Fic: Draw Your Swords (Arya, Gendry)
Title: Draw Your Swords
Author: breve
For: iinfidi
Pairings/Characters: Arya Stark, Gendry
Rating: G
Words: 2100
Warnings: Threats of violence
Prompt: Prompt #1; Modern AU/Canon world: Arya is the daughter of the vice president who just got assassinated along with the president. Arya my have accidentally filmed the first lady (Cersei) hiring the assassin/selling the nations secrets or w/e with Needle her high tech video camera she's never without. So now the equivalent of the FBI is after her so with the reluctant help of a computer hacking super genius, Gendry, who Arya is convinced is stupid. She might have a chance to bring her fathers murders to justice and save the nation from corruption and blah blah fall in love with this really hot guy who is shirtless half the time.
Summary: Technological Future Westeros!AU. Of all the people Gendry might have expected to see when he slid open speakeasy grill in the iron-banded door to his lower lab, the girl wanted for his father's murder was not among them.
Notes: Title from Angus and Julia Stone. I could not possibly get all of the specified elements from the prompt into the story, so I just took the premise and sort of went with it. Hope it works for you!
Of the people Gendry might have expected to see when he slid open speakeasy grill in the iron-banded door to his lower lab, the girl wanted for his father's murder was not among them.
And yet there she stood, easy as you please, staring at what little she could see of his face with a level of expectation and aristocratic entitlement that really should be gone after more than three years at large and on the run from the Gold Cloaks.
He had long known her face, of course. Even though she'd been no more than a child when she and her family came to the capital-a scant few months before the Queen had him and his bastard half-siblings ousted from the city-he still remembered the first time he saw her with her sister and Lord father, riding high in an old-fashioned yet oddly stately mechanized carriage, complete with shining brass horses that made scarcely a squeak or whir as they pranced. Gendry was reminded not for the first time of the strong bond of love that had existed in the Lord Hand's family, so alien to him in the cold Court of the capital city, and of the even more foreign fatherly affection he had seen with his own eyes. Little Arya had had a dark smudge of dirt or grease on her face as she peered out at the masses of the city for the first time, and the Lord Hand only smiled at her fondly.
So had Gendry, point of fact, but the relevance of that memory was beyond questionable in this precise moment.
All of which was only to say that he did indeed know her face, and even had he not, the Queen had it plastered across every screen and station on the network at all hours of the day or night, accompanied by the flashing angry red text reserved for the most hazardous of public enemies.
LEVEL ONE ENEMY OF THE STATE: Arya, exile of the formerly exalted House of Stark. Wanted alive for crimes against the Diarchy and Peoples of Westeros including sabotage, treason, conspiracy, theft, slander against the crown, assault upon a royal person, murder, vandalism, forgery, impersonation, and regicide. Armed, dangerous, and cunning. Approach with utmost caution.
With all of this crashing through his mind, Gendry allowed himself to stare stony-faced for a moment, just long enough to make sure she was alone and make her shift uncomfortably before-
"Yeah?" he asked shortly, all brusque indifference.
"I'm looking for the Bull," she said, her pale cagy face peering up at him warily.
"This look like a barnyard to you, kid?" he snapped. Oh well done, he congratulated himself when the immediate tick at the edge of her jaw betrayed her annoyance.
She rose to the bait just as her reputation promised she would. "I don't know. You seem stupid enough to fit right in with the aurochs and asses, so could be," she snapped.
He didn't smile, but it was a close thing for a moment.
She shifted again, and her pale spindly fingers fiddled nervously with the brass buttons just below her throat. He followed the shining line of them to the point where the disappeared under the studded leather utility bodice that stretched across the curve of her- what? No! Not the time!
Gendry snapped his gaze back up to her face and gave his most menacing glare, which she met with one of her own. Gendry was more than a hint uncomfortable at how much he liked the look of it on her face.
Fantastic. Tight in the pants for enemy of the state number one.
Finally, she huffed a little and broke both eye contact and the silence, toeing at the bottom of the door in annoyance. "Someone told me he could help me," she said.
"Lot of 'someones' in this world," he said, just to see the glare again.
"The Red Priest sent me," she hissed, patience apparently at an end. "He said to tell the idiot at the door that 'Mother Merciless forestalled the dawn but the broken men would be made whole again' whatever that means."
