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takerfoxx · 3 years

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Blood Island, Chapter 3

For once luck was with Nuriel, or at least the poor fortune that had been dogging her for days had decided that nearly walking into a tomb infested with giant spiders was enough for now and gave her a bit of a break, in that despite running blindly through the jungle with little thought to stealth and awareness of her surroundings, she didn’t encounter anything trying to eat her, smash her, or infect her with something exotic and horrible.

When enough of her senses returned to her to at least take stock of herself, she was standing in a part more brightly lit than most, due to the trees overhead not being as thick so as to blot out the light. Where she was in relation to the tomb, the grove, the path, or the field, she couldn’t even begin to judge. But her heart was still pounding, her hands were shaking, and she was jumping at every sudden noise.

Nuriel anxiously looked around. No, nothing was stalking her, nothing was crawling toward her, nothing was crawling on-

Wait.

The second the thought entered her mind, Nuriel frantically slapped herself all over, searching for any disgusting stowaway that might have picked up a ride. It took searching herself twice over before she was convinced that there was no spiders clinging to her ass or slugs crawling up her legs.

All right.

Nuriel slowly inhaled through her nose and exhaled out her mouth over and over. She was safe. She was good. She had gotten away.

She stood there, still and alone, staring off into space.

Then she began to shake. It started small, just a tiny trembling of the fingers, but from there it spread to her wrists, up her arms, and from her shoulders it went both down and up, until her whole body was shaking.

Don’t scream, said that small voice of rationality, the one that always became the most insistent whenever she was in trouble, which was often. Let it out if you must, but do so quietly!

She listened. She bit back on the shriek she felt forming, clenching her jaw tight and refusing to let it out.

But she did everything else though.

Her vision misted over, and she attacked everything that was near, kicking tree trunks and pounding the ground with her fists. She tore up ferns with ripped them to pieces. She slammed her knuckles into a large boulder until the skin threatened to break.

From there, she grab up everything she could get her hands on, from stones to leaves to handfuls of dirt, and threw them as hard as she could. She did everything she could to channel her rage out while making as little noise as possible.

And why shouldn’t she rage? Everything about her current situation was completely and absolutely unfair! Sure, she was a thief and a bit of a liar, but that didn’t mean she deserved to be blamed for a hurricane and thrown overboard to drown, end up marooned on an island full of monsters, get attacked by bugs at every turn, and now have to deal with vengeful ghosts! It wasn’t right at all!

In time her anger burned itself out, leaving her feeling drained, but just a little bit better. After all, she was still alive. Nothing had eaten her yet, she had suffered no serious injury, nothing had really focused on her yet. She was, for the time being, all right. She just needed to keep her head on and her wits about her.

Nuriel slowly breathed out. Fine. She was fine. She could do this.

Then, as she continued to calm down, another piece of good fortune made itself known to her. She heard the distinctive trickle of water coming from somewhere nearby.

Heartened by this, Nuriel followed the sound until she came across a small creek running through the trees. She almost dove right at it, only for a sharp memory to force itself into the forefront of her mind.

A deal had gone south, and she and Father had had to flee the city for a time, taking refuge in the woods. And nearly a solid day of walking, Nuriel had been hot, tired, and thirsty, and upon finally coming across a small stream much like the one she just found, she had darted for it just like she was now.

Only that time, Father had seized her by the bicep and roughly yanked her back.

Are you mad? he had demanded. Do you want to be heaving your guts out? That little trickle’s flowing so slow, and you could piss in it a mile away, and it would still flow back into your greedy tongue!

That had stunned her. Sure, the water from the canals in the city were filthy, but this had been out in the wild! Surely the water had to be clean out there!

But when he had calmed himself some, Father had explained that small, slow-flowing streams moving through the dirt and mud were likely to be full of animal shit and pieces of animal carcasses and whatever else they picked up. Larger, faster rivers were better, and water that flowed through and off rocks was the best, which did come to make sense once Nuriel had thought on it some.

Nuriel followed the creek. It seemed to be getting bigger. Soon the green-covered soil gave way to rocky ground, and other creeks were running in to feed the main channel, turning it into a proper river.

What was more, she could hear the sound of a waterfall up ahead.

Now it should be safe enough to drink. Nuriel knelt down next to a large stone that divided part of the river into two, cupped her hands to catch the water flowing across it, and drank. Once her thirst was finally quenched, she began rubbing the water all over her, essentially giving herself a quick whore’s bath to wash off the film of dried juice and sweat.

When she was done, she felt a whole lot better. Sure, those fruits hadn’t exactly stuffed her, but they were something at least, and where there was one kind of fruit there was probably more somewhere about. And now the flies would leave her alone at least. And hey, the spiders hadn’t gotten her! That was a definite point in her favor.

As Nuriel rose up, her gaze fell upon a relatively gentle pool that sat near her feet.

Her reflection stared up back at her.

It had been a long time since Nuriel had seen her own face. The last port she had taken ship hadn’t left her much time for anything of the nature. She had just enough time to pawn what meager findings she had managed to scrape together, get herself a meal, pick a few pockets, and find a new ship to set sail on.

But now…she looked different from what she remembered. Her pale woolen hair, normally cut short so as to make passing as a boy easier, was now past her jawline, while her freckled elfin face was thinning out, the baby fat in her cheeks disappearing.

Nuriel sighed. She was getting older. In times past stowing away in a ship or passing as a boy had been so easy. She just had to find a ship looking for a cabin boy and join the crew. Then she would have a designated place to sleep, semi-regular food, and didn’t have to worry about being caught. Granted, she would sometimes find herself having to ward off members of the crew who were growing lonely at sea and frankly didn’t care about her sex, but she had learned a trick or two to quickly divest them of those notions when it happened.

But lately it was just getting more and more difficult. It didn’t matter that she was binding her chest, it didn’t matter that she was cutting her hair and dressing up in man’s clothes, it didn’t matter that she had no voice to give herself away, they were starting to notice more and more. If she kept growing, even that would be a problem, as she wouldn’t be able to fit into the same spaces that she used to. She had always been small for her age, but that only went so far.

Then Nuriel glanced up. Well, at the very least she didn’t need to worry about any of that here. The locals didn’t care what was between her legs; they would eat her just the same. It was kind of refreshing in macabre sort of way.

Furthermore, there was one other thing she no longer had to do.

Nuriel unbuttoned her shirt, starting from the top and working her way down. Then she shrugged it off her shoulders and carefully laid it on a rock. Now with her shoulders and stomach bare, she knelt down to yank out St. George and used him to slice the strips of linen she had used to kept her bosom bound.

Her breasts had never been much to speak of, and honestly, given how baggy her shirt was, she probably didn’t even need to bind them down, but it didn’t pay to take chances. Still, she felt a measure of relief once they popped free. If there was one advantage to being marooned on an island of monsters and ghosts, it was that she no longer had to care much about societal conventions. The monsters didn’t care if she was a boy or a girl; they would eat her much the same.

It wasn’t much of a relief, but she would take what she could get.

As she straightened up, she glanced around and saw nothing. Then she looked back down at the stream and shrugged. Oh, what the hell.

She untied and pulled off her boots. Then she undid the ties of her trousers, stuck her thumbs into the waistline, and shimmied them down her waist and stepped out of the legs.

Now as naked as everything else on the island, Nuriel stepped into the shallows of the pool and knelt down. It made for a poor bath, but she was able to scoop water up with her hands and clean off the worst of the sweat and dust. Bathing was never very high on her list of priorities, and she didn’t get many opportunities to clean up, but she wasn’t one to snub the chance when it came by.

When she stepped out of the pool again, she felt even better. At the very least those flies might leave her alone now. She dressed again, finishing up by sliding St. George back into his home and stuffing the strips of linen into the back of her trousers, just in case if a situation came up that needed something wrapped. Then she headed off again.

There was a break in the foliage coming up. Nuriel sidled up to the last tree before the boundary and concealed herself. She listened for any sign of one of those animals, but could hear nothing more than falling water. Then she peeked out. There was no sign of movement beyond the last of the fronds.

Satisfied that she was alone, Nuriel stepped out of the jungle.

Beyond, she found herself standing on a jutting triangular shelf of rock that had thrust herself up over a steep cliffside. The river ran all the way across to pour off of the tip down into a lagoon far below.

A lagoon that drained out into the sea.

She had come to one of the island’s borders. Here, it was divided into a labyrinth of smaller islands and peninsulas, connected by natural stone bridges with their bottoms worn away and separated by shallow green water. The place was lush with vegetation, and Nuriel could see several of the strange animals moving around, though these were considerably smaller than most of the ones back at the field.

Furthermore, she was pretty sure she saw the mast of a ship, poking over the hills near the far shore.

Nuriel’s breath caught in her throat. If there was a mast, then that meant that someone had come ashore, perhaps merchants stopping to water and search for provisions before setting off again! Maybe even the Royal Navy! They surely would have no problem giving a poor, stranded girl a lift, would they?

Then again, it could be smugglers, or something even worse, like pirates. She wasn’t exactly having much luck with those sorts.

Still, it was worth exploring. Nuriel looked around until she saw that the cliff merged into a nearby hillside that would take her down to the lagoon. And from the lagoon, she ought to reached where the ship sat anchored.

Nuriel hurried over to the hill and began her descent. At first it was steep going down a grassy slope, and she had to sit on her ass and scoot her way down to avoid slipping. But then it evened out enough, allowing her to stand again.

Soon after, the ground straightened out into a wide shelf covered with grass and a few scattered trees nestled between two high walls of rocks. Beyond that was a short drop-off onto another shelf, which led to another, and another, all the way down to the ground. Nuriel ran to the edge and lowered herself down.

As she readied herself to run to the next ledge, a gruff snort told her that she ought to have been paying greater attention.

Nuriel froze. Swallowing, she slowly turned her head.

Standing nearby was one of the monsters. This one was closest to those chicken-legged, long-necked lizard things, in that it was roughly the same size and stood on two feet, with its arms held close to its chest and was balanced by a fleshy tail sticking out the back. Its rough skin was covered with dark brown scales. However, that was where the similarities ended.

Most of the creature’s body, when compared to the long-necked lizard, was both shorter and thicker, from its stumpy, yet powerful looking legs, to its meaty tail, to its normal-sized but heavily muscled neck. Its head was much larger, with two green eyes on either side and a stubby horn on its snout.

And the top of its head was taken up by a thick dome of bone, surrounded by spikes. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what that was for.

The dome-head rose up and croaked at her in agitation. It clearly wasn’t happy that she was here on its shelf, and it wanted her gone.

Well, Nuriel was more than happy to comply, but given that this thing seemed made for short bursts of acceleration, she didn’t trust it to not charge the second she showed her back.

When Nuriel didn’t immediately flee, the dome-head then lowered its head, lining up its neck, spine, and tail in a straight line right to the dome. One foot tipped with thick, blunt claws pawed at the ground.

Oh shit.

With one last gruff cry, the dome-head charged. Nuriel leapt to the side, barely missing having her chest caved in.

The dome-head kept going right past where she had been standing to slam into the thick trunk of a sturdy-looking tree. The whole of the tree shook upon impact, and it was forced noticeably a few inches forward.

Nuriel gulped.

Despite the knock it had taken, the dome-head seemed none the worse for the wear. It backed up, shook its head, and turned around to face her again. It bellowed again.

Nuriel took off, legs pumping as fast as possible, desperately focused on the nearby ledge. If she could just reach that, then maybe she’d be safe.

Behind her, the dome-head charged again, the gruffness of its growls and snorts coming closer alarmingly fast.

Faster, faster, faster, Nuriel’s mind begged her legs. Must go faster, must go faster, must go faster-

She was at the ledge! With no other choice, Nuriel took a flying leap, all the while praying that the drop on the other side wasn’t too high.

As it turned out, it wasn’t high enough to be lethal, but still higher than she would have liked. The ground rushed up to meet her, and she landed hard on her side, forcing a pained gasp from her lungs.

For a few seconds Nuriel lay stunned on her side, convinced that in her desperation to escape getting smashed to pieces she had ended up smashing herself. She was almost afraid to move, for fear of finding herself full of broken bones.

But she had to move. Grunting, she rolled over onto her back and made a quick self-examination.

Well, her side was throbbing, especially her hip, but nothing seemed to be broken. That was fortunate, though she really needed to stop dropping from various heights, as sooner or later her rash of bad luck would take notice and start interfering with that as well.

Then, as she gingerly sat up, she heard a hoarse growl of annoyance.

Nuriel looked up. The dome-head was peering over the ledge down at her. It chuffed and growled, but it didn’t follow. Apparently it was just too steep and too tall for it to risk, so it had to content itself with glowering.

Nuriel glowered right back. Then she shot it a rude gesture and stomped off, leaving it to bellow impotently at her.

The rest of the descent wasn’t nearly so eventful. The bruise on her hip slowed her down some, but she had dealt with worse, and soon she had touched down onto the soft sands at the bottom.

Nuriel took a moment to catch her breath. She checked to see if the mast was still visible. It was, but she couldn’t hear any sign of the crew, no voices in conversation and no sound of them going about their work.

Frowning, Nuriel slowly made her way around the bank of sand, sometimes sloshing through warm, shallow water from one bank to the next, keeping the mast in sight. As it grew closer and its condition became apparent, her heart started to fall.

Finally she turned the final corner, and all hope died.

It was just as she had feared. The ship was a wreck, beached on one of the many sub-islands that made up the tropical labyrinth and long abandoned by its crew. It seemed to be a brig, a smaller sized vessel favored for their speed and maneuverability. This one had apparently been privately owned, if the custom ornate trimmings were any indication. Nuriel tended to avoid them, as smaller craft made it harder to divert attention, but she had seen many of its like in ports. However, they had all been in much better condition than this. Though the hull seemed mostly intact, it was still battered and cracked, the sails torn from the mast, and the railings in ruinous condition. It clearly had sailed its last voyage.

However, there were two things that quite frankly did not make any sense at all. For one, the island it had run aground upon was well within the chain, a fair distance and several other chunks of land between it and the ocean. For it to have gotten this far in, the crew would have had to have navigated the network of natural canals, which didn’t make much sense at all. Why hadn’t they simply laid anchor on the outside and trekked in by foot, or at least come in by rowboat?

The second was that the ship wasn’t actually aground, but rather…atree. To be specific, it had somehow gotten thrust up into the branches of several beech trees, which were now growing around its hull, forming a sort of vise that locked it in.

Now, how in the hell had that happened? Had some great sea giant plucked it from the water and thrown it, like she had to the Santa Lillian in her dream the previous night? It made about as much sense as anything else she had seen so far. Or had it be carried off by a massive storm, hurled over the surrounding bits of land by a monster wave? For a wave to throw a ship that size that far, she honestly had a better time believing the sea giant theory.

That having been said, while the ship clearly wasn’t going to provide her with a means of escape, that didn’t mean it was useless. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to be ideal as a sanctuary. It was far enough from the main island to keep all but the most adventurous of the monsters away, it was held high enough to deter those from that latter category, spiders weren’t likely to be nesting this far from the jungle, there was a fresh water source within walking distance, there was probably several food sources nearby as well, and it would shield her from the worst of the elements.

Hmmm.

Nuriel walked over to the beech trees and looked the situation over with a critical eye. From there, she could see the words Carmilla’s Fancy (whoever that was) inscribed in gilded letters on the ship’s side, but more to the point, she could also tell that the trees were climbable. She spat in both palms, rubbed them together, and set to work, leaping up to grab onto the lower branch, hoisting herself up, and ascending up to reach the ship itself.

She paused as she reached the cannon ports, which were all snugly sealed up. That might actually be a good sign, as it meant fewer places for local critters to crawl in. If the wreck turned out to be monster-free, then it might make for an ideal hideaway so long as she was trapped on the island.

Finally she reached the deck. She hauled herself up and stood up straight. The boards creaked a bit, but they had been made to last, so they held.

In fact, while it was clear that the ship had taken a beating, it did seem to be in pretty good shape. It might even still have been seaworthy, with the main problem just being how to get it out of the damned trees and back into the water. Granted, even if she did have the means, Nuriel wasn’t about to test that theory without a very close and very thorough examination, but it was good news.

