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He clasped his hand around Hermione's and already felt that sort of familiar shudder of emotional transference. It might have made him feel perhaps a little more optimistic about things, but that only meant she'd be sharing in all his cynicism and general disapproval of all things unnatural.

"Anything will do," he answered. "Well. Nothing weird anyway."

Hermione nods her head - and she can feel his disapproval, the negativity, even as she combats it with her own certainty and the optimism she feels. Years in the Drabwurld might have worn her down, but she had to cling to something - and so she clung to hope, above everything else. She couldn't let herself drown, otherwise she'd be lost forever.

"I'm not sure what counts as weird anymore, you know."

But she tries, all the same, fighting her smile. She focusses and draws out memories, hoping that one of them slides across for Gendry to see and to share; her meeting with Ridire, her conversation with Lancelot, memories of her trying to help people - and then, just in case, the memory of Diarmuid singing to her, the same song she was humming before, so that Gendry can get the same warmth from it that she'd been given, once, a long time ago.

Gendry might have been trying to focus on such dull tasks like time spent in the forge or at long travel, but it was not for him to choose what she would see. The memory that rose from his subconscious was for the tree's benefit and not for her, though both would get to taste it.

The world seemed to gray, then there was the sound of a rushing river. The breaths and stench of other men flooded the senses and then they were all shuffling forward. We have to creep forward to see over the shoulders of the others, but there's a reason the rest have come to a stop. Lying in the mud just off the river is a corpse. One of the men, the tallest among the lot, gives the body a lingering look before spitting at his feet.

"Fuckin' Freys," he swore. "That's another one. Nastier than the others."

Another: "Gods but her face, they've nearly clawed her flesh off"

"Oh gods," uttered a stocky man as he fell to his knees to her. "Gods, look at her. Look at her, it's Lady Catelyn."

"Arya's mother," we whisper in surprise. To see this corpse, it was hard to tell she could be the mother of anyone. Her skin had paled to the color of curdled milk and her hair had become so discolored to be nearly white. Pinkish streaks ran across her face, with a nasty bloodless gash across her throat. She stank of death.

"Seven hells," the big man muttered. "How can you tell? She's nearly rotted through."

"It's her," the other replied. Desperately he turned his attention to balding man draped in red robes. "Thoros, you must call her back. You must."

"Are you mad?" Thoros asked. "Look at her, she's been gone too long. What would our Lord bring back? She is gone, Harwin. Let her be gone."

"Gone?" Harwin barked bitterly. "I have lost my Lord already and all his sons as well. She is here, it was meant to be. Please, you must try."

"I won't." In this, it was easy to see that Thoros would not be changing his mind, much as it seemed to pain him.

But our attention was on the half living man with the patch on his eye. He looked nearly as dead as the corpse did, though he could still will his limbs to move. He knelt in the mud across from Harwin and gestured that the woman be left to him. She was scooped into his arms and he stared down sadly at her.

"Your lord husband bade me this mission," he said so quietly that we could barely hear him. "Where has it ended? What has come of it? I have been where you are now. Do you envy me my life as much as I envy your death?"

"Beric," Thoros said cautiously, his hand resting upon the other man's shoulders. "This is the Lord's will. I know not what your purpose may be, but this..."

Beric lifted his head and fixed the red priest with a faint smile. Then his head lowered, he filled his lungs with breath, and with his lips upon the dead woman, he exhaled. For a moment they seemed like statues, until the man's body seemed to go still.

"Beric?" inquired the big man worriedly. "Lord Dondarrion?"

Beric's body fell, though not by his power. The woman's hands scrambled for purchase against him and she rose. Our breath caught in our throat and we felt the urge to run. By the gods above and below, she rose.

Arya's mother.

Lady Catelyn.

Hermione knows this person, not from meeting her but from the obvious connection - the whisper of familiar stories, of Sansa, the knowledge of Arya being her sister, knowing Robb and being a part of their world for a short time; she knows them and she knows who this is as the memory unfolds, and she wants to pull away from the connection as soon as she sees the body. As the memory unfolds she gets more and more afraid, the fear prickling down her spine like ice, making her grip Gendry's hand all the tighter, unable to stop. She can't look away, even if she wants to.

Robb's mother died, and they brought her back. They brought her back when she no face, no hair, nothing. She rose, standing, seeming too tall, broken and unmade and ugly, and Hermione had seen what the brink of death had done to people, she had seen Voldemort, shattering his soul into parts to avoid losing his life, she had seen Dullahan and she had seen rotting corpses, inferi that had no reason to live but to clamber and eat -

and she breaks, shifting and tugging her hand away, clasping it over her mouth as she fights her tears, shaking a little in the flickering sunlight that casts down from the treetops above.

