Notes: This is a piece written within the universe of The Executioner series, fleshing out the relationship that develops between Pod and Sansa during the war against the White Walkers. Written for asoiafrarepairs Rare Pair Week on Tumblr, Day 1: Ashes/Snowflakes.
Snow beats against the walls of Winterfell in time to the rap of steps on stone. A single shove, and a chained, dirty and broken bundle thumps to the ground. The guard pulls back the man's hood with a sharp jerk. Shouts and murmurs blanket the hall.
"The traitor's come alone."
"Kingslayer!"
"Take his head."
This is not my war, Podrick thinks, though he is crowded amongst fellow fighters, but there is something here for me to watch. And learn.
Beside Sansa, the usual quiet of Brienne's movements is replaced by power and—panic. Brienne rises to her feet, gripping the table. Her boots scrape the the floor, and Tormund's gaze turns to her, warm, clear, concerned. Brienne and Jaime surely had a deep friendship; Brienne's thumb trembles as it rests on the pommel of her sword.
Between Tyrion and Jaime there may still be some closeness, and perhaps Tyrion would have some stirring words in support of Jaime's life. But he and Daenerys are on the icy coast seeing Cersei away from Westeros. Tyrion had spoken fondly of his brother, once, and Jaime had risked his life to come to Winterfell. Podrick had studied the great houses, their lines and family trees, and everyone knew of the Kingslayer's past. Podrick had a past of his own. How could he judge? He'd been squire to a Lannister, and he'd been squire to a Stark-pledged knight. Now, he is simply Podrick Payne, whose only wish is to remain alive and well enough to serve whoever needs him. Life comes more easily to those who watch without judgment and take things as they come.
And so, Pod watches.
Sansa presses Brienne's arm with a gloved hand, and Brienne sits, her eyes still locked on the bundle wrapped in black wool, her strength shielding the passion in her blood.
Sansa's mask is in the whole of her body, the black of her skirts, the polish on her gloves. The tilt of her head and fold of her fingers, the unhesitating gaze. Long ago, a drunken Tyrion spoke of her lies in court. How she spoke of her love for Joffrey with softness, how even her hatred of him was beautifully concealed. Podrick is glad Tyrion is away. Sansa speaks, and there is no quietly trembling falsehood in her voice. Every word is a scathing blow for Jaime, and he bears it with the weakness of a man nearly dead: that is to say, not particularly well.
~o~
Jaime is confined to the dungeons, and Daenerys and Tyrion return from King's Landing. With preparations for war at full tilt, Winterfell hums with activity. Podrick is busy too, leaving Brienne and Tormund to their discussions and their sparring. Tormund's eyes, when they fall upon Brienne, brighten. His tender openness is only for her, and Podrick's heart clenches with a singular hope: that one day, Brienne will come to know the steadiness of Tormund's strength.
For now, Pod spends his days training with friends and strangers. The yard seems empty of all but blood and bleakness, but when he lets a young warrior from the Frostfangs catch him under the chin, her laughter, loud and delightful, echoes in his ears for the rest of his day.
For the first time in weeks, he sleeps with a smile.
~o~
There are always nights rest eludes him, and on one such night he stumbles to the library, the last place anyone might look for him.
"I think my Queen intends to kill my brother."
Tyrion looks up from his book, and his eyes are as dark and unknowable as the sky. A star's flash, and then his head bows. He turns a page and meticulously scrapes away the coating of dust with a single finger.
Dryness returns to his tone. "Daenerys spent quite a lot of time with a whetstone."
There isn't much Pod can say, but he can share his silent sympathy. He pulls a thin tome from the shelf. The spine cracks as he opens it, and a flower falls from between the pages. A pale brown stem greets him, cracking, barely strong enough to support leaves that would turn to powder with a touch. But somehow, the flower's petals still burst with colour. A rich treat of yellow in this world drained of colour.
We will win this war, the flower says, and he suppresses a roll of his eyes.
Yes, and I will find a girl with a heart as bright as this flower, and bards will sing songs about me, and my armour will sparkle for all the rest of my days as a knight.
He smiles, then.
Songs and poems aren't always wrong. Things that make people smile say something about what they really want. Even in war.
It's not wrong to want.
But it is impractical.
Pod will treat his dearest hopes like this flower: tucked away within the pages of his heart.
~o~
He scatters seeds of hope among those he fights with, and his world narrows to the whirl of his sword and the crack of his axe. Boots on wood and stone. Soldiers and snow and blood waiting to be spilled.
The screeching of dragons fills the air. There was a time when such a thing would've frozen him, though even now, he is not a man without nerves. But such a quality can be exaggerated for useful ends, he finds. He plays the silly boy and draws out laughter from those terrified, downtrodden, and despairing. Even the most irritable of men cannot resist his theatrics. The surliest rage at the Kingslayer's life being spared, rail at the Southern whore who'll come back to raid their shores, and wonder if the Queen and her dragons might turn on them. But even their anger melts beneath his exaggerated clumsiness.
He'd settled well into his humility with Tyrion, and Bronn, and then Brienne. Her strength had charmed him, and she'd encouraged his quiet modesty with her own.