Then she looked down the deck sternward, toward the captain’s quarters.

One of the two wooden doors lay open.

Nuriel frowned. Well, after they had found themselves stuck, the crew had probably just taken what they could use and abandoned the ship. There would be no need to close and lock everything up, right?

But why abandon the ship at all? Why not work to get it down? If there had been a full crew, they could have probably worked something out with ropes, saws, and whatever tools they had on hand, and the ship would provide better shelter than anything else until the task was done. Why leave at all? There didn’t seem to be any reason to.

Unless they had been chased out.

Nuriel swallowed. She pulled out St. George and cautiously made her way across the deck, headed toward the door. In the dying light it had a rather eerie look, like the open mouth of a slumbering monster. In all the stories that Father had told her, the monster always made their homes with ominous entrances.

Nuriel reached the door. She lifted her hand to push aside the one that was still closed, but then hesitated.

It hadn’t been too long ago that she had disturbed human remains. What if it happened again? What if she found the corpses of the crew inside, maybe even the captain himself? Ghost ships were nothing to fuck with, and if she ended up angering their spirits, then she was probably going to wish that those animals had trampled her that morning.

Swallowing, Nuriel glanced inside. The sun was setting behind the Carmilla’s Fancy, so there wasn’t much light getting in through the door that was open. She couldn’t make much out besides what looked like to be a leaning table with a broken leg.

Nuriel closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and shoved the remaining door open with her shoulder.

As expected, the room beyond was a wreck. She could see the remains of smashed barrels, destroyed furniture, and unidentifiable rubbish. It also smelled quite awful, a thick, musky scent that reminded her a little of chicken coops, only so, so, so much worse.

She took a step inside.

Something cracked under her foot.

Turning her foot, she saw the what looked like the leg bone of some kind of small animal. It was shattered, but not by her boot. Actually, it looked like something had already ripped it apart.

Oh no.

Then something let out a cackling cry of warning. One of the shadows moved, and Nuriel found herself locking gazes with a pair of luminescent golden eyes.

A moment later Nuriel found herself tumbling backward as a musty, feathery, shrieking something threw itself at her. It hit her full in the chest and sent her sprawling back onto the deck.

Chaos enveloped Nuriel’s world. Her vision was taken up by nothing but swirling grey feathers. Cackling shrieks filled her ears, while sharp blades swiped at her clothing, trying to reach the soft flesh beneath. Gasping with fear, tried to push the thing off, but it dug in its claws and stayed put. White-hot pain erupted where her flesh was punctured.

In pure desperation, Nuriel shoved her forearm up against the thing’s throat and pushed back. Her vision cleared, and she saw herself facing the most terrifying bird she had ever seen. It was an ugly thing, with feathers the color of both old iron and fresh blood, its murderous eyes bright yellow, and its beak long and…

Toothed.

The fucking bird had teeth!

One hand still wrapped in a death-grip around St. George’s handle, Nuriel quickly scrambled to her feet. The bird was now perched on the deck railing, wings outstretched as it cackled angrily at her.

It was an ugly thing all right, though surprisingly not as large as it had first seemed, barely larger than a raven in fact. But that didn’t make it any less scary. It seemed to be an unholy amalgamation of bird and lizard, with three sharp little claws extending out of the bend of its wings; scales around its eyes and talons; and a long, stiff tail. Both of its legs were covered with wide feathers, almost like a second pair of wings.

Nuriel stared at the beast. Her whole body was shaking with fear and anger. It was the first thing on this damned island to actually take a piece of her. She could see her own blood smeared around the tip of its beak and on its talons.

But she had taken a piece of it in turn. Salty blood was dripping from its chest feathers, blood the same color as the smear on St. George’s blade.

The bird raised its head and shrieked at her again. It crouched down, as it readying itself to hurl itself at her again.

Before it could, Nuriel rushed it, slashing at it wildly. Apparently it had not expected this sudden aggressive response, as it jerked back and tumbled off the railing.

Nuriel looked over the side. The bird had landed in an awkward heap in the sandy grass below. It flopped about until it got its wings situated and its feet underneath it. Then it angrily hopped away, flapping as it went. Each hop took it higher and higher, until it managed to get airborne.

Nuriel watched as the terrible thing flapped away. She noted with grim satisfaction that it was having trouble staying up, on account of the wing closest to its wound being out of rhythm. Good.

As Nuriel stood there on the deck, gazing out into the distance, the haze of anger and fear slowly lifted from her mind, and she began to take notice of things, things such as how the ocean breeze was chilling her sweat-drenched face, how her arms and legs were starting to shake, and how points of hot pain were making themselves known.

Nuriel looked down. Her shirt was torn around the belly where the bird’s talons had ripped through, and tiny dark rivulets of blood were starting to seep into the fabric.

Then she looked over to her right hand, where St. George was still held tightly in her fingers. Dark red blood dripped from the blade onto the weatherworn deck.

Then she lifted her free hand to her ear, which was burning hotly. The pain flared up at her touch, and when she moved her hand away, she saw drops of her own blood on her fingertips.

Nuriel rubbed her fingertips together. Oh, this was not good.

Then suddenly her upper body pitched forward. Nausea twisted her guts, and she heaved once.

Realizing what was happening, Nuriel dropped St. George, wrapped her arms around her aching stomach, and clamped her jaws shut like a vice. No! She was not going to let this happen! She had worked too hard to get those fruits into her belly to just let them just spew their way out now!

Her stomach lurched and heaved, and hot bile leapt into her throat. Still, Nuriel refused to let it win. She sank to her knees, arms still hugging her stomach, head bowed and watering eyes squeezed shut as she gritted her teeth and waged war on herself. She wasn’t going to let it win, she wasn’t going to let it win, she wasn’t going to let it win…

Finally the worst of the nausea passed, and her stomach finally stopped rebelling. Nuriel crawled over to the edge and spat out the mouthful of saliva, mucus, and what little bits of stomach acid and fruit that had managed to make its way past her throat. It fell down, down, and down to plop onto the sand below.

That done, Nuriel finally allowed herself to curl into a ball and collapsed onto the deck of the ship. Her whole body was trembling now, her wounds were still bleeding, and now she felt sick inside. And she had only been here for a little over a day!

It was official. She was going to die.

#blood island #original writing #my writing #pirates #vampires #dinosaurs

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johndaltcn · 3 years

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WANTED IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK: TAYLOR DANVERS or A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MISSING HER.

Drowning. John could think of worse ways to die. A car accident where you hurl out of the windshield like a ragdoll, some form of cancer, being beaten to death, a gas leak, poison. The list was seemingly endless. John could have conjured new ideas with each breath, with each turn of his head, which each greeting. He’d be sitting opposite a middle-aged man with a greying beard and a beer belly who needed a new motor for his boat and, suddenly, dying of old age alone in your bedroom. Though, there was still drowning in the ocean. Perhaps he would have eventually given up the good fight when he was out there for too long. He’d wade into the eerie quiet of the sea. On days where the list feels useless, he imagines Taylor doing just that. A product of her surroundings, growing gills and a tail like they do in the movies. She’d be blue but shiny like a wet marble. Her arms would be spread and she’d be smiling up at the blue, blue sky and quietly go the way the world wanted. The way she wanted.

Waves. An interruption to a dream about a man stranded on an island. John stirs under his duvet, light from his window peeking through the heavy fabric of his curtains. The man eats a coconut with one hand and draws shapes in the sand with another. First, he draws a circle and then turns it into a smiley face. Next came a hard penis and then an ocean wave. A lonely, makeshift masterpiece.

As the sun comes up, the room becomes brighter, earning the sun to rise in his dreamscape. It looms just along the horizon, casting a glimmer of white and pale blue across the darkened sea. The edges look transparent paired with the white foam that laps against the sand. His toes dig hastily into the warmth there before the cool of the ocean comes running up his hairy ankles.

This was a nice dream. For now. A miracle. The man wanders around with a smile. He is alone but he is satisfied. No burdens have followed him to his little island. He may starve one day and become a mummy in the sand. Rich people in need of normalcy will arrive one day and find his skeleton perched against a palm tree. Inside his hands will hold a now withered, torn note that says I loved it here.

Dying alone stranded on an island. A piece of John’s brain leaves a reminder to write that down on his list of ways to die.

The man wakes once again after another island sleep, stretching his limbs with a hearty groan. The sun comes up just the same. Glimmering, warm. Today, there was a grey cloud somewhere in the East. Light eyes look to it with confusion. How dare the weather interrupt his state of mind. His shoulders frump like a disturbed toddler, padding across the sand and into the wild jungle where the leaves hung low and sweat became his best friend.

He walks and walks. He’s not sure why. Perhaps he was looking for an answer or someone to scold. The weather was sickeningly humid, the kind that makes every inch of you damp and slick. John could smell his own skin in his sleep. His own sweat too.

The man follows a path down a long line of dirt and sand. He reaches the other end of the island which is much more bleak. The clouds hang low and are a muggy shade of black and grey. The ocean is almost green like moss. It doesn’t lick the shore like the other end. No, it clings to it. It’s thickened over time, probably from oil and other grimes that he couldn’t name in this moment. To his right, he hears a strange sound. A wet but also dry sound that makes the hairs on his arms prick and rise. He looks, there’s a fish. It’s dying, moving around, and gasping for air. His throat tightens. Is it food or a test? He looks to the sky for an answer, perhaps from God, but it only darkens. He was very hungry and a nice, dying fish over a fire sounded like a blessing. But, by some impulse, he scoops the slimy thing up in his shaky hands and goes running through the thick jungle once more. He scrapes his arms and legs on branches as he runs and runs. The beat of his own heart becomes loud like a speaker on high. His breathing is jagged and he begins to squeak with each breath.

Once his slice of heaven comes into view once more, he dashes to the water. His perfect water with all the blues and whites. When he’s close enough, he places the squirming fish into the water. It flops around uselessly. John thinks he might have been dreaming about the stupidest fish in history. It flies right out of the water and onto the sand again.

Did this damn thing wish to die?

With that, he scoops it up again and basically tosses it into the water. “I’m trying to save you!” He yells though his words come out muffled. It sounded like his throat had been piled to the brim with cotton balls.

Then he turns, only to find that the shore had been covered in dead fish. Most of them squirmed and jumped along the sand, bouncing off one another helplessly. The sound was atrocious, like someone chewing loudly in his ear or rubbing their thighs against a wet sheet of marble.

It grows louder, the sound of dead fish and now gawking seagulls falling from the sky. They were hungry for fish but are too ambitious in their endeavor to feed. They crash land to the island and accompany the still dying fish. They’re dying now too. The sound becomes louder and louder and louder. The waves sound like nails brushing together. Rusty ones that have been since forgotten inside someone’s garage.

The man covers his ears and screams. He screams his cotton ball scream and wishes to go home to the mainland. There’s a rotted human hand poking out of the sand just at his feet before John wakes up, gasping for air.

Like in the movies, he hoists himself out of his bed upon waking up. His sweaty back presses carefully into the headboard once he comes to. He was alive, awake, and dry. Well, almost. A hand reaches up brush strands of hair that stick to his forehead. John swallows hard, breathing heavily for a few moments. Mostly to collect himself. It was often that he had nightmares like this. Though they were all different in certain ways, they did all have one thing in common. Water. Sea. John has come to accept that this was the price he had to pay for knowing and missing Taylor Danvers. It might have been the price of loving her too.

The covers are thrown from his body then, draping down and across his bed. The bottoms of his feet move to touch the cold hardwood of his bedroom which grounds him. You’re alive, John. Light that pokes from behind his curtains moves across the floor, creating a line from the window and to under his bed where most of Taylor’s things were stored. He could have easily stuffed them in a box within the back of his closet but something about that made John uneasy. Embarrassed, even. To him, it seemed like such a cliché and John was already coasting the line of borderline cliché these days. The nightmares were enough.

Once the sleep was rubbed from his eyes, John heads to his kitchen to make himself some coffee. He checks the digital clock above his stove. The bright green numbers read 8:12AM.

At least it was early. At least he hasn’t become like his father, waking up late in the afternoon and still drunk from the evening before. The smell of coffee begins to envelop his home as he opens the creaky cabinet above his head in search of a mug. He plucks one with a decorative J on the front, a lackluster birthday gift his mother had sent him one year. She was a month early but he appreciated the sentiment regardless. Sometimes anything was better than nothing from Jennifer Dalton.

While he continues to wait for the pot to brew, he pictures Taylor dancing around the kitchen in her underwear. She did that almost every day, making a mess in the kitchen as she attempted to make both pancakes and scrambled eggs at the same time. How she made a mess of something so simple, John would never know, but he had always found that endearing. Her dark, smooth hair was always thrown up in a bun at the top of her small head. Her eyes were wide and muddy brown like a cartoon lamb. She would kiss his cheek and say he looked “positively handsome” each morning and then slide him a steaming cup with his beverage of choice.

The memory makes him purse his lips into a tight line as he picks up the pot and pours the coffee into his mug. Though he can never quite combat his thoughts. A specific memory comes to mind as he moves to sit at the marble island in his kitchen.

....

Rain tapped along the large windows inside his living room. His home is Dallas was large but comfortable, something out of an interior design magazine you’d find in a doctor’s office. Taylor had been reading a book, cuddled underneath an old blanket of John’s. Taylor made a habit of staying the night after a while and John didn’t mind. He enjoyed her company. He had slid beside her, removing the book from her lap and placing it carefully on the coffee table. A wide, beaming smile graced her expression in no time. She ran her fingers through his dark beard. John had started to ask about her family. He thought maybe they could spend a Christmas or a Thanksgiving with them sometime. At the mention of family, Taylor’s expression fell. He knew that look, it was always the look she sported when something or someone made her uncomfortable.

“My family is disgusting,” She said through gritted teeth, scanning John’s expression as if he should have known that much. He only shook his head, feeling guilty. “Oh,” Is what he started with, a little lost for words. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

Taylor then went on about how her sister was a backstabbing bitch and that her mother was a liar and her father just the same. Apparently they had disowned her, cast her out like some unwanted puppy. The idea not only confused John but also baffled him. She was so intelligent, so willing, so creative. He couldn’t imagine what had happened to make something like this happen. To make her family dislike her with such vigor.

“Well, what happened?” John asked then, head canting to the side. He had to know. By then, John had told her everything. About her mother and her bloated lips, injected hips, and much younger boyfriends. His father and his proclivity for drinking himself into a haze. And, then, his sister, a Jennifer Dalton wannabe with manicured fingernails and a voice that sounded so feminine and so grainy that it made you want to rip your ears right from your head.

That’s when Taylor’s own brows knit together, a look of anger flashing across her face like a stroke of lightning. Had he said something wrong? Was he not meant to ask? John can vividly remember the feeling of panic that had washed over him in an instant. He could still feel it now like he was reliving the moment.

She had grabbed his arm. Tight. Her much smaller fingers left a reddened imprint on his skin there. “Do not ask me about my family. Ever. I’m here with you now, John,” She cooed, releasing his arm then to stroke the sides of his face, “Nothing else matters but me and you. I want to forget them.”

At the time, that seemed fair enough. John had done so much to forget his own family, as well, especially once he moved away and his parents got divorced. Who was he to judge her or her reaction? He’d learn more about her past eventually. Someday. Perhaps this was how love worked. You had to fight for it and you had to deal with the pretty and all the ugly too. He remembers reading that somewhere. But he also might have heard it come from Jennifer’s mouth.

....

Back to the present, back to reality. Looking back, he should have known. Even then. The truth of the situation was that Taylor’s family had endlessly tried to have her arrested. For many things, actually. Theft, stalking, assault, battery, and more. She had once broken a Coke bottle and threatened to stab her sister and her boyfriend with it before running off to wherever it is she went. She always did that, apparently. Ran away, even as a child. After her death, John had taken a detour to Long Island, where she was from. It was a brief visit though her family was willing to tell John just what he needed to know.

Taylor was troubled, unsettling, and not the greatest person in the world. Not by a long shot. She stole and mostly survived, never really living. Apparently, they had a grandmother like this too who died of something that John can’t remember. All he remembers is something about alcohol being involved.

