faderift | CLOSED

Entry tags:

CLOSED | head-on

WHO: Wren + Gwen

WHAT: Training montage but like, no one's happy about it.
WHEN: Earlyish this month.
WHERE: Gallows.
NOTES: Language, probably.

The location is secluded enough; with so few to occupy these halls, it hasn't been difficult to ensure this stretch of space (once a classroom, perhaps, for its size) temporarily unoccupied. The battered furniture has been dragged aside, some marks sketched on the floor and walls in chalk.

She's arrived early, a set of basic trousers laid out beside an unaccented dagger. The latter is quality steel, for all its stark appearance; the former — well. If some small concessions have been made to quality, they are unlikely anything that Gwen will notice. Finer than might be strictly proper to requisition is still. You know. Peasant shit.

No purpose to armor here: Her own clothing's loose, plain. If there's an edge about her today, it's been deliberately pressed flat. She waits, and rehearses, and breathes,

It isn't the first time she's trained an insolent harpy. It probably won't be the last.

Just, usually they already know how to throw a punch.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If the purpose of the exercise were to firmly establish that Gwenaëlle will not unwarily handle a blade, then she'd excel. She doesn't take it casually - it takes her a moment to steel herself to take it at all, unease with it in every line of her. She holds it gingerly, incorrectly, as little as she can possibly manage without dropping the damn thing; as far away from herself as she can get it.

And not for long; she probably hasn't even figured out exactly what balance she's supposed to be feeling when she shoves it back in its box.

It's context, more than anything else; in another moment she could very easily hand someone else a knife, hold it a moment albeit with similar if less bone-deep reluctance. In this one, though, she's too conscious of its purpose, of her purpose here, and the way her stomach turns is visceral.

But habits, nonetheless.

"Describe it to me." Gently, but firmly. She plants her stance: there's space between them, but there's an implacability about it regardless. "How did it feel?"

The knife, the rest of it. Gwenaëlle touches it as though it holds some static charge. Wren lifts the knife from the box once more, sets it back on the table.

"Heavy," she says, after a momentary pause. "Cold."

Like she badly wanted to put it down again, which is so excruciatingly obvious as to go without saying. Her gaze lingers on it, though not long; she jerks up to meet Wren's eyes, conscious of the deliberate way about her, conscious of her own instinct to make herself small and lean away from it.

Only sheer, blind stubbornness keeps her where she stands. She will not be cowed.

"I didn't care for it."

"Good."

That she's admitted to the obvious. That she's said anything at all. That she's doing something unpleasant, because they're damn well going to do it anyway. A short gesture:

"Again, please." It's not a request. Wren blinks slowly, calmly, "In greater detail. Where does it wish to tip? Where does it warm in your grip? Who holds it?"

There's a hesitation - it isn't immediately clear to her whether Wren only means for her to say it again or to hold the thing. In the absence of a very specific command to do the latter, she settles on the former.

"I don't know what that means. It doesn't. And no one, currently."

Which is, without a doubt, her preference.

She schools her expression.

Don't sound tired, don't sound tired, don't sound tired —

"Pick up the knife, Gwenaëlle," Without being handed it this time. "And try again. Until you know the answers."

Gwenaëlle sets her jaw.

(I can make you give up. She'll cut her whole hand off to spite her fucking arm, she can play the long game, she can make Wren hate this so much she'll make it stop.)

She sets her jaw and she picks it up, as gingerly as before. She holds it away from her, in her fingers and not her hand, and stares at it as if it insulted someone in her family she actually cares for.

"I don't know, at the heavy bit." It's all heavy. She hates this. "It isn't warming anything, my hand is just uncomfortable. I am holding the fucking thing."

"One answer," If barely. "So continue."

Wren steps around the table at last, reaches out (a slow approach, time to bolt) to tap the guard of the blade. Her voice lowers a touch.

“It will all feel heavy, if you hold it like a used handkerchief. Wrap your hand around the hilt." Her hand moves to demonstrate on empty air. "Is it still uncomfortable?"

She knows the answer. It's still not rhetorical.

"Yes," she says, flatly, her fingers flexing with the visible desire to just drop it from her hand now she's holding it more firmly. For a fleeting moment she regrets bringing it - not because she imagines that she wouldn't have had to do this, but because she wouldn't have hesitated to do precisely that if it were just some cheap thing of Coupe's.

