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Her hair is bright red, the colour of burning buildings and warmth, but her skin looks how winter feels - silver blue, soft and shining, and beautiful.
Will would never dare say that out loud, though. He knows the others would laugh, because Sansa is… Something else. Not just because she's from a whole other planet, but because she's so much more than he is.
Will feels like he's only on the team because of who his uncle is, most of the time. The same could be said of Allyria, whose older brother and sister are Dawn and Dusk, or Renly, whose brothers are the Stag and Steel, or even of Tyrion, whose uncle is Goldeneye, the greatest enchanter on the planet, and maybe beyond it, but that isn’t the point. Any of them, or any of the others, they’re all special. Allyria is stronger and faster and more than any other girl Will has ever known, Renly is so strong and so resilient to… Everything really, that it scares Will sometimes, Tyrion is so clever and so quick with the shimmering golddust of his magic that he’s probably the most dangerous of them all, and then there’s Will.
He can do cartwheels, and knows how to handle computers.
Sure, he can do more than that, lots more, but he’s just the grunt. He’s just a normal human being, trained up as best as Baelor could manage when Will pushed for it, after Mom and Dad were killed.
The others are titans. Will’s just… a teen.
He never feels it as much as he does around Sansa, and that means he can never tell her how beautiful she is.
*
They have their headquarters at Summerhall - it’s the most central they can manage, since the only one of the core team who’s put out by the location is Tyrion, and Tyrion’s family have more money than the rest of the world combined.
Will’s rich, too, but his money is all locked up in trust funds and savings and bonds until he turns twenty-one, which wouldn’t be a problem, if he and the others weren’t relying on their aunts and uncles until that day. Right now, it means he has to be within easy flying distance of HQ, so he can borrow some of Baelor’s little planes and get it back without Baelor or Mal noticing.
Sansa lives in HQ, because she can’t get home - there’s some awkward tension between her and Renly and Tyrion, a lot of the time, because of the circumstances of her arrival on Earth, but she’s professional about it most of the time. She’s even professional about having to live out of the barracks they built here as an emergency precaution, in case any of them needed a safehouse, never complaining about the lack of privacy, about how impersonal the whole place feels - like a hotel, but worse, because things like soft furnishings and abstract wall art weren’t high on their list of priorities when Will was siphoning money off their benefactors’ accounts to build the place.
Sometimes, though, when they all gather in HQ, and some of the others are there, too, and things get a bit messy, the tension boils over. Tyrion tends to get the worst of it, which is fair, since he was more directly involved with her arrival than Renly was, and because their shared nephew looks a hell of a lot more like Tyrion than he does like Renly.
“If I find my home destroyed one more time because of a party, ” she hisses, her bright hair flickering like a forest fire around her shining shoulders, “I will tear you apart.”
“Oh, come on, Sansa-” Renly begins, cavalier as he always is because he’s more or less indestructible, his voice dying in his throat when Sansa snarls. Her lip curls back over her flat white teeth, which suddenly look very sharp, and a razor-edged growl bubbles up all the way from her belly.
Renly doesn’t try to deny that he and Tyrion and the rest of them made a shit of the place. In fact, he admits that they always do this, and admits that he’s never once thought about Sansa having to live with the messes they leave in their wake.
“I am learning,” Sansa says, the fire in her hair smouldering down to banked winter-morning embers, “that few humans ever do.”
*
The first time she confides in him, it’s the smallest big thing he’s ever known.
Sansa can fly - this had blown them all away when they first discovered it, but since then, it’s become so much a part of their skewed kind of normal that none of them even remember it, most of the time. Case in point, Will sometimes climbs and swings and clambers his way up into the rafters over the training centre, where he can sit on one of the thick steel crossbeams and lean his chin on his arms, resting them on a narrow little strut.
He comes up here to think, and to brood, and to grieve, because he can’t let himself get upset about Mom and Dad at home, where he has to keep his best side out for Marg and Loras’ sakes, and for Garlan’s, too, even though Garl would deny needing Will to watch out for him. So he comes up here, where none of the others ever go, and he sits in the shadows and thinks for a long time. Sometimes he cries, and if the others ever guess that, well, they don’t say anything about it.
They all know what it’s like to lose someone important, so they know better than to tease him.
Sansa has been with them for almost a year, the first time she lands on the crossbeam beside him with that precise elegance of hers, a flurry of silver-blue and gold-red and the rich, stormy-grey of her gear. At first, he assumes that she’s only here for a moment to rest - she does that, sometimes, practicing what look like complex gymnastics in mid-air, while the rest of them are training on the mats below - but when she lingers, swinging her long legs back and forth as if she’s waiting for him to say something.