Meeting Taylor’s family, for some reason, made it easier to make up scenarios or reasons why. To this day, he does regret seeking out the truth. He wished he would have let it remain a mystery, an unknown woman coming into his life who made him fall in love but then died in the process. That sounded much better than discovering that Taylor Danvers was an unstable woman who had no true moral compass.

But, she was exactly that. As time went on, John began to see her as a lonely woman rather than a bad one. He started to look for excuses that, soon enough, formed into a ball of guilt. Perhaps she was depressed, maybe her family wasn’t telling the truth, maybe she needed a friend, maybe she lied about stalking, maybe something happened to her when she was young, maybe this, maybe that, maybe anything.

An alarm sounding through John’s home rips him from his thoughts. He sets his mug down and races back to the kitchen. He doesn’t know when he wandered into his living room. This usually happened when John’s thoughts went too deep, when he spiraled. A pan of scrambled eggs were burning on the stove. John didn’t even remember putting them up. With a shaky hand, he shuts off the stove and tosses the pan into the sink, running it under cold water. He grabs a dishtowel and fans the place and then his smoke alarm until it stops beeping.

Burning to death in a housefire. He mentally writes that down, adding it to his long list of excuses.

#drabble.#character development.#water tw #death tw #drowning tw #violence tw #stalking tw #i read over this FOUR TIMES if there are typos i'll start flying and break through the atmosphere and then explode #anyway....just some insight on taylor hehe

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danielcooperrp · 4 years

Text

Terror

As much as he loves being around his wife, like, all the time, these days, he’s grateful for the little pockets of time he gets one-on-one with their daughter. Just over the six month mark, Anna tells them something new about herself every day, and the chance to see it, to be the first one to discover that she gets the hiccups when she eats too late or that she’s afraid of the leprechaun on his Celtics sweatshirt, feels like a personal triumph. So when Ally told him that she was going to take a long weekend and help Nat out on a service mission in Ecuador, he sent her off with a kiss and a wave of the baby’s chubby fist, ready for some quality daddy-daughter time in the city.

Around noon on Saturday, after a lazy morning snuggling in bed, Daniel sets them up in the living room, queuing up the Patriots’ 2001 AFC Divisional Playoff game on the TV. “Okay, Jelly Bean,” he says, lowering her into her Pack ‘n’ Play, “if we’re gonna get you caught up on Patriots history, we’re gonna have to start you early. The Snow Bowl is a perfect entry point, so pay attention.” She blinks up at him with wide eyes. "Just be glad I’m not starting you with Red Sox history, little girl. It’s much longer and much more depressing. You don’t need to learn about Bill Buckner ‘til you’re older.”

He settles on the couch with a mug of tea and hits play, and soon he’s narrating the game to Anna. “So the false start means that a set offensive player crossed the line of scrimmage before the ball was snapped. Can you say ‘scrimmage’?” She shrieks, shoving a stuffed bulldog into her mouth. “Fantastic.”

Just after the start of the second quarter, a familiar odor pervades the room. He pauses the game. “Uh-oh!” He grins at the baby. “I think someone needs a diaper change, and since Uncle Connor isn’t here, I have a guess who it might be.”

He bends down to scoop the offender into his arms, dramatically pinching his nose to make her giggle. He carries her into the nursery—what was once Jonathan’s room—and sets her up on the changing table. It takes him longer than strictly necessary, given his penchant for singing operatic ballads to narrate everything he’s doing, much to his audience’s delight. She cackles as he dances the wet wipe in front of her, giving it an impossibly deep baritone.

He’s just finished snapping the closures on her onesie (navy blue and red, for the occasion) when he hears what sounds like exploding glass from the living room. Confused, he picks Anna up and, cradling her against his chest, tentatively leaves the nursery. It takes him a few moments to see what happened—the room looks more or less normal, the usual insane amount of baby toys strewn all over the place, his mug of tea where left it on the coffee table—but before he can register the glittering sea of glass on the floor, something flies across his field of vision.

“Fuck!” he shouts, ducking back into the nursery. He slams the door shut, and the baby starts to wail. Over her cries, though, he can hear the telltale sound of tires screeching on the street below.

“Shh,” he whispers, bouncing her more anxiously than is probably helpful. Anna’s face is growing red, so he presses nervous kisses to her cheeks, murmuring, “It’s okay, baby girl. It’s okay, I’ve got you.”

He sets Anna in her crib, giving her a random stuffed animal to occupy her, and then he edges carefully to her window, which also faces the street. It’s completely clear, not a person in sight, so he guesses it’s safe to go back out.

When he reenters the common area, he nearly vomits; the front window is entirely shattered, glass shards everywhere, and sitting on the floor in front of the TV, guilty and shocking, is a brick. He stares at it, unblinking, unable to comprehend what happened. It’s like all those years of education suddenly vanished, and he’s left with the mind of a child: Where did that brick come from? Why is in the apartment? What happened to the window?

Stepping carefully in his socked feet, he ventures further into the room, heart pounding in his ears. He peers closer at the brick, like it’s a bomb that could explode at any moment, and something new catches his eye. There’s something in Anna’s Pack ‘n’ Play, something much different than the array of fluffy animals and wooden blocks she’d been playing with earlier. When he sees it, his stomach drops, leaving him woozy: a second brick, right where his baby girl had been sitting just a few minutes earlier.

All caution abandoned, he stumbles forward, skin crawling, itching over his bones, to snatch his phone up from the coffee table. He scrolls frantically for his phone app, ready to call the one person he can think to need in this situation—but pauses, finger hovering over the dial button. No. Panicking is not going to help. There’s a way to handle this, and it involves a different contact. He scrolls again, and makes a call.

“You need to come into the city,” he says flatly, quietly. “Now. Tell no one.” He hangs up.

He moves mechanically back to the nursery, touching as little in the room as possible. He’s vaguely aware of pain in his feet, but he ignores it. He closes the nursery door again once he’s inside and picks Anna up out of her crib. He can’t imagine putting her down again, couldn’t think of not having her directly in sight. He sits stiffly in the glider that they uses to rock her to sleep, bouncing her automatically in his arms. She’s mostly stopped crying at this point, having now worn herself out. She wanders in and out of sleep, her eyes opening and closing with no real sense of reason. They sit in the quiet, her little chest rising and falling, his almost perfectly still as he barely breathes.

He doesn’t know how long it takes, though it feels both like forever and like no time at all. There’s a mechanical crash in the living room—that stirs the baby—and a familiar voice. “DANIEL! ANNA!”

“In here.” He doesn’t even know if his voice is audible.

But it must be, because half a moment later, the nursery door is banging open, and Anna wails in his arms. “What the fuck happened?” Tony demands, suit deconstructing around him. “It’s like a war zone out there.”

He has to work hard to pull himself together into something resembling a human person. “They threw bricks. Through the window. Two of them.”

“Who?”

“No idea.” His eyes fall down to Anna, who’s gripping the front of his shirt in one tiny fist. “One of them landed in her Pack ‘n’ Play.”

Tony staggers to the side. “Jesus Christ—is she—”

“She’s fine. We were in here when it—” He takes a deep breath. “But she had been in there just minutes before.” He finally looks back up at his father-in-law, eyes brimming with tears. “It could have killed her.”

Tony runs a hand over his face. “I don’t understand. Who—why the fuck are people throwing bricks into your place?”

“Did you see them?”

“No, why?”

The words are burned on the inside of Daniel’s eyelids. “They’ve got ‘Die, muties’ written on them.”

The silence echoes, filling the nursery until Daniel thinks the walls are going to collapse.

“You’re hurt,” Tony says finally, voice croaking. He nods to Daniel’s feet. “You’re bleeding.”

Daniel nods. “I know.”

“Does Ally know? Is she on her way back from...Columbia?”

“Ecuador. And no. I haven’t told her. And I’m not going to.”

Tony frowns. “Uh, hate to break it to you, kid, but I think she’s going to notice the massive hole in your window.”

“No, you’re going to help me get that fixed and this place cleaned up before she comes back.”

With a sigh, Tony says, “Look, kid, you can’t keep something like this from her—”

“I’m not going to lie to her,” Daniel snaps, and then quickly adjusts his temperament when the baby starts to fuss. “I’ll tell her everything when she gets home. But I’m not calling her back here early when there’s nothing she can do, and I’m not going to have her coming home to a terror scene. Besides, if she finds out now, she’ll go through every anti-mutant bigot in this town until she’s arrested or dead.”

“And what’ll stop her from doing that once she gets back?”

Daniel looks him straight in the eye. “You will.”

Tony snorts. “Have you ever tried to stop my daughter from doing something she wants to do? I’m a billionaire but I’m not god.”

“She’s not going to find the people who did this because you’re going to find them first.”

Tony blinks in surprise. “Daniel, kid, listen, I get that this has been a shocking experience—”

“A shocking experience?” Daniel laughs derisively. He pushes himself up out of the glider, ignoring the stabbing pain in his feet. Tony winces. “What’s shocking is that this is the first time this has happened. What’s shocking is that we weren’t better prepared for it. What’s shocking is that I let myself drop my guard for five fucking minutes.”

“Daniel—”

“You think this is the first time something like this has happened to me? I was four when I first heard someone call my dad a kike. Walking out of Fenway, first home win of the season, we were floating on air, and some skinhead shouts it at him from across the parking lot. I was seventeen when a group of grown men chased me and Connor with bats through downtown London because they saw us leaving a gay club. I’ve been called a fag more times than I could count, and I’ve been with Ally when she’s had to walk past anti-mutant protesters all around town. Shocking? Tony, this is our fucking lives. And it almost cost my daughter hers.”

He crumbles back into the chair, wiping furiously at the tears on his cheeks. He brushes away the curls from Anna’s face, his heart racing.

The silence is long, ended only when Tony clears his throat. “I can have the window replaced by the end of the day. We’ll get something stronger, bulletproof, brick-proof, whatever. I’ll get F.R.I.D.A.Y. to start scanning the internet for chatter about an attack on you guys, see if we can’t get a lead.”

“You can take the bricks to Detective Shannon McInerney at the station on Myrtle. She owes me a favor, can run fingerprints under the table.”

Tony tips his head to the side. “Why does a BPD detective owe you a favor?”

Daniel shrugs. “I introduced her to her wife. Tell her it’s for me.”

Nodding, Tony turns to head out. “Take care of your feet, before you bleed out.” He’s almost out the door before he stops and turns back. “What’re the odds?”

Daniel’s barely listening, his attention turned back to the fussing baby he’s holding. “Hm?”

“What are the odds that these asswipes would choose to do this when Ally, a mutant who could easily kill them without breaking a sweat, happens to be out of town by herself for the first time in...god, forever.”

Daniel freezes, considering Tony’s words. He’s not wrong. Ally never goes anywhere for an extended period of time without him, especially not since the baby was born. The only reason she went on this trip at all was because it was only for a few days, and it was all logistical on-the-ground stuff, no actual superheroing required. The chances of them picking a random Saturday to throw bricks through their front window and hitting the one when she wasn’t home...

“What does it mean?” he asks quietly. “Why threaten a mutant if the mutant isn’t there to receive the threat?”

Tony chooses his next words carefully. “Unless the mutant they were intending to threaten wasn’t Ally.”

The words rush over him like an icy river. His eyes widen as he stares at his daughter, petrified. No one knows, of course, whether or not Anna will end up being a mutant, but if there’s one things bigots hate more than mutants, it’s mutants making other mutants. Anna poses an existential threat to the anti-mutant agenda: the daughter of a powered superhero, the granddaughter of an Avenger, and possibly part of the next generation of mutants.

The bricks were meant for her.

He nearly vomits.

“I’ll take care of it,” Tony says quickly. “You hear me? You stay here, you stay with her, you get yourself cleaned up. I’ll have this all sorted out before Ally gets back, I promise you that.”

“And what will you do once you find them?” he asks, devoid of emotion.

Tony pauses. “What needs to be done.”

A beat. “Good.”

Tony nods, and then closes the nursery door behind him. Daniel continues to gently rock back and forth, humming tunelessly until Anna’s eyes flutter shut again. He can’t stop looking at her, can’t help but think himself in circles about what he almost lost today. Despite his diatribe to Tony, he is in shock. He’s shocked that despite everything he’s been through, he’s still able to feel the razor-sharp fear of this, the choking panic of how close he came to having his still-beating heart ripped from his chest. There have always been stakes before, the uncertainty of someone else’s behavior, the fierce anxiety of what could be done to him or to Ally or to Connor and Jonathan, but this, this little, impossible thing in his arms, all rounds edges and eyelashes, this is without a doubt going to be the thing that breaks him.

He presses the softest kiss to her forehead. As much as his body is itching, his limbs aching to get up and run, to stash his little girl somewhere the rest of the world could never hope to touch her, he lets her sleep, breath coming slow and even, lost in a dream where only those who love her most can find her.

#drabble #anna banana #tony #connor #v1 #thenamesallison #tw #slur #anti-semitism #homophobia #violence #this was...a lot

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avatarsarny · 5 years

Note

Post S8 Arya/Gendry? With a cherry on top?

Well, anon, since you asked so nicely. Just in time, bc I really needed to get this out of my system. This is for @gendrie, @gendryadempsie, and @starrynightshade, whose blogs and fics have kept me sane over the past few weeks of D&D’s clownery. Thank you guys for feeding us with that sweet sweet Gendrya content throughout :)

For context: In my head, everything ended similarly to D&D’s bad fanfic version with some notable adjustments: Jon is not exiled to the (nonexistent) Night’s Watch; he decides against being king and goes to bring the Wildlings back down to the North with Tormund (bc the lands beyond the wall are a barren wasteland wtf) and thereafter settles at Winterfell to be Hand to Queen Sansa. Bran is made King of the 6 kingdoms as he was in the show, with Tyrion as his Hand and ruling with his council. Jaime did not turn on Brienne in the last moment, didn’t erase years of character development, and instead left to kill Cersei himself, finally realizing the disease she really was, and became Queenslayer for the good of the realm. He survives Daenerys’ attack on KL and is serving Bran in the new Kingsguard, under Brienne the Commander.

Finally, Arya does not randomly decide to become Christopher Columbarya and sail the ocean blue, erasing years of her own journey to finally be home with her family again, no sirs, she finds Gendry after the sack of KL, after she realizes what Sandor was trying to tell her to do, to choose life, and tells him to ask her again. You can guess the rest from what you read below :)

And in keeping with the pack survives narrative (bc that’s what good writing is about!! Consistency!!) the Starks remain closer than ever, visit each other often, and don’t end up alone and separated! Hope yall enjoy!

P.S… Okoye. You’ll see why soon. definitely not taken straight outta black panther Ahem. Continue.

“And reinforcements from the Stormlands will arrive tomorrow, Your Grace, if I’m not mistaken. Lord Buckler of Bronzegate sent me a raven saying twenty ships worth of food and supplies will be here just after sunrise.”

Bran nods in approval and looks up at the sunlight streaming in through the windows of the newly - reconstructed King’s solar. Daenerys’ rampage had left little of the Red Keep standing, but some of the personal chambers had remained mostly intact, so the new King and his council lived in close quarters for the past three months while they supervised the city’s recovery. There were still many injured and many more starving, so Bran called upon every Lord and leader in Westeros, high and low, to contribute whatever they could to the city’s smallfolk; who had suffered the most.

Bran glances over at the man across him. His blue eyes are bright with belonging and purpose, his dark hair is gradually breaking free of the short crop he had sported when Bran had first met him, and he wears fine leathers in same way his father and uncles had, only this time adorned with clawlike marks on the shoulders of his tunic.

The young King smiles at this observation. Stags don’t have claws. But he can think of another animal that does.

Gendry catches his King’s gaze. “What is it, Your Grace?”

Bran’s smile grows ever so slightly. “When is my sister returning, my Lord? It’s been a fortnight since her last raven.”

Gendry sighs and looks out a window, where the city gates rise from the sea of ruined buildings far out in the distance on one end, and the azure waters of Blackwater Bay lay calm and still. “I’m not sure. She said she wouldn’t leave Queen Sansa at Winterfell until she’s made sure she’ll be well protected.”

“Won’t Jon be there soon?”

Gendry blinks. “Yes - er - I didn’t know that until this morning - got a raven from Tormund. How’d you find out?”

