She’ll wed some burly blacksmith

Gendry is the most patient man she’s ever known.  That isn’t to say he doesn’t have a temper; he does.  Sansa’s seen him throw items around his forge, even seen him go toe-to-toe with Jeyne Heddle, but there is nothing intimidating about his anger.  He huffs and puffs and then he is calm and quiet again, begrudgingly letting the children Jeyne’s collected climb all over him.

He asks for her permission each time before he touches her.  He whispers and pants against her ear, “Is this all right?”  He never tugs at the laces of her bodice or gathers up her skirt without first looking to her, always giving her the chance to say no.  And she has said no, and Gendry backs off, stops touching her at once, apologizes.

Sansa and Gendry- Sansa gets out of Kings Landing (for @riahchan​)

She sits alone on the ground, the dirt is already starting to stain her dress, the kind of dress she used to dream of wearing when she was a little girl in Winterfell. She wishes she could burn the thing, destroy it, and never set foot here again. She wishes a lot of things now.

“Are you okay, m’lady?” She hears a voice, gruff and coarse, but it sounds melodic to her, like the songs she’d use to sing that would now never escape her lips again. When she looks up she sees a boy, and he smiles at her. “You are going to ruin your dress.”

“But why would your lady sister grant me her favor?”

Gendry frowns, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion. 

He is already dressed in his armor for the first tilt. Despite his newly granted name and title as the Lord of Storms End there are no stags on his person, and the helm under his arm is in the shape of a bull, though it is finer than the one she remembers from their days with the Brotherhood, ornamented with bronze and jet inlays. 

He looks like a knight from a song, Arya notes with satisfaction, watching him squirm under her hard appraisal. And with my help he might even act as one.

Arya grabs him by one elbow and bodily drags him towards where she knows Sansa sits with the queen’s other ladies.

“Well she has to give it to someone, stupid!” 

Read on ff.net

Chapter Two 

Whenever they weren’t on the battlements or in the library, he was shy. Sansa noticed how he wouldn’t look at her, and how he would become panicked whenever she approached him in the forge. It had been a week since she began teaching him how to read in the library, and Sansa had begun to feel a real connection with her betrothed, but in the following seven days something changed. She had first noticed it the day after he had arrived when she had gone down to breakfast and he had hastily excused himself from the table.

I made more because I got bored. None of these involve spoilers, all scene’s that feel that may come from my fic are just suggestions I’ve written out for myself. So none of what you see dialogue or otherwise will truly appear, but if it does it will be in a completely different fashion. 

“I can’t marry you.”

Gendry’s face falls from nervousness to absolute hurt, the ring he made in his little shop shaking in his large hands.  “You don’t - You don’t love me?”

Sansa shakes her head, grabbing at his hands.  “No, I love you.  I do.  You have no idea how much I love you.”

“Then why - “

“There are things you do not know about me, about my life before I came here.”

“And I told you I don’t care about whatever happened before we met.”

“I’m already married, Gendry.”  When his brow furrows in confusion, she rushes on, “I did not want it, but I was forced to wed - to wed a man I did not want to marry.  But even though I did not want it, we said our vows in a sept, and that is a marriage.”

“But you were a maid when we - “  A light blush fills his cheeks, and it charms her even as her heart breaks for them.  “You never laid with him.  It’s not a real marriage then.”

“But a septon would still have to set it aside.  And besides - “

Gendry gently presses his thumb to her lips.  “You were forced, yeah?  And you never shared a bed with him.  That’s no marriage, not a real one.  We don’t even have to have a septon do it.  I heard - I mean, I knew a girl once from the North and she said her people, they made their vows to the Old Gods in front of a heart tree.  We could do it that way then.”

Sansa’s heart breaks a little more as she thinks of the godswood in Winterfell, so different from the little ones here in the Riverlands.  She wishes she could tell him that she is a Northern girl, that her father would’ve loved to see her wed in a godswood, but Sansa Stark died in the Vale escaping Lord Baelish.  She is just Cat Rivers now, a bastard from the Riverlands.

“It means that much to you that we wed?”

Gendry nods.  

She takes the ring from him, studying it for a moment before slipping it on her finger.  It looks right there, feels right in a way nothing has in such a long time.

spring has come: gendry and sansa

Pairing: Sansa Stark/Gendry Waters Rating: Teen || wc:  ~4.6k a/n: For @ryswell, from your (very belated, very sorry!) GoT Secret Santa. I sincerely apologize for taking so long with this, and I hope you enjoy the read. It was such a pleasure to write for this pairing (one of my favorites!) and I tried to get in a bit of an ‘arranged marriage’ vibe there for you :) Wishing you a very happy new year!!

i.

Sansa shivered and wrapped her cloak around her. She should be inside by the fire, warm and with a needle in her hand and Lady at her feet. Instead, she was standing with her entire family as they waited to greet the king’s son.

His bastard son, who was to be fostered at Winterfell.

Her mother was not happy about it, but her father had insisted. He had took them aside and told them that while Gendry was here, they were to treat him as a brother. Sansa hadn’t been sure what to make of that. He was a king’s son, but not a prince, and that seemed to matter greatly to everyone in one way or another.

So when the carriage pulled into the Winterfell courtyard, Sansa was half-curious, half-wary about the dark-haired boy who stepped out. She knew he was of Robb’s age and a favorite of his father’s, but that was all she had gleaned from secretly listening to her mother’s conversations.

As he walked towards them, he looked to her father and smiled nervously. He was taking his final steps, when a blur of black–Shaggy Dog–shot out from nowhere and startled him. Slipping in the mud, Gendry fell, splattering muck everywhere.

