken a bath in days, her make-up smudged, but it was Hot Pie, so that probably meant that whatever he saw he would report it back to Gendry. And though Arya was depressed, it didn't mean that she had lost her pride.

Like a flash, she quickly dove into the bathroom, fixing her make-up before running a comb through her hair and wriggling into a bra before Hot Pie came up the stairs, tapping on her door.

"Arya?"

She threw off her pajama shirt and wrenched into an old, black, long sleeved top. Snatching up her computer, she sat in her window seat, her laptop balanced on her knees.

"Come in."

Hot Pie looked no different from months ago, other than the fact that he wore an uncharacteristically caring look on his face. In his hands he carried what looked like her favorite dessert; chocolate soufflé cake with a delicious carmel-toffee sauce.

"Hey," Hot Pie said awkwardly, taking in her room, which was worse than it had ever been. Arya pushed her hair out of her eyes.

"What do you want?" She snapped.

Hot Pie looked taken aback by her harshness and gibbered for a few minutes, as if unsure as to how to respond.

"I came to see you," Hot Pie said. "You haven't been around, and I wanted to see how you were. And to give you this."

He set the soufflé down on the only corner of her desk that wasn't piled high with stuff.

"Don't bullshit me," Arya said heartlessly. "Gendry sent you, didn't he?"

"No," Hot Pie said, but somehow, she wasn't quite convinced. "I came because I wanted too."

"Whatever," Arya said. "I can't talk long. I'm busy writing a paper."

Hot Pie let out a sigh.

"I just wanted to let you know that I miss hanging out with you," he said awkwardly. "I mean, you were always a pain in the ass, but it's weird not having you around."

Arya didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

"And... And I also wanted to tell you that there's a party tonight," he said. "At the Forge. A little, pre-holidays type thing. And it'd be really awesome if you could come-"

"Will Gendry be there?" Arya said, cutting across him. Hot Pie sighed.

"Yes," he said, looking sad.

"Then I'm not going," she said viciously.

"Are things going that well for you and that other guy?" Hot Pie asked tentatively. Arya blinked. So Gendry had told him about her lie about Edric Dayne? She was surprised, it didn't seem like something he would admit to others about.

"Yeah I guess," Arya said, suddenly feeling a crushing sensation in her chest. "Listen, I really have to finish this paper. So if you could please-"

Her voice cracked.

Hot Pie didn't seem to notice. With an awkward grimace he turned apologetically and left, shutting the door behind him.

Arya sighed, putting her computer down and curling up into a ball in her window seat, burying her head in her knees and trying very hard not to let the tears that were squeezing at the base of her eyelids to fall down her face.

"Was that Hot Pie?"

She shot up, nearly hurting herself, to see Ned, who was down at home for the weekend, looking hopefully into her room.

"Is he staying for dinner?"

"No," Arya said, frowning. "He just left."

"No!" Ned said, coming into her room and looking upset. "I would have enjoyed his company."

"Dad," Arya said. "You hate Hot Pie."

"I don't hate him... Shouldn't you be at fencing practice?" Ned asked, realization suddenly snapping across his face.

Arya picked up her computer.

"I quit," she said, unable to look at him.

"You quit...?" Ned repeated, sounding thunderstruck.

There was a long pause as he let out a tremendous sigh.

"Arya put down the computer, we need to talk," he said, and to Arya's surprise, he didn't sound harsh or angry or any of that. He sounded defeated.

Maybe it was this that caused her to stop and put the computer down. Ned sat on her bed with a sigh, and then patted the place next to him. Awkwardly she stood, and then sat down next to her father, both of them looking at their hands.

"I want to apologize," Ned said, and Arya whipped her head to face him, shocked, "for the way I reacted. I should have never yelled at you like that, and I can see now that my actions made it impossible for you to come to me. I was angry, but I'm still your father, and I should have handled the whole situation better, and I'm sorry."

Arya blinked, unable to speak. She had never, not in a million years, expected this. She had thought that he would be the one demanding the apology.

"But Arya," he said, looking at her, and it struck her how old and exhausted he looked, "he's just a boy. It isn't worth it, you going to pieces like this."

Arya blinked.

"But Dad," she said, and she could feel her throat going dry as it often did before tears and gulped, "he wasn't just a boy. He was my best friend."

An understanding faded across Ned's face and his eyes, which were usually so hard and unreadable, turned soft.

"I know," he sighed. "I know."

There was a long silence.

"Arya," Ned said carefully, "did you... Did you and Gendry... Were you two... Intimate?"