Bran throws him an unimpressed glance. “Well I am the three eyed raven. I flew over Jon and Tormund’s group last night. They’ve settled the Wildlings in some unoccupied lands about a day’s ride from Winterfell. Sansa wants Jon to be her Hand, and it looks like Jon’s agreed to it.”

Gendry nods slowly, trying to process the King’s extraordinary statement in a way he can understand. “I’ve heard of your abilities, Your Grace, but forgive me, I’m not sure how one flies when they can’t even walk. But if what you say is true, then you can see where your sisters are, too, can’t you?” He grins then, and maybe in front of a different King he’d be punished for his audacity, but Bran is no ordinary King. And Gendry has never been one to worship the ground at a highborn’s feet.

But he’ll fight for any one of the Starks. Arya and her family time and again showed kindness and mercy to the common folk, and beneath their ferocious direwolf fangs they shared a gentleness for the innocent that Gendry had rarely seen among the rich and powerful. Even Sansa, the Red Wolf of the North, held a great tenderness concealed beneath her icy, calculating exterior, and people everywhere adored her for it.

Bran’s smile widens into a true grin, then. A feat so rare Gendry thinks he should get Grand Maester Samwell to check on their King’s health.

“Yes, I can see everything. Anything, anywhere, at any point in time. But sometimes it’s nice to put it all away for a while, and be a normal man. Or at least act like it,” he replies. “I did see Arya, by the way. It appears she’ll be staying in Winterfell for a few more weeks before she starts her journey back here.”

Gendry’s face falls, but he catches himself and hopes the King doesn’t notice. The least she could do is send a raven, but she’s been oddly silent since her last message to him, and he’s getting worried. If she doesn’t send more word soon, he’ll go off to Winterfell himself.

Bran quirks a brow at him. “Storm’s End needs someone like you, someone who will take care of the people. Your uncles left the Stormlands in such disarray, but the Stormlords are willing to follow your command. Don’t worry about my sister, she can handle herself.” He smiles serenely at the former blacksmith.

But what about me? Gendry thinks. Does she not understand that every day we’re separated feels like an eternity to me?

None of it will mean anything, if you aren’t with me, so be with me…

It will be nearly four months since Arya left to help Sansa settle into her role as Queen in the North. Four months since he last held her in his arms, since he tasted her on his lips and felt the warmth of her smile, since he saw the heat and tenderness in her gaze she reserved only for him.

She had sought him out after the Dragon Queen had stormed King’s Landing, after Jon drove a dagger through his aunt’s heart and liberated all who would come under her tyranny. She had been covered in ash and blood and he’d never felt more fear in his entire life, that he would have to watch her die like this, but she was mostly unhurt, the blood had not been hers, not all of it.

“Ask me again,” She’d rasped, coughing out grey soot and clutching at him for dear life. “I thought I wouldn’t come back from Kings Landing. I was going to die there, and I couldn’t do that to you, I had to refuse,” She whispered, tears falling from her eyes and down her grimy face. “I couldn’t hurt you.”

And oh, she had never looked more beautiful, he had never loved her more fiercely than he did in that moment, not even on that night they thought would be their last, when she had kissed him down in the Winterfell stores and made breathless, frantic love to him. “You could never hurt me, love,” he’d said, wiping her tears away and crushing her to his chest. “I know you don’t want to be a Lady, I’ve always known. We can go wherever you like. Do whatever you want. I’ll follow you anywhere you go, till the end of my days,” he promised, and released her so he could kneel before her in the ash and dust. “My life means nothing without my family. Please be my wife. Please be my family, Arya of House Stark.”

And with that, she’d tackled him into the rubble with all the strength she could muster, and kissed him senseless. “I love you,” She’d breathed against his lips, “I will be your family. Your - your wife,” she broke off in a quiet moan, as he moved to press searing kisses down her throat. She held his face in her hands, stilling his sweet movements to look earnestly up at him. “And I will lead by your side, Gendry of House Baratheon.”

He stared at her in shock, his hands coming up to bracket her own. “You - you want to rule the Stormlands with me?”

Arya smiled at him, even though it hurt to do so and her face was bleeding. “I want to be here for the people who can’t protect themselves. I want to make our world a better place than the one we grew up in…I couldn’t save them in King’s Landing,” she’d paused as more tears trailed down her cheeks, and he dutifully brushed them away with the pads of his calloused fingers. She would tell him about the girl and her mother, later. The little family that had saved her from the stampede, only to end up burnt beyond recognition in the end. “I have to make sure this never happens again.”

Gendry kissed her forehead, the bit of it that wasn’t cut open. “As m’lady commands,” he’d murmured, threading their fingers together. “Now let’s get you a maester.”

“I also need to teach you how to use a fork, none of those idiot lords will respect you otherwise.”

He laughed and scooped her up into his arms. “I’ll need all the help I can get. I don’t know any other rich girls willing to teach me.”

Part 2 coming soon :)

#Anonymous #gendrya #arya x gendry #game of thrones #i'll post this on ao3 as well once it's finished #sorry if this is garbage lmao #but it's better than clownery i say

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ducktracy · 4 years

Text

132. fish tales (1936)

release date: may 23rd, 1936

series: looney tunes

director: jack king

starring: joe dougherty (porky), billy bletcher (fish)

let the fun of the jack king porky cartoons begin. in truth, he didn’t direct that many at all. maybe 4 tops, but they’re so strange (and this one terrifying) that they left such a mark on me. i said i’d never rewatch them again, and here i am! they’re not AS BAD as i make them out to be, and they’re certainly ambitious, which i give king credit for. yet they’re certainly... offputting, and this one is the most disturbing in my opinion. so, with that warm, happy, promising introduction: porky heads out to the lake for some fishing, but once he falls asleep he has a surreal dream that the fish are catching HIM instead, and it’s up to porky to escape before turning into a pig roast.

any day is a happy day for porky. we open to our porcine pal strolling along, fishing rod in hand, whistling merrily. life is good. he passes by a tiny hole in the ground, where two little worms poke their heads out. they both follow porky to his boat, tied to a stake in the ground on land. porky climbs aboard and notices the worms, sticking his can out so they can climb in. typically worms don’t WANT to be used as bait... then again, this scene feels particularly disney-esque, as all jack king scenes do. one of the worms hops in and signals for the other to join, the other strutting around à la mae west (for reasons unknown) until the first worm yanks him inside. the animation of the worms, and in this cartoon in general, is very fluid and enjoyable.

porky cranks the motor on, and the boat sputters to life. unfortunately, there’s one caveat: the boat is still tied to the stake in the ground. evidently the motor’s got quite the oomph to it—some lovely animation as porky’s boat threatens to drag the entire land behind him. instead, the boat is swung around in a circle, the rope eventually wearing thin and snapping, sending porky catapulting across the lake. seeing as bob mckimson gets an animation credit, i wonder if this is his work: very solid, top notch, mesmerizing animation.

the engine roars on, the ship now completely out of control. a sharp veer towards the left sends porky headed straight for a battle ship. he moans in agony and covers his face, preparing for the impact. but, with a good dose of cartoon logic, the boat takes a sharp turn downward, plummeting into the lake, under the boat, and rocketing back towards the surface again. speed is very strong and tactile, and could very much be likened to tex avery’s knack for speed.

unfortunately, porky’s relief is only temporary. though he narrowly avoids crashing into the ship, his boat is once more hurtling towards the ship. this time, he doesn’t dodge it—he flies straight through, cutting up a dining table (the next porky cartoon, fittingly enough, is shanghaied shipmates, one scene in particular staged very similarly to this one) and zooming out through the other end of the boat. the ship sinks in the distance while porky continues his wild goose chase of a ride.

the animation and speed combine to make a very exhilarating experience. the drawings are three dimensional and almost make for a sense of motion sickness as he zooms across the screen. though this cartoon is a strange one, it’s certainly ambitious and takes many risks, and king deserves credit for that alone.

after whirling around like a torpedo, porky finally realizes that maybe, just maybe, he should reach for the brake. he feels around aimlessly with his foot and finally stomps on the pedal, and the boat spins around in a flurry of activity to a halt at last. dazed from the impact, porky slumps over the boat to recover from his vertigo. in the process, he accidentally swallows a fish and snaps awake, spitting it out. he feels his face and collects himself, making sure he’s truly in the clear.

and, just like that, porky reaches for his fishing rod and finally sets out what he intended to do in the first place: fish. already he nabs a big bite, and prepares to reel in for the long haul. instead, he reels in a mounted fish head (if the cartoon were made in 1999-2000, perhaps the fish head would’ve been a singing big mouth billy bass. just what everyone needs.) clearly displeased, porky frustratedly tosses his catch back in the water. next time, he reels in a REAL catch. to deposit his win, he stretches a bucket out like a long tube and places the fish inside, the bucket returning to its natural state. the gag would have been funnier if it were more apparent, but it’s handled a little too nonchalantly and thusly reads as more incoherent and arbitrary instead of funny.

already, porky grows tired of fishing, literally. fashioning some rope as a makeshift pillow, porky lies down and settled in for a nap. we pan down to the waters below, and spot a quite frankly terrifying fish who’s ready to do some fishing of his own. he opens a picnic basket and rifles through, attempting to find suitable bait: a donut will do. he stuffs the donut inside a rifle and shoots, the donut attached to a string. very similar to the rifle/fishing rod/grappling hook invention featured in gold diggers of ‘49.

in an almost identical manner to the terminally boring old glory 3 years later, porky’s “dream self” rises from his real self and takes the bait. i think this is a big downfall of the cartoon—spoiling the surprise halfway through. if you’re going to go the surreal route, stick with it and don’t spoil the audience that he’s already having a dream. wait until the end for him to wake up for real to imply that it was already a dream instead of explicitly stating “this is a dream, folks!” keep your audience on your toes by tricking them into thinking it’s real. but i digress. the fish reels in his catch, sending porky hurtling down into the water and scooping him up in a net, removing the donut from porky’s snout where it had been clamped down.

the fish carries porky by the feet and waddles along to his humble abode. he signals that he’s home (by making a really strange noise—the only way i can describe it is that it sounds like an abbreviated version of porky’s ostrich from porky’s pet), and two of his children excitedly run out to greet him. yet first, they swim inside merrily to their mother, exclaiming in incomprehensible chatter that their father is home with a big catch. the entire family crowds around porky, one of the fish children poking him and giggling. like a real fish, porky jitters around, and it’s enough to scare the children. they run inside the house and dive inside the laundry hamper, both of their heads covered by a bra (well, not LOTS, but bra humor would sometimes pop up in the 30s cartoons. porky’s party comes to mind when a sheepish porky tosses away a bra.)

here’s where things get delightfully (or not) strange. the fish takes his catch inside and “skins” him, cutting off porky’s sweater. he places the naked, writhing pig inside an aluminum pan, dressing him up so he makes the perfect pig roast. thanks to a hearty helping of pepper being doused on him, porky sneezes and propels himself across the counter, the fish responding “gesundheit!” and positioning him back in the pan. well, he’s polite at least! there’s no voice credit for the fish, but the deep voice leads me to believe that it’s billy bletcher. he garnishes his potential meal and slaps another pan on top to cover him, and places him in the oven.

thus sparks the infamous, disturbing, uncomfortable and quite frankly hilarious scene of porky roasting alive in the oven, coughing and sputtering (and stuttering) “LEMME OUTTA HERE!” porkys manages to buck the lid off of him, pushing the oven door open and making a break for it.

it seems that even nature is against porky as he traverses the unknown waters (i guess he was fishing in the sea instead of the lake?)—an eel threatens to tie him up and restrain him, chasing him around. porky manages to sock the eel in the face, with enough force that the eel ties itself up in a knot. of course, the eel unravels itself and chases porky with more determination than ever.

the chase leads to a sleeping fish (perhaps the same one from before, i had always been under that impression but now rewatching it i don’t think it is), porky and the eel swimming into its mouth. the fish blows the eel out of its mouth like a party streamer, now awake, both the eel and porky swimming back out of its mouth. the fish only looks on in bewilderment. elsewhere, a swordfish threatens to slice porky in two. thankfully, it gets its nose lodged in a spare wooden beam. porky uses this opportunity to grab a mallet and hammer the swordfish’s nose in, bending the point.

while attempting to make his escape, porky comes across a particularly angry octopus, who captures him in its tentacles. some nice, stretchy animation as the octopus spanks porky, porky slingshotted into the distance and flying back into frame thanks to the octopus’ iron grip. now, the octopus attempts to do what the eel couldn’t: strangle him. as porky fights for his life, we fade back into reality, where porky is, for reasons unknown, NAKED and coiled in his rope. he wakes up and collects himself, wrangling himself out of the rope. determined to never see a fish ever again, porky throws all of the fish he caught out of the boat (even though we ever see him catch just one fish.) iris out as a terrified, naked pig zooms into the horizon in his motorboat.

i’m actually glad i rewatched this one, because i’ve definitely re-evaluated my stance on it. i still don’t like it that much, it’s not very funny and more uncomfortable than anything, but at the same time it’s unconventional and has some great bursts of animation. jack king was certainly experimental, but his experiments rarely ever worked out in his favor. i’ve never classified his cartoons as funny, especially in comparison to tex avery, friz freleng, and later frank tashlin (who’ll be coming into the picture soon.) he DOES have at least some sort of eye for cinematography, playing around with camera angles and close ups, which i admire. this cartoon was strange and was meant to be strange, so i appreciate that he took a different route. it’s still overwhelmingly offputting, but it’s not as terrible as i had thought it was before. there’s some great animation, especially the beginning half of porky’s wild boat ride. the cartoon was meant to be disconcerting, and it more than succeeded. i don’t think i’ll be watching this again soon, i still don’t particularly LIKE it but i can appreciate it more. because of that, i’m ambiguous on the recommendation. it’s just so strange that it could constitute a watch, but if you’re looking for something funny and/or charming, this isn’t your best bet. but, with that,

link!

#lt #fish tales #reviews #long post #king

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blackjacketmuses · 5 years

Text

hc; poe 3

Bibliography

Poe has written nine mystery novels between the ages of 13 and 22 --- they’re very popular and sell very well, usually near the top of the best-sellers list in the mystery genre, and he makes a good bit of money of the royalties.

The books star a detective named Benjamin Lapin, an amateur mystery writer just out of university with a fascination with the occult and a brilliant mind, able to see things a way most others can’t and pick up on things others dismiss. He’s friendly and cheerful and charming, a bit too eager to discuss his interests, and a bit unable to understand what’s not appropriate to talk about cheerily (ie gory murder details); but he can get serious when it comes time for the reveals, and he has a very strong sense of justice. He doesn’t have any assistants, but the main police officer he works with, the stiff and uptight but honorable Detective Pym, is a recurring character, as is the mysterious woman named Annalise.

The mysteries themselves are always incredibly well-written, tight, and very clever, with no room for any plot holes or errors. There’s always a last minute twist and a shocking reveal that seems out of nowhere, but when the mystery is explained, one can look back and see every single clue was there the whole time, and an attentive reader can catch and figure out the mystery perfectly well, even before Lapin himself. In his later books, starting with the third, he begins to incorporate mild supernatural elements that don’t detract or ruin the mystery, but add an layer of intrigue and something to think about once the book is over, whether or not it really was supernatural, as a rational explanation is given and it’s up to the reader to choose whether or not to believe.

The books are as follows:

The Black Theatre -- Rumors have begun to spread that a local theatre is cursed, given two people have died there mysteriously, so Lapin --- curious about this curse more than anything --- goes to visit, and a third death happens while he’s there. Drawn into the mystery at that point, especially when the detective on the case seems to think they’re just accidents, Lapin ends up uncovering an old scandal that had remained buried for a decade and reveals that the killer is the cleaning man, who had had an affair with a popular actress who was tormented for her fame and killed herself. The cleaning man kills himself on stage when caught out, to join her, but the mystery is solved and Lapin and Pym become friends.

