fic: A Little Shit

[tiny_white_hats]

Title: A Little Shit

Fandom: Game of Thrones

Characters: Arya Stark, Joffery Lannister

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: unbeta'd

Word Count: 892

Disclaimer: I don't own anything mentioned in this unofficial fanwork. All characters are the property of George R.R. Martin and friends.

Summary: Human AU. Somebody needs to give Jofferey Baratheon a good punch in the face. His next door neighbor Arya Stark is more than happy to do one better.

A/N: My final entry for trope_bingo, for the trope au: neighbors. I just started watching Game of Thrones very recently, and I'm already completely obsessed, so that's why the sudden new fandom.

Arya Stark was not fond of Joffery Baratheon. This wasn’t a popular opinion among her family. For one, her mother insisted, they had lived next to the Baratheons (the Lannister-Baratheons, Mrs. Lannister-Baratheon kept saying, but the name never seemed to stick) for generations. Furthermore, her father declared, Robert Baratheon was a good man, not to mention his best friend, and he’d raised a good boy. And finally, her sister snapped, she was dating Joffery, and Arya needed to be nice to her boyfriend. Arya was convinced by none of those reasons.

Joffery Baratheon was a whiny little shit, Arya had decided a long time ago. He was the kind of boy who, in elementary school, had lit ants on fire with a magnifying glass and then blown out the fire, just so he could light each ant ablaze again. Arya had been the kind of girl who punched boys like Joffery Baratheon in the face and then stomped on their magnifying glass until they shattered like window panes. (She had gotten into trouble for that, more often than not. Like when she gave Viserys Targaryen a bloody nose, her parents had been less than impressed, but then Theon had started bringing her along to his fencing lessons, so Arya had considered it a win.) And now, in high school, Joffery liked nothing better than using his wealth and inexplicable popularity to bully and manipulate and hurt other kids, like some sort of low grade sociopath. Arya had been itching to do something for ages now (ever since he’d incited the entire cafeteria to laugh and call Sam Tarley fat, or when Ros had come to school the morning their first date with wrists and knee mottled with inky purple bruises) but she’d refrained, mostly because her best friend Gendry had an awful habit of reminding her just how much trouble she’d be in if she hit Joffery and had a severe height advantage over her. But this time was different, because he had involved her family, and Arya was going to make Joffery scream. Nobody messed with the Starks and got away with it.

                                

The problem wasn’t so much that Joffery had dumped Sansa (because Arya was 600% behind anything that would get her sister away from that psycho), but that he publically dumped her on the school’s front lawn, just so he could turn on his heel and ask Margery Tyrell to Prom. Sansa was humiliated and furious and wildly, impotently angry, but she wasn’t going to do a thing about it. Arya wasn’t nearly so complacent, and she was out for blood.

                                  

The Baratheon’s had excellent security (had excellent everything, really, excepting moral fiber, apparently), but they never bothered to watch the border between Baratheon and Stark property. Nonetheless, Arya had no interest in being recognized when she snuck in, so she tucked her hair under one of Jon’s old black caps (back from when he was in that skiing phase) and crept from ironwood to ironwood, hiding in her bulky black hoodie and cargo pants behind the trunks. She figured that she looked enough like a boy that nobody would suspect her, even if one of the security guards got lucky and spotted her, so she was safe.

                                  

            Luckily, for as clever as his mother was, Joffery was glaringly stupid, and lacked the good sense to lock the glass door to his balcony, which was right below the thick, hanging branches of an ironwood tree. Arya slipped in through his balcony door, quiet as a whisper, finding Joffery’s room empty, just as she’d expected. No doubt, Joffery was busy bullying people and would return home far too late. She looked around the room quickly, taking in the heavy steel chair in the corner and the lavish bed covers, before pulling his closet door open and laying her package dead center in the middle of the floor. She knelt down and pulled it open, taking care to lean back so as not to smell its contents, and slipped a small device within it. Sealing it loosely, Arya left the stinking package lying in the center of the room and made a break for the balcony, swinging the doors shut behind her as the package emitted a steady, humming beep.

                            

She climbed from the balcony to a nearby branch, and sat for a few seconds, lying in wait. Then, it happened (a small boom, a thick splat) and Arya jumped down from her owl-like perch in the old tree. She left the Baratheon’s backyard, incredibly grateful that Gendry had been willing to teach her some of the bizarre odds and ends he learned in his engineering class (things like welding or designing or building small grade cherry bombs), and that Nimeria shit quite so much.

                                     

She crossed the property line into the Starks’ backyard with a smirk, thinking just how fitting it was that she had left an exploding bag of shit for such a little shit. It was beginning to seem almost poetic, the longer Arya thought about it. But the poetry was far less important than the vengeance, and Arya was certain that Joffery came home to find his room splattered in dog shit, he was going to absolutely lose it.

                                                

Arya was just hoping he’d scream so loudly that she’d be able to hear it, one house over.

fin.