Arya's cheeks flared red and Ned looked uncomfortable, but determined to know non-the-less.

She did not answer.

"It's all right," Ned said gently, placing his hand on hers, and Arya realized how much she had missed her parents, and their usual affectionate nature towards each other. "I won't get angry. I won't press charges. I just honestly want to know."

Arya didn't look at him.

"Yes," she whispered mortified. Ned sucked in a sharp breath. "But Dad, it really wasn't... It wasn't just sex, you know. And he didn't pressure me or any of that. He wasn't like that. He would have never even suggested doing something that I didn't want to do."

Ned didn't say anything, he didn't speak for a long time, just thought.

"You loved him, didn't you?" He said after a long time. Arya felt tears at her eyes just to think of it and blinked them back.

"I still do, Dad," she said brokenly, and with that she was crying, all her hurt and sadness and rage that had been buried for months bubbling up as Ned held her in his arms, gently stroking her hair and letting her have her cry.

When she was done, she broke away, mopping up her eyes and sniffing.

"Hot Pie came down here to invite me to a party tonight at the Forge," she admitted. "I said no because... Well because he'd be there."

Ned nodded, and then he took a deep breath, as if unsure about what he was going to say next.

"I think you should go," he said. "I think... Well I can't say I'm thrilled about it. But seeing you this unhappy is enough to break my and your mother's hearts. We can't bare to see you like this, Arya."

"You think I should go?" Arya repeated in utter disbelief.

"Yes," Ned said. "I'll ask you, please, to hold off with all the... Well at least wait until you're eighteen, which isn't too far away, to start up again with him, but yes. I think you should go make things right with Gendry."

Arya couldn't believe it. All at once, everything, all the horrible, ugly things she had been feeling, lifted and floated away. Her Dad was giving her a chance! A chance to make things right again!

A chance to get Gendry back.

Oooooooooooooooooooo

Gendry sat in the parking lot of the Forge, his lunch untouched, staring at the grey snow that was washed against the side of the road, black with dirt and slightly melted by the cold warmth of the day. It was freezing, and his ass probably had frostbite, but it didn't really matter. The cold was nice. It was numbing, and it was easy to get lost in his head, staring at the dark clouds and the trampled snow.

"Gendry!"

It was Yoren, signaling that his lunch break was over. Getting to his feet, Gendry pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders and tucked in his scarf, his cheeks feeling burned from the cold. As he walked back inside, his breath came out in icy puffs, hanging in the air after him.

"You're going to die out there one day," Yoren said, and though he was still his harsh, blunt self, he had been kinder to Gendry. He probably felt bad. Everyone felt bad these days. "It's cold enough to freeze fire."

"You can't freeze fire," Gendry said, throwing his lunch away. "Any idiot knows that."

He took off his scarf and stalked off back to the car he was working on, its hood still propped open so he could work on the engine. He knew Yoren would be angry at him for being so rude, but he didn't care. He was tired of small talk, and of people telling him what to do and how to live his life.

"Hey."

He nearly had a heart attack, whipping around to see Hot Pie, who must have just gotten there, his face red with cold, standing near the car.

"You nearly made me piss myself," Gendry grumbled. "Didn't your mum teach you not to sneak up on people?"

"You're almost as nice as Arya was today," Hot Pie snapped.

Gendry's heart jolted into his throat. Arya.

"Did you ask her?" He demanded, trying not to look as desperate as he felt. Hot Pie shook his head.

"She's not coming, mate. I asked her, but she won't go," he said apologetically.

"Did you tell her I was going to be there?" Gendry asked. Yes, unfortunately he did sound desperate.

"Gendry, she's not coming. She doesn't want to see you," Hot Pie said. "Face it, man, she's over you. You need to get over her."

Gendry leaned against the car, running his hands through his hair miserably.

"I can't," he said, not caring how pathetic he sounded.

"Well, you're going to have to," Hot Pie said heartlessly. "Mate, this is ridiculous. You've been moping for months, and it needs to end."

Gendry sighed. Hot Pie had a point.

"Look," Hot Pie said, "she's over it, she's moved passed it. It's high time you moved past it too."

"How?" Gendry asked. "How? I've tried, and it doesn't work!"

"Well..." Hot Pie said. "Arya's found someone else. Maybe it's time you found someone too."

Will Arya reach Gendry in time? Or will it be too late? (if I could only make movie trailers for my chapters, that would be awesome lol)

I'll post another chapter soon, since I have some free time today and tomorrow, but I can make no such promises for the rest of the week. But... Like I've stated before, if I enjoy writing something, I tend to want to write on it for a long time. So we'll see