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

7

He guards the baby.

No one asks him to.

And yet.

"You know," He says, and he is talking to an empty room and a child who cannot make sense of his words, but when he speaks, Gendry likes to pretend he is listening. "We're sort of brothers, in a way."

Not really. His father was a king and his mother goes without a name, just the shadow of a smile and the memory of stray strands of yellow hair hanging down around her face, and this baby's mother was a murderer, a murderer who loved him and who would never know his name.

I want his name to be Michael, she had said, right before Sansa stepped forward and ripped the baby out of her arms. They had let Cersei nurse her until they could find a woman in Kings Landing to serve as a wet nurse, and maybe so they could wait until Sansa was here. The Lady of Winterfell had been all ice, then, reaching down to lift Cersei's son from her arms as she cried and begged and asked them not to hurt her baby.

I don't judge sons on the sins of their mothers, Sansa had said, lip curling, and even though she was holding such a precious thing, there was nothing loving in her grip. Nothing gentle. Once it was over, it would be Arya that she would hand him to, and even though all the others could only look down on it and see a Lannister, Arya had smiled, held the child close to her chest and bent her head down so her hair fell over both their faces. You'll find that's where you and I differ.

"Your mother was married to my father, for a time." He reaches his hand down into the crib, and when the baby stirs, Gendry tricks himself into thinking that it was because he was answering to the sound of his voice. "We would have been raised in the same house, if things were different." If he was trueborn. If this child's mother didn't do the terrible things that she did. If Daenerys Targaryen hadn't sent the Lannister throne toppling into the dirt. "I would have taught you how to swing a sword."

He would have taught him so many things.

He would have protected him.

Even if he was never true born. Even if he only got to live in the castle, a shadow boy. He wouldn't have been resentful like Jon was. He would have just been grateful to have a family.

He's with the baby when Arya comes to him.

"Come on." Her gaze lands on the baby and a smile flits over her face, but then it's gone, and she stares up at him, all too big eyes and serious face. Arya stretches a hand out to him and he takes it. "It's time."

Time for the execution. Time for the Queen to not be a queen anymore. Time for Arya to cross a name off her list.

Gendry doesn't argue. He had planned to skip it, but the lords were expected to attend, and a part of him thinks that he has to be here, to see Arya finished what they had started. To watch her get rid of her very last ghost.

People stare at them when they walk into the room. Arya let's the eyes slide off of her, but Gendry curls in on himself like he always does, shoulders hunched up and arms tucked into his sides until he is nestled between Jaimie and Grey Worm, a few spaces over from Daenerys and the Starks.

"You promised me mercy, once." Sansa is speaking. Daenerys allowed her this. After this is over, Sansa would bend the knee, swear the North's loyalty to the Targaryen crown in perpetuity. "And then you cut off my father's head. Do you remember?"