this is our homecoming (this is a land half forgotten)

5

When the rest of them finally made it to the throne room, Jon bursting through the door with the Dragon Queen right on his heels, Cersei is already on her knees, Arya's knife at her throat and a circle of bodies spread out around them.

Gendry is sitting on the steps, the one closest to the Iron Throne, watching a puddle of blood seep slowly across the floor.  He stands when everyone else comes in.

"No," Jaimie says, and does not look at his sister, just moves from one knight to the other, and Gendry remembers, with a pang of pity, that he used to be one of them.  That they were probably friends.  "It shouldn't have been this easy."

He veers over, almost drunkenly, off balance, the side with the golden hand dipping towards the floor.  Brienne catches him, because where Ser Jaimie is, Brienne always follows.

"Easy?"  Daenerys does not move to climb the throne.  Maybe its underwhelming, when you finally get to it, or maybe she's just afraid, to reach the point she had been working towards for her whole life.  Afraid of the after.  "I wouldn't call that fight easy."

It would have been easier, if she had used her dragons.  The city would have burned, walls falling to rubble.  But I am not meant to be queen of the ashes, she said, over and over and over, like she was reminding herself just as much as she was the generals.  I don't want them harmed.  Men, women, or child, if they don't stand against you, we will not strike them down.

I came to raise them up.  Raise up that city so no tyrant can ever grasp it, and Gendry felt it again, the idea that this was a woman worth dying for.  That's what I am going to do.

"She doesn't care about the city," Jaimie says, and slides to the floor even with Brienne trying to hold him up.  Cersei doesn't smile, but she doesn't react, either.  "There should have been more men around her.  Her and the child."  His eyes search out his sister's  Gendry wonders what it would be like, to have someone like that who always feels like home, even when home is a bitter thing.  "That's what she cares about."

"The last time.  The last siege," Brienne looks afraid now, and Gendry still doesn't get it.  He's always been slow, and he does not know the history of this place and these people beyond what Arya and Ser Davos had told him, and he does not understand politics.  "She had poison.  She wouldn't be taken alive."

"No," Jaime says, and Cersei just laughs, throws her head back and the sound echoes over the walls.  "You wouldn't."

He still doesn't understand.

The others are starting to.

Arya is already gone.

This time, she does not wait for him.

He finds her later.

The others are cleaning out the castle, hall by hall and room by room, taking stock of the supplies and the people they have left, but Gendry doesn't.  He wouldn't know how, anyways.  Wasn't sure that he could make people follow him like the other lords could.

But this, taking care of her?

That he could do.

"There was so much of it."  She was covered in it.  Arya had tried to wash it off, but it had only smeared around her skin.  "The wildfire."

She had fallen in it.  It had been piled in the basement of the castle with the dragon skulls, a great pool of it with candles in the middle, and it had been dark enough that she hadn't been able to see that she was stepping in it until she was, falling right onto her back, and she had been so terrified, she had said, terrified that when she fell the movement of it would make one of the candles tip.