Gendry considered her for a moment, and then moved his hand to the first bolt. He sighed and hoped to the shining God that Thoros knew what he was doing. The girl hadn't killed his father, he was sure of that-had been sure of that the first time he saw the alert appear in uniform flashes of red across all of his network-enabled screens that might as well have had 'scapegoat' and 'patsy' written all over it. But she was no harmless little girl, that was more than certain. To stay alive and uncaptured for so long at such an alert level bespoke of skill and determination - aye, and ruthlessness, too. Harboring her, though, would bring a world of trouble down on his already hounded head.
An image of his own alert crossed his mind.
LEVEL TWO ENEMY OF THE STATE: Gendry, supposed former bastard of the blessed late King Robert I. Wanted dead or alive for crimes against the Diarchy and Peoples of Westeros including vigilantism, tax evasion, theft, murder, information hacking and falsification, and inciting a rebellion.
He was particularly proud of the last one and not ashamed to admit it.
Arya's list of "crimes" was longer than his, to be sure, and the alerts belonging to both Thoros of Myr and Gendry's own sometime uncle Stannis were longer still, but if he could add harboring and abetting a level one enemy of the state and mayhaps the simple but ever-impressive treason to the list, it would flesh it out nicely. Might even bump him up to level one himself.
He was chuffed just thinking of it.
Besides, what was the adage? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Queen and crown Prince wanted this one dead even more than they wanted him, and if half of what they whispered about Arya in the underground was true, she'd make the risk more than worth it.
Gendry sighed long-sufferingly. "Hands where I can see them at all times," he said, and swung the door open when she raised them compliantly.
He kept his gaze solidly on her as she slipped into the lab-because innocent of regicide or no, the woman had left an impressive trail of blood behind her-and rebolted the door with one hand. He hefted his short double-barrel from its holster at the small of his back and used to it gesture her forward from the narrow entryway with what he told himself was an air of consummate complete friendliness and welcoming. Or something.
She smelled of smoke and damp earth as she brushed past him, and he swallowed hard before stepping after her.
Arya paused, and he watched her take in her surroundings: the burnished gleam of the long line of consoles on his workbench; the comm devices arranged in rough order of decryption level on the table to their left; the casually scattered weaponry and tools that all bore his maker's mark-a small black bull in silhouette, head lowered and horns outstretched in attack; and, perhaps most tellingly, the complete absence of another living soul.
When she rounded on him accusingly, he smiled faintly and shrugged.
"It's you," she said, disbelieving. "You're the Bull? You're the best tech engineer south of the Neck?"
He grimaced, pained. "I don't much like that moniker. Strictly speaking, Ygritte isn't a tech engineer. She's an information broker who knows how to hack the comm systems and maybe the network if the Black Cloaks are having an off day. Fine distinction, but to say that I'm only the best 'south of the Neck' when she isn't even-"
"I didn't come here to listen to you brag," Arya snapped. "I came here because I was told you could help me. I need to broadcast a vid capture on the network. The Red Priest said that you...that you...." She frowned, and tilted her head as she squinted up at him.
He reached up to shove a lock of hair from his eyes, suddenly self-conscious, and his nerves prickled as her eyes tracked over the length of his weapon and up the slope of his shoulder, assessing his strength and skill in a way that was more obvious than she might have believed. He'd known before he opened the door that there was a chance she'd recognize him. The face of the king was well-enough known to the general public, but what they saw was the gilded veneer, the cloth and metal and paint layered on his face and body to give the false appearance of youth and strength and vigor. As the daughter of the king's Hand, she would have been privy to his private face, and doubtless his private audience hall in which he kept the true portraits from his younger days.
And the likenesses of his bastards.
She stared at him hard, eyes flitting over every detail of his face, and he saw it the instant she realized. More out of instinct than any real fear, Gendry stepped forward and had the shotgun pressed against her temple before her mouth had yet dropped open in shock.
Damn it. He needed more time to get her measure before she figured out who he was. Reputation and enemy status stood for something, but it wasn't enough. If she knew who he was, if she decided to risk a middleman and turn him in for the bounty, the funds would be enough to keep herself hidden and safe for years to come.
"You," she whispered, echoing her earlier realization with an even more profound one now, and not even reacting to the weapon in her face. "I know you," she said, eyes narrowed.
