#buttercuparry

I absolutely adore this

In s7 it’s okay that Sansa didn’t swing the sword (I mean yeah I have problems with that whole plotline + they used Arya like a servant which was awful and reductive but the thing is Westeros is still sexist and the northerners wouldn’t expect a woman who doesn’t know how to use a weapon to perform an execution.)

Arya knows who the boy is before she even sees him. She can feel it through Nymeria, the bond they both have with their wolves. When Arya is the wolf she can sense her brother, and he is angry, almost as angry as her. She wonders how much he knows, and what has happened to him, to be so angry at the world.

Will he know me?

Rickon was only a baby when she left Winterfell. She can scarcely picture his face. She has been alone for so long, and she might not be alone now but the thought of Rickon not knowing her hurts.

I’ll make him know me, she thinks determinedly.

She sees the red hair first as she approaches, then a long face. Arya doesn’t remember Rickon having a long face, but he was a baby, babies faces change, and Rickon’s has.

He has father’s face.

Her baby brother starts to run, his black wolf at his side, and he ignores the call for caution behind him.

“Sister,” he shouts.

He’s laughing, breathless laughter. That is something Arya does remember about him, his laugh, and he’s running towards her, long faced, calling her sister and Arya’s eyes fill with tears as she starts to run too.

For the most incredible: @buttercuparry! I hope you enjoy it, bb!

a hole in the world

“Arya Stark” arrives at Castle Black, and Jon’s dreams are crushed. 

“Smith, don’t get too close,” Lem warns him through the earpiece.

“I’m not going to get too close,” Gendry says, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee to his lips to hide their movement.  “I can’t get a good view of her is all.”

“She’s twistier than a cat.  You get too close and she spots you we’ll have to find a different eye for her and we’re under-staffed right now.”

“I know.  I know.  Ever since Beric–”

“Smith.”

“I’m just trying to get a better view.”

They’ve been tailing her for weeks–ever since they’d found the remnants of a fake id in Frey’s burned down place.  She clearly hadn’t meant for it to survive, but somehow it had.  Facial recognition software at the precinct hadn’t brought up who she was but Gendry…well, he’d recognize those eyes anywhere.

“Smith,” Lem barked into the earpiece, but he’s close enough now to see her.  She’s typing into a computer, staring intently at the screen.  She hasn’t noticed him yet, Lem can quit worrying.  Except he won’t.  “Smith.”

Gendry pretends to stumble, knocking his coffee over her table and ripping the chord out of his earpiece so that it won’t work anymore.  “Shit!  Sorry!”

Lightning quick, she grabs the computer away from the coffee that could kill it and her eyes flash up to Gendry and just as he’d known it was her immediately–

“Gendry?” she says slowly.  Her voice is lower now, older than a ten-year-old’s, and he remembers what it’s like when they’d found Harwin, he remembers hearing it thick with emotion like that. 

“Arya?” he breathes.  Breathes because she’s alive.  She’s really, and truly alive.

Gendry’d never thought anything would distract him from his career.  He never thought that he’d ever compromise what he knows to be right, what his marching orders are from the chief, that he’d be the best he could be in a job that–ideally–is about helping people.

But he’d never accounted for Arya.  Maybe Lem’s right.  He shouldn’t have gotten close, he should have stayed back and watched her from afar.  But he’d spent how many years looking for her, hoping that the Hound hadn’t brutalized her the way the Hound had brutalized everyone, only to find that it was she who had somehow flattened The Twins.  

He shouldn’t have been surprised.  He shouldn’t have been relieved.

He shouldn’t have gotten close to her because the moment he did it was like he was sixteen again and the only person who mattered was the ten-year-old who had more spine to her than anyone he’d ever met.  The only thing that mattered was that Arya was alive, and what did it matter if she was working on bringing down the Lannisters–the justice system wasn’t doing it.  They practically owned the justice system.

And maybe it was that he’d liked comic books too much as a kid and Arya was a little too much like Batman.  He was fine being James Gordon.  A little too fine with it.

He can tell she doesn’t trust him–not the way she used to.  Maybe it’s because wherever she’s been, whatever she’s been doing has made it so she can’t trust anyone wholly anymore.  Or maybe a shrewd kid had gotten to be a shrewder adult.  Or maybe she knows he’s a cop somehow.  Some sixth sense.  She’s always had one.

He’s not going to rat her out, though.  He can’t.  There’s some part of him that knows that it’ll mean his badge, his life, but losing Arya again is more than he can bear and he hadn’t realized that would be true until she’d been there on her computer, researching Lannisters.

He knows she’s researching Lannisters.  He’s not stupid.  

She still calls him stupid though.  

It makes his heart sing.

“Are you in it with me?  For true?  And don’t you dare lie.  I’ll know if you do.”

It’s raining and windy and they don’t have an umbrella.  If he were wearing a wire it would be impossible for them to hear her.  She knows.  

He’s not wearing a wire, though.  Lem took him off the case ages ago–after the coffee incident–because he wasn’t following orders.  He benched him and Gendry doesn’t care because being benched means that he can help her and feel less like a good cop gone bad.  Or a bad cop gone good, maybe.  It doesn’t matter.  He doesn’t feel like a cop at all.  He feels like he’s standing with her in the wind and the rain and like they’re kids again.

“Yeah,” he says.  “Yeah, I’m in it for true.”

There’s a fire in her eyes, and the smile on her face isn’t a happy one–it’s a purposeful one and it would be scary if he didn’t know her.