Belief (Builds from Scratch)

Disclaimer: I know GRRM is gonna be pissed no matter what, but hey, this isn't mine, okay?

A/N: Fluff written for a friend. Also, please be aware this makes use of a QUESTIONABLE TIMELINE. Like, I know it's set after the war and at the beginning of spring, but if you're wondering who is king/queen, what happened to the others, etc., you're probably not gonna get the answers you need.

Sansa felt the first hint of spring on her twentieth nameday. There had been a bird on her windowsill that morning when she woke, and the chill, although not gone from the air, had lost its bite, burned away by a welcome sun. It had been warm enough in her quarters, although her husband's side of the bed was cool and empty. He must have been up for hours now - reading, if Sansa knew him at all. He was always careful not to wake her at whatever ungodly hour he crawled out of bed, so she did not trouble herself about it; it was a common enough occurrence, something she had long grown accustomed to.

When she padded downstairs to break her fast, her maester had told her the bird that woke her was a good omen, and Sansa agreed that it was - for everyone. This spring was long pasts its due - even this far south, at Casterly Rock, there hadn't been a glimpse of the greenery abiding beneath the snows for nigh on three years - and its coming would mean nothing but good for everyone it touched, noblemen and smallfolk alike.

There was a time when Sansa might have thought its arrival on her nameday held some special meaning for her coming year, but she was a girl no longer - had not truly been one since even before this long winter had started. And she told the maester as much. He had chuckled and called her a "practical girl," to which she responded that so all women of the north had to be. For a moment the old man had looked perplexed, and Sansa thought he might make some reminder that she was a lady of the Rock now, but instead he just chuckled again.

"No doubt your lord husband appreciates that trait," he told her, "for he is a practical man." Sansa smiled politely and picked at a piece of over-crisped bacon. "Lord Tyrion wishes you to know that he has something he would like for you to see this day." There was something like mischief crinkling the old man's eyes.

For just a moment, a stab of old fear touched Sansa's heart, familiar and visceral. The Lannisters had shown her many things - one of them her father's head a spike. Her breath caught in her throat, and she had to force herself to swallow the bacon without grimacing. The memory was a stale one, almost a decade old now, but she could still taste the metallic tang of her family's blood on her tongue.

Her husband's voice interrupted the onslaught of unpleasant memories as he took a seat opposite her. "Lord Tyrion is able to tell his lady wife himself, thank you very much." His tone was as warm as his words. Although she had voiced the worry only inside her own head, Sansa flushed with embarrassment. She was a woman grown now, well and truly, and this was the present. Joffrey was long dead, and even if he hadn't been, she had faced far worse than Cersei's spoiled and cruel eldest child.

She had not killed him - and neither had her lord husband - but she could have. She knew that now.

Tyrion smiled at her as he broke off a crust of bread, seemingly sensing her dark thoughts. He often seemed to know what she was thinking even before she did - at first it had unnerved her, but, like many of her husband's strange habits, she welcomed its familiarity now. "I am sorry I was not with you this morning, Sansa," he said. "I wanted to be sure I was not mistaken in what I planned to show you; I would hate for you to be disappointed on your nameday. So it was required that I do some research."

Sansa could not help but smile into her hand. "There is always some research that needs your attention, husband," she said, playfully. "I'd tell you you read too much, but I doubt you'd hear me over the words in your head." Tyrion did not mind being mocked, she had found, at least when it was her doing the mocking.

"Sansa..." he began, and she knew immediately what he was going to say.

"Yes, Tyrion?" Her husband hated it when she did not use his name, although Sansa could not say why; perhaps it reminded him of their first few strained months, before murder had separated them and war had brought them back together again, as much strangers the second time as the first.

He grimaced; if Tyrion hated anything, it was being predictable. The look did nothing for his face, but having looked upon it for so long, Sansa found she could no longer be repulsed by it. At least it was ugly right on the surface, unlike so many things in life that at first appeared fair and good, only to mask so much ugliness beneath. There was a certain truth to be found in an ugly face.

Sansa said none of this, imagining the words might sound less of a compliment than she intended them, and Tyrion continued, "Would you accompany me to the godswood, if you have eaten your fill? I know there will be months before the snows melt, but spring is upon us, and I trust that if I disappear into a snowbank, you will do your best to find me."

Her husband often spoke self-deprecatingly, another way in which Sansa found him hopelessly predictable. Another woman might have argued with him, might have given him false assurances - told him he was not overly short or that the loss of his nose had not made a wreck of his face - but, by the time she had been wed to Tyrion, Sansa had had enough of lies. "You know I would do my best, Tyrion, but I can make no promises you wouldn't have frozen into Lannister-shaped icicle by the time I dug you out."

Judging by the look he gave her, her humor was appreciated far more than any pretty words would have been.

"But, truly, you know how I love the godswood," Sansa said. And she did. She had never enjoyed her time spent in Winterfell's godswood as a child, thinking it too somber and lonesome, like her father on his worst days. But now the solitude was a welcome remembrance of the land and the father she had grown up with. "You needn't have asked me if I wished to go, but I suppose your courtesy required it of you."

Tyrion smirked, picking up a winter orange to carry with him. "And you of all people know how much my courtesy means to me."

As the two of them walked the halls of Casterly Rock in amicable silence, Sansa had never more appreciated that Tyrion no longer felt the need to fill the space between them with forced japes. As they had grown to know each other, his jokes had become less frequent, surely, but now that they were given spontaneously and freely, she was able to laugh at them freely as well. Her husband was funny, even without trying, and to her great surprise, Sansa had found that she could be, too. Joffrey and Cersei and Littlefinger - who had made her into his daughter and almost made her into something more - they had stripped her of her capacity for humor. But during the darkness of winter, she had learned how to laugh again.

