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The bride wears white, white like her skin, white against the backdrop of the cloak of the Stark banner, its greys and blacks bleeding against that pure white.
He watches from a distance in the sept.
He watches and knows he cannot interfere, not without risking everything he’s worked so hard to build.
If he’d spoken sooner, made his move sooner, professed all sooner…
If he believed in the retribution of the gods, that his actions had consequences in the world beyond this, he might think that he’d earned this. That he’d earned the sight of Sansa Stark being cloaked in the colors of the Tyrell house. That he’d earned the way she glowed for a man that wasn’t him.
He should have known, but he thought that he had planned for every contingency, planned for every action that was in (and sometimes beyond) his control.
And yet…
There she stood.
Before the septon, before the gods, before her husband to be and all their families united (some in it for the money, the name, the brand recognition and others genuinely hoping that this couple will be the one that makes it).
But as Willas Tyrell cloaks his bride, Petyr knows it’s just a matter of time before she comes back.
Sansa speaks in his bones, whispering secrets and delicious lies. He hears her in the twittering of his whores and in the moans of junkies on the street, gasping as he pays them for their services.
She’d buried herself in every part of his life and then extracted herself from the kingdom she’d built in him with all the subtlety and callousness of a construction crew attempting to restore a thousand-year-old building.
He hated and admired and loved and loathed and pined and resented and lived and died in her. Whatever independence he’d had for the first 40 odd years of his life were stripped away by this red-haired termagant that swept through his carefully constructed life and left ashes in her wake.
He couldn’t say to her, “Be careful, tread softly, tread softly lest you tread on my dreams on me on my life on my identity, tread softly lest I fall in love, lest I forget that I am me and start to believe that I am we.”
Petyr wants to rush the steps and push the septon back down them, watching the frail and brittle body shatter against the cold stones of cold gods, cold arms, cold eyes. He wants to take Sansa into his arms and declare that his is hers and she is his and never shall they be parted for in the eyes of the gods they are one.
But he stands rooted, his feet in the stone and of the stone and watches the life he thought he’d live die by slow, torturous inches.
His Sansa, his forever bride, cloaked by another, by the thorny rose and not the mocking bird.
Somewhere, buried deep, so deep inside him, he marveled, completely in awe of her, completely taken by her independence and cruelty, her caprice and dedication. That she could pledge her love to him the last night and stand before the gods in the light of day this unholy morning and earnestly give her loyalty to another was nothing less than a miracle.
For Sansa Stark was miraculous, truly without peer in this realm of the dying, dying dead.
And she made her vows to this other, this inferior, crippled thing, Petyr made his own, only the gods and ghosts bearing witness: I am hers, she is mine, neither god nor man shall keep us apart, and the world will burn before I let her leave me.