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…
The first time it ever happens, Sansa and her husband are standing amongst the ruins of Winterfell together.
A light snow is falling, flakes that whip about like dust to sting her face. Cracked stone edges are sharpened rather than blurred in her vision: here was the kitchen, with its smoke pit and a hearth large enough for two men to stand up in. Here was the larder with its barrels full of dry apples and salt pork and chestnuts. Here was the smithy, the sept, the stairs to the library tower, the glass garden where her mother had grown roses all through winter.
Tyrion holds their lantern up against the blue evening air. He wears a heavy bearskin cloak about his shoulders, the blonde of his patchwork hair as pale as new wheat against the black fur. The breath comes out of him in white clouds.
And the whole time it takes them to pace out the grave of Sansa’s old life, her husband never says a word. He never reaches out to touch her. He never seems to notice she is crying, tears freezing to crystal on her lashes.
He merely keeps the lantern steady, clearing a path for them through the softening twilight, and this proves to be enough.
(For a moment the silence between them changes, becoming somehow clear and empty and full at once like a bell awaiting its first strike, and then it is gone.)
…
The second time it happens, Sansa is watching her husband shave his face in the broken fragment of a looking glass.
She has thrice offered him the use of her own mirror, on the grounds that he will only end things by cutting himself otherwise. Tyrion has thrice refused it, on the grounds that he is already missing a nose and so losing anything else will simply even out the picture.
He tips the shard at sidelong angles, as though attempting to see his way around dark corners. The white lather in his beard – Sansa has made that soap herself, cutting its smell of tallow fat with lemon peel and lavender – causes him resemble a wizened little old man, for all that he looks like a child from behind.
She should be untangling her hair, Sansa distantly remembers. The bone comb’s strokes slow before finally pausing while she studies him.
He pulls the razor’s straight blade down his jaw, scrapes it up the exposed curve of his throat, purses his lips to catch at the wicks of his mouth, and everything done with that same practiced, studious concentration. Water ripples in the basin when he taps his razor clean on its porcelain rim. Sunlight reflected off the water’s murky surface flickers along his arms.
“My lord,” she turns in her chair, “I thought you said a beard served you better in the cold.”
“I did.” He splashes his face, lets the water drip. “But it seems old age shows itself in a man’s face before it shows upon his head.”
(Well, yes, that was also true. She has noticed gray hairs beginning to appear through the black and blonde, although they are closer in color to fish scale-silver or smoke-white than to gray.)
Sansa coils up all her own hair and holds it fast atop her head with the comb.
“I should think the appearance of gray hair would give you something to be smug about – it’s certainly not an accomplishment most men we’ve known can boast of.”
Tyrion raises one elbow, which is perhaps meant to indicate a shrug.
From the edge of her eye, Sansa catches sight of her own reflection in the mirror: the pale throat, the freckled shoulders, the short cloud-wisp curls that frame her neck. She will be nineteen this year, and Tyrion will be – ah.
She comes to stand before him.
“You missed something here.” She taps her face with two fingers. “No, no. A bit more towards the left, my lord.”
Tyrion lifts the razor.
Before she can bridle her own giddy impertinence, Sansa reaches down and gives the shaving basin’s water a good, broad slap. Suds splatter Tyrion on the chin and cheek and go right up his perfectly functional nose.
(Sansa turns away as he sputters with astonishment and mock offense, but not before her heart beats itself hard against her ribcage like trapped bird. She lays a hand over it until it eases.)
…
The third time it happens, Sansa and her husband are sailing out from beneath the Titan of Braavos. They stand at the ship’s stern, hands gripped around its deck rail, watching their wake carve the water’s surface like a pair of iron shears.
“The salt air,” Tyrion remarks.
Sansa glances down at him. The tips of his ears have turned shell-pink from the chill and damp.
“My lord?”
“The statue.” Tyrion points vaguely towards it as the massive shadow falls over them. “You asked what lends the bronze that greenish color. From what I’ve gathered, it would seem to be all the rain and seawater in this air – and age. Like rust. In the time Lomas Longstrider wrote of it, he said you could see it gleaming in the sunlight from a league away. The chief architect fashioned it after his own likeness.”
Sansa bows back her head so far that she nearly overbalances. The statue stands two hundred and fifty feet high, she guesses, at the very least. Perhaps three hundred, when it still held the whole sword.
“Excepting several artistic liberties, I assume,” she says.
“Yes, apparently the hempen rope hair is a bit shorter than the real man’s was.”
Looking up into the Titan’s face is as dizzying as any view into those fathomless, open-mouthed chasms below the Eyrie. Crying gulls wheel around its helmeted head.
(She had asked that question fourteen days ago, Sansa realizes. She had forgotten about it entirely.)