"Aye," he affirmed. "And I'm not surprised, clever little trickster that you are. And I know you too, Arya of House Stark."
That she identified him so quickly might not have been a surprise, but the sharp press of the dagger at his belly was, although one perhaps more pleasant than an outsider would ever expect. It was the way negotiations were made amongst their ilk-no threat without another made in answer, no offer without a counter, no progress without assurance that all parties were equal. They could kill each other off right here, or they could come to an understanding, and he was certain of the way it would go now, could see it plain as day.
"I didn't kill your father," she said.
"I know," he said. "I did kill the Queen's Prime Gold Cloak at the ford," he offered in return.
Her grey eyes flicked between his rapidly, her expression tense and focused. "I'm not interested in any bounty, whatever you think of me." And them, casual as you please, she continued, "I have proof the Queen killed the king and the crown Prince killed his Hand."
Gendry stared at her, wholly wordless.
"I have proof," she said again, as though to emphasize the point in the midst of his shocked silence, "That they killed your father. And mine."
Her words washed over him, all hot and cold at once, and more monumental than even the implications of her words was the frightening rush of anticipation and eager hope that rose up in him. To implicate the royal diarchs in mariticide, murder, usurpation... it was beyond anything any of the Brotherhood had ever hoped for. If there was a vid capture, if there was even a chance of getting it on the network for all of Westeros to see, then the regime would crumble, and the war would go with it.
Gendry didn't lower his arm, but he tilted his gun back with a flick of the wrist so that it pointed at ceiling. The ghosts of the twin barrels lingered for a moment, imprinted in pale pink lines on her skin. The sharp point of the blade pulled away as well, and when he had gathered his reeling wits enough to hazard a glance down, it was nowhere to be seen. Damn, but the woman was impressive.
She raised her chin and lifted a brow, all defiance once again, and he smiled. "Well then," he said, finding his voice at last, breathless though it was, "that changes things doesn't it, m'lady? If you're telling it true, I think we may just become the best of friends."
A flicker of a smile crossed her face, the first he'd yet seen. She tucked a hand into one of the slim pouches on her belt, and raised a slim silver vid capture case into his line of vision.
It was beyond a doubt the second loveliest thing he had seen that day.
Author: breve
For: iinfidi
Pairings/Characters: Arya Stark, Gendry
Rating: G
Words: 2100
Warnings: Threats of violence
Prompt: Prompt #1; Modern AU/Canon world: Arya is the daughter of the vice president who just got assassinated along with the president. Arya my have accidentally filmed the first lady (Cersei) hiring the assassin/selling the nations secrets or w/e with Needle her high tech video camera she's never without. So now the equivalent of the FBI is after her so with the reluctant help of a computer hacking super genius, Gendry, who Arya is convinced is stupid. She might have a chance to bring her fathers murders to justice and save the nation from corruption and blah blah fall in love with this really hot guy who is shirtless half the time.
Summary: Technological Future Westeros!AU. Of all the people Gendry might have expected to see when he slid open speakeasy grill in the iron-banded door to his lower lab, the girl wanted for his father's murder was not among them.
Notes: Title from Angus and Julia Stone. I could not possibly get all of the specified elements from the prompt into the story, so I just took the premise and sort of went with it. Hope it works for you!
Of the people Gendry might have expected to see when he slid open speakeasy grill in the iron-banded door to his lower lab, the girl wanted for his father's murder was not among them.
And yet there she stood, easy as you please, staring at what little she could see of his face with a level of expectation and aristocratic entitlement that really should be gone after more than three years at large and on the run from the Gold Cloaks.
He had long known her face, of course. Even though she'd been no more than a child when she and her family came to the capital-a scant few months before the Queen had him and his bastard half-siblings ousted from the city-he still remembered the first time he saw her with her sister and Lord father, riding high in an old-fashioned yet oddly stately mechanized carriage, complete with shining brass horses that made scarcely a squeak or whir as they pranced. Gendry was reminded not for the first time of the strong bond of love that had existed in the Lord Hand's family, so alien to him in the cold Court of the capital city, and of the even more foreign fatherly affection he had seen with his own eyes. Little Arya had had a dark smudge of dirt or grease on her face as she peered out at the masses of the city for the first time, and the Lord Hand only smiled at her fondly.