Whatever Gendry gets from the tree... She hopes it was worth it.

It had been strange seeing Lancelot again. He'd been a knight cut from the same cloth as Gendry. They had trained together with Reynard, before that had gone sour on all of them. They might not have ever bonded as close friends, but there had been something inspiring. Lancelot had been more of a knight than Gendry could have ever hoped to reach, but it had shown that even someone common and without a name could do great deeds. Gendry had abandoned that course, but it felt bittersweet to see him like this, to feel a stronger friendship than what he'd known for himself. With all the walls he put up around himself, was this what he'd missed out on?

But then he felt the tightness on his hand and he pulled himself away from her memory. It was at that very moment she had broken away and Gendry's eyes went wide in alarm. She'd seen something and all at once, he realized it must have been something terrible. He started towards her.

"Hermione! What was it?" He hesitated even as his hand was about to reach out for her. "What was it? What did you see?"

Gendry reaches for her hand but she pulls away, stepping back and blinking at him. She had never imagined seeing anything like that, people coming back to life, the dead being restored - she knew Harry had survived at home because, in the end, he'd had an extra soul, he chosen to come back, but this... This person, this woman, this creature, the only word that fit, had never been given that choice. She'd returned and that was it; death and pain and hurt and, oh.

What would Robb say? How would Sansa and Arya feel? She couldn't ever tell them, could she? She couldn't go to Robb and tell him that his mother died and was brought back, that whatever she came back as wasn't entirely who she was before, surely. Looking back at the memory - there's no way the woman that returned to life was the same as Catelyn Stark. She couldn't believe it, it couldn't be that easy, that simple, that obvious.

Instead she blinks, staring up at Gendry, eyes wide and a little afraid.

"Robb's mother."

Lady Stoneheart. The name stuck in his throat and made him feel ill. After all this time he'd spent trying not to remember her, he did not imagine this tree would be so selfish as to pry that secret from his mind. He had hurt the Starks with it once already, he could not imagine having to see them suffer that truth a second time over. Not when he could see the pain already writ in Hermione's eyes and she had never known the woman at all.

He swallowed his discomfort and looked away.

"... I'm sorry, I didn't think it would be that. She's-" He clenched one of his fists together, then spread his fingers out again to the time of one long and heavy breath. "They can't know, Hermione. They had to know once already because of me. I can't do that to them again."

It's probably not as hard for her as it is for him, and Hermione feels like she's shivering under the weight of what she's learned. Her eyes can't move away from Gendry's face and she swallows, staring at him, before she forces herself to try and speak, to summon words. This seems like some kind of impossibility, but she knows just how Robb and Sansa and even Arya would react - there would be devastation for all of them, and she can't do that to them. She can't hurt them like that.

Neither of them could do this to the Stark family. It just wasn't fair to them - it wasn't right for them to suffer more than they already have.

"No, it's - it's not your fault. I know that sharing memories here isn't always logical, it doesn't make sense, I learned that before with Caster..." She breathes out a sharp little noise. "I won't tell them. I can't do that to them, not when they've just found out about Robb - I can't."

On the edge of his subconscious, he heard an old and familiar song of The Day They Hanged Black Robin, a tune well familiar to the Brotherhood who often saw the ends of their days being marked by a noose and a lonely tree. Only, they'd turned it around. Now it was Mother Merciless who condemned lords and knights to a rope's harsh end.

There, lying in the grass, he saw a bull-shaped helmet. It was the same as the very one he'd forged three years ago in King's Landing, which was stolen by one of Gregor Clegane's men, and later brought to him in the Drabwurld. It followed him yet again and he knelt down to pick it up, concluding that it was not worth it. It was just steel, cobbled together by a younger smith with naive sense of the world.

"... they call her Lady Stoneheart now. That and a lot of other things." He tightened his hands around the horns of the helmet. "Time was, we did good, you know? Least, I thought it's what we did. It was only dark days after that. I don't doubt that each Frey that dangled from those nooses didn't deserve it. But others..." He pushed himself back to his feet and he smudged something away from his cheek. "It's not her. A woman like that could have never raised them. There's only hate left in her now."

"I think that happens to people that die and come back, or came to the brink of death. There's something... Not right about them anymore, and it comes down to why they were reborn, why they came back - was it for good or for bad? And how can you tell, really? It's not until you see what's in someone's heart that you really understand what's going on, and then it might be too late."