She's never seen her uncle's face. She can't even imagine what he would look like sad. Still.

"I don't know what it wants to tilt, it's just there." It isn't irrelevant that she's still holding it pointed perfectly straight toward the floor. "It still doesn't feel warm."

"It shall." Eventually. "Bring it up, towards the door. Why is it uncomfortable?"

She's never been the type to get breathy over tools; at least, she'd never thought she was. Tools last beyond you: They are borrowed, sold, repurposed. The loyalty you show them is never repaid —

(Gwen won't have kept this so close as her blankets. Has not felt for it in the night, or mulled over its stolen place on a shelf.)

— But you show them it, all the same. If it hurts, that's the point of a blade.

Edited 2017-05-23 09:13 (UTC)

What does she feel, holding it?

(Alone. Helpless. Adrift in things bigger than she is, that she has no control over, unloved, unnecessary, scrambling desperately for stability on ground that will never be solid underneath her--)

"It's a tool for combat and I'm not." For combat. A tool. Particularly useful. (What will she do, if she's not useful? She had her newsletter but that won't do, that won't do at all, and now what value has she without it?) "I don't have any desire to be."

She raises it, and it feels heavier. She feels smaller.

"Nor should you. You have control, and it does not. Tools do not think —"

And that would be a waste. A critical eye, an approving little nod:

"— Straighten your arm, breathe out. Steady. Feel the grip. Is it warm yet? Is the room? Tell me about where we are."

"Most aristocrats prefer soldiers do not, either," very blandly, doing as she's bid.

Gwenaëlle keeps company with far too many of the type to sell a line like that convincingly to anyone who knows Yngvi's devotion to her, the fact that Alistair had been helping her practise when she'd injured him, that the Comte's loathing of Asher Hardie is specifically and explicitly because he viewed him as a threat, that he saw his daughter following that mercenary into the wild all too plausible. However, she doesn't know exactly how much Wren knows about her, and also, she'd have still been snide if she did.

(If forced to choose between elf and avvar, the Comte would choose 'a more expensive and skilled assassin'.)

Still. Her arm straightens. She breathes, and if it's unsteady at least she doesn't expect to be mocked.

"We're in the Gallows, so named for the great love the Chantry is known for bestowing upon mages, can't imagine why they mysteriously revolted." Would it be better or worse, as she weaponises someone else's pain for her anger, if she seemed to make a token effort to sound as if she actually sympathises? She doesn't, regardless. "I suppose it's warm."

"Fortunate, then, that you are not a soldier."

Sass isn't panic. That’s something.

It’s something, even as the insincerity of its outrage grates, as she longs just a little for the days she might answer it back in ordered laps. Exercise: Another thing they’ll need introduce slowly. It matters not if the girl’s ever a champion of sport; still best she know the motions. It may save a trip to the healer should they overextend.

"Good. And what of the walls? The furniture. Do not lock your elbow —"

She chances the light tap of an index finger to Gwen’s arm.

"Plain. Plain," she repeats, in a tone more like herself, straightening her arm again (without locking her elbow) as if ignoring the tight, violent way she flinched when touched will mean it didn't happen. "There's chalk on them."

Her eyes had been traveling around the room; now they follow Wren, though it seems less pointed than instinctive, made suddenly aware of her and discomforted by it, watching to anticipate.

"Targets, for later."

The blade was less a problem until it gained context; and she has to wonder if that’s what’s at play again now, or if she’s stumbled upon some entirely new hurt. Gwen’s life is an alien one. Her reasons as much so.

Still, when she moves again, she moves slowly. Wren keeps her hands open, deliberately in view.

"What are you watching for?" Neutrally. She meets Gwen's gaze, lifts her brows lightly. "I am not the one with the knife. Which of us is holding it?"

Are you sick of that fucking question yet?

"Nothing," immediately, eyes forward, not expecting that Wren will somehow think that's a sufficient answer but neither having a better one nor wishing to give it. "I am holding the fucking knife."

It would be hard to say she doesn't seem to be sick of absolutely every part of this already. What a promising start.

"Yes," She agrees. "You hold it. You control it, your grip upon it. It is warm only because you are. It does only what you bid. There is no chance in it."

"You could," Wren adds: "Stab me now, and have done with this whole affair."

The problem is -

the problem is.

If she were another girl, living another life, those words might comfort her. She might find some steadiness, some reassurance in them. It's control. It's choice. It's far too close and tangled with exactly what terrifies her and there's no spite in it when the knife clatters to the floor, falling from her grip, because dropping it is a reaction and not a choice.