It’s on the tip of his tongue, just like it always is, to tell her how beautiful she is, but he bites down on that and shakes it away.
“Is everything okay?” he asks instead, and is rewarded with a shrug. Her hair glows amber in the gloom, and he’s never noticed it, but her skin glows like a pearl, too, bright and just slightly shining, and something that feels annoyingly like despair edges into his stomach. “You don’t usually hang out up here.”
“You do, though,” she says, shrugging again. “It seems to give you some peace, to be away from the others - I had hoped I might join you, and find some of that solace that affords you such strength.”
He laughs at that, the first time he’s ever laughed while in the rafters.
“You’re the strongest person I know, Sansa,” he tells her. “I don’t think that there’s anything up here for you - it’s already in you. Everyone can see it.”
Her face falls, just a little, and he wonders what he’s done wrong.
“You know,” she says, sounding as lonely as he feels whenever he thinks about Saturday morning rides with Mom or Sunday evening polo with Dad, “you’re the only person on Earth who calls me a person without hesitating.”
Her fingers, always cold, rest over his for just a moment, and by the time she lands so-softly on the floor, his face is hot.
*
They sit on that crossbeam a lot, over the next eighteen months.
Allyria has been Will’s best friend since the day they met - she’s got less than no time for assholes of any stripe, a laugh like a braying jackass, and a heart of pure gold. She pulled him through the mess of his parents’ deaths without mercy, which was just what he needed to balance the coddling of his remaining family, and she’s the only one who’ll fight him at full strength.
He needs that, sometimes. He’s physically weaker than all of his teammates (except maybe Tyrion, but with magic, who knows what’s possible?), and they all hold back when they spar with him, but sometimes, all he wants is to hurt. Sometimes, it’s the only thing that can pull him back from the edge of the anger and pain that fester inside him, and Allyria is the only one willing to help him.
Sansa doesn’t feel like a best friend, even though he probably knows her better than he’s ever known anyone, Garlan and Allyria included, after the past eighteen months. He knows about her brothers, living and dead, and her sister, missing so long she’s likely dead, too. Sansa tells him about her father, who was killed in a failed attempt at the very procedure which dragged her to Earth, and her mother, who died at her brother’s side, trying to find justice for Sansa’s father.
Sansa leans against him, lets him tuck her under his arm, and sometimes, they cry together. It feels better to cry with someone else for company than it does to cry alone, and Willas can’t help but miss it when Sansa doesn’t fly up to sit with him, when he climbs into the rafters.
Tyrion has noticed, and so has Renly, and they’ve been spreading rumours about Will and Sansa among the others - Harry, who Will dislikes at the best of times, keeps giving him dirty looks, and Egg and Rhae, who are twins and kind of terrifying, seem to be worried for him, which is almost as terrifying as they are.
Tyrion, Harry, Quent, sometimes even Egg, they all look kind of jealous, kind of the way Will feels when he sees his teammates with their parents, and he wonders if they think him and Sansa are together.
Sansa is so much more than he is. She wouldn’t ever choose to be with him - he’s just a little quieter than the others, and that’s why she spends so much time with him in the rafters. If the others want to know what they do up there, well, Sansa can tell them. Will isn’t going to tell someone else’s secrets just to stop people laughing when he walks into a room.
*
He almost tells Sansa how beautiful she is after Tyrion sneaks a case of his dad’s super expensive wine into HQ.
None of them have ever had much, if anything, to drink before, and that means it doesn’t take much for them all to get wrecked - and somehow, Will finds himself sitting on one of the big armchairs that are almost loveseats in the common room, with Sansa crammed in beside him, half in his lap, with those long legs of hers draped over his thighs.
You’re so beautiful, he could say, and play it off as a casual compliment, but he’s afraid that if he starts, he won’t be able to stop.
Sansa might be resilient, nearly as indestructible as Renly or Allyria, but Willas Leyton Tyrell is not, and he thinks he might just break if Sansa, in all her gentleness, let him down easy.
*
When he finally works up the nerve to tell her that she’s beautiful, it’s Christmas Day, it’s almost midnight, and they’re in Oldtown.
Will has just been thrown from the upper floors of the Citadel by the force of a gunshot to the gut, fired by the Huntsman, who wants to hurt Will to hurt Baelor.
The others, the Titans , are all in the city too - Baelor’s buddies are all visiting for the holidays, and since Baelor’s buddies all sideline as vigilante superheroes, too, that means all the villains are in the city.
And the Titans follow the villains. Hell, that’s part of why Will was even in the Citadel - the family lives in the High Tower, and they do all their partying over there, so while he would have been in Oldtown anyways, he shouldn’t have been in the Citadel.
