WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin + assorted. WHAT: Sad elfblooded in snow. WHEN: Early Harvestmere. WHERE: Skyhold. NOTES: References to death; likely also to infidelity, substance abuse, general mental instability. Starters in the comments.
Grieving isn't something Morrigan can say she has a particular talent at. If there was grieving to be done then she always did it alone and after, sometimes years after the fact; her own girlhood and how it had been throttled, pressed down into a bog until the muck and mire got under her and into her mouth, up her nose, through the cuts in her feet and her fingers from the mirror that shattered at a mother's hand. She never mourned Flemeth, didn't rejoice the way some might have expected her to; you don't dance when you slip free of the noose, you merely breathe and find yourself strangely thankful for that breath but never quite so certain of each one that comes after for a long time.
But she's reminded so much of Kieran, the terrible nightmares that come with lyrium (that come with her, with one night that saved three skins and were her ransom if she wishes to be terrible. It was a price, and nothing comes free, not even for her, she knows that now). Her hands are gentle when they cradle Gwenaelle's head, brushing through her hair with same soft noises she's uttered in the dark for ten years now to calm a growing boy. Always gentling some wild thing - it isn't lost on her that so many could say the same about her, about how Kieran has done the same - but grief does strange things, she's seen that in ten years so she won't rush her. Allows her to be small in here, as if this is the whole world. As if Morrigan's will alone could bend the world upon itself to make it so.
(If only, she thinks sometimes, if only. How much simpler it would be to keep so much safe in a smaller world but safe is a lie, and Morrigan knows that sure as she knows Flemeth has a part to play in this chaos before it is at an end.)
"Gwenaelle," she murmurs in her low voice, "what do you wish of me?" A request not lightly granted but here it is, offered freely.
The fabric of Morrigan's skirts under her cheek dampen and she hitches a breath that trembles, hates herself fiercely in that moment for weaknesses she's never been able to control the way others seem to do so effortlessly. Always behind, always a little bit less - never what she was supposed to be, not for any of them. Not the elven child that wouldn't have been taken from her mother; not the composed heir that could advance past where her stepmother's illnesses had kept her. Not the sweet thing that would have looked past her father's sins and been glad for his affection -
Just this, too sharp and too frank and too unhappy to please anyone at all.
Stroking her fingers through Gwenaelle's hair, she sighs quiet enough the air doesn't dare to be disturbed by it. This part she can do, quiet noises until the girl (in this moment she is a girl, not a young woman, because there is a chance to be a girl when someone else allows it, Morrigan knows that keenly through the lack of what she had herself) can find her knees to sit up with her. Morrigan knows her son, and when Gwenaelle has no suggestion, she raises her voice just enough that he might know he's wanted in here too.
"Kieran?" The door opens, her son hesitating, hovering, and she extends a hand to help him decide to come in with a blanket streaming behind him like a sail. He curls by Gwenaelle, tucks himself next to her so that some of the blanket is draped around her too. "Will you sit with Lady Gwenaelle while I make tea? Look after her for me?"
"Of course mother," he replies in a voice that's more solemn than usual where one of his very favourites is involved but she's never seemed so-- well he doesn't know what the word is, he's only ten, it just feels-- "jagged," is what he murmurs, then tucks himself against her while Morrigan extracts herself to make tea. (A benefit of magic; boil water in a moment, you always have herbs at the ready, you know what is needed at what time. This isn't a moment for wine either.)
Tea is better. Their company is better; Gwenaëlle rests her cheek against Kieran's hair and breathes out, supposes that jagged is precisely how she feels right now. Like a part of her she didn't know she needed was cut haphazardly away from her, withou care for the wound, or how she's to bind it. What does she do? How does she grieve a loss that isn't supposed to be hers?
"I'm terrible company," she apologises quietly. It feels like she's finally stopped holding her breath, even if it isn't quite the release she needs.
With one small hand, Kieran strokes Gwenaelle's hair, makes a quiet noise like he might to a wounded bird - is that comparison so wrong in his head? He feels like one when he spreads his blanketed arms to rearrange the blankets, tucked close because she's hurting, and when his mother was hurting because the spymaster was hurting, Gwenaelle was always there.
Water boils where Morrigan is, the quiet rustling of herbs in a jar before she returns soon enough with three cups. Not the tea they drink in Orlais, not even in Ferelden unless they live on the fringes and know enough about what herbs to pick and when. She settles back where she was, sets the tray down and her hands are warm when she cups Gwenaelle's face.
"You are not," she says firmly. "You lost someone. It hurts. Drink some tea, take a breath. You need not even think if you do not wish to here, you may say whatever you wish and know it will not leave this room."
She wishes she could just blurt it out. Say it as easily as it sounded like Alistair did, or be so - just to not trip always on the words, for it not to stick in her throat like she's choking on it. Trust it will not leave this room and have that be enough, not have to fight with herself, have to bargain and rationalise and persuade herself.
It's terrifying how much she does trust Morrigan, and still it won't come naturally.
With careful, conscious deliberateness, she says, "She was my mama," cutting her gaze away before she can see the words land.
Secrets spill into Morrigan's lap, and she is reminded of Alistair too. It had been easier to joke with him because it had been Alistair (to ask if he had wanted her sympathies or some such, and she almost chokes on her tea, sets the cup down) when Fiona being elven had been--
Well she was Grand-Enchanter, a former Warden. So many other complicated things all wrapped up in there with Kieran the thing they danced about when he had told her, when if there was something she and Alistair shared long before a child then it was the pain of a childhood you wouldn't wish upon an animal. Unwanted and moved passed about for him, wanted only so much for what she might be in the end for her.
Much more makes sense. A piece slots into place that she thinks would cut them both if handled wrong but when has she been afraid of a dangerous thing or a sharp truth? Kieran's head jerks up, Alistair's face not hers because she's seen Alistair trying to hold himself together in the face of grief and loss on the road to Lothering. Quiet little offers of I'm sorry murmured to her with a beseeching look to his own mother, because mothers have a magic all their own, don't they?
"Gwenaelle," she says when she has her voice, when she knows she must be careful as she would with a wolf hunting in a cold hard winter, with a viper coiled to strike, a thing that might lash out and hurt them both but hurt itself worse because she has been that aching thing for so many other reasons. "I am so sorry. To lose her in such a way-- I cannot--"
And that is the problem, she thinks distantly, that she cannot, that motherhood is sometimes such a snare. That it has been for them both in different ways.
"The woman you spoke of before..in the eyes of all the world she was your mother as she was your father's lady wife. And she was your mother, I will not take that from you. But this loss...tis not one you can grieve. Nor one you can acknowledge outwith many walls." I will keep it safe for you, she thinks. Same as any thing ever said between them though this hangs more heavily when the damage it could do is so much greater for one young woman, when there are so many that would use it as a knife in her back or to her throat, to see her left with nothing at all in the world. The hearts of men and the hearts of the Court are ugly bitter things after all.
No, she can't. It can't be hers, and - it isn't, not really, the awful, hollowness in her when she says, so bitter,
"All I ever did for my mothers was watch them die."
A disappointment to Annegret, a chain that bound Guenievre, and loved best by a man she doesn't think she has it in her to ever forgive for her existence. All she did and all she can do - there is nothing else, not any more. Annegret and Guenievre are gone, and she can't even allow herself to mourn for the one. She can't be this, not balanced on this knife's edge.
Annegret wouldn't let her hold her hand, at the end. Guenievre had never been allowed to want. Gwenaëlle, alone, wraps her hands around her elbows and doesn't realise she's rocking herself, self-contained in the way she soothes, too accustomed to having to be.
"And they didn't do that for me to ruin it all like this," softer. With her own weakness, with griefs that they had borne with the stoicism she's never mastered.
A rustle of fabric and Morrigan is moving to sit down by her instead, because it's easier that way. Because she isn't what so many might think of her - an advisor in name, a lady in name, titles others have stuck to her same as the Chantry or their ilk would place apostate upon her shoulders too. To pull both Gwenaelle and Kieran in close to her, to lay her cheek upon Gwenaelle's hair and curl her hand about her shoulder.
A thing she cannot recall having done to her but there are a great many things she's learned these past ten years, and thought herself better for having learned them.
"You did not," she tells her as fiercely as she can without it being too much with her gathered close. "A mother--" The words catch in her throat when she looks from Gwenaelle to Kieran and back again, the way they have before, they way they threatened to when Pel came to ask questions Morrigan felt barely qualified to answer. It had been easier with Zevran when she knew more of his pains, when they needn't tiptoe about them so much.
"A mother prepares her child for the world as best they can, and this world is a cruel one. It will take and take till there is naught left." Some mothers, she thinks, will devour you whole as well, and that isn't true only of mothers in swamps who live in huts; Orlais is just as capable of producing bloodthirsty mothers albeit without the magic capable to assume command of their daughters so neatly. "You will ruin nothing. Outside this room and your own, you were attacked. No matter whom you travelled with, you were attacked and you were hurt. Someone with whom you shared confidences with was taken from you by those who would have taken your life as well."
And because she is honest with Kieran too, about dangers. "I carried my heart in my throat in the Court each time you were but a well-spoken lad, naught to do with me for your own safety."
"I know mother." Is that her in his voice or is it the thing that nestles somewhere deep within that can look up with such solemn eyes. "The road can be very scary, but you aren't alone."
"The archer pointed his bow at me," she recalls - details that had seemed so unimportant when her hands were red with her mother's blood, things that had registered without sinking in until much, much later. "Alexander threw a knife."
And then he - wasn't pointing a bow at her any more.
If Guenievre hadn't been her mother, the experience of being so deliberately targeted for their weakness would have almost certainly been sufficiently distressing for anyone. She remembers in an abstract and strange way that she fought it when he dragged her away, that he had been inexorable in doing so regardless; the memories are stark but disjointed, oversaturated and impossible to entirely decipher. She couldn't be sure in what order it all happened, and not only because it was so swiftly done.
They are memories she could do without, but - what else would she have of her, if not this?
The slow, incremental way that she relaxes against Morrigan and Kieran both as she sifts through those recollections to parse them and contextualise that with Morrigan's words is telling in itself; only half-tame, easing like a cat pretending not to slink closer so as not to be banished upon noticing. She leans in like she's aware of how strangely starved for it she is, conscious of the lack and cautious to take 'too much' of what's offered.
"Her real children died in Halamshiral," she says, means, my sisters. "Celene killed them. There's only me of her left." And she doesn't feel like anything like enough, whatever anyone says--
"They wanted to kill you. He stopped them." Kieran speaks quietly, raised on stories of the Fifth Blight as well as so many histories and other lessons to prepare a lad, fighting his face because his bottom lip isn't staying still (what would uncle Alistair or Zevran say, or aunt Leliana?) but he doesn't like thinking about people wanting to hurt her. Not people wanting to hurt anyone really but certainly not someone who always takes him places and shares jokes with him, makes him smile and laugh, and doesn't treat him like he's just a child.
Whatever other feelings Morrigan might have about Lord Luthor in the way any woman might have about a strange young man entering the life of a yong woman they care about when they know too much about men, she can say this in his favour, even if he might never hear it. "I am glad that he was there, I would be poorer for your loss."
In front of Kieran she cannot say some of what she wants to say. Because she's trying to keep him safe from the horrors of her own childhood, from the nightmares that chilled the very blood in her veins, that hurt her, that turned her to such a bitter biting creature as she was. When Gwenaelle does not need to be held so gently she will tell her the truths of the Witches of the Wilds, she thinks but she rests her forehead down against hers, a sign to listen well when such words are far too harsh to say.
"A child is flesh and blood, but not always that of your body." Am I your daughter mother, or did you steal me from a Chasind? In truth she knows in her heart that it's the former and twas only ever spiteful bitter comforts that she tried to find in distancing herself from stings and slaps in thinking of another mother who had a babe ripped from her once by a prowling creature she feared. "All this time she was with you, watched over you, kept your confidences. The world is a hungry thing but it cannot take the truth; she brought you into this world, that made you real and made you hers as much as she is yours, even now. What you do with that is up to you. You are your own person, Gwenaelle. You will always have choices."
Perhaps harder to see now than ever but when Morrigan snatched them from her mother's fingers leaving pieces of herself behind, she will be damned if she allows someone she cares for to lose sight of that if she can prevent it.
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no subject
But she's reminded so much of Kieran, the terrible nightmares that come with lyrium (that come with her, with one night that saved three skins and were her ransom if she wishes to be terrible. It was a price, and nothing comes free, not even for her, she knows that now). Her hands are gentle when they cradle Gwenaelle's head, brushing through her hair with same soft noises she's uttered in the dark for ten years now to calm a growing boy. Always gentling some wild thing - it isn't lost on her that so many could say the same about her, about how Kieran has done the same - but grief does strange things, she's seen that in ten years so she won't rush her. Allows her to be small in here, as if this is the whole world. As if Morrigan's will alone could bend the world upon itself to make it so.
(If only, she thinks sometimes, if only. How much simpler it would be to keep so much safe in a smaller world but safe is a lie, and Morrigan knows that sure as she knows Flemeth has a part to play in this chaos before it is at an end.)
"Gwenaelle," she murmurs in her low voice, "what do you wish of me?" A request not lightly granted but here it is, offered freely.
no subject
Just this, too sharp and too frank and too unhappy to please anyone at all.
"I just -"
She burrows in closer, shaking her head.
"I don't know."
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"Kieran?" The door opens, her son hesitating, hovering, and she extends a hand to help him decide to come in with a blanket streaming behind him like a sail. He curls by Gwenaelle, tucks himself next to her so that some of the blanket is draped around her too. "Will you sit with Lady Gwenaelle while I make tea? Look after her for me?"
"Of course mother," he replies in a voice that's more solemn than usual where one of his very favourites is involved but she's never seemed so-- well he doesn't know what the word is, he's only ten, it just feels-- "jagged," is what he murmurs, then tucks himself against her while Morrigan extracts herself to make tea. (A benefit of magic; boil water in a moment, you always have herbs at the ready, you know what is needed at what time. This isn't a moment for wine either.)
no subject
Tea is better. Their company is better; Gwenaëlle rests her cheek against Kieran's hair and breathes out, supposes that jagged is precisely how she feels right now. Like a part of her she didn't know she needed was cut haphazardly away from her, withou care for the wound, or how she's to bind it. What does she do? How does she grieve a loss that isn't supposed to be hers?
"I'm terrible company," she apologises quietly. It feels like she's finally stopped holding her breath, even if it isn't quite the release she needs.
no subject
Water boils where Morrigan is, the quiet rustling of herbs in a jar before she returns soon enough with three cups. Not the tea they drink in Orlais, not even in Ferelden unless they live on the fringes and know enough about what herbs to pick and when. She settles back where she was, sets the tray down and her hands are warm when she cups Gwenaelle's face.
"You are not," she says firmly. "You lost someone. It hurts. Drink some tea, take a breath. You need not even think if you do not wish to here, you may say whatever you wish and know it will not leave this room."
no subject
She wishes she could just blurt it out. Say it as easily as it sounded like Alistair did, or be so - just to not trip always on the words, for it not to stick in her throat like she's choking on it. Trust it will not leave this room and have that be enough, not have to fight with herself, have to bargain and rationalise and persuade herself.
It's terrifying how much she does trust Morrigan, and still it won't come naturally.
With careful, conscious deliberateness, she says, "She was my mama," cutting her gaze away before she can see the words land.
no subject
Well she was Grand-Enchanter, a former Warden. So many other complicated things all wrapped up in there with Kieran the thing they danced about when he had told her, when if there was something she and Alistair shared long before a child then it was the pain of a childhood you wouldn't wish upon an animal. Unwanted and moved passed about for him, wanted only so much for what she might be in the end for her.
Much more makes sense. A piece slots into place that she thinks would cut them both if handled wrong but when has she been afraid of a dangerous thing or a sharp truth? Kieran's head jerks up, Alistair's face not hers because she's seen Alistair trying to hold himself together in the face of grief and loss on the road to Lothering. Quiet little offers of I'm sorry murmured to her with a beseeching look to his own mother, because mothers have a magic all their own, don't they?
"Gwenaelle," she says when she has her voice, when she knows she must be careful as she would with a wolf hunting in a cold hard winter, with a viper coiled to strike, a thing that might lash out and hurt them both but hurt itself worse because she has been that aching thing for so many other reasons. "I am so sorry. To lose her in such a way-- I cannot--"
And that is the problem, she thinks distantly, that she cannot, that motherhood is sometimes such a snare. That it has been for them both in different ways.
"The woman you spoke of before..in the eyes of all the world she was your mother as she was your father's lady wife. And she was your mother, I will not take that from you. But this loss...tis not one you can grieve. Nor one you can acknowledge outwith many walls." I will keep it safe for you, she thinks. Same as any thing ever said between them though this hangs more heavily when the damage it could do is so much greater for one young woman, when there are so many that would use it as a knife in her back or to her throat, to see her left with nothing at all in the world. The hearts of men and the hearts of the Court are ugly bitter things after all.
no subject
"All I ever did for my mothers was watch them die."
A disappointment to Annegret, a chain that bound Guenievre, and loved best by a man she doesn't think she has it in her to ever forgive for her existence. All she did and all she can do - there is nothing else, not any more. Annegret and Guenievre are gone, and she can't even allow herself to mourn for the one. She can't be this, not balanced on this knife's edge.
Annegret wouldn't let her hold her hand, at the end. Guenievre had never been allowed to want. Gwenaëlle, alone, wraps her hands around her elbows and doesn't realise she's rocking herself, self-contained in the way she soothes, too accustomed to having to be.
"And they didn't do that for me to ruin it all like this," softer. With her own weakness, with griefs that they had borne with the stoicism she's never mastered.
no subject
A thing she cannot recall having done to her but there are a great many things she's learned these past ten years, and thought herself better for having learned them.
"You did not," she tells her as fiercely as she can without it being too much with her gathered close. "A mother--" The words catch in her throat when she looks from Gwenaelle to Kieran and back again, the way they have before, they way they threatened to when Pel came to ask questions Morrigan felt barely qualified to answer. It had been easier with Zevran when she knew more of his pains, when they needn't tiptoe about them so much.
"A mother prepares her child for the world as best they can, and this world is a cruel one. It will take and take till there is naught left." Some mothers, she thinks, will devour you whole as well, and that isn't true only of mothers in swamps who live in huts; Orlais is just as capable of producing bloodthirsty mothers albeit without the magic capable to assume command of their daughters so neatly. "You will ruin nothing. Outside this room and your own, you were attacked. No matter whom you travelled with, you were attacked and you were hurt. Someone with whom you shared confidences with was taken from you by those who would have taken your life as well."
And because she is honest with Kieran too, about dangers. "I carried my heart in my throat in the Court each time you were but a well-spoken lad, naught to do with me for your own safety."
"I know mother." Is that her in his voice or is it the thing that nestles somewhere deep within that can look up with such solemn eyes. "The road can be very scary, but you aren't alone."
no subject
And then he - wasn't pointing a bow at her any more.
If Guenievre hadn't been her mother, the experience of being so deliberately targeted for their weakness would have almost certainly been sufficiently distressing for anyone. She remembers in an abstract and strange way that she fought it when he dragged her away, that he had been inexorable in doing so regardless; the memories are stark but disjointed, oversaturated and impossible to entirely decipher. She couldn't be sure in what order it all happened, and not only because it was so swiftly done.
They are memories she could do without, but - what else would she have of her, if not this?
The slow, incremental way that she relaxes against Morrigan and Kieran both as she sifts through those recollections to parse them and contextualise that with Morrigan's words is telling in itself; only half-tame, easing like a cat pretending not to slink closer so as not to be banished upon noticing. She leans in like she's aware of how strangely starved for it she is, conscious of the lack and cautious to take 'too much' of what's offered.
"Her real children died in Halamshiral," she says, means, my sisters. "Celene killed them. There's only me of her left." And she doesn't feel like anything like enough, whatever anyone says--
no subject
Whatever other feelings Morrigan might have about Lord Luthor in the way any woman might have about a strange young man entering the life of a yong woman they care about when they know too much about men, she can say this in his favour, even if he might never hear it. "I am glad that he was there, I would be poorer for your loss."
In front of Kieran she cannot say some of what she wants to say. Because she's trying to keep him safe from the horrors of her own childhood, from the nightmares that chilled the very blood in her veins, that hurt her, that turned her to such a bitter biting creature as she was. When Gwenaelle does not need to be held so gently she will tell her the truths of the Witches of the Wilds, she thinks but she rests her forehead down against hers, a sign to listen well when such words are far too harsh to say.
"A child is flesh and blood, but not always that of your body." Am I your daughter mother, or did you steal me from a Chasind? In truth she knows in her heart that it's the former and twas only ever spiteful bitter comforts that she tried to find in distancing herself from stings and slaps in thinking of another mother who had a babe ripped from her once by a prowling creature she feared. "All this time she was with you, watched over you, kept your confidences. The world is a hungry thing but it cannot take the truth; she brought you into this world, that made you real and made you hers as much as she is yours, even now. What you do with that is up to you. You are your own person, Gwenaelle. You will always have choices."
Perhaps harder to see now than ever but when Morrigan snatched them from her mother's fingers leaving pieces of herself behind, she will be damned if she allows someone she cares for to lose sight of that if she can prevent it.