She thinks, then, of Voldemort, of how it felt when she had realised what had happened to him - the split souls, the knowledge of how he had done it, murder upon murder, each one 'special' to him, how he had lost his heart and his soul, how everything about him had been wrong. He was borne of love potion and could never understand the emotion - perhaps he'd never had any hope of not being 'bad'. It might be the same for this Lady Stoneheart; brought back from death with memories of pain, hurt and vengeance on her lips.

How could anyone escape that fate?

"There's no way to hope that she will find some kind of sympathy and remorse. All we can do is hope that, one day, there's a way to draw her back from the hatred - to try and show her a better path, otherwise she has to go for good."

Death was about the only end he could see for her. Gendry could not fathom how a creature like her could live at all in that state. When all that was left for her was a broken and ravaged body, there couldn't be anything left after that. Not even after all his deaths had Beric been left in such a state.

"Lord Dondarrion had died too. Six times before that. It changed him too, though never like her." He frowned, feeling a deep sense of remorse for the loss of a man who had inspired so much in him. "But it must have broken him too, for him to pass it on to her."

There isn't hope, not really, when it comes to the dead - Hermione had seen it. The Drabwurld might have deluded her into thinking that people might come back after one, if they'd been given a shard, but beyond that? There was no real hope. They simply had to realise that trying to draw someone back from whatever beyond they'd gone to was not going to work - and it wasn't fair on the people who might have found peace.

"Lord Dondarrion might have been far stronger than anyone might have been able to guess," Hermione says quietly in return. "But I don't think he died with the same kind of hatred and need for payback that Robb's mother did. I know how he died, and that sort of betrayal will haunt you, even as a spirit." Pursing her lips, she shifts, a little awkwardly. "Maybe he had hope, and that hope failed him, but at least the hope was there. I'm sorry that it didn't work out the way you wanted."

He had shared more just then than he had with anyone in a very, very long time. It was a lot for him to say as much as he had and he never really knew what to do with sympathy. Sharing any kind of feeling with anyone was an awkward experience that he didn't rightly know how to return. After all, he'd saddled his own burden on top of her now.

So it only naturally fell upon him to rise above it. He rubbed at the tip of his nose, looked one direction and then another, and only finally back at Hermione. "What's dead is dead," he concluded. "I'm sorry for all that. You've plenty of problems already... you didn't need mine too."

Hermione isn't offering him huge amounts of sympathy - she's just standing there, trying to wrap her mind around it. It's magic she's never heard of herself, magic she could never begin to want to understand... But isn't that the same as the magic of Horcrux making? She'd never wanted to understand that, to wrap her mind around it, but she had. She'd been forced to, against her will, because she had read the books and had known she needed to prepare herself.

She hoped there would never be a time where she had to worry about this sort of magic.

Stepping forward, she reaches out and squeezes his hand gently before she nods.

"I learned a little while ago that problems don't seem as heavy when you share them with someone." And then, finally, Hermione shrugs a shoulder. "Now - has the tree given you anything?"

He had picked up the helmet before, though he'd done nothing to really show it off to her. The bull shaped helm might have been expertly craft, but it seemed a paltry gift after the memory he'd been made to share. Given the choice, he would have vastly preferred to simply put the days of work into simply making it again.

But she was kind, at the very least, and he didn't mind so much that she initiated contact again. There was no rush of sudden memories this time, but only instead the warmth and comfortable presence of a hot furnace from the forge he'd spent so many long hours around as a growing boy. It was where the helmet had been cast.

"This." He offered it for her to see. "I made this, more than three years past."

Hermione can feel the warmth - or she thinks she can, at least, and it makes her face feel hot and prickling, as if she's flushing instead of standing in front of hot coals. Lifting her head, she steps forward to look at the the helm, tilting her head to look at it; she doesn't try to reach out and take it away from him, nor does she ask that he pass it over, she simply basks in the fact that he's sharing the chance for her to see what he was given, something unique and important to him.

"I see what you mean about the metal on the planet here," she says finally. "If this is the sort of thing that's possible in your world then there's no point wasting materials here. It just doesn't seem like it would ever really work or come to it's full potential - even under the best of hands."

Moving back a step, Hermione gives Gendry a bit of space to breathe.

"It's beautiful, and really well made. I'm impressed."

He might not have looked it, but he was an artist, and the evidence of that was in his hands. But more than that, he was a critical artisan and while her words were appreciated, he held himself at too high of a level to simply accept them.

