CLOSED | head-on

[limier]

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.

Comments

[limier]

"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.

[elegiaque]

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.

[limier]

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?

[elegiaque]

"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.

[limier]

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.

[elegiaque]

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?)

[limier]

"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.

[elegiaque]

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.

[limier]

"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?"

[elegiaque]

"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."

[limier]

"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?"

[elegiaque]

"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.

[limier]

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.

[elegiaque]

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.

[limier]

"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.