The Town of Clocks -- Lapin is called out to an old college friend’s wedding, to a town in the middle of nowhere, and it seems the town is very odd, as there are clocks on nearly every surface available, all telling the same (incorrect) time. Apparently it’s tradition, and the friend has no idea where it began. The father of the groom, however, is murdered horrifically, and so the investigation begins. The clues as more people die begin to point towards Lapin’s friend, but in the end the twist comes in that it was his fiancee (whom he had not met until now) the whole time...or was it? She in turn reveals that she is not the fiancee, but someone else, and the real fiancee is, in fact, the killer --- seeking to reveal the grisly truth behind the clocks. After the chaos of the reveal, the false fiancee (a woman named Annalise) disappears with some important documents, fascinating Lapin, but the mystery is solved.

The Ninth Circle -- It’s winter, and Lapin heads up to a mansion-style vacation hotel in the mountains for some time to write. His trip coincides with a theatre troupe’s visit to the same hotel to practice their next play. They get snowed in, and murders start to happen during the blizzard. Whispers start circulating among the guests that it’s the doing of a local legend, an evil monster that lurks in the mountains to hunt prey, and at first it seems that’s the only option, given some of the inexplicable circumstances of the murders. However, it turns out to be one of the troupe members, using the legend to their advantage to take revenge on the leader of the troupe by taking everything away from him. The mystery is solved, though it’s left a little ambiguous how some of the finer details of the murder were committed, and maybe some of it was supernatural, after all. (Hint hint ability user hint.)

The Witch’s Island -- Lapin is dragged along by another old college friend to an island off the coast, where a treasure hunt is occurring for what’s said to be a stockpile of gold. The guests are all rather eccentric, and it’s revealed that the clues to the treasure’s whereabouts are hidden in a vaguely creepy old nursery rhyme. The rhyme gets creepier when people start to die in ways relating to it, and it’s linked to the legend of a witch on the island, who was burnt at the stake for reasons involving the treasure. Eventually, though, one of the so-called treasure hunters is revealed as the culprit, a self-proclaimed descendant of the witch trying to clear her name and reveal the true story, but also protecting the treasure from any who dare try to take it. During the climax, one of the other treasure hunters is revealed to be Annalise, and it’s implied that she made off with some of the treasure, or at least the monetary part of it, as the rest is not what it had been implied to be, being something only valuable in sentimental terms. It’s never determined either way whether the so-called witch really was a witch or not, however.

The Schoolyard Murders -- Detective Pym requests Lapin’s help on a personal matter; his niece, Madeline, a high school girl, goes to a school in which there has been a murder. Lapin agrees to assist him, and the two go to investigate the school. Almost all the students insist that it’s the ghost of a boy who killed himself decades ago, the school’s legend, because the school is trying to tear down the old building where he died. During the investigation, a few more people die, and a very strange black cat is seen on the premises, that people think is an ill omen. Eventually, however, it comes to light that a teacher is murdering the students who had stumbled across an innocuous thing in the old building that ends up proving the student had not killed himself, but was killed by the same teacher for discovering his illicit relationship with another student, and now the teacher is trying to cover it up. In the end the case is solved, and it seems that the cat had been helpful after all, as it wanders off into the old building and seems to vanish after having helped reveal the damning clue.

An Ancient Curse -- One of Lapin’s favorite teachers, also a famous archaeologist, invites him to the opening of an exhibit of a bunch of artifacts he’d discovered on a dig in Africa. The exhibit goes well, but after hours, the teacher is killed, and the camera footage shows that it seems as if it were some kind of ancient spirit that did it. The staff flies into a panic, but Lapin, fascinated and excited, dives right into the mystery. Several more members of the archaeological team are killed, and it seems like there really is a curse, or that the foreign member of the team is doing it as revenge for the artifacts’ ‘theft’, but in the end, it is revealed that the head of the museum is committing the murders and intending to frame the foreign team member and use the entire incident as a publicity stunt. He is arrested, but at the end it is revealed he died in custody, seemingly of a heart attack over the stress of the ordeal, but...was that really it?

The Siren’s Call -- A college friend of Lapin’s, a reporter, calls him telling him excitedly that he has a big scoop on something strange happening in a coastal town, a clue to a big mystery, but then something happens and the call is cut off. Concerned, Lapin heads out to the town in time for them to find his friend’s drowned body. The town doesn’t seem to like outsiders, but he finds a friend in the innkeeper and his teenage son Ernest, who tells him that a lot of people end up drowned around here, and they say its because of the nasty currents around the beach. But there’s also a legend of a sea monster in the caves beneath the town. As Lapin investigates, he discovers that the whole town believes in the sea monster, the Siren Mother, and treat her as a local deity, and the deaths are sacrifices to her. Ernest, too young to know about this, helps Lapin investigate further, and they discover beneath the town a large cavern with the mummified body of a woman, as well as Lapin’s friend’s bag, in which there is evidence that the town’s founder murdered a local native woman over land disputes and fabricated the Siren Mother to cover it up and control his people. The current mayor/leader of the ‘cult’ knows this, and he’s the one who killed Lapin’s friend to hide it. He shows up in the cavern, and during the struggle, both he and Ernest fall into the water. Somehow, however, Ernest survives, and he swears he heard someone humming a lullaby as they pushed him out of the water. There is no proof of that, though, and it’s written off as luck, and in the end, Ernest’s father becomes the new mayor, and the secrets are all revealed. It will take a while for the town to readjust, but Ernest and his father are willing to try.

The Red Death -- Lapin is shocked one day when Annalise appears on his doorstep, inviting him to a party at a very rich art collector’s house, implying both that she intends to steal something and that something worse might happen. Intrigued, he accepts her invitation, and they go together to the party. At the party, one of the major guests dies of a ‘strange illness’, and a murder case begins. Lapin and Annalise investigate, more guests die, and it’s uncertain whether or not it’s poison or something else, exacerbated by the mysterious man in a red coat seen around the mansion. It turns out that it is poison, the daughter of a painter who was exploited by the collector to make counterfeits taking revenge on those who abused her father. She takes her own life with the poison and jumps off the balcony, but her body is not there, and the man in the red coat is seen vanishing into the forest. Her body is found later on, laid out in the collector’s gallery beneath her father’s real paintings, with a red coat over her like a shroud. The man is never found, and Annalise does make off with a painting, but not before she says farewell to Lapin and disappears, seemingly into thin air.

The Circus Act -- Lapin goes with Pym and Madeline to a circus, and at the magician’s show, the festivities are interrupted when one of the acrobats dies in the middle of the show. An investigation begins, then, and it’s not long before a web of deceit and affairs and secrets come to light that makes it so that almost everyone has a motive for everyone else’s death. A few more people die, all in ways befitting their act in the circus, and the surviving acrobat, Berenice, fears that she is next. Lapin is in her room investigating when the killer attacks him and nearly kills him, and he wakes up bound and gagged in a box during the magician’s magic show, and realizes the magician himself is the killer. He barely survives the trick he’s stuck in, and at the climax of the show bursts out of the box to accuse the killer. The magician tries to kill Berenice, motivated by an obsession with her, and chases her up into the top of the circus tent. He tries to grab her, but falls off of the platforms above and dies. Berenice was nowhere near him, but insists that he was pushed, and wonders if it was her partner’s ghost protecting her. Either that, or he fell. Lapin is taken to the hospital, still wounded, and in addition to the get well presents from Pym and Madeline, a single rose finds its way to his hospital room with a tag reading ‘From A’.

#;hc: poe

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evangeline-perry · 6 years

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Narnia 3: Peter x OC: part 11

complete series

masterlist

‘No matter what happens here every soul who stands before me has earned their place on the crew of the Dawn Treader’, Caspian spoke to the crewmen, ‘Together we have traveled far. Together we have faced adversity. Together we can do it again. So now is not the time to fall to fear's temptations. Be strong. Never give in. Our world... our Narnian lives, depend on it. Think of the lost souls we're here to save. Think of Aslan. Think of Narnia.’ Caspian tries to keep his voice steady but I could see he was just as scared as all of us. But as he moved to walk down the stairs, the crew erupted in chanting: ‘For Narnia! For Narnia! For Narnia!’ Quickly everyone joined in.

It is dead silent on deck as we enter the mist. Streams of it start passing over the ship, circling around and through people.

‘I can't see a thing. This fog's too thick’, Drinian whispers.

I stand between Peter and Caspian, holding Peters hand. I can see them look around, bewildered, and I know they are seeing visions I’m not able to see.

‘No!’ Peter suddenly exclaims.

‘Peter?’ I ask, squeezing his hand, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah’, he breathes

‘Keep away! Keep away!’ a voice in the distance shouts.

‘Who's there?’ Peter calls out.

‘We do not fear you’, Caspian adds.

‘Nor I you’, the voice responds.

Peter takes out Edmunds torch, on a giant rock to our right there is a ragged man. ‘Keep away!’ he warns.

‘We will not leave’, Caspian insists.

‘You will not defeat me’, the man shouts.

‘Caspian’, Peter slightly nudges, ‘Caspian, his sword.’

‘Lord Rhoop!’ Caspian exclaims.

‘You do not own me!’ the lord snaps.

‘Stand down’, Caspian orders, ‘Let's get him on board, quickly.’ With that Eustace scoops Lord Rhoop up and puts him down on board.

‘Be calm, my Lord.’ Caspian continues to try and sooth the man.

‘Off me, demon!’ Rhoop continues to shout.

‘No, my lord. We are not here to hurt you’, Caspian reassures, ‘I am your king, Caspian.’

‘Caspian? My lord?’ Lord Rhoop says in a small voice, ‘You should not have come. There's no way out of here. Quickly... turn this ship about, before it's too late.’

‘We have the sword. Let's go!’ Peter speaks.

‘Let's turn her about, Drinian.’ Caspian orders.

Drinian: Aye-aye, your Majesty.

‘Do not think’, Lord Rhoop suffenly calls out, ‘Do not let it know your fears... or it will become them.’

‘Oh, no’, Peter suddenly says.

‘Peter, what did you just think of?’ I ask worriedly.

‘Oh, I'm sorry’, Peter says as he moves to peer over the edge of the ship.

We all see something moving in the water, it hits the boat, causing us all to fall.

As Peter helps me up, Caspian calls out ‘Look! What is that?’

‘It's too late. It's too late!’ the Lord cries out frantically

‘It's gone under the boat!’ I hear a crewman shout. I turn around to see the sea serpent reappear on the other side of the boat, but, there hiding, I can see her. ‘Gael! Come here! Run!’

I take hold of her and pull her behind me.

Eustace flies down and begins to attack the beast together with Reep

‘For Narnia! Take that and that! Yah!’ Reep gets knocked off and grabs a hold on one of the ropes on the ship, ‘Eustace, hang on.’ At that moment the serpent dives under water, taking Eustace with him, only to reappear a few seconds later and slam him into a rock. Eustace burns the serpent, it dives under water to stop the fire.

‘Out, creature!’ Lord Rhoop shouts, throwing his sword, stabbing Eustace in the shoulder.

‘No! The sword! The sword!’ I cry out as Eustace fries of, ‘Eustace! No! Come back!’

‘We're all doomed! Doomed! Turn this ship about!’ I hear lord rhoop shout.

‘Stop him! Someone stop him!’ a crewman calls after the lord. We all get knocked back by a sudden turn of the steering wheel.

‘Now, crew... to your rowing positions’, Drinian orders, ‘Oars at double speed!’

Aslan, please help us. I think to myself. Then suddenly a small part of the clouds open and a seagull flies through the air.

The sea serpent reappears and behinds to attack the ship again. I take Gael by the hand and take her inside to our room. ‘Gael, come on! This way! Now you must stay here until someone comes and gets you’, I tell her, ‘Okay?’ Gael holds on to the blankets of the bed, tears forming in fright. I take Susans bow and arrows. As I run outside I hear Peter yell to Caspian over the noise of the splashing water. ‘Steer her to port. I'll keep it on the prow.’

I climb the steps to get a proper aim at him

‘Look out!’ - ‘Forward!’ - ‘Come on!’ crewmen shout.

I can see Peter crawl into the mount of the dragon statue in front of the ship.

‘Try and kill me!’ I hear him taunt, ‘Come on! Come on, I'm here!’ The serpent bites off the first of the statue.

‘No!’ I cry out.

‘Peter!’ Caspian shouts.

‘Archers... ready yourselves’, Drinian orders.

‘I'm still here!’ I hear Peter shout as he climbs on top of the statues head

I let an arrow fly, it goes into the beasts eye right before it rams into the rocks.

‘Brace yourselves!’ Caspian shouts.

Because of the impact, Peter gets knocked back and falls onto the deck. I run over to him and so does Caspian, then we hear what sounds like a cackle coming from the serpent. It rips open its own body looking intimidating like a snake would in a fight.

‘Move!’ Caspian pushes us both aside, so that the serpent misses when he tries to attack us. Caspian takes his blade and slashes at one of the serpents tentacles, it gets hacked off and turns into green mist before disappearing, ‘We can beat this.’

‘We have to get it closer’, Peter states.

‘All hands to the main deck’, Drinian orders. I see Peter runs and grab hold of one of the ropes, he swings himself to the nets and begins to climb up. I go back to the top of the stairs and try to get a good shot at the beast.

‘Ready the harpoons’, Caspian adds.

‘I want everybody up here!’ Drinian shouts again.

‘Ready?’ Caspian yells.

‘Aye, sir!

‘Now!’ the harpoons are thrown, ‘Pull its head down! Heave!’

I can see Peter up on the mast, ready strike, but then he freezes, a bunch of green mist floats around him. I don’t know what he sees but I can tell that what he sees, terrifies him and enrages him at the same time

‘Peter! Do it!’ Caspian shouts as he and the men try to hold onto the rops.

Parts of the ship fly of as the serpent tries to get free when suddenly Peters sword starts glowing blue.

‘Do it!’ Caspian shouts again.

‘Come on!’ Peter yells at the serpent, gaining its attention. It attacks, with that Peter is able to stab the inside of his mouth. Lightning strikes the beast and it falls back into the water, dead, turning into mist.

Light starts coming through the dark clouds as they lift away. Ahead of us small boats are seen, coming from the white clouds in the distance.

‘The spell... it's lifting’, I breath out, ‘Peter! Caspian! Look!’

‘Narnians! Narnians!’ a crewman shouts.

‘Mummy!’ Gael yells, sitting on her fathers arm.

‘Helaine!’ Rhince shouts happily. Both of them jump into the water and swim towards the boat.

I get down to the deck Peter wraps his arms around me as I place my head on his shoulder, he kisses my forehead.

‘Rhince! Gael!’ the woman in one of the boats calls.

‘Mummy! Mummy. Oh, Mummy.’

‘Let's have them on board!’ Caspian orders, ‘Clear the decks.’

‘We did it, I knew we would’, I smile, as Caspian joins us.

‘It wasn't just us, though’, Peter say.

‘You mean...’ Caspian begins but gets interrupted by, ‘Hey! Hey, I'm down here, Alexa. Over here! Hey, alexa. I'm in the water. Alexa!’

‘Eustace’, I see him swimming.

‘I'm a boy again’, he shouts enthusiastically, ‘I'm a boy.’

‘Eustace!’ Reep call out, ‘I see your wings have been clipped. Ha, ha!’ He jumps in the water to Eustace, ‘Where sky and water meet

Where the waves grow ever sweet’, Reep sings befroe drinking the water, ‘It is sweet. It's sweet! Look! Look!’

We look to where he points and see, ‘Aslan's country. We must be close.’ Caspian says.

‘Well, we've come this far’, Peter smiles.

