this is a disclaimer.
AN: more of the watch!verse. Whereas the first lot of stories were in chronological order, these ones probably won't be. So for the dates in the chapter titles (aRW = after the Red Wedding) I refer the interested Reader to the last chapter of my watch began, which is a timeline for this AU. (Title of this collection from McMaster Bujold.)
tyrion – (6 aRW)
If you'd told him seven years ago that he'd ever dance at a feast to celebrate the rebuilding of Winterfell, he'd have laughed in your face and reached for a drink.
Well, the drink part hasn't changed.
The music rises to a crescendo with a scrape of fiddles and a shout of laughter. Robb is spinning his wife across the floor with his broad hand across her lower back and her hair coming loose as she laughs up at him; scarce three weeks out of childbed and Jeyne Stark is unstoppable.
Well, the girl gave birth the first time on some innkeeper's hearthrug; that'll harden anyone. If it doesn't kill them.
It's all far too reminiscent of the first time he was feasted here by another Lord Stark, with a different Queen as guest of honour. Daenerys is flushed with wine and friendship and safety. Selmy stands behind her chair listening to her conversation with Arya Stark with a faint, contented smile.
Tyrion gives himself a shake. Of all the things he could be doing right now, observing his fellow revellers is surely the least interesting of all of them. There was a serving maid earlier who smiled at him inviti-
Ah.
She's pouring wine for his lady wife.
Some fool demon squatting in his head prompts him to wander over to her, stepping over dogs and dropped tankards and the legs of Quentyn Martell, stretched out in front of him while he frowns up at the ceiling – Aegon was right, the boy can't hold his liquor – and wolf pups both two-legged and four. Kitten is contemplating the dregs of a glass of wine thoughtfully.
"Don't," Tyrion stops to tell her. "Once you've started, you'll never stop."
She looks up at him with eyes the same colour as her namesake's – as her aunt's – and smirks.
"Is that so?"
He shakes his head at her and carries on. Girl can't resist a challenge. Having the wolf blood, he's heard Arya call it.
He puts his tankard down on the table by his wife's elbow and climbs up on the bench beside her. That black wolf of hers is lying on her other side with its head in her lap.
"My lord of Lannister," says Sansa courteously.
"My lady wife," he says expansively, and wishes she could at least have the decency to flinch at the words.
She doesn't.
"Don't you think we ought to be moving beyond those sorts of formalities by now?"
Faintest upward turn of that perfect mouth.
"Courtesy is a lady's armour, they say."
"I remember you saying it, yes."
Sansa looks surprised. Faintly, again. She's good at faintly. Where her expression was once vacant, now it's controlled: not quite stoic, but still guarded.
"Do you remember so many of our conversations, my lord?"
In spite of himself, Tyrion says, "Yes."
She glances down at the wolf in her lap, long fingers curling briefly in fur. She wears white, this wife of his, white and grey and little else unless it's pale blue, but the sapphire teardrop around her neck is set in gold, not silver.
He remembers it was a gift from Prince Aegon, for no occasion that Tyrion can recall except that he saw it and liked it and thought it suited her.
"What now?" he asks.
Sansa purses her lips. "I think I shall bully one of my brothers into dancing with me one more time, and then I'll retire."
That wasn't what he meant. He's not sure what he did mean. Her hair is pinned up only haphazardly, a careless informality he does not recall ever seeing in her at King's Landing. One long curl of it falls down behind her left ear and brushes at her smooth neck and the collar of her dress.
(He wants to reach out and twist it round his finger and pin it back in its place.)
When she looks at him, Tyrion could almost believe she's seeing into his very soul. The Queen of Winter, they call her, with eyes of ice and a smile like summer...
How many men have asked for her hand? He knows Robb's refused to make Arya marry, wrecking one attempt of dear Uncle Kevan's to return the North to the rule of the Iron Throne partly by proposing a marriage between Arya and the Tyrell heir. Rumour was Robb laughed in his face. What you prevented Lady Olenna from doing with one sister, you'll happily arrange for the other? he was said to have scoffed.
At least Kevan wasn't fool enough to have proposed a marriage with one of Aunt Genna's boys.
"Tyrion," she says and sighs. "I never could understand what it was you wanted from me."
A marriage.
"Neither could I," he says robustly. "What did you want of me, my lady?"
Sansa looks away, the torchlight sliding over her shoulders and playing in her hair. She's watching Jeyne fall into a seat by Dany and Arya, Robb gathering up the girls and shooing them towards the door, Rickon deep in conversation with Larence Hornwood and the young Glover lad, Bran's fingers trailing over the soot-stained walls as he follows his nieces, stops for a word with Robb.
"I wanted you to send me home," she says distantly.
I wanted you to not be a Lannister. I wanted you to not murder my parents. I wanted you to be tall and brave and handsome. I wanted you to be chivalrous and sweet and loving, not abrasively kind. Not just decent. I wanted you to be more. To be better. To be my dream, my knight, my champion.
Tyrion licks his lips.
"I'm sorry," he says bitterly.
Too much to ask to bend her stiff Stark knees. Then as now.
She looks at him silently. Nothing there: no sympathy, no apology, no regret. He knows now why they say she has eyes of ice.
He's almost opened his mouth to make an even bigger drunken fool of himself when the wolf looks up and a shadow falls over them: Jon Snow, holding out that burned right hand of his to his foster-sister/cousin.
"Dance with me, Sansa," he says, laughing. "Dany doesn't know the springreel and I promised I'd show her."
Sansa pushes her pup off her lap gently and jumps up with a swish of white skirts. "And you'd find yourself in a hopeless tangle if I weren't there to hold your hand!"
"Indeed I would," says Snow, still laughing. "Sansa taught me to dance, you see," he says to Tyrion. "In the godswood, when we were children."
The plain implication is that Lady Stark never let him take lessons with his supposed siblings, but both Sansa and Snow are smiling with the memory, as if it was one of the few times they were close as children.
"I'm sure she was an excellent teacher," says Tyrion, but they've already gone, whirling off into the smoke. Ghost picks Memory up by the scruff of her neck and carries her over to the fire where Arya's wolf – Nymeria? – lies asleep.
Tyrion empties his tankard and goes in search of another.