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

Ode to Hot Pie

bonus chapter!!!!

The cook is terrible.

Arya's trying hard not to be critical of that, even as she scoops up a spoonful of soup and lets it all drip back into the bowl for the third time in a row instead of swallowing it. Across the table from her, Gendry doesn't look any happier with it than she does, but he's still dutifully scooping up mouthful after mouthful.

That's what he is now.

Dutiful.

"Do you know," She says, knowing that she shouldn't start with it but also wanting to needle him about it. Starting a fight is better than watching him pore over all those reports that he has trouble reading, with the crease making a permanent home on his forehead and his bottom lip gone black and bloody from all the time he spends chewing on it. "That your cook is terrible?"

"Yeah, well, half the city is starving, Arya, I can't just," He waves his hand over the soup, at the weird lumps of overcooked meat that are somehow floating on the surface. "Go fetch lemon cakes and ice cream when my people are going hungry."

"You don't need lemon cakes." She shoves the bowl away and he stares at her, exasperated. It's how he always looks at her, but it's always so fond that she has to look away. "You just need a better cook. Good cooks made all the food easy to eat, no matter how little of it there is."

She wants to tell him about the clams. About lemon and salt and vinegar drizzling over her palm, how she would dive underneath the water and come up with them clutched in her palms when she got hungry. About throwing a fish down onto a fire and splitting it with strangers, how the brunt parts were the only flavor to it. About a group of soldiers cooking a rabbit on a stick, and how all of that was better than his cook.

"What do you want me to do?" He throws himself down into the chair, long legs reaching over into her space, and Arya smiles. "Go find a new cook?"

"No," She says, and thinks of pot pie where you brown the butter first, and bread folded into the shape of a wolf. "But I could."

He stares at her.

She stares back.

"No," He shakes his head, and laughs, and then does both at the same time. "Arya, you can't- he's all the way back in Winterfell! And whose to say- there's been like, three wars since you last saw him. Who's to say he's even alive?"

No one.

But he's survived this long. Hot Pie must have gotten good at it at some point.

"He's a cook. No one ever wants to kill the cook." She lifts up another spoonful of the stuff. It's so congealed that the top layer suctions up with it. "Otherwise, you get stuck eating things like this."

"It's just," He shrugs, goes red in the face. "That's a long way away."

"So?" She crosses over to him, lifts herself to sit on his lap, and his hands go to her waist to steady her without her having to ask. "Think I'll get lost?"

"No,-"

"That I'll get kidnapped? Some big bad robbers are going to come and take me away?" She shouldn't be joking. She's a good fighter, but she's not a good enough fighter to get herself out a situation where she's alone on the Kingsroad and gets ambushed by seven knows how many men. "Think I need some big strong man to keep me safe?"

She tries to circle her hands around his arms and pinch at his biceps, but her hands are too small, or his arms are too big, so it's more like she's just resting up against him.