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#narnia #The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe #prince caspian #voyage of the dawn treader #Narnia imagine #Narnia x reader #peter #peter pevensie #Narnia peter #Narnia peter pevensie #peter x reader #peter imagine #peter pevensie x reader #peter pevensie imagine #Narnia peter x reader #Narnia peter imagine #Narnia peter pevensie x reader #Narnia peter pevensie imagine

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jupiterreed · 6 years

Text

(The days that followed)

It’s a casual sort of sinking, a perennial mudslide beneath the once rosy bottoms of your feet, a head-first collision and you don’t see what you’re crashing into but you can imagine once you hear the sound of the glass shattering and it’s almost a choir. The sirens pouring into the fizzling distance. Flashing murder-red behind your eyelids. Feral red, confused red. The red of eyes in paintings of the devil. The red of the inside of my thighs, blooming ghastly and slightly swollen. Most definitely swollen. It’s like diving blind-eyed into monster-infested waters and it’s everything it’s rumored to be, krakens and megalodons and you want to slip away but you’re chained to the bottom of the sea and it’s your worst childhood fear, the Jaws theme ringing ominously in your head. It’s dreaming of coral reefs wet with your own blood. Gasping for air and coming up empty, coming up slick-clean and robbed of your will to live. The first month was waking up with a night terror sitting upon my chest, the woman with craggily skin and fingers like barbed wires. I was incapacitated and breathing dirty ocean water. The first month was a panic attack in a Burger King bathroom stall and meeting a German boy on Tinder who told me I was pretty in a strange way. It was being touched for the first time and feeling my body flinch in unprepared protest, soldiers flanking my stomach lining, cherry bombs exploding in my chest and scorpions scratching at my throat. When he left he told me he didn’t like my septum piercing that much and I told him to fuck off. No longer intrigued by the glossy allure of cancer sticks disguised as cherubs. Impolite girl, angry girl, Britney’s 2007 breakdown. I come pre-packaged and licked by the moon. I am what I am. Foolish fever, selfish retch. Unlovable wind, intolerable myth. I know I’m not enough, but enough is no longer quantifiable.

The months after were a barrage of broken light bulbs, rat-traps, temptations of guzzling chlorox in the basement and offering my body to the fruit flies. It was hair pulled from shower drains and afternoons spent in unmade beds and fighting the urge to change my name and flee to the Himalayas.

Lately my lungs are propellers but there’s nowhere to land, nowhere to uphold temple, Bermuda Triangle days circling the hips of void. I’ve been aching to talk about the longing. How I want and want and want. But I never know what I need. I need to be suffocated by the skin of another. I need closure. Rituals of death in department store parking lots. All those girls with their high-pitched voices and soda pop laughter, calling me the girl whose name no-one can ever pronounce, and what does it mean anyway: sorrow, daisy, fool? I’ll be honest for five minutes because the lies are piling up like dried up moths beneath my bedsheets. I’m jealous, I’m canine. I want to turn into a wolf at night and maul them all. Go back to simpler times when cruelty made sense and their smiles got trapped in ribcages and nobody ever questioned the meaning of things. I still remember we threw slumber parties for roadkill and brought our bodies down in the middle of the street to emulate the feeling. I remember feeling smaller than the microorganisms of misery milling at me. I remember the vintage dress I bought off of eBay and the look on his face when he saw me in it for the first time (and maybe reverence never belonged to the gods anyway). I twirl around in it and for 0.5 seconds I get to feel like a garden variety princess and the sky turns stale and black coffee pours from the heavens and my hands are satellites again. (But then I wake up and everything I’d ever wanted is still too far away and the peach dream is over.) Did you know how often the average human has thoughts about death? Gosh I’m so fucking tired of having to try. Call me sloth, call me chimera. I can’t move. I’m sinking further and I can’t move! It’s all in your head. The rinds of darkness. That rotten pomegranate smell that grew ever-so familiar. The blood I found in my best friend’s bathtub, how it took up an entire block, crippled the air with rot. She stopped calling me. It’s been over five months now and we haven’t talked. Part of me wishes she’s dead on the side of the road somewhere, because the happier possibility would be too unbearable. I know, I’m terrible. When the anger settles and the upset hightails it out of my windpipe all I’m left with is the dull drone of cicadas and an impaled conscience.

He comes over again and this time I ask him to leave with citrus in my eyes. He makes sure to make note of all the skin I’ve peeled from around my nail beds and I make sure to let him know that the next time he comes around, I’ll be biting my fingers off too. Maybe I’m just afraid of what he’s capable of turning into, like the kindergarten boys who step on the helpless ants that trail the sidewalk just to feel a little bigger than themselves, like the grade school boys who TP the principal’s office and peg poor Jimmy from homeroom upside down by his underwear outside the boy’s locker room upon rumors of being gay, like the high school boys who bring their father’s guns to school to impress the pink-lipped prada girls who have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Like the sound of Camilla’s shriek and the final bullet bouncing off a multicolored wall advertising a false sense of safety.

Maybe I’m afraid of me, how these days my chest is a beehive and my heart a winged animal. The depression is a pyramid scheme, my blood vessels pop candy reverberating the same old fucking mistakes over and over until I’m left lifeless, pickled, taxidermied. My dad tries to call me every 2 days but the disappointment in his voice is getting larger now and I think about how I could scoop it clean with a pickaxe or let it fester, let it grow sentience and a sense of belonging. I tell him I’m sorry even though it’s useless and tastes like spoilt milk. I tell him I’ll try even though I know I won’t. Not hard enough. I’m still disgusting, stagnant. I feel like I’m on the world’s slowest carnival ride and the lights are dimming all around me. It’s sitting cross-kneed in a bomb shelter as the world implodes around you, it’s falling asleep on a train once you’ve missed your stop, it’s the circulatory system of a star puking up whatever’s left of its glow. That was before we began killing ourselves over the aesthetic, before the taillights of his car came alive and turned into fireflies. Before I was girl incapable of living. Before long-sleeves and the concussions we received from 7-11 slushies and picking at the scabs under your chin as if you could tame flowers there. I was restless and so very bored, I’d stare at my reflection in mirrors for hours and take knives to my zits, pierce the skin like cake. But proper girls don’t ache that way.

I kept losing myself on empty park benches and in the back of grocery store aisles and across the street from the airport where escape awaits. I remember calling her up, it was raining and it would continue to rain all week (at least over me), I was cold and shivering, my clothes pressed to my skin like I’d been trapped in a spiderweb of my own design. I told her the truth, that I wasn’t strong, that I’d never been. That sometimes giving up felt deceivingly like winning. Like getting out, scot-free. Like shelter from a nuclear winter. I fell victim to the temptation of teeth in September and spent way too long communing with ghosts, cracked my forehead open on the bathroom shelf, turned my blood into an altar. What I’m afraid of is waking up one morning with the brevity to go through with it. My roommate walking in on my body lying on the floor, the expression on my face so peaceful it could be mistaken for sleep if it weren’t for my bloodied wrists exhibited like vines. Self-inflicted, self-stormed, self-destructed. But I want to make it through, dammit! I want to be good!

(The day before I killed myself)

I imagined the colors were brighter than I remembered them, like they were screaming or had been for years and I was only just noticing the extent of their turmoil. I took my neighbor’s dog, Buster, for a walk and she smiled at me, old teeth yellowed, close to ruin, but her eyes still echoes of her baby days. They were forecasting more rain on the radio, nothing obnoxious or inconveniencing, not an inkling of a storm - more like, the kind of weather that feels like a kiss to the back of your neck: pleasant, quiet. The slightest prickle. I remember I spoke to my mother on the phone and she asked me if I could fetch her some carrots from the store on my way back home. I told her I’d be home late, and she didn’t argue. She rarely ever does these days. I made the familiar walk to school, I absorbed faces. All these people I would pass who I would never get to meet. What does that even mean, to meet someone? Do we ever truly meet anybody? I’ve been growing familiar with emptiness, like my whole life’s been leading up to this fabled meeting I’ll one day have with someone, someone who will walk into my life and change everything. I think my soul is waiting to be met. Except that day will never come, nor that person. And I’ll never know what it feels like to forgive myself or to succeed at something other than breaking my own accident records, or whether my ex-best friend will ever try to get in touch with me again. I’ll forget the colors. I’ll forget I existed. I’ll forget - everything.

The Day Before I Killed Myself (And The Days That Followed) || j.r (please do not remove original source)

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avatarsarny · 5 years

Text

and summer comes again

ao3

The finished version of this. How GoT ended in my head, because D&D's bad fanfic version can go in the dumpster where it belongs. For @gendrie, @gendrywatersseaworth, @gendryadempsie, and @starrynightshade, whose blogs and fics have kept me sane these past few weeks of clownery and terrible show writing lol. Thanks for feeding us so well with that good good Gendrya content throughout!

For context: In my head, everything ended similarly to the show version with some notable adjustments: Jon is not exiled to the (nonexistent) Night’s Watch; he decides against being king and goes to bring the Wildlings back down to the North with Tormund (bc the lands beyond the wall are a barren wasteland wtf) and thereafter settles at Winterfell to be Hand to Queen Sansa. Bran is made King of the 6 kingdoms as he was in the show, with Tyrion as his Hand and ruling with his council. Jaime did not turn on Brienne in the last moment, didn’t erase years of character development, and instead left to kill Cersei himself, finally realizing the disease she really was, and became Queenslayer for the good of the realm. He survives Daenerys’ attack on KL and is serving Bran in the new Kingsguard, under Brienne the Commander.

P.S. - can you spot the Okoye reference? Definitely not straight outta black panther

Bran nods in approval and looks up at the sunlight streaming in through the windows of the newly - reconstructed Royal Council solar. Daenerys’ rampage had left little of the Red Keep standing, but some of the personal chambers had remained mostly intact, so the new King and his council lived in close quarters for the past three months while they supervised the city’s recovery. There were still many injured and many more starving, so Bran called upon every Lord and leader in Westeros, high and low, to contribute whatever they could to the city’s smallfolk; who had suffered the most.

The young King smiles at this observation. Stags don’t have claws. But he can think of another animal that does.

Gendry catches his gaze. “What is it, Your Grace?”

Bran’s smile grows ever so slightly. “When is my sister returning, my Lord? It’s been a fortnight since her last raven.”

Gendry sighs and looks out a window, where the city gates rise from the sea of ruined buildings far out in the distance on one end, and the azure waters of Blackwater Bay lay calm and still on the other. “I’m not sure. She said she wouldn’t leave Queen Sansa at Winterfell until she’s made sure she’ll be well protected.”

“Won’t Jon be there soon?”

Gendry blinks. “Yes - er - I didn’t know that until this morning - got a raven from Tormund. How’d you find out?”

Bran’s smile widens into a true grin, then - a feat so rare Gendry thinks he should get Grand Maester Samwell to check on their King’s health.

But what about me? Gendry thinks. Does she not understand that every day we’re separated feels like an eternity to me?

None of it will mean anything, if you aren’t with me, so be with me…

And oh, she had never looked more beautiful, he had never loved her more fiercely than he did in that moment, not even on that night they thought would be their last, when she had kissed him down in the Winterfell stores and made breathless, frantic love to him. “You could never hurt me, love,” he’d said, gently wiping her tears away and crushing her to his chest. “I know you don’t want to be a Lady, I’ve always known. We can go wherever you like. Do whatever you want. I’ll follow you anywhere you go, till the end of my days,” he promised, and released her so he could kneel before her in the ash and dust. “My life means nothing without my family. Please be my wife. Please be my family, Arya of House Stark.”

And with that, she’d tackled him into the rubble with all the strength she could muster, and kissed him senseless. “I love you,” She’d breathed against his lips,“I will be your family. Your - your wife,” she broke off in a quiet moan, as he moved to press searing kisses down her throat. She held his face in her hands, stilling his sweet movements to look earnestly up at him. “And I will lead by your side, Gendry of House Baratheon.”

He’d stared at her in shock, his hands coming up to bracket her own. “You - you want to rule the Stormlands with me?”

Arya smiled at him, even though it had hurt to do so and her face was bleeding. “I want to be here for the people who can’t protect themselves. I want to make our world a better place than the one we grew up in…I couldn’t save them in King’s Landing,” she’d paused as more tears tumbled down her cheeks, and he dutifully brushed them away with the pads of his calloused fingers. She would tell him about the girl and her mother, later. The little family that had saved her from the stampede, only to end up burnt beyond recognition in the end. “I have to make sure this never happens again.”

Gendry kissed her forehead, the bit of it that wasn’t cut open. “As M'lady commands,” he’d murmured, threading their fingers together. “Now let’s get you a maester.”

“I also need to teach you how to use a fork, none of those idiot lords will respect you otherwise.”

He'd laughed and scooped her up into his arms. “I’ll need all the help I can get. I don’t know any other rich girls willing to teach me.”

“Lord Gendry?” the King addresses him, drawing his attention away from the cloudless sky, out of his reverie.

Gendry starts. “Sorry, Your Grace. I didn’t catch that. I was just - thinking about how we could allocate the food to the city once it arrives tomorrow. I’m thinking we should just set up the distribution points along the docks, that way we won’t need to spend half a day hauling it all through the streets to get to everyone. Most of the needy are already down there, which makes our jobs easier.”

He said all this rather quickly.

Bran smirks. “Well, I hope this helps you see why you’re the best man for the job. You grew up here. You know the people. And you care, which is the only qualification that matters, in the end.”

Gendry turns to his King. “I still don’t know what I’m doing, not really. I know nothing of ruling or leading people, or throwing fancy feasts, or running castles.”

“But you remember what it’s like to live as an outcast, among the very worst of men, to live in the dirt and the muck, and what it’s like to go hungry for weeks on end. You want a world where the powerful protect the weak.” Bran says quietly. “My sister knows this, too. The realm could use more people like you.”

Gendry lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding in. “I..well, thank you, Your Grace.” He straightens up then, and smooths out the map of King’s Landing he’d been going over before King Bran had entered the room. “Then I will give the realm everything I have to make it a better place. I won’t hesitate.”

Bran nods in affirmative. “I’ll be depending on you a lot, Lord Baratheon.”

Someone knocks on the doors of the solar just then; Ser Brienne walks through the threshold and bows her head in greeting.

“Your guest is here to meet you, Your Grace. Shall I bring them in?” Her eyes slide over to rest on Gendry, a small smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. “It’s good to see you, Lord Gendry. You look well.”

“As well I could be, Ser Brienne,” he smiles at her. He nearly admits that he could look better, much better, if only his little she-wolf were here with him, and not a thousand miles beyond his reach. But given Brienne’s fierce protectiveness over Arya, he thinks better of it. He’s not sure he could best the formidable Lady Knight in a fight, even with a hammer.

He’d only gotten two days, just two measly days with Arya, before she’d gone north with Sansa. When he sees her again (if ever, he thinks just a little sourly, for she may decide to stay in Winterfell for good, and forget about him, and marry a handsome Northern Lord who knows exactly what he’s doing, especially how to eat with proper utensils.)

Seven hells, he is pathetic.

Bran nods, his smirk growing wider than ever. “Please bring them in.”

Gendry takes this as his cue to leave, and starts gathering up his things. Maybe he’ll seek out Ser Davos and convince him to grab a large jug of ale with him. The Onion Knight always knew what to say.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a small figure stroll into the solar, clad in a floor-length gown, with a sword at her hip.

“My King,” the young woman says softly, kneeling in front of Bran, before turning to Gendry. “My love.”

Gendry’s jaw drops to the floor, and so do the maps he holds in his arms.

He wheels around to see Arya Stark rushing forward to squeeze Bran in a tight hug.

“I missed you, little brother. Sansa is happy and safe, Jon is with her now.”

Bran seems to lighten up ever so slightly at the sight of her, a ghost of the boy he used to be flits across his normally blank features, the boy who had looked upon his warrior sister with awe and immense pride, who had wanted to be as good a fighter as she was, well before they knew what fighting really was. He wraps his arms around Arya to squeeze her back.

Gendry stands there, taking his betrothed in for the first time in months. She’s wearing a dress, Gods help him, the long skirts billow out from her waist and clings to her petite figure in a way that sharply forces him to remember he’s in the presence of civilized company, and he immediately tries to control his breathing.

Her hair is just a little longer than the last time he saw her, falling loosely down her back, save for the Northern braids woven at the crown of her head. For once, she looks like the warrior princess she is, and Gendry couldn’t tear his eyes from her if he tried.

Bran releases his sister. “I’m happy to hear. It’s been quiet here without you. Although I’m sure Lord Baratheon here felt that more than anyone.”

Arya turns to him then, raising one dark brow and raking her storm - grey eyes over him. Just as she’d done back in Winterfell, watching from the shadows as he worked the dragonglass into weapons against the dead, before she had made him hers forever. Gendry barely suppresses a shiver.

“Have I surprised you, my Lord?” She laughs, her eyes bright and glinting with mischief. “I’ll bet you thought you’d have a few more weeks of peace without me.”

Peace? He thinks incredulously. He’s felt anything but in her absence.

