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They meet by accident – the Queen has been excruciatingly careful to isolate the Tyrells and remaining Lannisters from the rest of court, but she forgot to police the library and so it is that Willas finds himself landing smack on his backside having run straight into the Lady Regent of the North.
Sansa, as he already knew from Loras’ stories, is devastatingly polite – she shrieks in horror once she realises who he is, what he is, and cannot do enough to get him back on his feet, offering her maester for his use if she has hurt his bad leg. He assures her that no, he is well enough, as well as he can be, and that she has caused no great harm to him.
He cannot do much more than that, though, because she is breath-taking and Willas is helpless before her.
*
He courts her quietly, away from the watchful gaze of the Queen and her most trusted advisors. Sansa laughs rarely, her eyes and heart shadowed by the hells she has traversed to arrive here in this sunny alcove with him, but when she does he is sure that there is not a more beautiful sound in all the world.
His brothers, he thinks, know that there is something going on – what they do not know, but Loras has commented more than once that Willas seems to have a spring in his uneven step, and Garlan keeps teasing that he has never seen Willas so well groomed. They’re right, both of them, but somehow even their persistent teasing does nothing to bring him down from the dizzy heights Sansa’s shy smile elevates him to.
*
There are many who court her openly, who have the luxury of doing so, and Willas hates them all with the sort of fervour he has always disapproved of so in Loras.
There is Prince Aegon, gleaming, silver Prince Aegon who could mayhaps match Sansa’s beauty, who has crowned her his Queen of Love and Beauty twice. There is the new Lord of Storm’s End, once Edric Storm now Edric Baratheon, raised by Renly to be as charming as it is possible for a man to be. There is, there is, there damn well is – she is the most desirable woman in the realm, the most beautiful, damn near the most powerful, and there is an endless line of suitable, more appropriate suitors waiting for her to only bestow a smile on them so they might claim her favour.
Willas sits and broods in the library, and he wonders how he might redeem House Tyrell. Then he feels a fool, and he wonders if mayhaps it is better that Sansa is so far out of his reach. She is so much younger than him, after all, and deserving of better than a cripple over a decade her senior for a husband.
*
Sansa, it would seem, disagrees.
She has already spoken to her brother, it would seem, and has his approval to go forward and marry as she pleases. Willas still cannot see what a woman like Sansa Stark could truly want from him – is this all a ploy to keep House Tyrell under control, under surveillance, a gift of sorts for her princely cousin? – but he is, he thinks, fool enough to agree when she asks him to take her as his wife. Who is he to say no to the liberator of the Vale and North and Riverlands, after all?
*
The Queen herself comes to Highgarden for the wedding, glaring about with suspicious eyes at the wealth that is still House Tyrell’s despite their shunting aside at court. Grandmother performs her usual act of appearing welcoming while actually being the most begrudging hostess to have ever lived, but Mother and Father are careful and deferential towards Her Grace.
Sansa arrives with an entourage of Northmen, riding alongside the boy they Wildling Wolf, Rickon, Lord of Winterfell, who is her image save for the pale silver-blue of his eyes. Willas watches his goodbrother-to-be carefully as the lad hands Sansa down from her horse, offers her his arm and walks her up the steps to the doors.
He growls under his breath, so softly Willas almost misses it, and his lip curls into a sneer – or a snarl? – as he snaps out a sharp, succinct greeting.
Willas smiles and accepts it graciously, welcoming the Starks to Highgarden. Sansa is flushed – with shame at her brother’s conduct? Surely not – and Rickon frowning, but they allow themselves to be lead to their chambers without further incident.
*
Their wedding was the finest to have ever been in the Seven Kingdoms, if Father was to be believed, and Willas was disgusted by the extravagance when there were dozens of smallfolk struggling through the winter.
He catches Aldwin’s eye, his most trusted man, and motions to the obscene spread on the tables with a raised eyebrow. Aldwin nods in understanding, and Willas sits back in relief, knowing that the food will not go to waste but will be distributed around the wall town. It is the best he can do, and while it is little enough it is better than the nothing his father would have offered.
He notices Sansa watching him with a queer look in her enormous eyes, and when he asks if she is well, she smiles and nods and says nothing, and he feels oddly embarrassed to have been caught out.
*
He is truly embarrassed – nay, ashamed – when he can barely make the short walk from the door to the bed when he is pushed into his-their chambers. He hates stairs, despises them, but his are the third finest chambers in Highgarden, after Father’s and Mother’s, and there are many steps between the banquet hall and the family’s apartments. Usually, he can manage the stairs at his own careful pace, pausing whenever his leg pains him too much, but tonight he was rushed up by his sister and cousins and the wives and daughters and sisters of his bannermen.
Sansa says nothing when he collapses onto the bed with a huff of relief, and he does not look at her until he has removed his brace – the only thing left to him – and settled back against the pillows.