So had Gendry, point of fact, but the relevance of that memory was beyond questionable in this precise moment.
All of which was only to say that he did indeed know her face, and even had he not, the Queen had it plastered across every screen and station on the network at all hours of the day or night, accompanied by the flashing angry red text reserved for the most hazardous of public enemies.
LEVEL ONE ENEMY OF THE STATE: Arya, exile of the formerly exalted House of Stark. Wanted alive for crimes against the Diarchy and Peoples of Westeros including sabotage, treason, conspiracy, theft, slander against the crown, assault upon a royal person, murder, vandalism, forgery, impersonation, and regicide. Armed, dangerous, and cunning. Approach with utmost caution.
With all of this crashing through his mind, Gendry allowed himself to stare stony-faced for a moment, just long enough to make sure she was alone and make her shift uncomfortably before-
"Yeah?" he asked shortly, all brusque indifference.
"I'm looking for the Bull," she said, her pale cagy face peering up at him warily.
"This look like a barnyard to you, kid?" he snapped. Oh well done, he congratulated himself when the immediate tick at the edge of her jaw betrayed her annoyance.
She rose to the bait just as her reputation promised she would. "I don't know. You seem stupid enough to fit right in with the aurochs and asses, so could be," she snapped.
He didn't smile, but it was a close thing for a moment.
She shifted again, and her pale spindly fingers fiddled nervously with the brass buttons just below her throat. He followed the shining line of them to the point where the disappeared under the studded leather utility bodice that stretched across the curve of her- what? No! Not the time!
Gendry snapped his gaze back up to her face and gave his most menacing glare, which she met with one of her own. Gendry was more than a hint uncomfortable at how much he liked the look of it on her face.
Fantastic. Tight in the pants for enemy of the state number one.
Finally, she huffed a little and broke both eye contact and the silence, toeing at the bottom of the door in annoyance. "Someone told me he could help me," she said.
"Lot of 'someones' in this world," he said, just to see the glare again.
"The Red Priest sent me," she hissed, patience apparently at an end. "He said to tell the idiot at the door that 'Mother Merciless forestalled the dawn but the broken men would be made whole again' whatever that means."
Gendry considered her for a moment, and then moved his hand to the first bolt. He sighed and hoped to the shining God that Thoros knew what he was doing. The girl hadn't killed his father, he was sure of that-had been sure of that the first time he saw the alert appear in uniform flashes of red across all of his network-enabled screens that might as well have had 'scapegoat' and 'patsy' written all over it. But she was no harmless little girl, that was more than certain. To stay alive and uncaptured for so long at such an alert level bespoke of skill and determination - aye, and ruthlessness, too. Harboring her, though, would bring a world of trouble down on his already hounded head.
An image of his own alert crossed his mind.
LEVEL TWO ENEMY OF THE STATE: Gendry, supposed former bastard of the blessed late King Robert I. Wanted dead or alive for crimes against the Diarchy and Peoples of Westeros including vigilantism, tax evasion, theft, murder, information hacking and falsification, and inciting a rebellion.
He was particularly proud of the last one and not ashamed to admit it.
Arya's list of "crimes" was longer than his, to be sure, and the alerts belonging to both Thoros of Myr and Gendry's own sometime uncle Stannis were longer still, but if he could add harboring and abetting a level one enemy of the state and mayhaps the simple but ever-impressive treason to the list, it would flesh it out nicely. Might even bump him up to level one himself.
He was chuffed just thinking of it.
Besides, what was the adage? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Queen and crown Prince wanted this one dead even more than they wanted him, and if half of what they whispered about Arya in the underground was true, she'd make the risk more than worth it.
Gendry sighed long-sufferingly. "Hands where I can see them at all times," he said, and swung the door open when she raised them compliantly.
He kept his gaze solidly on her as she slipped into the lab-because innocent of regicide or no, the woman had left an impressive trail of blood behind her-and rebolted the door with one hand. He hefted his short double-barrel from its holster at the small of his back and used to it gesture her forward from the narrow entryway with what he told himself was an air of consummate complete friendliness and welcoming. Or something.
She smelled of smoke and damp earth as she brushed past him, and he swallowed hard before stepping after her.