But the Huntsman had sent him a message of Sansa screaming in pain, and some furious little part of Will’s hindbrain had taken over.
Sansa wasn’t in the Citadel, of course, but she’s here now, leaning over him, and the rest of the team are gathered around, too.
He can hear sirens, in the distance, and the sky is orange, the colour of Sansa’s hair, instead of the peach-skin pink it should be over the city. Maybe they’ve done their job, and it’s for the police to mop up the aftermath now.
He can feel snowflakes on his face, and tears, and something hot and thick slipping down his cheek, from the corner of his mouth.
“You’re so beautiful,” he sighs, trying to lift his hand to touch Sansa’s cheek and failing to move an inch. “I’ve always wanted to tell you.”
Allyria is kneeling on his other side, her bare knees so brown against the snow, and Tyrion is at her shoulder with his hands glowing gold.
Sansa moves to cradle his head in her lap, and Renly drops to his knees beside Will, the golden-black strangeness that makes him so strong fading from his skin and eyes, leaving him as young and scared as Will feels, just now.
“This is going to hurt you so much,” Sansa whispers to him, her hands bitter, icy cold against his chest - Allyria has the knife she usually keeps strapped to her thigh in her hand, did she just cut open his uniform? - “and Tyrion will try to help with that, to take away your pain. Please, love, forgive me.”
She leans down and kisses the tip of his nose, pinking it with the chill, and then the cold of her hands turns so intense it burns, and he can hear her sobbing and Baelor shouting over his own screams.
*
It’s warm, when he wakes up, and he feels a thousand years old because of how much everything hurts.
“Don’t try to move,” Baelor says quietly, his hands gentle as he pushes Will easily back into the pillows. “Here, try this.”
The ice chips Baelor helps him get passed his cracked lips are flavoured very slightly with lime juice, Will’s favourite, and they help him find his voice.
“What happened?”
His voice is deeper than it should be, like it’s broken all over again, and that seems fitting. The pain is everywhere, but it stops too sharply just above his pelvis, and below that, there’s nothing.
He saw his legs, saw his hips - they were so misshapen, with bones straining and tearing through the skin, that they should hurt more than anything except his stomach, where he took the bullet, but there’s nothing at all, never mind the pain.
“Huntsman knew that hurting you would- it would ruin me,” Baelor says, his own voice deeper than Will is used to. “So he used the alien girl to lure you to the Citadel, and- and he was trying to kill you, kid. To kill you.”
“She’s not the alien girl, ” Will said, thinking of the rosemary scent of Sansa’s hair around his face in that perfect moment before the healing pain began. “She’s a person, and she saved my life, didn’t she?”
Baelor is older than Will ever realised, he notices now, seeing the grey in his uncle’s hair as age rather than distinction for the first time, and it makes him feel very small.
“She almost died to save you,” Baelor admits. “She tried to explain it to us - something about special powers she can only access during solstices. I didn’t really understand, since I was a little preoccupied.”
“Understandable,” Will agrees, slipping too easily into their usual back-and-forth. “Baelor-”
“She did all she could,” Baelor says, “but it would have killed her to fix everything. So, you’re- your legs-”
“I know,” Will says, and he manages to lift his arm just enough to rest his hand in Baelor’s hair when his uncle falls forward against the side of his bed and begins to cry.
*
“You saved my life,” he says, when finally Sansa is well enough to visit him. She caught him at a bad moment, while he was struggling to get himself dressed after a shower, so they sit on his bed, him in just his boxers, her in a dressing gown that he thinks belongs to Malora. “What can I ever do to repay you, Sansa?”
“You saved mine, too,” she says softly, letting her cool hand press over his. Her fingers are long, and slim, and he has a faint silvery imprint on his chest, opposite his heart, from where she’d pushed her magic and life-force into him to keep him alive. “Do you know how many people can call me a person and mean it, Willas?”
“Everyone knows-”
“Just one,” she tells him. “Just you.”
There’s a moment of quiet, embarrassed for her and stunned for him, and it turns shy so quickly he misses the transition.
“Without you to remind me that I am a person,” she says, shifting a little closer, and then a little closer again, and then she’s lying against his chest, and her robe has slipped enough that he can feel the cool press of her collarbone against his, when she slides her arms around his neck, “I don’t know what I’d become.”
He remembers those rare occasions when she loses her temper, when she seems more wolf than woman, and dares to wrap his arms around her back.
“Don’t worry,” he promises her. “I won’t be going anywhere for a while - I haven’t even gotten fitted for a wheelchair yet.”
She laughs, and it’s like spring.