look. i'm just being honest. ( closed )

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin + Alistair.
WHAT: Bonding.
WHEN: A while after Sabine leaves to do elf things.
WHERE: Skyhold.
NOTES: Drunk adults talking about adult things, probably. Will update if necessary.

Sabine's absence is not immediately noteworthy, mostly because Gwenaëlle has avoided Sabine's presence being immediately noteworthy as much as she's been able. With, admittedly, mixed success - nevertheless. There are lots of people in Skyhold, and lots of them she doesn't see every day, and a particular few of them she would be happy to own she has no pressing desire to see every day. The resentful distance is mutual, as far as she can tell, what with that hair-pulling incident-- Alistair, on the other hand, has never in so many words denied being her friend. When they talk he seems to care about her opinions, and possibly her feelings, if she were inclined to acknowledge having any, as she largely is not. He is someone whose moods she notices and then bothers to remember, later; some awareness of how incredibly stupid he is about Sabine is unavoidable. His face does a thing when she's around, even worse when he doesn't think anyone's looking -

So when she realises that the elf has gone, it's mostly because of the things Alistair's face have started doing. Different things. Sadder things, mainly. She hasn't actually seen him gaze meaningfully at the horizon and sigh, but it may only be a matter of time and lack of proper supervision, which means that proper supervision must therefore be applied.

With alcohol, as it turns out. That's how you know it's proper.

Gwenaëlle doesn't wait for him to come and speak to her, or to express a need; she preempts it entirely by joining him one evening in his tent (which she surveys with a critical eye, but it isn't why she's here and she keeps her editorial remarks to herself) with two bottles of what probably came from her father's cellar and very likely cost more than the entirety of the Warden encampment. They are, to put not too fine a point on it, virulently alcoholic. Without any preamble whatsoever--

"Guess what we have in common now."

Go on, Alistair. Guess.

Comments

[byblow]

"Hmm," Alistair hums, looking up at her from a pile of bear skin and old blankets in his perfectly-serviceable-thank-you tent. He'd closed the book on his lap at the first sound of footsteps in the ice outside, but now he sets it aside entirely. He hadn't actually been reading anyway. He'd been staring at a single line, and possibly sighing. Only the opacity of the tent was sparing the horizon his gaze.

So she's arrived in the nick of time.

He looks her over. Mainly the bottles. If he closes his eyes he'll be able to see Teren's disapproving face, so he doesn't close them. One of the key components of his attempts to drown himself (or pickle himself, perhaps, because pickles can't feel betrayal) on arrival in Orlais had been the privacy of it. He's not an addict. Drinking with a friend is a better idea for him than sulking soberly alone.

"You don't look like you've had a growth spurt, so I assume our feet aren't the same size." On another day he'd make a show of checking to be sure, but today the words alone stretch his good humor as far as it will go, until they're strained. But in a tired way, not a sour one. The smile he musters up is entirely genuine. "If you've joined the Wardens I'm going to have to have a word with whoever let you in. We have enough trouble."

[elegiaque]

"You've not got anybody in this camp who could get past Morrigan to make me a Warden," she says, dropping one of the bottles into his hands as she makes herself at home - and besides that look, doing it with more ease than one might imagine she'd have. One who wasn't aware of some of her more peculiar friendships, at any rate.

"Although I'm not prepared to swear to there not being anyone stupid enough to think it's a good idea." Thanks, Gwenaëlle, you're a real pal. "No, it's not that--"

and she sits, sweeping her furred cloak down to give herself something to sit on, her skirts momentarily puffing up around her as she does, dress easily taking up more space than girl would do on her own. She looks out of place and entirely at ease with it, pulling the cork out of her wine bottle with her teeth -

"Alexander left me, too," around the cork, and then, "but also, Sabine did it once. I see she didn't cut your hair in your sleep. She must have really liked you."

[byblow]

Alistair lets all of these things and words happen around him with bemused tolerance, like someone who hasn't quite woken up from sleep. It's the most he can do to take the bottle he's offered, pry the cork loose—easily, hands like a stonemason—and sniff the contents—

"This is wasted on me," he warns under some of Gwenaëlle's talk. He'll drink it, of course, but she ought to know. Just in case she'd rather keep it and leave him to be equally happy with swill.

—before the last bit jolts him into better focus.

He follows. He isn't sure that he follows, though. That he won't be berated for the assumption if he makes it out loud. He takes a drink without taking his eyes off of Gwenaëlle, eyebrows crookedly arched with a challenging and wary sort of interest. "She told me she worked for you," he says, hedging.

It's not wounded. It's not she lied. There are a lot of things he never said, too.

[elegiaque]

"Did she." Gwenaëlle's small smile is - well, it's small, so it's hard to say, but maybe it's fond. Or bitter, or - that bittersweet thing where it's sort of both, at the same time, if she had any feelings at all on the matter, which she absolutely does not. "Imagine how good a lady's maid she must have been," she advises, taking an indelicate swig from the bottle in her hands.

Months ago, when Thranduil had started that stupid rumour about the reason for their fight - it had burned her at the time, infuriated her, but there'd been a black humor to it, too. He'd just chosen the wrong elf, that was all.

"I kept her so long as I did because we were fucking," she says, with candour, "and then she tired of me, and she left. After an argument. Our hair tangled, you see, in the night. And she cut my hair--"

(This may still irritate her.)

Another generous taste of the wine.

"And now Alexander is gone, so I am quite done with redheads, I daresay."