The shield for his heart, letting hope grow within.
~o~
War is difficult, and even Podrick feels his hope threatened by the monotony of pain. On the front lines, warriors grapple with blood and blade, and within Winterfell, minds and hearts clash. Fear and fatigue make everyone irritable, until the living are simply roots tangling with each other, thin and sapped of strength.
Sansa is the earth beneath. The harder they cling to her, the more she bears up beneath them, until Winterfell is suffused with her softness. Her hardness is another strength, untwisting arguments with clarity. As Pod returns from battle, covered in snow and ash, he comes upon one such argument, withdrawing to watch and listen.
"Turnips. Again." A Northman's burr cuts through the cold.
"They're what we have," Sansa says. "We'll feast after we've won this war."
And so these tensions have their outlets, for the war has only just begun, and men are still somewhat fresh. They can put their free minds to other things, the trivialities of turnips.
And, as always, the less-trivial: house and sigil, loyalty and family. He would choose Sansa not for her name, though the Stark lineage is a powerful one, but for the way she is the soil beneath roots. He would see the flower blossom in her smile, one day. He watches her when she is at the high table with her lords, and slowly he begins to recognise the smallest lightening of her eyes that is her smile without smiling. That brightness falls on him when she passes through the training yard, brighter still when he falls for her benefit; even bloody, the men laugh, and he laughs too.
~o~
There are more than turnips, and on a night full of death, where the ashes of the burning dead are thick in the air and choke Pod with coughing, he sneaks into Winterfell's larder.
That night, he stays his sleep with a sachet of dried lemon peels and the hastily scrawled recipe that accompany them, a moment of summer that drives away the dead.
The next evening, Podrick's bloodied again, but the smell of lemon and the thought of Sansa's smile has kept him alive through another battle shift. He finds her alone in the great hall, surrounded by lists and charts and letters. He must look frightfully awful—gore-covered and grinning with his plate of lemoncakes. But he stands, and smiles, and waits for Sansa to look up. When she does, a shock of amused delight passes over her face for the briefest moment before she composes herself again. As Pod turns to leave, the sky of her eyes brightens with the warm blue of summer.
~o~
As the main hall fills with the hungry, Sansa stands beside him. Through her glove, her hand is warm. Beneath the earthy smell of her gloves and the sweet smell of her hair is the faintest tinge of citrus. Her face is still, but her eyes blaze brightest blue.
"Thank you, Podrick."
His face is as still as her own, but something warm wells up in him.
The flower and the earth.
"My lady."
The fealty of his spring.
~o~
The war escalates.
Pod is slashing and cutting and piercing, and when he has a blessed moment to breathe, he sees them, separating Brienne and Tormund from the line. A group of wights, cutting them off from their safety, until they are but two alone against thirty untiring dead, and they are cut and faltering and then failing, and Pod is rushing in, slashing with dragonglass, fire, burning and stabbing and burning again, and he burns too, blades and teeth and claws tearing his flesh until he is stumbling.
Then, the horde is gone, and Brienne and Tormund limp to safety.
Blood bubbles in Podrick's chest. Black pours from his throat, and pain is a black wave rippling through him.
"On the horse, idiot!"
A sharp voice.
"If you don't live, I'll never stop hearing her cry!"
A wiry arm pulls him up.
And before he lets a warmer blackness take him, he smiles.
It would be Sansa's sister who'd save his life.
Fitting, that.
~o~
He spends the rest of the war in his chamber, falling in and out of consciousness.
Rust in his mouth, and the smell of camphor.
Boots and gruff voices.
Voices that gentle when they speak of him.
Quiet.
His waking memories are flashes, fleeting before pain draws him away, down into the dark.
A cool hand on his cheek, a warm palm, the smell of leather.
The smell of skin without leather, once.
Long and graceful fingers wrapping around his hands.
Wool sweeping on stone.
Careful, decisive steps.
The rattling of the door's chain as it seals, the thunk of the wooden bar in its latch.
The coppery flash behind his eyes, the soft red fall.
The shaking hands that hold his.
Salt on his skin, warm and wet.
~o~
Podrick does not die, of course; if he thought the gods were real, he might say they missed making fun of him, or that his near-death experience was an extended mockery. But he is not one for great philosophies, only the thankfulness they bring.
When Arya breaks the Night King, Pod smiles. The gods did bring him some mercy. Though his rest was pain-ridden, he did sleep through all of the war, as Sam had demanded.
Pod couldn't have borne the burden of bringing hope to those in that final battle if their plan had failed.
But it did not, and now is time for celebration, and even if he is a little sore, he is still a hale and hearty man, fresh with the memory of soft skin and sweet tears.
And then Sansa is beside him, offering her hand, and her wrist is smooth beneath his lips.
~o~
Sansa leads Pod to her chamber, and for the first time, his hand grasps the bare flesh of her wrist. It is warm, and inside he stills.
He has been with women before, and allowed the grace of another lie: that it was his body that made them want him so. That his cock was some magical he tired of playing the blushing lad, he simply laughed along. He joked that perhaps the Red Woman could fill other men's cocks with power.
