After Joanna, he hadn't thought he would ever remarry.

It was an afterthought, something he never deemed important. For the first few years after Tyrion's birth, he had thought that he didn't need to. He had Jaime, after all, and he had taught the golden boy everything about being the Lord of Casterly Rock, come the day Tywin fell to the same inevitable fate that every men alive and dead will and had come to.

Then his firstborn joined the Kingsguard, and a twisted part of him wished he could strangle Aerys Targaryen back then for allowing such a thing. He was left with a dwarf for an heir, or a woman that was as prideful as the lion in their coat-of-arms.

Cersei was dumb, Tyrion unfit.

For years, even after, he had hated the thought of replacing the only woman who could ever have managed to make him smile. He missed Joanna, harbored a certain type of hatred for his youngest son.

It wasn't his fault, but an enraged man filled with grief could never see reason, no matter how much time had passed, how many years had come after the rebellion.

The wolf king was dead under his orders, Renly Baratheon slain by a 'shadow' — though Tywin would rather believe that the young stag's own bodyguards had done the service — and Stannis had little forces after the Blackwater.

And yet, he had reduced himself to marrying someone for the sake of politics. Alliances that would be left broken if he did not follow through, for Tyrion had Sansa and Cersei refused to see reason. Jaime was still a Kingsguard, though his oldest son seemed to have lost something along the way, and it wasn't only his hand.

You were a bride too perfect. Good standing, good house, an alliance no one in the Seven Kingdoms would pass upon... yet, Tywin was not the man for romance. He had grown old, too arrogant, too prideful. He had to focus on family, and family alone.

The lion does not concern itself with the opinion of the sheep.

Somehow, he had started to concern himself with your opinion. If your chambers were adequate, if the food was to your liking, if the gifts he would send you — always made of pure gold and commissioned by the best jeweler — were a good fit.

He refused to see it, but he had grown softer in your presence.

And for the first time in years, he smiled.

It was just a simple evening, where he sat on his desk, worrying himself with how the crown would pay for Joffrey's wedding to Margaery Tyrell. From the corner of his eye, he could see you moving about the study room, and whatever it was that you were doing, it made him look up.

For a moment, he was quiet, his gaze unsettling, unmoving, unable to be read. Then, as if seeing something no one else could notice, the corner of his lips tilted up — minimal, but the first time his mouth had the slightest curve that wasn't a scowl in it after what appeared to be centuries.

"You're with child."