[byblow]

"That's smart," Alistair says. It's the safest of the several unsafe things he can think to say. "They're trouble."

He isn't done with redheads. With this one. She wasn't tired—he doesn't think she was tired—she wasn't tired. He decides.

Everything remains astoundingly awful.

Alistair takes a drink along with Gwenaëlle, a second behind and slightly longer out of manful competitiveness, and faintly registers that it's good wine that someone without Fereldan tastes would appreciate.

"I'm sorry about Alexander." He'll circle back to the hair in a moment: how much, how awful, were there hats. (He'll try very hard not to circle back around to fucking: how much, how awesome, were there hats.) "Did something happen?"

[elegiaque]

"He had to go back to the Free Marches. For I don't know what. And that was that, I suppose. I didn't think anything had happened." It has the taste of finality, regardless - she isn't the type to imagine differently. Even if it were, even if she had a promise, she might still be sitting here as doubtful.

Redheads and elves and men and so many other things she's sure she's done with -

Until the next time. There is a wearying sort of embarrassment with having imagined anything else, but - but it's done. She managed not to completely humiliate herself; now she can sit here and drink not unsympathetically with Alistair.

Eventually; "Your big stupid face looked sad."

(This is like affection.)

"So." A tilt of the bottle. She means well.

[byblow]

"So," Alistair echoes.

His big stupid face dips back toward sadness, because he has minimal control over it. The best he can do is look away and take another very long drink and not talk about it.

Of everyone who's left me behind, she has the second-best reason—bitter, opens too many doors. I've only ever heard of Wardens settling down when I had to deliver a death notice to someone's wife—wah wah, he hasn't had nearly enough to drink to be stupid and mopey enough to get into that. I love her—

No. He does actually know who he's talking to. That was that, she said. He could probably learn from it.

When he lowers the bottle and looks back, he manages a little smile and a little mischief.

"How bad was your hair?"

[elegiaque]

Her fingers go, unconsciously, to the back of her hair - the face she pulls is so purely genuine as a reaction. Her hair, Alistair--!

"There was a great chunk of it, here," tangling her fingers at the side, where it had tangled with Sabine's in the night. "There was nothing to be done for it, either, it all had to be trimmed to blend it in so I wouldn't look foolish. We had an awful row - Guilfoyle, he came because of the screaming. And she left and I didn't see her again, not until Skyhold. Off doing whatever she does that she's better at than serving."

Gwenaëlle's perhaps slightly more self-aware than she was, then, about how tiring it might have been to be both her lover and her maidservant, but Maker forbid she concede even an inch, even when Sabine isn't fucking here to hear her do it.

"I cried for a day." A beat. "My hair, you understand."

Yeah.

[byblow]

"I do," Alistair says, running his own fingers past his temple and over his scalp—pretend vanity that he only is able to fake so convincingly because it's actually mostly authentic.

He smiles, rubs his mouth, visibly hesitates, and then:

"She didn't leave me, really. She just had to go, and I'm being a child about it because I have abandonment issues." Said like he's quoting someone else, but without any sarcasm, because it's true. He pauses and shrugs. "Unless it was all a very elaborate excuse. I've certainly known people—I cannot marry you, ma cherie, I am sworn to the Wardens." He rolls his eyes and his head along with them. There's what he thinks of that. Not that marrying a Warden is a good idea for anyone, ever. That isn't the point. He takes a drink. "I suppose we'll find out for sure when this is over and I go after her."

Maybe he should be slightly less serious about that, after only six months. But if she'd snagged him when he was twenty he'd already be trying to die for her. So.

"If she cuts off anything of mine when I do, I'll let you know."

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle lowers the wine bottle in her hand, slowly, looking at him almost accusingly -

"Maker's breath, you're the marrying kind, aren't you."

It's only because it's Alistair that she means that criticism affectionately. Or, maybe it's a little bit because she is, she would like to be - marriage is a fraught prospect in the nobility, even for girls who aren't keeping secrets like the ones she cradles to her breast, a business transaction poorly romanticised. If she harbored dreams of securing something else, Alexander Luthor took them back to the Free Marches with him, and Gwenaëlle's unlikely to give it voice now.

Or any other time.

She thinks Sabine would be happy with him. Happier than with her, certainly, but that probably wouldn't take much - more than that. Properly happy, maybe.

She should have that. He should.

"Ugh," deliberately.

[byblow]

"Well, I don't know about that," Alistair says, but with a horrifically soft-eyed sort of look at the empty ground between them that clearly suggests she's right in the ways that matter, however little he's fussed about getting a Chantry sister's blessing in the process.

He snaps out of it a moment later, right back to sharp-eyed and smirky, and tips the mouth of his bottle toward her to use like a pointer.

"More important things now. How long were the two of you able to keep that up, hm?" he asks. "I mean, there's liking a challenge, and then there's..."

There's what he imagines the two of them must have been like. A relationship—or whatever—equivalent to being elbowed in the ribs. Repeatedly.

[elegiaque]

"Ugh," she repeats, meaningfully, and then he asks his question and -

Gwenaëlle takes a drink. Reflecting on her relationship with Sabine, such as it was and such as it was never going to be again with or without some labradorish Fereldan plonking himself down and being much better at Sabine than Gwenaëlle had ever managed, requires a bit of that. She'd never imagined or aspired to reunion, so there's that.

"A while. A few months. Long enough," very deliberately pronounced. "It was a terrible idea. I thought maybe I was taking advantage for an entire thirty seconds before I remembered she would hit me in the face if she thought so and dismissed it."