She glances down at her husband again, who is staring up as well, and discovers that his expression is lighted by the singular, absorbed fascination of a boy who once read his uncle’s history book to tatters.
(And this seems to bloom open in her belly, warming her like a blush that rises all the way to her neck and face. Sansa draws the hood over her head before Tyrion can notice, if indeed there is anything to notice at all. She dares not touch her own cheek to confirm it.)
…
The fourth time it happens, Sansa is pulling her needle through a torn place in one of her husband’s linen tunics.
She has turned it inside out to expose the seams. Tyrion’s own more scrawling needlework has already mended it in several places, and Sansa notes that he pays no attention whatsoever to which colors would be most suitable: crimson red, inky black, sparking gold.
The house growing up around them is somewhat smaller than Winterfell’s foundations, more a sprawling lordly manor than a proper castle, all built to the stocky and stable proportions of Tyrion’s charcoal drawings.
The world is changing, he tells her. Siege catapults and alchemy and larger armies in the field will spell an end to these great old fortresses, sooner rather than later, and apparently a cynic makes for a very good defensive engineer.
(But he rebuilds the glass gardens for her anyway, just where they used to stand.)
Sansa, meanwhile, has roughened her hands with sweeping out old ash from the corners, feeding wood into fires, beating laundry and turning soil because the house staff is so small nowadays and there is no one else to ask. She does not mind.
“Needlework is the art of living writ small,” Sansa quotes, as Tyrion attempts to take the tunic back from her. “It teaches one how things must first be pierced open before they can be pulled back together.”
Tyrion rests both blunt-nailed thumbs on his belt. He hardly allows for a pause when next he speaks, but his voice never changes.
“Is that what you told Petyr Baelish when you killed him?”
“No.” Sansa flicks the bright needle around for another throw, leaving behind stitches that are neat and ferociously precise. “I’m afraid that proverb doesn’t quite apply to knives in the same way.”
She does not see the need to avert her eyes from Tyrion’s, here, as he stares at her.
“…Of course not,” he says. “Spoken like a true and immaculate lady.”
Then her husband smiles at her: not a smirk, but a smile, although with that scar it requires a certain learned skill to decipher between the two.
He shot his father dead with a crossbow, she knows. He strangled the woman who was her handmaid in King’s Landing. He has never lied to her about it.
So perhaps Sansa should be repulsed by this smile, or ashamed, or draw back from what seems to be an expression of companionship as silent and darkly immediate as a cloak offered out to enshroud her.
But she is a lady, after all, a Lannister as well as a Stark, so Sansa merely smiles back and resumes her needlework.
(And something passes through her, like lightning riving its way down a tree, so sudden and consuming that she stabs her own forefinger and leaves three drops of blood on the linen. She scrubs it white later with lye.)
…
By the time it happens again – their fingers both close at once over the same cyvasse piece, an ivory elephant rubbed smooth from use. Tyrion lets it go first – Sansa recognizes the feeling for what it is.
(Perhaps she is a maid, as much now as on the day she married him, but she is not quite so foolish and naïve as that.)
…
And precisely eight years, five months, ten days and eleven hours after she was cloaked in the colors of House Lannister whilst her husband stood on the back of a fool, Sansa turns from a still-lighted candle and looks at Tyrion as he begins to unlace his doublet for the night.
Her arms reach out.
“Let me do that, my lord,” Sansa says, in as practical a tone as she can manage.
Tyrion stops. Sansa does not move to come any closer. He does not step away, but his hands lower slowly his sides.
He looks just the same, Sansa thinks, the same as he had looked that night a lifetime ago when he asked her to open her eyes. She takes in the brutish brow and the crooked scar and the odd-thatched hair and the half-grown limbs, as though the pieces of him were once too hastily assembled: all, all the same.
She, however, is not. And neither is he.
So.
“My lady — ” Tyrion begins. The hard knot in his throat bobs as he swallows. “—I do appreciate the offer, but I would rather you not mistake pity for desire.”
But Sansa considers how she is here now, as is he, because they have outmatched everyone who has ever tried to kill them, so she closes the intervening distance in several long strides. The skirts sigh around her when she drops to her knees, and Sansa sees that his face is pale and tight with fear.
She bites the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.
“If you truly think it possible to confuse the two, Tyrion,” she says, lightly, picking at a doublet lace with her fingers, “you are not nearly as clever as I’ve always taken you to be – may I?”
He seems to look at her for a very long time before he nods, only once.
This, too, proves to be enough.
(The candle burns on, its wax weeping away beneath the tall flame’s light and heat. Sansa never does bother to blow it out.)
…
(“It took all the courage that was in her to look in those mismatched eyes and say, ‘And if I never want you to, my lord?’”)
…