The door opens and there is Sansa beaming at him, dressed in sleek jeans and a tailored blazer, gleaming hair swinging with her movements tantalizingly. She must have come straight from work. He braves the eye-contact and she does too, and he feels like a fool for ever thinking that she, too, has been hiding anything. Sansa does not have feelings for him; Sansa is not remotely attracted to him. After all, why would she be?

(He is so pathetic; he can hardly stand to be in his own skin. He wishes he could shudder out of himself, shed his flaws like a snake, and slither away and forget all of his many private sins.)

(So he cracks a slight smile and mentally smacks himself, and he moves on. He will not be this sort of man; he will be the man he has always intended to be. He will. He will.)

at first, he does not feel real: this boy with dirty hands and bright smiles and a world so very unlike her own - but beneath his blue eyes, everything fades to white until she cannot think beyond his gentle touches and soft words and nothing exists but this.

he thinks he’s a fool: how arrogant was he to reach for the sun when he was barely worthy of standing near her flame - but he blinks and there’s something vulnerable in her eyes pulling him closer and when he reaches out find her, she is not ethereal or too bright or too hot but warm and real and reaching back for him, too.

this cannot be real: and maybe it isn’t, maybe it is half a dream and half a wish, the world fading into dim light and soothing embraces and whispered secrets -

but perhaps that is all reality is made of.

The apartment is so small, they’re always walking in on each other; just yesterday, Hot Pie stumbled into the bathroom while Sansa did her makeup and reacted as if he’d found her performing yoga naked, stuttering and stammering through ninety apologies for something that required none.  It is the unfortunate side effect of sharing a tiny apartment with two of Arya’s friends because she decided to fuck off to Europe to “find herself” and Sansa broke up with Jon, needing a place to stay at the last minute.

He can scarcely look at her since they left the Riverlands, keeping his attention on the children and speaking to her only when necessary.  They are just outside King’s Landing, spending the night in yet another inn, when Sansa has reached her limit.

The children are tucked into a large bed, Gendry eventually threatening to punish whoever climbs out of bed, and Sansa presses kisses to their heads, thinking of her own siblings piled into the bed to listen to Old Nan’s stories.  When Gendry moves towards his room, Sansa catches his wrist.

“We need to talk.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Then you can listen to what I have to say.”  She exhales impatiently.  "After so many years of marriage, do you truly not care to listen to me?“

"I wasn’t married to Sansa Stark.  I wed Cat Rivers, and she had ample time to tell me the truth.”

“I know, but you have to understand - ”

“No, you have to understand!” he cuts in, pitching his voice low so as not to carry throughout the hallway and wake the children asleep behind the door.  "You never trusted me enough to tell me the truth.  All those years, after five children, you still didn’t trust me enough to think I wouldn’t turn you into the Lannisters.“

"I couldn’t - I was trying to forget who I was, trying to move on - ”

“And you turned my life into a lie.”  Gendry sighed, running his fingers through his thick, dark hair.  "You can’t just expect me to shake this off and not be upset.  I need time, Ca - Sansa.“

Tears fill her eyes.  "I do not want to lose you.  I love you, I love our life - ”

“You are Sansa Stark of Winterfell and I am a bastard armorer you wed to hide.  Our life is over.  Whatever life we had, it does not exist any longer, and we have to start over.”

A tear rolls down Sansa’s cheek.  "Do you want that?“

Gendry lets her name their babe, and as much as Sansa longs to call her Catelyn, she knows it is too dangerous.  Instead she calls her Cait, and Gendry takes to calling her his little Caity.  She isn’t certain if all fathers love their daughters as much as Gendry loves theirs but she knows Gendry would do anything to protect their girl.

The first time Sansa wakes in the middle of the night to find Gendry dozing near the fire with Cait in his arms, it strikes her just how much she loves them, how she has created a brand-new family here in the Riverlands.  And as she realizes she has a family again, Sansa remembers how quickly they can be stolen away.

Now when she holds Cait, she remembers cradling Rickon and what Theon did to him and Bran.  When Gendry moves to kiss her, she thinks of watching Father and Mother stealing kisses when they thought they were alone and how she will never see them do that again.  There’s no such thing as safety or happiness anymore, and even if she is Cat Waters, wife of Gendry, now, the memories of Sansa Stark haunt her.

She starts finding excuses to leave Cait with Jeyne or Willow during the day, even letting Gendry take her to the forge.  When Gendry reaches for her when they are abed, she flinches away and claims to still need to heal from Cait’s birth.  It was foolish, she decides, to get so comfortable, to forget that the world is a terrible place where no good things can exist.

Cait is not a good sleeper, screaming off and on throughout the night, and neither she or Gendry gets much sleep.  It is during one of her shrieking fits that Gendry finally snaps.  As she all but pushes Cait into his arms, he growls, “Stop pushing me away!  Stop pushing us away!”

Sansa recoils from the accusation.  “I don’t know what - “

“Don’t lie to me, Cat!  Ever since Cait was born, you can barely look at either of us.  If you don’t want us - “

“It isn’t that!” she insists over Cait’s wailing.

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t want you to die!”  

Gendry’s brow folds in confusion.  “What?”

“Everyone I love dies!  I’m cursed.  I never should’ve married you or had Cait because now you’re cursed too.  And I can’t - “  Voice breaking, tears now streaming down her face to rival Cait’s, she manages, “I can’t watch you die too.”

Gendry steps to her, one large arm enfolding her against his chest, Cait’s wails starting to taper off.  Burying his face in her hair, he swears, “Nothing is going to happen to us, sweetling.  I swear it.”

“You cannot promise that.”

“I can and I am.”  Holding her closer, he murmurs, “So long as we’re together, Cat, that’s all that matters.”