Gendry moves to open his mouth in a retort, but their King interrupts.

“Ser Brienne, I must go off to the upper floors and survey today’s reconstruction progress, and Lord Tyrion has called a council meeting after lunch. If you would be so kind as to take me there?”

Brienne looks from Arya to Gendry to the young King, and valiantly attempts to conceal her knowing grin. “Of course, Your Grace.”

On their way out, Bran pauses and looks to the pair still standing in the solar. “I’ll be waiting to hear all about Winterfell and how Queen Sansa is faring at dinner tonight. For now though, I suggest you take care of the pressing matter before you. See you in the Great Hall later.” He waves his sister goodbye, and Brienne hastily converts her snort into a cough as she pushes his wheelchair out the doors.

Gendry flushes beet - red as he stares after the King. Arya flashes her betrothed a wolfish grin and steps closer to him. As a girl, she’d loved to rile him up and annoy him till he’d chase her through the forest and muss her boyish locks in revenge. Now, she gets an even bigger thrill simply seeing him blush like a maiden, because of her.

She must do it more often.

“I like this,” she says, bringing her small hands up to run along the clawlike marks in his leather tunic. “What inspired this break from Baratheon clothing tradition?”

“What inspired yours?” He breathes, bringing his own hands to circle her waist, and pull her even closer. “Who forced you into wearing this?” He grins, gesturing to the garment that hugs her form and fans out from her hips, embroidered with leaves and direwolf motifs all over the sleeves and skirts.

Arya scowls just a little. “Sansa. She made it for me and ordered me to wear it on my journey home. Does my Lord like it?” She asks coyly, scanning his gaze for his reaction.

She needn’t have asked.

His eyes are dark and wanting as they travel over her form, and she suddenly feels so, so warm. Gendry, for his part, makes a mental note to send the Queen in the North a large pile of gold upon his return to Storm’s End.

“You’re always beautiful,” he murmurs, “No matter what you’re wearing. Or when you’re wearing nothing at all.” She presses herself flush against him at that, and he has to shut his eyes to keep his thoughts coherent. “I’m very thankful to your sister right now. Hail Queen Sansa, first of her name. May she make you many more dresses to wear. I’m a grateful man.”

“I’m glad. I have suffered so in this gown. At least one of us is pleased,” she quips, rolling her eyes.

Gendry can’t quite take it anymore, he moves to capture her lips with his own; he needs to taste her once again, needs to breathe in her scent of wildflowers and leather and the spring breeze of the outdoors. He’s just about to close the gap between them when she suddenly wriggles out of his arms.

Oh, Arya has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling at the utterly woebegone expression that crosses Gendry’s face as she pulls away.

“Arya,” he nearly whimpers in exasperation. He looks so forlorn that she almost loses her resolve, but she steels herself and moves away.

“Spar with me,” She asks breathlessly.

“What?” He blinks down at her, dumbstruck.

“I’ve gone four months without a worthy opponent. No one at Winterfell is good enough to best me, except perhaps Jon. And I managed to throw him on his back just before I left to come here.” She says, just a little smugly.

Gendry quirks a brow at her. “And you think I’m the one who could best you, my Lady? I’m not a soldier, as you know.”

She locks her dark gaze with his own and moves so that they’re mere inches apart, once again. “No,” She says softly, her hands come to cup his cheeks, stroking the rough stubble that grows there, “But you’re a fighter.”

He smiles at the reference, and leans into her touch. Her hands are soft and cool against his burning skin.

“Meet me in the garden courtyard later. The one with the view of the sea. Bring your hammer. But feel free to leave your leather shirt behind, as lovely as it is.” With that, she pulls his face down to her own, kissing him deeply, her sweet mouth hot and wet, melting against him and causing all sense to leak out of his mind.

Their kiss is over far too soon for Gendry’s liking, and she saunters out of the solar. “I’ll be waiting, Milord,” she says, grinning at him over her shoulder, and then she’s gone.

Gendry sighs and stares up at the high, vaulted ceiling. “I’m a dead man,” he chuckles to the empty room.

The sun is high overhead as Tyrion and Jaime stroll past the balconies overlooking the vast palace gardens. There’s a warm breeze coming off the sea, signaling the winter’s end, and the encroaching summer.

It’s enough to put a spring in nearly everyone’s step. After the wars ended and Bran was made King, peace descended upon Westeros, and people everywhere watched with cautious optimism in their hearts as the summer flowers began to bloom and the winter chills slowly faded away.

The charred remains of the Red Keep’s gardens had been replaced with exotic plants from every known part of the world, and were open to all who wished to enter, be they the poorest smallfolk or the King himself. But today, the paths and courtyards criss-crossing the greenery were mostly empty, with the rebuilding efforts taking up most of the city’s free time.

Tyrion pauses to look over a particularly scenic vantage point. “I’d say winter is well and truly over, brother.”

Jaime smirks, and nods. “Strange that the Starks, who never shut up about winter, would be the ones to end it.”

Tyrion chuckles. “I’m not in the least bit complaining.”

Jaime smiles down at his younger brother. “Neither am I.”

The relative quiet is broken then, by clashes of steel and shouts of triumph. Jaime and Tyrion throw each other bewildered glances, before starting off in the direction of the commotion.

“D’you think someone’s trying to break into the Red Keep again?” Tyrion wonders aloud.

“Just another day on the job,” Jaime drawls.

The Lannister brothers turn a corner before skidding to a halt on a landing overlooking a large circular courtyard.

“Well well! It appears our Lady Stark has returned from the North.” Tyrion pants, bending over to catch his breath. “I’m very glad I was informed beforehand of her arrival.” He deadpans. “I do love being in the know of what goes on in this city.”

Jaime squints curiously down into the courtyard. “It also appears she’s challenged her own betrothed to a duel.” His eyes widen at the sight below him.

A panting Arya Stark, brandishing that skinny little sword she refused to part with, circles a much larger - and barechested - Gendry Baratheon, who wields a warhammer and stares his future wife down, trying to calculate her next move.

Tyrion looks upon them with great interest. “It’s like looking at a pair of ghosts,” he says quietly.

Jaime throws his brother a questioning glance. “What d’you mean?”

“Look at them. Really look. Who do they remind you of?”

Jaime turns back to the sparring pair below them. And then it hits him.

“Robert and Lyanna,” he breathes. He doesn’t know how he missed it before, but now the resemblance is jarringly uncanny.

Gendry - broad shouldered and muscular, looks every bit like young Robert once did, with thick black hair that falls into trademark Baratheon blue eyes. He even wields a hammer in the same way his father did, though he’d never laid eyes on the former King, much less seen the way he’d fought.

Arya, with her dark hair falling wildly about her face, the gleam in her grey Stark eyes, and the grace with which she moves as she swerves away from Gendry’s blows with ease reminds Jaime sharply of how the late Lady Lyanna, the wild Northern beauty, had moved on horseback, with her bow and arrows.

Tyrion smiles sadly at the realization on his brother’s face. “They were a match doomed, and Robert began the war that changed the entire continent for his Lady Lyanna. But the future for these two appears much brighter. This Baratheon isn’t at all like his father, and she possesses the foresight her aunt never had. One generation had thousands die fighting in the wars they started, the next helped save many thousands more.” He says, watching them pensively.

Jaime only hums in agreement, still intently observing the pair below. The play-fight between the young couple is getting more intense by the second. Amid the flurry of steel and limbs, they’re clearly taking care not to actually hurt one another, but they’re just as certainly not going easy on each other, either.

Gendry swings his hammer at the girl with all the famed Baratheon strength he inherited from his father, but Arya is far too quick for him, and she laughs at his attempts to disarm her.

“You’re too slow,” she taunts, darting left and pretending to cut him across the belly with Needle. “Dead.” He swipes at her.

Arya dodges his blows again, then smacks her blade harmlessly against the back of his neck. “Dead again, Milord,” she grins up at him.

Gendry circles her, growling in frustration, catching her eye and nearly making her gasp at the raw desire she sees burning in his gaze.

She focuses her attention on the way his raven hair is long enough now to fall across his brow, and watches the play of muscles in his broad chest, slick with sweat, as he draws in rapid breaths and sneaks heated glances at her when he thinks she isn’t looking.

She’s missed him so much.

Her guard falls just long enough to be her downfall, as Gendry seizes her momentary pause to grab Needle from her hands and toss it aside, and proceeds to tackle her onto the painted mosaic floor of the courtyard.

Up on the terrace, Jaime and Tyrion look on in stunned silence. Arya Stark, the Princess that was Promised, the she-wolf who had slayed the Night King, taken down in a mock fight by non other than a former Baratheon bastard.

“What’s got you two so suddenly interested in the gardens?”

The Lannister brothers whirl around to see the new Master of Ships walking curiously toward them.

“His Grace is looking for you both to take lunch with him. Have either of you seen Lord Gendry? I’ve been meaning to ask the lad to come eat meals with me, he’s been looking a little - er - overwhelmed lately.”

Tyrion chortles. “Your lad has just managed to knock Azor Ahai herself to the ground in a duel, Ser Davos. It was quite a thing to see.”

The Onion Knight’s eyes widen in surprise. “So she’s back, then?” He looks down from the edge of the balcony to see Gendry pin Lady Arya beneath his arms. “I guess he won’t be eating with me, now.” He watches them wrestle with a fond, sad smile.

Jaime smirks down at the pair again. “I’m not sure this match is quite over yet.”

Gendry straddles one of her legs and lays an arm across her chest, securing her beneath him so that she can’t move from his grip. He grins cheekily down at her, pupils blown so wide his eyes are nearly as black as his hair. “You should’ve stood sideface, M’Lady.”

Arya stares defiantly up at him, before the mask is dropped completely, and she breaks into a giggle. “So I’ve heard.”

The sound of her bubbling laughter is the sweetest music to his ears. “Although I’m not sure how much smaller a target I could get than you,” he murmurs.

Their resounding laughter echoes across the deserted gardens, and while Arya’s got him distracted, she twists her hips and flips Gendry onto his back in a swift, deadly maneuver, her Valyrian steel dagger presses up against his throat in a flash.

Check and mate.

He blinks dazedly up at her, mesmerized by the way she straddles his waist, her triumphant victory gleaming in his she-wolf’s eyes. The sight brings back wonderful memories of that first night, when she’d pushed him atop those sacks of grain and made him lose himself over and over in her.

“I win,” she whispers, breathing hard, and she releases her hold on his wrists to sheath her dagger.

“You’ve won,” Gendry agrees. “Show me how you did that.”

She smirks down at him, crossing her arms over her chest, her legs still wrapped around his hips. “Not before I claim my prize,” she says, and the lilt in her voice makes his heart hammer in his chest. He suddenly remembers how long they’ve been apart. Too damn long.

“And what’s that?” He inquires softly, gazing up at her astride him.

Arya hums, innocently tilting her head and shifting her hips just so against him, and his eyes flutter shut in bliss.

Far above them, the three men watching quickly avert their eyes and turn away in varying degrees of mortification.

Jaime snickers, shaking his head. “That wasn’t a fight we were watching. That was foreplay.”

Tyrion loudly clears his throat. “Well, Ser Davos, you’re welcome to take lunch with us instead, seeing as Lord Gendry is rather occupied at the moment.”

The Onion Knight smiles ruefully down at the King’s Hand as the three of them make their way to the Great Hall. “They grow up too fast.”

Arya flicks her gaze up to the balcony overlooking the courtyard. Their adoring fans are gone.

Good, she thinks. Not that she will ever be ashamed to show her love for Gendry, to touch him freely in front of others, but this moment, here in the warm sunlight as the sea breeze ruffles through their hair, belongs to them and them alone.

She trails her hands slowly up over the hard planes of his glistening chest, biting her lip as she admires the sight of him flushed beneath her, in broad daylight.

“I missed you, love.” she admits in his ear, emitting a low gasp when Gendry reaches up to grasp her hips and press her down onto him.

He’s firm and throbbing against her belly, and the blush spreading over Arya’s face does nothing to help calm the fire coursing through his veins.

He tenderly brushes her hair away from her face. “I was afraid you weren’t coming back. That you were going to stay at Winterfell and forget me.”

She smiles softly and leans down to press her forehead against his. “As though I could ever forget you. Not even the House of Black and White could erase you from my memory. And they tried, believe me.”

He trails warm fingers against her cheeks, down to her chin, and guides her mouth to his. “My family, my wife,” he breathes against her lips, kissing her as though he were a man dying of thirst in a desert, and she’s the life-giving oasis that saved him.

Arya brings her fingers up to tangle in his hair. “Not yet,” she reminds him breathlessly between kisses. “A whole three months to go until I meet you in the godswood.”

“Aye, that’s true,” he mumbles, his tongue coaxing her lips apart and swallowing her moans, “but you’re my wife, even so. And you’ve been my only family for years now.”

Because Gendry can’t bring himself to give a shit about the ceremonies. He is hers, and she is his, and they’ve been married ever since she stumbled into his arms after the burning of King’s Landing, as far as he’s concerned.

She pulls away from their kiss to regard him with large eyes. Suddenly, Arya seems much more like a shy doe than the fierce she-wolf he’d been sparring with, and a wave of protectiveness washes over Gendry.

Arya swallows. “I never imagined I’d ever get married. I didn’t want to just be a womb for some stupid old lord to produce sons. So many women have been chained into it by our society, I didn’t want to be one of them. I never thought I’d fall in love, not before I met you.” She pauses.

Gendry nods, kisses her knuckles, and waits for her to continue.

She leans in to brush her lips against his. “You always protected me, you could’ve been a bully like all the rest but you were kind and good. I was just a scared little girl, but you made me feel less alone. You were such a stubborn bull, but you were my best friend in the whole world.” She blinks rapidly, trying to clear the tears welling up at the memories. “I would’ve died back then, had it not been for you.”

There’s a lump in Gendry’s throat. “Arya,” he breathes, and he surges forward to kiss her more fiercely than ever. “You saved me too, so many times,” he says roughly. “I never would’ve left you on your own, I should’ve listened to your distrust of the Brotherhood. After Davos helped me escape the Red Woman, I tried so hard to find out where you’d gone. A part of me did die that day, when I heard you’d been killed at the Twins. I never forgave myself for my stupidity.”

Arya hugs him close. “I’m here. I have you, now.”

Gendry holds her tight, and he’s never letting her go again. “You have me, now and always.” he promises.

Arya smiles against his mouth, and she pulls away to beam at him. “I need a bath.” She whispers, running her hands down his bare torso. “I’m very sweaty, and tired from my long journey. Help me wash, husband mine?” Her eyes grow large again as she looks at him imploringly.

Gendry moves to stand, but he keeps Arya in place when she tries to climb off him. He grips his hammer and holds his Lady in his arms, and she lets him carry her back to the Red Keep.

Hours later, Arya wakes up to the late afternoon sun streaming through the curtains of the chambers she’d lived in the last time she had been in King’s Landing, when her father was still Hand to King Robert Baratheon, and she and Sansa were still mortal enemies, back when she was still learning water dancing from Syrio Forel. Before her world and family were torn apart by Cersei, before she’d run into Hot Pie and Lommy, before Gendry had come to her aid and asked her where she’d stolen her Needle.

All of it seems like another lifetime ago, like the past few years have been a dream, like she’ll wake up any minute now, in the same bed, and she’ll be 11 again and still have a Father and a Mother, and Robb and Rickon.

Arya turns to her side; the sheets are cool against her bare skin, but she is very warm, thanks to Gendry who is wrapped around her, with his nose buried in her hair as he sleeps on.

Had she been told, years ago when they were still being hunted through the Riverlands by Lannister men, that she would be married to her stubborn Bull, and that she’d be waking up next to him in the Red Keep not as a prisoner waiting to be killed, but as the Princess (however much she loathed that title) of the Six Kingdoms and the North, and that her crippled little brother would be the Sovereign himself, she would have laughed in their face and pushed them into the dirt for spewing out such a nonsensical lie.

That Sansa would be Queen in the North, and love Arya enough to want her little sister to sleep in the same bed as her every night after they reunited, to make up for the years of lost time, the years when sisters become friends.

