Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Arya had always loved zombie movies, ever since her parents started to be more lax about what she was allowed to watch on TV. All those gritty late night cable showings of Romero classics she started watching in fourth grade were a sort of gateway drug. She’d watched them on the tiny 13" television she had in her bedroom, a hand-me-down that Robb passed on to her, complete with a rabbit ear antennae and tin foil, while she curled up in her blankets long after her bedtime. 

She'd introduced Gendry to what she claimed were the ‘newer classics’ her freshman year at Winterfell College. It took all of her willpower not to make fun of him when she first made him watch 28 Days Later, sitting against the wall on the bottom bunk in her dorm room, and he grabbed her hand under the blanket during the scary bits. 

They never thought it'd actually happen. Sure, they'd spent late nights talking about what they'd do or wouldn't do, and who from their group of friends would bite it first. And when it did actually happen, there were a few things she was glad of. 

That these seemed to be the viral infection sort, not the "when there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth" sort. 

That they were slow moving, couldn't climb ladders, jump well, and that the cold weather seemed to slow them down even more. 

That she'd been raised to shoot, to stalk and kill wild game with her father and uncle, slinking through the woods outside their old Stark Estate. 

That Sansa was better at this than she'd ever imagined. Because of her, they were dry tonight. They'd made their way to a small town, which thankfully to not be crawling with Others, and hit up the grocery store and pharmacy to try and find anything that was left. This was what Sansa was good at - supply runs, quickly getting what was needed, or what she thought they'd need down the line. That afternoon when they did a sweep of the town, she'd came across a small pharmacy that wasn't picked over, and enough canned goods at the grocery store to be the hero of a food drive. 

They'd all thought Sansa was crazy when she suggested they spend the night in a yoga studio. Just trust me on this one, she'd said. It'll be easy to clear, and lots less hiding places like there are in the grocery store. Besides, most of the houses around are pretty worse for the wear... And no one would suspect it. It's even on the second floor, so it'll be easy for whoever is on watch.

No one else had a better suggestion, so they agreed; Jon and Gendry hid the cars, and made it inside just as the rain started to pour down. Everyone soon figured out another reason why Sansa had suggested it. Inside she quickly found a closet full of blankets, and a storeroom stocked with bulk store sized cases of fancy spring water and expensive gluten-free protein bars, all of which would get taken with them in the morning. They’d found more matches and lighters in an office desk, presumably for the candles that were scattered about the practice room, as well as a couple unopened cartons of AAA batteries. She just shrugged and said that every yoga studio she'd ever been in was like that. 

It'd be one of their more lucky days. They had those, at times. Sansa and Shireen grabbed all the yoga mats, lining them up one for each of them, and then stacked them up trying to make it as plush as possible. After sleeping in the cars or on the ground the last two weeks, it felt amazing. Shireen made a high-pitched squeaking noise earlier when she'd found a cardboard box full of expensive hand-knit socks from alpaca farmers in Essos. They’d eaten a feast of room temperature soup that they’d found earlier that day, and joked that if you closed your eyes, the chocolate chip protein bars were almost like a Snickers. Almost.

It was the middle of the night when Arya awoke and saw that it was Gendry on watch by the window, sitting on a wooden chair. It had been a quiet night so far. She wrapped herself in one of the blankets and padded over to him.

"Hey, Gen, do you remember when we saw Zombieland?" she whispered. 

"Do I remember the seventeen times we saw Zombieland? Yes, I do."

"Good thing we never thought it'd actually be like that... All funny and shit," she said. She sat down on his lap and pulled the blanket around both of them. 

"Oh, I dunno. We've had some pretty funny times since the world went to pieces."

It was a bright moonlit night, and Gendry could see the side-eyed stare Arya was giving him. 

"What? We totally have." He paused a moment to think. "Don't you remember when we spent the night in that double wide outside of White Harbor? We put on all those old clothes and costume jewelry we found and played about fifty games of War until Ygritte fell asleep at the table, dressed up like Mama Rose from Gypsy. The rest of us changed clothes and fell asleep in a pile in the wall-to-wall Casterly King bed, but we left Ygritte out there... gods, how confused she was when she woke up like that... Or how about when Sansa opened the pickup truck door and fell into that giant mud puddle? She walked around for two days like the Creature from the Black Lagoon."

"Oh, that!" Arya laughed. "Now that was something I'll never forget--"

"Hey!" Rickon half-yelled, careful to not make too much noise. He'd sat up on his yoga mat, Shireen still curled into him. They were young, and sometimes Arya thought she shouldn't let them sleep like that, but they seemed to have a connection and in the end, who slept with who was low on her list of worries. "Could you two be quiet? Some of us would like to sleep."

"Ugh, fine, Rickon," Arya answered. She whispered a "sorry" to Gendry, kissed the spot below his ear, then stood up and walked back to her makeshift yoga mat bed. "Back to sleep with both of us. You've got next watch anyways."