"It's amateur's work," he admitted before placing it on his own head. Only then did a grimace appear and he gave it a knock knock on the top of it. This was strange.

"Oh."

"It might be amateur to you, but it's incredible to me. I can't even imagine it."

Which is true. Hermione might have commissioned work from the blacksmiths at the Citadel, but she had never been any good at it herself. Maybe, if things had been different, she'd have learned, but she never had the chance, not really. She was always far too busy with all her work, with fighting, with the war... All of it.

Pausing, she frowns, tilting her head to try and peer at Gendry through the mask. "Oh?"

He tilted his head back down at her and only then did he take the helmet back off, flipping it over to stare inside. His complaint was incredibly petty, admittedly, but it still nagged at him anyway.

"I had this in the Drabwurld. You remember those little shadow beasts that only seemed to be scared of hounds? This was my reward, my boon, for helping out some. Only they'd enchanted it so it was always chilled inside." Gendry's expression twisted into a reluctant and embarrassed smile. "Not that it needed that, but it was... nice."

There had been something rather nice about wearing the helmet on a hot summer's day as well and how it kept his head cool, rather than bake it. He'd learned to make that particular enchantment himself, though he'd lost that power along with his Shard.

"Oh." Hermione knows she's repeating herself, but she steps forward to look at the inside of the helmet before she pauses. Gendry is without his shard and, therefore, without his magic - unless he had some natural ability that she didn't know about - but she pauses, hesitating for a moment, before she tilts her head up and looks at him with a shyness she can't quite force away.

"I remember. Things don't always need to be enchanted, but it does help more often than not. I remember when Lancelot taught me the rune for 'warmth' when he was stitching it on his blankets - it was a little ridiculous. I've never been all that good at sewing."

Tilting her head up, she pauses for a moment.

"Do you remember what the enchantment was? Or if it was a rune? I could recreate it for you."

He traced it with his finger inside the helmet, but stopped before he finished and instead tilted it back towards himself. If she could manage it, that was just as well. But he was suddenly very aware of what he was requesting and he was already in her debt for getting this far. Besides that, he knew good and well it was trouble getting too involved with pretty girls. He was flustered enough already having to deal with grim memories, much less conversation and receiving favors.

"It makes no matter," he insisted very suddenly before placing it back on his head and so out of her reach. "It's not so hot here or on the ships. This will do."

Hermione blinks in surprise, but she doesn't protest. To her it was a simple offer, borne of friendship rather than anything else, and she didn't really see it as anything that Gendry would ever owe her - she just wanted to help, since that's what she does. It's what she's always done, and considering that this man is only person that remembers the Drabwurld, just like her, in a way she can't forget... It makes her want to keep him a little bit closer. Still, she fights back her arguments, nodding her head.

"Of course, that's fine too," and she smiles. "There might even be a cold snap on the fleet one day and then you'll be glad for the stuffy helmet."

At the very least, he returned the smile and spoke with experience. "Might be I'll make an even better one. Enchantments are always stronger when forged with the steel."

There might have even been a metaphor there, something about friendship and forged in fire. Or perhaps it was just Gendry only accidentally appearing to be saying more than he actually was. Either way, it was something of a relief to have someone like Hermione around. Not because of the utility of what she could do, but simply because it meant that perhaps the last two years of his life amounted to more than just the nothing he might have otherwise assigned it. She reminded him that this part of his past mattered.

"That would be just as amazing. Maybe the next planet will have better materials and a good forge and you can have as many attempts as you'd like. It's entirely possible, given what I've seen so far."

Poisoned moons, planets where touch inspired memories... It's nothing like the Drabwurld but it has the hallmarks of it all the same, just as she'd expect. Solais and the Seelie had taught her that the Drabwurld was the root of all the universes, all the worlds, and if that was the case then it was the start of this one, too, with the fleet and all it's crew and the ridiculous television show. Lifting her shoulders, she manages a smile.

"And if not then you have your present as a good back up."

In the end, he decided not to talk about his intentions to stay on the planet. If he was going to be dragged along with this fleet to gods only knew where, then perhaps it wouldn't be nearly so awful as he imagined it. Though it did seem particularly awful.

"Thank you," he managed to say in a moment of unusual maturity. "For all of it."

Perhaps others might have done this too, but that didn't matter. Good people weren't perhaps so rare as in the world he hailed from, but that didn't lessen any of. She had done it for him. Gendry would remember that.

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