This lie was a grace for the women he had lain with, for they would not accept his truth. He gave it to them anyway, for they deserved it.
His truth was in his asking.
Asking of their thoughts, their dreams, their hopes and wishes. Their families, their friends, their memories and lovers. He had asked, and asked, and asked. His voice had shaken then, young as he had been, and they had drawn him out. So few had done, and yet it was all he had been ridiculed for as a boy. He had learned to ask, and then to not ask,. to feel with his body and his heart. And from the brothel's women, he learned another way of asking, when to press on and when to pull back, to ask with fingers and tongue and mouth.
Let those around him believe there is some magic in his flesh, and not the lessons reaffirmed again and again by the world's goodness. In life there is pain and death and blood, but good, too.
You need only ask.
~o~
Sansa bars the door and turns from Pod to sit on her bed. He stands in the middle of the room-a bit lost, if he's honest with himself-only her side profile visible to him. She has drawn herself up again. Sansa is still a queen in her own chamber, and the strength in her spine says so.
She rolls her glove back over her wrist and speaks. Her voice is strained.
"I am not-"
Sansa stops herself abruptly, and clasps her hands together.
Pod cannot see the way her skin ripples, the way her muscles move beneath her thick wool and all its cloaking dark. But he knew of Brienne's regard for Jaime, and of how Tormund found his way into her heart. He knew men's fear of the cold, and want of something to make them smile. He knew how to draw out the small joy of women confined to a brothel. Pod's knowing is not that found in a library, but in life and all its realness. The feel of a horse beneath him, dirt under his boots. The smell of simple food; the ice of winter and the glow of hope that defeated it.
He has always watched, and asked, and known, and so he knows the small truths of Sansa's body. How her elbows bend, tendons tightening, how she presses her fingers together so the leather is close to tearing, how the seams of her gloves must dig into her fingertips, how her wrists must feel that they will snap.
The ivory of Sansa's throat ripples as she swallows.
"You won't like it."
It is not Podrick's place to say that he will like it.
To assert that her flesh is unmarked when it could not be.
To tell her that she is.
That she always was, even as a young girl in Joffrey's hands. That she was, even as Tyrion's wife; that she was, even as a pawn in Littlefinger's game.
That she was, even as she was never asked.
Those are truths that she must draw from within. Asking of herself things that will break, but never destroy. Not her.
Podrick cannot ask her such things, but he can be with her, as a book can hold a flower.
He sits beside her, and does not give, but only asks with his hand, laying it next to hers. Sansa's little finger reaches out to stroke his own. Though Podrick's touch presumes, he cannot restrain its truth. His smallest finger winds around Sansa's own, and he squeezes. The leather is smooth on his skin. Within her glove, her hand trembles, and he feels it through their linked fingers.
Sansa pulls her hand from his, bowing her head to work at her gloves. Pod rests his fingers against her arm. Though she easily tended to him after he fell in battle, she never did while he was awake. He will grant her the space she needs. She strips quickly, never looking at him. He watches her hands as they fist the fabric on her skin, as they work the clasps and ties open. They palm scars that must still be painful, for she has sewn scraps of wool and silk into the lining of her skirts and bodice in strategic places.
Finally, Sansa is on the bed in her shift.
In war, flesh can be torn apart in so many ways. By blade, by mace, hoof and tooth and fist and flame. So many different scars are left: rough, smooth, shiny, puckered.
On Sansa's skin, one man became a thousand different men to tear into her flesh a thousand different ways, and feasted on her in a grotesque mockery of victory.
Podrick could rip the sheets of her bed apart if he were a different man. His anger is a thing that could cripple him, if he did not know how to turn it to better ends. It is difficult to focus on those ends now, when the woman of his focus sits before him with her skin gouged and scarred and burned.
But her tormentor lives no longer; he is not with them in her bed.
Here, the yellow flower of their hope waits to break the surface of the snow. The petals cradle his anger and soothe with their softness, and finally he can look to her, to those eyes that are as clear as the spring sky.
Darkening in their sadness.
"Am I so delicate to you?"
He could answer No and he could answer Yes, and neither would be a lie.
For Sansa is delicate in all the ways his yellow flower is.
Her iron is that delicacy strengthened by the coldest winter, green blood thickening for warmth, the frozen flower that turns to seed to survive and blooms again.
And now, buried beneath her drifts of pain, she is breaking through.
So he asks.
"Is a flower delicate or strong?"
"Both."
"Then you are the most beautiful of flowers," Pod says.
At that, she enfolds him in her arms.
Her scent is as soft as her skin, and she peels his clothing from him until he is in only tunic and breeches. Her hair is a rippling copper wave beneath his fingers, smelling of her wintry strength, sweet and bracing. Her bed is warm and soft, and Sansa burrows herself into Pod's arms, making of his body a nest for herself, making of her body a nest for him, tucking his head beneath her chin, intertwining her legs with his, pulling his arms around her, and stroking his side.
Sansa can take from him whatever she likes.
Pod smiles.
She is asking him, with the comfort of her touch, if this is a delicacy he wants.
And he does.
For now, the softness of sleep.
Later, a tender flower they will nourish.