Rickon let out a groan to show his unhappiness at his watch schedule, and she heard Gendry almost giggling to himself as she curled up in the blankets. At least one of us is still great at finding the bright spots. 

In the morning, they'd load up the station wagon, its roof box, and the piece of crap Blazer with blankets, food, yoga mats, medicine, Shireen's prized socks, and all the full and half full rolls of toilet paper they could find. Lucky days were few and far between, and they'd take as many as they could get. 

Chapter Text

Ygritte couldn’t remember her first kiss, which Sansa thought was a shame. Rickon was unable to remember the first time he’d broken a bone, since he was so reckless before the turn, but Arya usually reminds him that it was his left wrist when he was three, from a Pogo stick accident. Shireen seems to recall that the first movie she saw in theaters was Finding Nemo, only because there were pictures of her with Nemo and Dory stuffed animals in an album she used to have.

They could all remember the first one they killed.

The first week, when the radios were still working and the blockades were going up, they’d all stayed holed up in the Stark Estate. It was the first weekend of fall semester break. Jon and Ygritte had arrived first, before anything started, to watch Rickon and Shireen, and Ned and Catelyn had left the same day for their own vacation in the Riverlands. They were both stationed at one of the Westerosi military outposts along the North Wall mountain range and it was only a half hour plane ride into Winterfell. That was a Saturday. Sansa’s flight in from Highgarden landed Sunday morning, and Arya and Gendry arrived Sunday morning from their university in Winterfell. Robb was in the Westerlands with his wife, Jeyne, and Bran was still at his boarding school in Greywater.

The hope was that it wasn’t real somehow. Monday afternoon they lost power, and with that, telephone and cell phone service. The middle of October was already cold in the North, so they brought blankets and slept in the great room in front of the fire place. Sansa suggested turning on the generator in the garage, but Jon decided they needed to conserve gas, just in case.

Just in case arrived two days later. The last broadcast they’d picked up on the battery-powered radio was a plea to the Seven to save them all, then screaming, then static, then nothing.

They left shortly after that.

After Gendry got furious and knocked over the kitchen table.

After Jon and Ygritte prepped the cars and siphoned every drop of gas from the riding lawn mower.

After Rickon and Shireen ransacked the house and shed for anything useful.

After Arya silently gathered clothing, tears running down an otherwise stoic face.

After Sansa emerged from the basement with Robb’s old hockey duffel bag, filled to the brim with knives, hunting rifles, and other guns.

It was getting cold, and no one wanted to stick around Winterfell to find out whether they’d freeze or starve first.

Gendry was the first in their group to kill one, hitting a monstrous looking female figure in a flowered dress with the front left side of the station wagon. He’d laughed, yelling “Volvo one, Zombies zero!” as he raised a fist up.

They found a house to stay the first night, on a side road outside of Moletown. It had a ‘for sale’ sign in the front yard and was still impeccably furnished for showings.

Sansa’s first time was before they’d even gotten into the house. Jon had pressed the handle of a large buck knife into her right palm and went to go check the shed for anything useful. She’d watched him open the shed doors and head inside, turned her gaze for a second to check on everyone else, and when she looked back towards the shed she saw one coming out of the patch of trees on the east side of the property, making its way towards the shed. Her fingers curled around the handle and she took off, sprinting as fast as four years of breaking high school track records could take her, and slammed the blade of the knife into the Other’s skull full up to the hilt before she realized she’d done it. It fell to the ground and she bent down to wipe the blood and bits of brain matter on to the grass, then walked back to the group as if that had been a completely normal thing for her to do.

The next morning, Jon and Ygritte went outside first as everyone else got ready. The rest of the group emerged from the garage just in time to see Jon and Ygritte taking on a group of five, the biggest group they’d seen since they left Winterfell. He was holding a hunting knife taken from their father’s collection and Ygritte held two hammers, which she must’ve grabbed from the garage on her way out. Everyone knew that they’d both had years of military training, in explosives, sharp-shooting, hand-to-hand combat, and both had seen their share of action in Essos and the far north, but it was different to watch them like this. They weren’t moving in sync with each other, but even just from observing, you could tell that at each second they knew where the other was. Every watched in awe as Jon and Ygritte made quick work of the five Others.

Arya got her first later that morning. They’d stopped at a small town gas station along the W10, favoring the provincial roads instead of the Kings Road Expressway, which they had figured was either gridlock, or barricaded, or worse. There were three seemingly abandoned cars out front whose passengers were nowhere to be found. Arya had volunteered to have a look around the gas station for any supplies while Jon and Gendry worked to siphon gas from the abandoned cars.

It was a bit picked through, but there were still some useful items she could pilfer. Arya was in a back aisle that held the gas station’s small assortment of pharmacy items, home goods, and car maintenance items, when she heard a noise from across the store.

