Moments
The first time he saw her she was nine.
She stood alongside her family, clothed in a fine dress that fit her seamlessly, despite her picking and pulling at it, as if it were dreadfully uncomfortable.
At the time, Tyrion had chuckled to himself. In that moment he decided Arya Stark amused him.
He never got a chance to speak to the young Stark girl during his stay at Winterfell, but he would see her now and again running around the castle, her dress dirty and torn. He would often see her hiding in the training yard, watching her brothers and his nephews as they practiced at their weaponry. At times like this, when he was close enough, he could see her eyes alight, fascinated by the clashing of metal, that is until her Septa would start calling for her. Then her eyes would flash with dread and she would scamper away.
Although his favorite times to watch her was when she was in the godswood, running through the brambles with her wolf. Her laughter, mixed with growls and barks, echoed through the trees.
In those moments Tyrion thought she looked like a Wilding, free and unbound.
When he traveled to the Wall with the Stark bastard, Jon he was called, he learned more of the wild child.
Tyrion was careful when asking Jon about his life, asking a variety of questions, but was always able to gently swerve the answer to involve his favorite Stark child.
He learned much of Arya through Jon Snow. Her adventurous side was already known to him, but he enjoyed hearing stories of the pranks and tricks she played on her sister, her love of warrior songs, that she loved her bastard brother most of all, that she named her sword Needle, the fact that she had desired a sword in the first place.
The more he heard of Arya Stark the more he looked forward to getting to know her when he returned to the Red Keep.
However, that would never come to pass.
By the time he finally returned to the capital ,Arya was gone, perhaps dead, and her sister a prisoner in a gilded cage.
He was kind to Sansa, not only for Sansa herself, but since she was the sister of the Stark he so wished to know.
He wedded, but never bedded Sansa, for Arya Stark seemed like the kind of girl that would bed no one but her own choice, and so he extended the same grace to her sister.
Joffrey was killed and everything changed. Sansa vanished, he found the not so dead Aegon Targaryen, the exiled Mormont, and the young trusting Penny. All the while he journeyed between imprisonment, freedom, slavery, and joining the company of sellswords.
During this chaos and travel, Tyrion thought on how Joffrey's death would have at least brought Arya some joy.
It took time and effort to convince the Second Sons to side with Daenerys, and even longer to find her across the Dothraki Sea.
When they finaly met, Tyrion thought Arya would have liked this woman, since Daenerys was so much like Arya's favorite warrior queen from the old songs.
It was one morning, back in Meereen, Tyrion was sleeping in. Their planning session on reclaiming the Iron Throne had gone long into the night. That is why it so surprised him that he was woken by a pounding on his door, demanding his presence in the hall imminently.
With Tyrion's mind filling with the worst possibilities, he hurried from his chamber, where he found the hall not full of advisers or captains, but a single erect young woman.
Tall, limber, and thin. Pale skin, dark hair, grey eyes.
She no longer stood by her family, the majority of her family being long gone and across the Narrow Sea. Dressed in trousers and shirt, her garb was not raggedy but also not clean. A sword hung at her belt, yet her stance, her posture, the regal look in her eyes, all clearly stated her birth.
Tyrion chuckled to himself.
It seemed he still had a chance to get to know Arya Stark.