There's no playing that off; she doesn't try. She stares at it on the ground for a few moments as if she isn't sure how that happened.

"No," after a pause, finding her voice from some terribly far away place, "I can't imagine I'd do so at all successfully."

"Gwenaëlle,"

Quiet, steady. Her expression’s drawn tighter about the brow. They’ll never get anywhere if they don’t push this. But it would help, perhaps, if she knew the shape of the stone.

A lot of things would help. That doesn’t mean they’ll be forthcoming.

"Come, sit," A chair (plain), the floor. She moves to collect the knife and it disappears up some sleeve, out of view. "That is enough for now."

Action, choice. They're going to need to speak of this. Not right away, not when Gwen sounds like that.

She sits. On the floor and not the chair - there's no debate, no moment of hesitation, she moves where she's comfortable and sits cross-legged, flattening her hands against her knees, expression fixed in something coldly distant. (The only knife she's used to handling is metaphorical, palmed inward.)

For now, she thinks. Just for now.

"My lord would be upset if he knew I'd dropped it," she observes, and it sounds like an observation, no particular emotional reaction of her own tied to the words. Like she's commenting on the weather.

She's brisk about some business of the table (water, a canteen), but Wren watches from the corner of her eye, all the while.

"Oh?" She hands it down, avoids — this time — stating the obvious: My lord is not here. Wren eases herself down opposite her, back to the wall.

Why’s she offering this? Reflection, or yet another signal to some barb? How long to wait this detachment out, before trying to draw her back?

"I can't see the hand of any god in my uncle dying while all these staff-wielding halfwits still live," reflectively, "but I don't particularly grieve my lord's unhappiness."

She had done. More than she wants to admit, watching him lose hope had ached somewhere quiet where she'd rather ignore.

And then Guenievre, and he deserves all of his grief.

Guilt pools icy in her guts. She ignores it. Whatever Emeric Vauquelin's sorrow is worth, a life — even a bitter one — makes fair trade. It has to. It wasn't cheaply-bought.

Wren tips her head aside to consider her; its own sort of distance.

"Beetles will survive a Blight,"

There's no point to confirming the connection: Your uncle, a mage? — the charades of a half-wit themselves. It's not as though the Circles are where her interest lies. Gwen's never asked after her service, and it's doubtful that she ever will. That suits her well enough. My father failed me every day of his life,

"Should you?"

Grieve his grief.

In her mind's eye she sees -

No. She feels the weight, Guenievre losing her footing, hand a vice on her arm til suddenly it wasn't any more, falling, failed. She could protect Sabine who never needed it but not her mother, what good is this thing that will kill her, what point to sitting here as if she can learn to do anything but be left behind.

"I just always wondered what I was to do with it."

(Any of it, Maker. What is this for? What is she for?)

"What did you wish someone had done for you?"

Pretty stitching, a vigil stood — but Gwen didn’t speak of how others had marked her loss. She draws affection from all corners, surely someone had. And what of those other griefs, older; the ones she knows little of beside short notation in skimmed geneaologies. What of those?

For someone who is never more than shouting distance from attendants, Gwen holds herself like a girl alone. But when she speaks —

When she speaks of her father it’s always so nearly claustrophobic.

When Asher died - when he lay dying, still - Morrigan had come as soon as she heard. Flown in another form and taken Gwenaëlle unhesitating into her arms when she'd reached for her as Guenievre sat with some menial task and gaze close, features impassive. And she had been there when needed again, when Guenievre died, a place to safely land when there were precious few to be found. Alistair had confided in her, had listened to her, had been patient. Thranduil had tried--

she had not let him. Had raged and resented for things he could not know nor change. Had turned to him only when her own bravery or decided lack thereof had been on the line, and shame would not let her cling to Morrigan.

She says, "I've never asked for anything."

Demanded many things. Asked for something she needs? Mm.

"Nor answered my question."

To wish, to ask, to receive — such terribly different acts.

I’ve never asked for anything, and what does that excuse? Does it shift the blame of this loneliness, back onto itself? Not the shortcomings of others, how could it be? Not if she’d never told them of it.