He tries to speak, he does, to explain and make excuses, but she leans over and kisses him before he can find the words, and then she sits back on her heels, biting her lip and looking at him expectantly.
He asks the question that has been plaguing him for so long, then, twisting his fingers together with hers and not meeting her eyes. Why me? he says, and waits and waits as she takes back her hand and turns her back, stripping out of the sheer, skimpy shift that he suspects her brother insisted was left in place, and when he raises his head all he can do is reach out and brush his fingers over the latticework of pink and grey and white and silver overlaying the rich cream of her skin.
Because you understand she says, and when she kisses him this time he does not give her a chance to pull away.
*
There are knowing guffaws and teasing smiles everywhere they turn when Sansa’s belly swells a bare four months after their wedding, but Willas does not care – while he is still uncertain of her, still does not truly believe that she could want him, he is slowly coming to love Sansa. Before, he knows, he was besotted by her, but this is more, deeper, better.
Everyone believes that they have the perfect marriage, and in many ways he would agree, but she is so damnably stubborn that sometimes he half wishes he’d never married at all.
It is all because of Grandmother, he knows, insisting that they need to choose a name for the babe sooner rather than later, the better to be ready when it is born – when he is born, Sansa insists, and she never seems to believe it when Willas insists that he would be just as happy with a girl.
But the names Sansa wants, Rickard and Eddard and Robb, her grandfather’s and father’s and brother’s names, they are Northern names, names almost as alien to the Reach as the vibrant fire of Sansa’s Tully hair. He suggests Leyton and Martyn and Daved and even Edwyn, which is something of a compromise because he’s fairly sure he had a great-great-uncle on his mother’s side named Edwyn and Sansa is fairly sure that there was a Stark king named Edwyn years and years ago.
But they cannot come to an agreement, not even on Edwyn, and so at every meal and every evening when they sit together by the fire, they bicker and squabble like children, much to everyone else’s amusement and their constant annoyance.
He tries Tully names, thinking that that might be enough to sate her need to name her children for her family without giving the future Lord of Highgarden a name that will always raise eyebrows, but she is so damnably stubborn and refuses outright, although she does mock him by suggesting Edmyn and then deciding flat against it.
They are bickering over girls’ names – she wants Lyanna, Evanda, Deirdre, he wants Sulyn, Olwyn, Marei – when she suddenly doubles over, fingers digging into his arm, and squeaks out that mayhaps he should send for the maester.
*
Willas was always sure that his most frightening memory would remain either the crushing, cracking weight of Mander on his leg as Oberyn galloped away down the lists, or the sight of a great cream-and-gold dragon flying over Highgarden.
When the maester comes to the door requesting more linens because the bleeding won't stop and Sansa's screams - only Sansa's - echo out into the hallway, he knows that he has always been wrong.
*
Another scream pulses out into the hall, and Willas can’t help but press his hands over his ears to try and close it out.
He cannot lose Sansa. He cannot.
He is vaguely aware of Father, of Mother, of Garlan and Loras and Margaery and even Grandmother and Uncle Garth coming to talk with him, but he cannot think of any of them while Sansa still shrieks and cries, while her voice fades softer and weaker with every passing moment and still the midwives and maester refuse to let him in, still they will not tell him what is happening, if his wife and child are alive or dying or dead.
It seems at eternity before the doors of his and Sansa’s rooms finally swing open, a flushed and tired midwife motioning for him to come in, and he almost trips over his cane in his eagerness to see Sansa, to see the babe, because surely the woman would not look so proud if either were dead?
Sansa is asleep on the bed, blissfully unaware of the women changing the linens around her, snuffly little snores enough to reassure him that she is not dead, and Maester Lomys smiles and beckons to Willas, leading him towards the crib in the far corner, carved all about with roses, the same crib he and Garlan and Loras and Margaery were laid in before this babe, before his child, and all the rest of the Tyrells of Highgarden before them.
The old man offers his congratulations with a grin, and leaves Willas staring down at the two perfect, chestnut-haired, blue-eyed boys already wrapped in swaddling.
Twins he manages to gasp out, and then he laughs.
*
Sansa wakes slowly the following morning and huffs out her disgust at seeing the elder boy – Willas has already decided that he will be Leyton – with the wetnurse. She holds out impatient hands for the younger – Eddard, he thinks, Ned Tyrell has something of a ring to it – and Willas supports their son as Sansa unlaces her nightgown.
But then she stops, hand stilling and then dropping to trace the shape of little Ned’s face, and it takes a moment for Willas to understand that the hitch in her breath is caused by the tears in her eyes.
He looks just like Rickon did as a babe, she laughs, seeming as confused by the crying and giggles as Willas is, but then she kisses Ned’s hair and opens her neckline properly, and when Willas takes Leyton back from the wet nurse he thinks he will never be happier.