Chapter Text
"Won't you take her with you?" Walda repeats, her desperation hidden behind a sweet tone, visible only in her aching eyes. "Say that you will, she'd have such a lovely time in the Capital. With the Red Keep and the harbour and all. Wouldn't you like to see it, Jeyne?"
"Yes, Lady Mother," Jeyne Rivers whispers, curtseying again to avoid Gendry's eyes, her cheeks flush with embarrassment, to be trotted out in public like this.
This is what Robb Stark must feel like all the time, Gendry thinks, somewhat hysterically. Trapped between what law and custom dictates, and what he feels to be right and honourable. Or between simpering Walda in her humongous pile of pink ruffles, and Arya fuming at his back, her pregnancy just beginning to show through her riding leathers.
"I would have written to Winterfell, had I known who you were! Father wouldn't have objected me marrying Robert Baratheon's son, oh no." Walda continues blithely, "But I thought you were bound for the Night's Watch, see, so I never thought to see you again."
He can't deny the story is plausible. The small girl has the Baratheon look, no doubt, straight black hair tied back into a single scraggly braid, big blue eyes. The features have been made infamous since Cersei's disgrace. But Gendry isn't the only man in the North with dark hair, and blue eyes are common. She's the right age, probably. But at that stage, a moon or two, or even a full year can be forgotten, and how would he notice? He only has Walda's word for her birth date. But does it really matter?
Gendry considers it as he drops to a crouch, to better see her, this trembling little girl. She's clearly terrified of him. Of what he might do to her, as he gently lifts her chin with his thumb. Gendry is a Baratheon now, after all, and "fury" is in their words.
But Gendry doesn't feel anger when he looks at Jeyne Rivers, in her second-hand dress, with fraying seams and a torn hem. Only pity, that she will be stuck here at the Twins. No lord that comes a-calling would take her fat mother to wife with a bastard in tow, and what kind of life will she continue to suffer here? Yet another mouth in a crumbling holdfast with too many to feed. And a bastard one at that. Last to be fed, last to wed.
Gendry well understands what it was like to be nothing and no-one to anyone. He was a motherless urchin in Flea Bottom, until Jon Arryn paid Tobho Mott to take him in as an apprentice, for the luck of who his father was.
It doesn't matter if she's not his. Not really. Doesn't he owe it to Jon Arryn, to raise her up? A way of paying back some of the debt he owed the man, as Gendry never could during Jon's lifetime.
"Aye," says Gendry, tucking a loose strand of hair behind the girl's ear. "I'll take her."