Or instead, some cheap attempt to stand defiant? I’ve never asked for anything, I did this for myself. The latter possibility strikes absurd. The daughter of a Comte doesn’t do her bloody hair herself. The girl may wear the blinkers of wealth, but she's hardly blind. Not irritated as she was with the notion of slinking off behind the Duke. Not longing to be invisible as she claims. Gwen has never been invisible, has no notion of what it means in any more than fantasy,

I've never asked for anything. Has she truthfully ever needed to? With every whim attended, does she know how to ask?

(She hasn't had to ask for this. Has made a point of it that she never intended to. And here they are again, and only one of them's doing the asking.)

"What would you have had done for you?"

"What could I possibly need?"

A slightly sardonic question, an unconscious echo of Wren's train of thought. No, Gwenaëlle is under no illusions about the limits of her independence, the many ways her life cossets her from consequence. So few illusions, in fact, that it becomes easy to dismiss her hurts, to turn bitter at her inability to dismiss them - look at everything she has. Look at everything she has while her sisters burned to death in a fucking slum--

What right has she to ask for more than she has? What, this isn't enough?

If it isn't, the fault can only be her own. If she isn't good enough for the best of things, what help is there for that?

"There's no answer. I don't need anything else done for me."

"As your father doesn't?"

She's been resisting the urge for a while now: to fidget, to pace, to do anything with her hands. Easier to focus that way. Easier, and cheap. It would betray the desire to not deal with this, to simply agree and walk out.

You're right, you'll never lack for anything. So pull yourself up, and get on with it —

Wren rubs at her jaw, an absent, methodical motion. Patience is not infinite, empathy isn't. To twist herself around to this, in all its gloomy shades, and do anything other than advise action,

Her mother slept through the long, chill winters; could not be roused. Refused to be. So many years now she's longed for the same — and what reason has either of them ever had? An absent son, but a present daughter. So many dead, but so many still living.

Pain isn't rational. It doesn't listen. She knows it, and still, it's a struggle not to bristle. To hold face and voice steady, to avoid giving in to judgment,

(It's always come so much more naturally than this.)

"His grief, it has not gone, has it?"

"No."

There is no pity in her voice; no sympathy. There is no warmth in her whatsoever. Wren had wanted her steady and present again and she gets it, a thought leading her back and everything behind her eyes suddenly still, coalesced around one thing -

"It hasn't."

- ugly, remorseless, ruthless satisfaction. Her father is in pain and she is coldly glad of it. If he aches every day for the rest of his life, it is just as he deserves, and it will never be enough. She didn't even get any last fucking words. All that he took from her and all that she gave and Gwenaëlle sees her last moments of awful silence every time she closes her eyes and the only thing she wishes is that he had to as well.

Who gives a fuck what he needs.

Edited (WORDING MATTERS) 2017-06-01 09:50 (UTC)

Holy shit, kid.

She's tried to square them, all these different glimpses of the man: Pieces sketched in isolation, by artists bearing agendas great and small. Taken together?

Taken together, the view's poorer than ever. She smothers the question that begs asking — why should yours? — the tie it implies too dangerous. With what, she can't very well fucking say.

Wren watches in silent scrutiny. One moment, two. She hasn't forgotten the eagerness that other Gwenaëlle had eventually seized upon, and it would be better not to encourage that now. Better not to have her at a weapon in anger.

It would be better. It wouldn't be realistic.

"Once more," She shifts herself up, palms the knife out. "Put it back in the box, when you are done."

With what, she doesn't specify.

And you do have the choice. No one will make you fight.

Cullen's voice, in the back of her mind; a reassurance she'd meant to coax out of him and an exchange that had had much less dignity than she'd planned in the end. A reassurance, all the same, tangled up in all her embarrassment. An exchange that means saying she's never asked for anything is a splitting hairs--

No one will make you fight.

They will leave her, and she will have no choice--

No one will make you fight.

She picks up the knife, and in anger she holds it no less reluctantly; her grip is no tighter, no more confident. There will be a day when this is more dangerous, when the coiled thing inside her looks for outlet and finds it, but today she looks down at it and the anger drains from her as color from her face, leaving only something small and sick behind.

She's the only thing she's ever wanted to destroy.

"Every morning, you will practice holding this. You will tell yourself aloud where you are, and why are you doing so."

Nothing that she has a way to enforce; Wren's hardly about to shake down her maid to such purpose. (As if the girl would even listen —)

"Your gestures with the mark, we shall go through them next —"

Let the literal handwaving commence.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

CLOSED | head-on

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject