Family is - complicated. Family is her parents (all three of them); family is the brother she isn't supposed to have, that she loves and is exasperated by in roughly equal measure; family is the Leblancs, a reprieve from the cavernous distance between her and everyone who's ever said they love her. Family is a secret, a tangle of lies, a delicate balance of what she can have if she makes herself fit the space she belongs in, it's always thinking Guenievre's daughters and never my sisters, it's Guenievre teaching her to say mama to Annegret, her fingers tracing the roundness of Gwenaëlle's small ears as a child and pinching them, imagining.

Family has never meant making anyone proud, before. She doesn't trust herself to answer, at first, so she makes her hands into little claws and bares her teeth at him, tiny little bear thing, silly and lovely and loved. She ducks her head a moment later, presses a kiss to her fingers and her fingers to his temple, follows the line of his jaw down and then tucks her hands back into his, and - it's the best, easiest, only way she knows to express that nearness. Just to - be near.

"You're easy pleased," she tells him, but there's no sting in the words.