“… Rickon? Is that you?” she asked, not looking up from the travel sized bottles of aspirin as she shoved them into her bag. “You know Jon told you to stay at the car…”

Her voice trailed off when she heard a step and a drag, step and a drag. Shit. She turned to her left and it was right there, a fat old man dragging a snapped left ankle and wearing a name tag on his gas station issued polo. It was awkward the way she was still holding her backpack, making it difficult to reach her knife. She backed up a few steps, scanned shelves and quickly found her new weapon.

“Sorry, Walt,” she said, as she picked up the four-way lugnut wrench and shoved one of the ends through its eye socket.

Rickon was purposely shielding Shireen from having to kill one. It’d taken weeks before she’d finally had to. Not Rickon – he’d gotten his not too long after Arya. The Other couldn’t have been much older than he was, and in truth was no real threat to him or the group, but he was of the idea that it didn’t matter if they were a threat that second, they all had the potential to kill them later. If there was an easy shot at taking one out without risking any harm, he felt it was something they needed to do. “If we don’t take care of it now, we might see it again later when it’s hungry,” he’d say. He was able to sneak up the first one quietly – he’d always been able to sneak up on anyone. It was walking along, on the side of the road when they’d stopped for a bathroom break. It didn’t know what was coming when Rickon’s crow bar, his new favorite, entered the right side of its skull, pressed through, and made its way out the left side. The gooey noise he heard made his eyes go wide, it was oddly satisfying.

Everyone had been telling Rickon that he needed to let Shireen start helping. She was a year older than him, relatively fit and quick, and light on her feet like he was. Arya and Ygritte had taken to letting her keep them company during their night watch shifts so that she felt like she was helping out, which quickly turned into impromptu knife handling lessons. So far, they’d been lucky to not have to use the guns very often, and the certainly couldn’t work on target practice with Shireen in the middle of the night.

It had actually been about a month into things. They were passing through a small country town, somewhere in the plains outside of White Harbor, as they were not willing to attempt to go to a city. With their cars parked in the middle of an intersection, everyone grabbed their backpacks and made their way to search the grocery store on the corner. It was actually a Fossaway’s, surprising for this small of a town, and they hoped that all of the canned goods wouldn’t be picked over. Sansa kept watch by the front door as the made their rounds, but they came running quickly when they heard her whistle, and immediately saw why she had called them back.

“Oh, for fucks sake,” Ygritte said, breaking the silence as they stared out the glass doors. There was a crowd forming around the area where the two cars were parked.

Gendry tightened the straps on the hiking backpack he wore, pushed his hair out of his eyes, and picked up his metal baseball bat from the ground. He checked the knife holder on his belt, adjusting it more to the front, easily accessible in case he needed it. “Ready, guys? There’s about 50 by my count. Biggest crowd we’ve seen yet.”

Everyone followed Gendry’s suit and started to get their things ready. Rickon didn’t say anything until he saw Shireen move towards the sliding glass doors and noticed the axe in her hand.

“What are you doing?” he asked, the words a bit too loud, a bit too harsh when they left his mouth.

Shireen was used to the way Rickon reacted sometimes. She tempered him when he was quick to anger, and replied firmly, but calmly, in a nonchalant way. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Shir, you can’t go out there. Just stay, out of sight, and we’ll give you the whistle when you can come out.” He made to grab for the axe and she quickly jerked it farther from his reach.

“If I don’t go it’s more of them for all of you. I need to do this. I need to use this axe for more than just splitting kindling.”

“You can’t keep her in hiding forever, Ric,” Jon said. “We’ll all be out there too. What if she got cornered in here without us?”

She opened and tightened her grip on the handle a few times, making sure she had the best grip possible. There was no way she wanted it to slip out of her hand while she was trying to prove herself. They’d never let me out of the car again. “You can’t stop me. I can outrun you.” She took his hand for a second to calm him down, but wasn’t able to hold on for long.

Gendry pulled the door open and they walked out into the sunlight, shielding their eyes as they made their walk towards the crowd, the adrenaline of it all making them break out into a jog. Shireen ran towards the right side of the crowd at an easy pace, not wanting to tire herself out and need anyone’s assistance.

As she got closer, she quickly picked out her first target, a young woman not much bigger than her. Shireen managed to catch her off guard, sending the blade of the axe into the back of her skull, and stopping her in her tracks. The blade stuck a bit, so like she’d seen everyone else do dozens of times, she picked up a boot-covered foot and kicked her torso, forcing the axe loose and the newly actually dead Other to the pavement.

After that, it was easy. She spun towards the remainder of them and plotted out her plan of attack in her head, then quickly started again. By the time they all re-grouped, standing around the two cars, and catching their breath, Shireen felt for the first time since this all started that she really belonged in this group, that she wasn’t just dead weight. She could do this, and she would survive.