It had felt like breathing.

Trading scathing remarks was something she had never envisioned herself doing with her husband, but then again, Tyrion Lannister was hardly the husband she had envisioned either.

When she looked down at her side, Sansa found that she held left Tyrion behind in her musings. Sometimes, still, she forgot to slow her stride to match his. War and winter had both come to an end, as things were wont to do, but neither had been kind to her husband. Tyrion was not so much older than she was - not truly - but at two and thirty, walking for any considerable length of time left him limping heavily. Secretly, she hoped that might improve as the cold of winter left his joints, but she never said anything of it. After all, voicing one's hopes rarely did anything to bring them to fruition.

Once, Sansa's courtesy might have dictated that she walk back to join him, but life with her lord husband had taught her that one man's courtesy was rarely another's. So instead she waited at the gilded door leading out to the godswood, using all of her strength to pull it open for him, instead of the other way around. The brisk morning air brought color to her cheeks, and Sansa pulled the hood of her golden cloak up over her head. (She would never be particularly fond of Lannister crimson - too much like blood, her mother's and her father's and her poor brother Robb's - but gold, she had learned, lent a renewed brilliance to the Tully hair inherited from the mother she had not known for nearly a decade.)

Once out in the godswood, Tyrion dropped to his knees, and for a moment Sansa thought he might be praying - but that was crazy. Her husband did not pray, least of all to the old gods. "Tyrion?" she asked, and then she saw that he was digging in the snow, his bare fingers ruddy with cold. "What are you doing? Have you lost something?" She paused, taking it all in. Sun poked through the clouds and was scattered wide amongst reaching weirwood branches, settling finally in Tyrion's hair. In that moment, he looked entirely a Lannister, but for the winter snows seeping into the knees of his breeches. That reminded her of her brothers and sisters, when they were all still children who had never been south of the Trident. "Your wits perhaps?"

He looked back at her, a wicked smile on his face. "Sometimes I wish I'd never taught you to laugh at me." But Sansa could not take the words at their face value and grinned into the bracing early spring wind.

"If wishes were fishes," she hummed. But her curiosity was piqued, and she waited quietly for Tyrion to reveal himself.

Everything became clear when Tyrion leapt to his feet triumphantly and pointed to the hole he had dug out of the snow. In it was the smallest sapling Sansa had ever seen. No bigger than a twig, the pitiful thing was covered in birch as white as the snow that had been hiding it, and on its lone branch... a single leaf, crimson as Tyrion's doublet. Sansa's breath caught in her throat. "A weirwood," she breathed, almost afraid to touch it. "But - but - they don't grow here anymore. They can't! Not this far south."

Tyrion nodded, the legs of his breeches soaked through, pride alighting on every feature of his face - even his maimed nose - as if he himself had grown the thing, rather than just found it. "I know, I know. I mean, I've read of these things, Sansa, and yet... here it is. But I had to be sure, before I showed you. I could not stand to disappoint you on your nameday. Especially when I have no other present at the ready." He looked slightly embarrassed. "What does one get a lady of the Rock? Everything is already at her disposal."

The dwarf reached up to touch her face with his half-frozen hand, but Sansa could not allow herself to flinch, even with his icy fingers on her cheek. Not when her husband was looking at her as if she was something as rare and precious as a weirwood tree sprouting out of the stone from which Casterly Rock took its name. "Sometimes," he said, and there was a seriousness to his voice she rarely heard, "things grow under the most unlikely of circumstances."

The scene was awkward, with her so much taller than him, and without meaning to, Sansa let herself sink to her knees in front of her dwarf husband - as she had not on their wedding day. She could not have done it then, she now realized. She did not know him, did not care for him. And if he had cared for her, it had been as one might care for a beautiful doll - something to be tucked away and kept safe - as he certainly had not known her either.

Maybe she had not even known herself then, not truly.

When Sansa was a girl at Winterfell, she had thought of her parents as living inside a song, their days and nights filled with love and laughter from the first moment of their joining. It was only now that she realized how it must have been. Her mother had never been meant to marry Eddard Stark, Sansa knew; rather, she had been promised to his elder brother Brandon, whom the Lady Catelyn had always remembered as having a smile upon his lips. Her father had been a replacement, and a somber one at that. How must her mother have felt when he wrapped his cloak about her shoulders and promised her his protection? Had she trusted him to give it to her? Had she even wanted it?

But in the end - and it truly had been the end for both her parents, though none of them could see it at the time - a bond, something meaning more than pleasant words and easy smiles, had grown strong and fierce between them. Somewhere in the years of snows and sun and babies and household matters, her mother, a Tully still, through and through - everyone said it - had found in her a daughter of the north.

Actually, Sansa thought, eyes on Tyrion's face - more open than she had ever seen it - she was wrong. This made a better song than what she had before imagined. There had been no single moment of union for Ned and Catelyn Stark - the gods had not designed one of them with the other in mind. But against all odds, the two of them had grown together (their shared experiences like the limbs of some great tree), had truly become one in heart and mind. No septon's words could do that.

And they had been happy.

In the cold shadow of the godswood, with an impossible weirwood growing between them and springtime snow melting through her skirts, Sansa pressed her forehead to Tyrion's and said nothing. Perhaps the bird had been a good omen after all.

Finish.