That she would see her beloved Jon again, her brother for always, no matter whose son he was, and that she’d see him happy at Winterfell, supporting Sansa’s rule as her most trusted advisor.

That Gendry would look at her like she’s his sun-and-stars, with gazes full of awe and love and unending hunger, instead of the grubby little girl he’d spent two years protecting, mussing up her hair and teasing her and perpetually getting on her nerves.

Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.

Gendry shifts in his sleep, and instinctively moves closer to her warmth, securing her fully in the circle of his arms.

Arya leans back, ever so slightly, so that she can get a better view of him. She reaches out to trace a finger lightly down the bridge of his nose, over his rough, stubbled jaw, over his lips, which are still pink from her kisses hours before.

Blue eyes, bluer than the famous Braavosi canals she’d spent so long near, crack open to regard her, and the lips she’s tracing press a gentle kiss to her fingers.

“Hello,” Gendry croaks, and he stretches a little before smiling tiredly down at her. “Did you sleep well?”

Arya flashes him a satisfied grin. “Better than I’ve had in four months.”

She sighs into his mouth when he leans down to capture her lips for perhaps the hundredth time that day, but it still feels as thrilling as the first time. She melts beneath him as he rolls over to gently press her into the sheets.

He’d been feverishly attentive to her during their bath, taking care to wash every inch of her skin and pressing searing kisses all over her. His strong hands had held her hips still as she sat in his lap and washed his hair for him, trying unsuccessfully to deter her sweet, torturous movements above him, but he’d groaned in defeat when Arya reached down between them.

“Wait,” Gendry had hissed when her fingers closed around him to take him inside her. He kissed down the side of her jaw to suckle her earlobe. “Want to take care of you,” he’d mumbled, his warm breath tickling her neck, his fingers reaching between her legs to stroke her slick heat, rubbing lazy circles around her clit and sending tidal waves of sweet pleasure coursing though her.

“Gendry…” she’d tossed her head back in pure bliss as he slipped a calloused finger into her, and then another. The hot coil in her belly wound tighter and tighter as he worked her, and she whimpered against his lips as he stroked against something that made her see stars.

He’d grinned up at her. “Yes, love?”

“Gendry, I want…” she’d panted, “I want…”

He kissed down her throat, curled his fingers inside her, and suddenly the tight coil deep in her belly snapped, and Arya fell over the edge crying out his name.

Gendry laughed softly, holding her quivering body against him, helping her come back down to earth. “That?”

She’d grabbed his chin to kiss the smirk from his lips, and he instantly melted into her mouth.

“You. I want you,” she’d corrected, “I’ve wanted nothing else but the feel of you inside me and your taste on my lips for months, husband.” She admitted sweetly, and he’d never been so damn hard in his life.

He’d flushed at her confession, and gazed up at her in pure adoration. He couldn’t deny her anything, not anymore.

“As M’Lady commands,” Gendry breathed, and made love to her over and over, until they collapsed into bed hours later, utterly spent and sated.

They’re just reacquainting themselves with each other when a low growl rumbles from Arya’s stomach, and they break apart, bursting into laughter.

“And here I was, thinking I’d finally satisfied you,” Gendry sighs, pushing himself off her and holding out a hand to pull her up with him.

“Nonsense. To gratify me in the way you’re insinuating, you’d have to have me like this three times a day, every day,” Arya smiles, her eyes glittering with mirth.

Gendry’s mouth falls open at her words. “Gods, Arya. Don’t tempt me.” His hands come up to trace the scars crossing her belly, the scars he’d spent ages lavishing his attention and his warm lips upon.

She hums in reply, and kisses his cheek before leaping off the bed to pull on her breeches.

He watches her from his perch against the pillows. “What would you like to eat? I’ll go bring whatever you want from the kitchens.”

Arya pauses to pull her tunic over her head. “Thanks, but I think my brother wanted us to take supper with him.”

Gendry nods, and looks out the windows to see the sun starting to sink closer to the edge of the horizon, casting deep orange bands of light over the sea in the distance. “Then we should get going.” He climbs off the bed in search of his discarded clothing.

He manages to find his breeches and his undershirt, but his leather tunic is nowhere in sight. He turns around to find Arya holding it, she's smoothing it out on the bed, running her fingers over the jagged slashes on its shoulders, an immensely soft expression on her face.

Gendry moves so that he’s pressed up behind her, and winds his arms around her middle. “Those weren’t there originally,” he says quietly, and he dips his head to kiss the back of her neck. “I wanted everyone to know I was yours without actually saying it. I think they got the message well enough, because the other Stormlords haven’t brought up marriage proposals ever since.”

Arya turns in his arms to peer up at him with tender eyes. “I should wear something of yours, then. Make it even.” She whispers.

Gendry kisses her forehead, then her nose, then finally her lips. “Always trying to one-up me,” he teases, and dodges when she aims a smack at his head.

“You’re getting better at that, I see.”

“M’lady’s a good teacher,” Gendry quips back. He takes her hands in his own. “I’d give you my cloak to keep, but tradition says I must save it until our wedding.” He grins and tilts his head, considering her. “I’ll make you a new hilt for your Valyrian steel dagger. Make it black and yellow, if you like,” he murmurs.

Arya reaches up to plant one more lingering kiss to his lips. “I’ll hold you to it.” She smiles, and pulls him by the hands out the door.

Daylight still lingers in the sky outside as Arya pushes open the large oak doors to the Great Hall, a clear sign of winter’s final death. The days during the last few years had steadily declined in length, growing shorter and shorter until the entire world had only a handful of hours in which their candles and lanterns remained unlit.

Until the end of the Long Night, when Arya thrust her dagger deep into the Night King's frozen heart, and destroyed Death himself.

Dawn had returned to shine down upon the world, and the warming rays of the sun brought life and greenery and hope back to Westeros.

Arya and Gendry walk in to find the newly-rebuilt Hall deserted, the long tables empty, save for a few members of the Royal court on the far end. Gendry glances at her, his brows knitting together in confusion. She wordlessly shrugs at him.

“Excuse me Milord, Princess Arya,” (the Princess in question grits her teeth at the title) says a kitchen boy carrying a large platter of fruits and cheese. “His Grace wished to take a private supper out on the upper terrace. He wants you to join him there. Please follow me.”

The kitchen boy leads them up through the castle, up many flights of new stairs, until they reach an unfamiliar landing that faces two intricately carved wooden doors.

Gendry pushes them open to help the kitchen boy pass through, and they find themselves standing on a vast open balcony, high over the rest of the Red Keep, with candles and lanterns glittering everywhere as the sunset turns the sky around them pink.

There’s a single long table in the middle of the terrace, and there Bran is seated, along with Brienne, Podrick, Davos, the Lannister brothers, Samwell Tarly and his Wildling wife Gilly, and (to no one’s great pleasure) Lord Bronn of Highgarden. The young King looks up and smiles at the newcomers.

“Welcome, sister,” he pats the empty seat next to him at the head of the table. “And Lord Gendry,” he nods. “We had a bit of a change in dinner plans, so I sent Terry here to fetch you.”

Arya smiles at her brother, and takes her place beside him, and Gendry seats himself on her other side. Terry the kitchen boy sets down the enormous platter with some difficulty, and for his effort, Arya slips him a large strawberry pastry from a nearby plate. “Thank you.” she tells him kindly, and the young lad blushes furiously at being directly addressed by the Bringer of the Dawn herself, taking the sweet from her with slightly shaking hands, and he all but flees from the room.

Gendry watches the exchange with a fond smile. “You highborns aren’t so bad after all,” he concedes. Arya elbows him in the ribs, and he laughs.

The bright orange-pink of the sinking sun fades to pale purple dusk, and the candlelight casts warm glows all around the table as they all tuck into their food, engaging each other in familiar conversation over the clatter of plates and cutlery.

Halfway through the first course of creamy soup Bran inquires Arya about their sister in the North.

“Is Sansa happy, there?” Bran asks slowly. “I know she didn’t want our family separated.”

“She is,” Arya assures him, “She’s already had Winterfell and Winter Town rebuilt, and she’s overseeing the allocation of lands to the Windlings, with Jon’s help. I think,” she pauses, looking out at the city over the edge of the balcony, “I think this is what she was always meant to be. A Queen. She’s never felt more at home than she does now.”

“She was,” Bran agrees. “I try to check up on her when I’m flying as a raven. She looked happy the last time I saw her, but also a little down. I’m sure it’s because she misses you.”

“She misses you too. She worries for her little brother down South, in what she describes as a rotten nest of vipers.”

Tyrion, who had been listening in ever since their conversation turned to Sansa, now spoke up. “She wasn’t wrong, Lady Arya,” he says with a sad smile, “She’d suffered the most while she was trapped here as my sister’s prisoner. It’s because of this that I, and the rest of us sitting here, are trying our best to rid this capital of those very snakes. We want to do our part to leave that world behind us, and amend for our pasts.”

Arya looks out over the others eating at their table. Once upon a time, she would have felt in danger among them, especially with Jaime Lannister, but so much has happened since then, so much has changed, that she not only feels comfortable sitting here with them, but at peace.

With a pang, she thinks of how scared Sansa must have felt, during those years she was held in this very castle, and what horrors she went through. Arya wishes her sister could see the Red Keep now, under their brother’s rule, and how it’s nearly unrecognizable from those days when it was ruled under tyranny and greed, and the Lannister Queen’s insatiable lust for power.

“Sansa didn’t want me to leave,” Arya whispers, then. Bran gives her a small smile, for he’d known this, too. “She didn’t want me to come back down here, she’d wanted me to stay in Winterfell with her and Jon.”

Gendry puts down his fork, and Arya feels his eyes on her. “I told her, that my family wasn’t just in Winterfell. I needed to come back and watch over you here,” She tells her brother softly, and reaches beneath the table to grip Gendry’s hand. “And I made a promise, to be Lord Baratheon’s wife. I’m his family, too.”

Gendry’s heart swells, and suddenly it’s too big for his chest, and he squeezes her fingers in return.

“We know,” drawls Jaime Lannister nearby. “No one here is in doubt of that. Incidentally, when is the happy day? We’re all dying for a bit of merriment, although this afternoon seemed plenty merry for you two.” His eyes flash with a hint of a smirk over his goblet of wine.

“Were you impressed by our fighting skills that much, Ser Jaime, to watch us for as long as you did?” Arya replies coolly. Jaime’s eyes widen in shock.

Gendry nearly spits out his ale. “He saw us?” He sputters. He hadn’t merely sparred with his Lady in those gardens, they’d also… he flushes at the thought. This gods-damned castle really did have eyes everywhere.

“Oh, it wasn’t just Ser Jaime,” Arya informs him brightly. “I believe Lord Tyrion and Ser Davos were present, too.”

Gendry whips his head around to throw Davos a look that could have roasted him.

The Onion Knight feverishly shakes his head in denial. “No no, my boy, I only happened to stumble upon you two by accident, believe me lad, I had no intention of - “

Arya leans across to place a hand on the old smuggler’s arm. “It’s alright, Ser Davos. Don’t worry about it.” When the anxious expression still doesn’t leave the Knight’s face, she smiles. “Come eat meals with us from now on, Ser. Gendry doesn’t admit it, but he’s missed you these past few weeks.” She’s grown rather fond of the man who had taken such good care of her beloved Jon and her Gendry.

Gendry drops the act at once, and nods at his now-father figure. “It’s true. I’ve been so busy running between here and Stormlands, but I’d be lying if I didn’t miss your company and your considerable wisdom.”

Davos bursts out into laughter, smiling at the best Baratheon he’s ever known, after his little Shireen. “Not sure about the wisdom part, but I’d be glad to provide you with my company and bad jokes for as long as you want.”

“Still, you haven’t told us when your happy day is,” wheedles Jaime, who has since recovered from his shock and has now gone right back to being a thorn in Arya's side.

“In about three months, Ser Jaime.” replies Gendry, looking at Arya. He squeezes her fingers again, her hand so small and warm in his own. “We’ll be married at Winterfell. When’s yours?” He shoots back.

The entire table hides their grins, and even the King himself spoons more stew into his mouth to keep his expression neutral.

Brienne turns pink, and Jaime’s face bypasses it entirely to burn scarlet. Arya decides to rescue them, if only because she loves the tall, blue-eyed Lady Knight across her.

“Sansa would be happy to see you married at Winterfell, too.” She gently tells Brienne. “She misses you a lot. Come North with us when we go.”

The Kingsguard Commander looks over at her King. “If Your Grace will allow, it will be my honor to see Queen Sansa again.” She turns to cast Jaime a shy smile, “and if you have no objection to it,” she says softly.

Arya swears she’s never seen Jaime look at anyone so tenderly. “I will go wherever you go, Ser Brienne,” he says simply. “Anywhere, as long as I get to marry you, and call you mine.”

Brienne blushes as red as Jaime does, unable to keep the joy off her face. Podrick pats her hand beside her. “Your Grace, I will be happy to remain here with the other Kingsguard while Sers Brienne and Jaime go North.” He pipes up.

Brienne swiftly turns to her former squire, now a young and capable Knight whom she loves like a little brother. “But I want you to be there too, Podrick,” she says quietly. “You can’t miss your own commander’s wedding, after all,” she declares, and Podrick beams at her.

Bran waves his assent. “You may come with us to Winterfell in three months’ time. The Grand Maester and our Master of Coin will manage affairs here until our return.”

Samwell nods eagerly. “Worry not, Your Grace, Lord Bronn and I will take care of everything.” He wilts a little then, as Bronn shoots him a withering look.

“Yes yes, you all go ahead and run off to your weddings and your celebrations, we’ll do all your work for you and run the Six Kingdoms in the meanwhile,” drawls the Master of Coin. “At least the North will be paying for these things, Highgarden can’t afford to be doling out gold for parties and funding the realm at the same time.” He grumbles under his breath.

The rest of the conversation fades into jumbled words in Arya’s ears, as she leans back in her seat to watch the twilight blanket the city and the sea in the distance in purple hues, and the stars are beginning to wink into existence far above them. The night air is cool, but the numerous candles provide warmth, and the weight of delicious food in her belly is a welcome feeling after nearly three weeks of riding down the Kingsroad from Winterfell.

Arya blinks slowly, her eyelids becoming heavier by the minute. She’s not sleepy, she will stay awake and alert to pay attention to the very important discussions taking place, she’s a damned Faceless assassin for gods’ sake…

Gendry feels something small and warm press into his side, and he looks down see his wife-to-be leaning against him as though he were a particularly comfortable pillow.

Arya’s pulled from her doze just long enough to register Gendry’s arm wrapping around her. “Shall I take you to bed, M’lady?” He whispers, his breath warm in her ear, his smile clear in his voice.

She hums softly in protest, her eyelids refusing to remain open any longer. “M’ awake,” she mumbles, “M’ just resting my eyes for a while.” A yawn promptly betrays her words.

Little Arya Stark would have never allowed herself to fall asleep in the company of anyone but her family, would rather have died than expose such vulnerability, but she isn’t worried tonight. The people at this table are her pack now, too. The Lannister lions sitting nearby are tame.

This place is no longer the den of venomous snakes where her family had suffered so much. It is a stronghold that protects the ones she loves the most, her old friends and new, and as long as she lives, she will honor her promise to Sandor Clegane. She will choose her family, her life, and give everything she has to ensure their happiness. But for now, Arya Stark will rest.

Gendry presses a kiss to the crown of her head, like her Lord father used to, every night before he tucked her into bed.

During moments like these, she can swear her Father sent Gendry to watch over her in his place.

“Awake. Of course.” Gendry chuckles into her hair. “With your eyes closed. Don’t start snoring on us, M’Lady.” Arya mumbles an incoherent retort, aiming a kick to his shin with all the accuracy of a drunken archer firing arrows into the night, and her leg meets nothing but air.

Gendry now laughs in earnest, the sound reverberates deep in his chest and gently lulls her to sleep, nestled in his arms.

The others at the table smile at the sight, and take care to speak in hushed tones for the rest of the evening.

#gendrya #arya stark #arya x gendry #gendry waters #braime #game of thrones #this is how got ended for me and i refuse to think otherwise #lord n lady of storms end come thruuu #also i apologize if this is garbage #but it's better than clownery i say #anyway d&d aren't valid #my fics

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