Arya paused, and he watched her take in her surroundings: the burnished gleam of the long line of consoles on his workbench; the comm devices arranged in rough order of decryption level on the table to their left; the casually scattered weaponry and tools that all bore his maker's mark-a small black bull in silhouette, head lowered and horns outstretched in attack; and, perhaps most tellingly, the complete absence of another living soul.
When she rounded on him accusingly, he smiled faintly and shrugged.
"It's you," she said, disbelieving. "You're the Bull? You're the best tech engineer south of the Neck?"
He grimaced, pained. "I don't much like that moniker. Strictly speaking, Ygritte isn't a tech engineer. She's an information broker who knows how to hack the comm systems and maybe the network if the Black Cloaks are having an off day. Fine distinction, but to say that I'm only the best 'south of the Neck' when she isn't even-"
"I didn't come here to listen to you brag," Arya snapped. "I came here because I was told you could help me. I need to broadcast a vid capture on the network. The Red Priest said that you...that you...." She frowned, and tilted her head as she squinted up at him.
He reached up to shove a lock of hair from his eyes, suddenly self-conscious, and his nerves prickled as her eyes tracked over the length of his weapon and up the slope of his shoulder, assessing his strength and skill in a way that was more obvious than she might have believed. He'd known before he opened the door that there was a chance she'd recognize him. The face of the king was well-enough known to the general public, but what they saw was the gilded veneer, the cloth and metal and paint layered on his face and body to give the false appearance of youth and strength and vigor. As the daughter of the king's Hand, she would have been privy to his private face, and doubtless his private audience hall in which he kept the true portraits from his younger days.
And the likenesses of his bastards.
She stared at him hard, eyes flitting over every detail of his face, and he saw it the instant she realized. More out of instinct than any real fear, Gendry stepped forward and had the shotgun pressed against her temple before her mouth had yet dropped open in shock.
Damn it. He needed more time to get her measure before she figured out who he was. Reputation and enemy status stood for something, but it wasn't enough. If she knew who he was, if she decided to risk a middleman and turn him in for the bounty, the funds would be enough to keep herself hidden and safe for years to come.
"You," she whispered, echoing her earlier realization with an even more profound one now, and not even reacting to the weapon in her face. "I know you," she said, eyes narrowed.
"Aye," he affirmed. "And I'm not surprised, clever little trickster that you are. And I know you too, Arya of House Stark."
That she identified him so quickly might not have been a surprise, but the sharp press of the dagger at his belly was, although one perhaps more pleasant than an outsider would ever expect. It was the way negotiations were made amongst their ilk-no threat without another made in answer, no offer without a counter, no progress without assurance that all parties were equal. They could kill each other off right here, or they could come to an understanding, and he was certain of the way it would go now, could see it plain as day.
"I didn't kill your father," she said.
"I know," he said. "I did kill the Queen's Prime Gold Cloak at the ford," he offered in return.
Her grey eyes flicked between his rapidly, her expression tense and focused. "I'm not interested in any bounty, whatever you think of me." And them, casual as you please, she continued, "I have proof the Queen killed the king and the crown Prince killed his Hand."
Gendry stared at her, wholly wordless.
"I have proof," she said again, as though to emphasize the point in the midst of his shocked silence, "That they killed your father. And mine."
Her words washed over him, all hot and cold at once, and more monumental than even the implications of her words was the frightening rush of anticipation and eager hope that rose up in him. To implicate the royal diarchs in mariticide, murder, usurpation... it was beyond anything any of the Brotherhood had ever hoped for. If there was a vid capture, if there was even a chance of getting it on the network for all of Westeros to see, then the regime would crumble, and the war would go with it.
Gendry didn't lower his arm, but he tilted his gun back with a flick of the wrist so that it pointed at ceiling. The ghosts of the twin barrels lingered for a moment, imprinted in pale pink lines on her skin. The sharp point of the blade pulled away as well, and when he had gathered his reeling wits enough to hazard a glance down, it was nowhere to be seen. Damn, but the woman was impressive.
She raised her chin and lifted a brow, all defiance once again, and he smiled. "Well then," he said, finding his voice at last, breathless though it was, "that changes things doesn't it, m'lady? If you're telling it true, I think we may just become the best of friends."
A flicker of a smile crossed her face, the first he'd yet seen. She tucked a hand into one of the slim pouches on her belt, and raised a slim silver vid capture case into his line of vision.
It was beyond a doubt the second loveliest thing he had seen that day.