#this one i think can 95% be read without reading the fury just pretend Sandor Made It

[gizkasparadise]

Before the beginning for the fury please you genius?

aksjda ty warnings for some gross descriptions re: Great Burning. also here @ ao3  

from ch. 4 of fury:

“Were you there?”

Arya immediately knows what he means. Unbidden, it all comes back: the screams, the smell of blood and burning flesh that will never, ever leave her. A child clutching on to a small, wooden horse. Ceilings caving in around her. A man who looked a little too much like Gendry grabbing her shoulders and asking for his wife. Arya swallows.

All her senses are submerged. Arya fights her way through the swarming crowds without seeing, her already beaten body being shoved and pushed. All she hears is a muted whistle, a solitary keening note that overpowers the screams and crashing debris and the shriek of a dragon. Arya moves without thought or intent, letting the crowd push her movements along and it’s not until she feels something heavy on her shoulder that the current is broken. 

“My wife!” She hears, distorted at first, although clearer on the second time. “Have you seen my wife?!”

Arya’s gaze focuses for the first time since escaping the Red Keep. Even then it’s a little off-center. The man in front of her is about a decade older, his eyes green and not blue, and his hair is dark but not cut as short. 

“Have you seen her?”

Her tongue is swollen. She can’t move it to form words. The man isn’t even looking at her, truly, because if he did he would understand that she doesn’t know him. Doesn’t know his wife. That it’s useless, right now, to ask about the fate of one person while thousands were dying.

He doesn’t ask again, and once his hand leaves Arya’s shoulder, it’s like whatever was drowning her releases, letting her come up fully into her senses. 

Standing on the outskirts of Flea Bottom as it burns alive, she wishes it hadn’t.

--

Arya never sees that man again, but once it’s done, she sees others. Women weeping over their children, children weeping over their siblings or parents. She sees a woman with red in her hair hunched over a boy about ten and screaming and Arya has to turn down onto another street. But it doesn’t matter. They’re everywhere.

A man sits slumped against the wall, a charred husk of something in his lap that he sings to with a voice thick from tears.

A child, no more than five, wanders around--a lone figure standing in a smoking street. He doesn’t cry at all, just stumbles in confusion in a place that isn’t, anymore.

She’s so exhausted that she trips over one of the bodies. 

Have you seen her?

--

“Why,” he can barely breathe, and so she knows this is pointed. “The fuck...you here?”

Arya sits at Sandor’s bedside. She doesn’t do anything sentimental like hold his hand. Instead her eyes find a place on the floor, staring at the red-tinted brick and trying to find an answer she doesn’t have. 

More skin of his is bandaged than not, the bandages stained yellow from sweat and pus. The Maester doesn’t think he’ll last another night.

“Go...home.” His chest can’t rise or fall deeply. Everything he says sounds like he’s running, like he’s submerged just like she was. “So I. Can die.”

Arya’s eyes burn. 

She doesn’t go home.

--

It’s Jon who cries first. Two days after the Burning, they’re alone, sitting on a stone bench in the courtyard at night. They’re talking about what it’s safe to talk about--the supplies, clearing debris--when he suddenly stops, hunching over and hiding his face as his back starts to heave. It’s small at the beginning, then bigger and bigger. Like a spiral winding out. Soon it becomes full sobs, and Arya doesn’t want him to do it. Because if he breaks, if her big brother breaks, then she can’t…

She doesn’t. Her own tears sting as the fall into the open cuts she has on her cheeks and lips, her own breathing rattles from the soot she’s still coughing out of her lungs. Neither can speak, so they don’t, and after awhile they both wipe their eyes, nose, and mouth and start talking about rations again.

--

Being in the Keep, surrounded by soldiers in silvers and blacks and reds, makes her hands shake. So Arya spends most of her time in the city. It’s backbreaking work. She clears brick, sometimes finding remains behind or under it. She scrubs the streets, scorch marks the only thing remaining of the bodies lying on top of them. She gathers what’s left of wood for the massive pyres that they’re holding in the street for the dead, as though more fire will bring any sort of closure. In the flames, more than once she sees the face of Beric, hears his blood-choked command for her to live.

Arya watches children while their parents search for their spouses, brings bread and apples for people to eat from the Keep. Arya keeps her body moving so her mind can’t catch up to it. So she can disappear like the burned stones and bodies everyone’s so eager to be rid of. 

--

When she closes her eyes, the image that keeps coming back is the man who grabbed her. But after she forgets what he looks like, the features start becoming someone else’s. It’s Gendry who is gripping her arms, Gendry whose eyes are wide and whose face is caked in blood that isn’t dried yet.

“My wife?” He asks her, hand shaking her shoulder. “Have you seen my wife?!”

No, Arya thinks as she bites down on her lower lip. No, she isn’t here.