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“You were married to Tyrion Lannister?” Jon says. Sansa instantly feels his voice darken, deepening in a protective way that makes her go still for a moment. The wordless threat there if she said the word.
They had only just begun catching up since she made it to Castle Black, since he took her in here and they began to tell one another everything. All the things, tragedies and all, that had befallen them since they left their home in opposite directions what feels like a lifetime ago. Since they lost everything. The tone change in Jon, her calm and collected brother who she felt she hardly knew before, makes it clear she’d have to temper how she told him about Ramsey. Sansa wanted Ramsey returned to dust, but not that quickly and not by Jon's hands.
That was all for later. For when Winterfell belongs to direwolves again.
For now, something twists in her. An odd bit of defensiveness, not the first of its kind for her first husband. For whatever reason, she is quick to dissuade whatever awful notion people have about her time wed to Tyrion Lannister.
“He was kind, truly. Tyrion never hurt me, and…did what he could to protect me.” She answers swiftly. “Our marriage was forced, and he vowed not to share my bed until I wanted it. And even if I never did.”
Jons face relaxed at that, even growing warm for a moment.
“He traveled with me here, you know. We became friends before he returned South. That sounds like him.” Jon admits.
Sansa shares a curious look with him. She had recalled hearing something about that, Queen Cersei’s brother going to the Wall with the Night's Watch when they had left for Kings Landing. It had barely registered then, in her naive mind, that her brother could have forged a friendship with the littlest Lannister. Or really much of anything concerning her half-brother at all, then. It stings for a brief moment, how she’d treated Jon before. And even then, he takes her in without question now.
Sees fit to protect her as he would Arya, who he had always been closer to.
Jon is quick to pull her out of the guilt clouding her mind though. Looking into the flames, he almost thinks out loud more than asks. “What happened to Tyrion, after Jofferys murder? Do you-”
She is quick to recall the last thing she had heard about her former husband, before she left the Vale. “He escaped execution, and the Queen was giving a lordship to anyone who could find him. Or me.”
“So he could be alive.”
“Possibly, somewhere.” Saying it, Sansa thinks of him, cloaked and in an ally crowded with people. Somewhere in a city across the Narrow Sea. For the first time, she wonders if he considers where she had gone in the chaos of Joffrey's wedding.
Jon gives a quiet, subdued chuckle at that but wears a rare, wide smile. “Good.”
Sansa doesn’t say anything, and the two of them are quiet before two bowls of soup are brought to them. Though she didn't voice it, Sansa agreed with Jon silently. Tyrion was many things, but for all she saw of him, he was never a monster. And the thought that he might have survived Kings Landing, survived his sister much the same way as she had makes her feel warm from the bitter cold around them.
Before returning to her conversation with Jon, beginning to turn her focus back to her home and how to root out Boltens Sansa thinks of what she could say to Tyrion if she ever sees him again.