when they tell you you are different from other girls, ( closed )

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin & Araceli Bonaventura.
WHAT: Two nice young ladies have tea.
WHEN: Now-ish.
WHERE: The Vauquelin home, Hightown.
NOTES: Refers to this.

Most of the books, by the stated end of her patience with their presence, have been either collected by members of the Inquisition or carted off to the Chantry to be donated and used in whatever form their charity best fits - to be sold on to raise money or perhaps stored in some chantry sister's library. Gwenaëlle neither knows the answer nor has any interest in finding out; they are out of her house and well out of her mind. One exception is made, however, a box of etiquette books set aside for Araceli Bonaventura to collect at her leisure -

and when that leisure arrives and the young lady is announced, Gwenaëlle makes time for her, has her shown into a sitting room rather than the library (the portrait that hangs there might be considered somewhat confronting for tea), doesn't bother making her wait longer than is necessary. In her own home, on her own time, the air is informal: hair loose and curling, her dress cut in clean lines and neutral colour, with enough draped fabric to not make immediately obvious that she's not wearing any shoes. A lady, but not one who feels she has much to prove.

Which might or might not be true, but what is true is that she doesn't go about it the usual way.

"Mlle Bonaventura," she says, polite enough. "Welcome to my home."

Comments

[foxsays]

"One of the first, I think," as if she isn't acutely aware of how long it's been at any given moment but it's impolite to rattle that off immediately. "Two years by the end of Harvestmere, hard as that is to believe."

Sometimes it feels so much longer when her homesickness washes over her, threatening to drag her down down down but other times it becomes so very easy to lose yourself in what you're doing and then you look up and you have a life. People who look to you for things. She settles herself comfortably with the bard's way of looking that isn't too different from a guard's way or a thief's way; turn your head politely to your host and strain the very edges of your eyes to see as much as you possibly can.

"If people could stop causing more work when there is enough to be done as is? I would very much appreciate it. Good intentions cancel themselves out when it lands in the laps of someone else." There's a smile when she says it at least, one of those that you can only share with someone that actually understands and isn't going to bite your head off about it or claim idealism either.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle is a lot of things; an idealist is probably never going to be among them. It's not something to which she's ever aspired, nor something she's ever considered at all realistic - as nice as it might be to look out and see the world as she might wish it to be, the only thing in front of her is the world that exists.

And it's awful, but that's what they've got to deal with. It doesn't stop being awful because they stop looking.

"Half the time," she says, ruminative, "I'm not completely sure of good intentions. I'm not completely sure of intentions, at all."

[foxsays]

Carefully - you can read the words on a page but what has Araceli said so often about anything printed, that the trouble with it is how it can go out of date and be ignored by the world as soon as it's made it to the presses because of that (or the scribes, Thedas is Thedas she hasn't had an urgent need to investigate that herself) - she inclines her head in agreement. It's easier to see the good intentions when the country is your own and there isn't a war, when war has been absent so long it's not even living memory. More difficult when you keep saying one thing and the people you care for are just as loud about going out and doing exactly the opposite of those words as the people that don't.

"There is a selfishness that takes me aback, and I know selfishness; in personal passions, yes, but to put your cause above so many others, to not step back and look at the overall picture. That this will be remembered by a hundred eyes and mouths and memories, a thousand, more? Some kind, some indifferent, many more unkind and not knowing any of us as people?" She shakes her head, folds her hands into her lap for something to do with them, to keep her jaw in check. "I could grab some of them by the collar and scream but that would only be encouragement for too many."

All of those who don't think their actions have consequences, that their words don't matter? They'd dig in their heels out of spite and obstinance or just because they're used to it if she did that, because any attention to them is better than none.

[elegiaque]

"There was a time," Gwenaëlle remarks, a parody of the upbeat sorts that still litter the place with their optimism and their ignorance, "where I imagined that the pressing matter of the end of the fucking world might be enough to drag us all temporarily past that."

Not indefinitely, of course, don't be absurd, but - for just long enough, she'd thought. Perhaps.

She's already pouring the brandy into glasses when she continues, "More fool I."

Of course it wasn't, isn't, would never have been.

[foxsays]

"This world," being in the home of someone else, being invited here because they spoke, because they seem to align on something like this is freeing and tension slips out of Araceli's shoulders, allowing them to sink a half inch, "it never moves on, it drags the same conflict through the mire again and again and again."

It's not everything she's held in her chest for - how long has it been, how many hours has she held in the screaming when she hasn't gone home to wherever she and Korrin have stayed to scream at the furniture, to throw a thing in an ugly fit - but it eases something in her.

"I have your publications, I enjoyed them. I was-- that someone would take the time. Would take the trouble to speak up. I know so many people who will wring their hands day and night and worry themselves but when it comes time to do anything, oh no, oh no they cannot, they will say the words so loudly but it means nothing if they cannot follow through." You have a voice, you use it, and you don't use it to snap at the people who'll wield whatever it is that they have if it carries them through and gets the job done. Stow your blessings in your holster, her father said and if she had her pistols now…

[elegiaque]

With brandy in hand, Gwenaëlle takes a moment to order her thoughts. The thoughts that had led to that publication, while it still existed -

"When I first came to Skyhold," she says, ruminative, "what I saw wasn't heroism from fables. It wasn't anything extraordinary. It was a great many people trying very hard to do something very hard. Strangers to one another working together. I suspect," a little dryly, "that years deep as we are now, familiarity has bred a bit of contempt that wasn't there in the first weeks and months after Trevelyan bit the dust."

What a charming way with words she has in person.

"But that was what I wanted to show...Orlais, and Thedas. That they hadn't got to wait around for someone to come down from the fucking sky to save them, they could do it themselves, that even the smallest things made a difference. That they could contribute. That they should. Don't you want to be proud of where you were standing?"

[foxsays]

Coming through the gates of Skyhold, chilled to the bone is etched in her memory. And others. Here are people who fell from the sky with marks same as the Herald. Here comes a runner with the news you've dreaded: the Herald is dead what do we do now?

(Would it be easier, with one leader to at least give direction and some central figure to direct complaints and frustrations and all else to rather than the Inquisition and all it stands for? Privately she often thinks yes but the choosing of an individual would be the thing to tear it apart entirely.)

"War isn't in the living memory of my home. The legacy is in shaping how we conduct ourselves but adjusting to living through one and talking of it so casually has been as foreign to me as any of this," a careful gesture with the brandy glass. "But I am a captain's daughter and of a nation of sailors, sailors know when all hands are needed before the mast and to be as wary of the calm."

She takes a sip of brandy, looks down into the glass then back up at Gwenaëlle. "I think they forget what pride is. Or they'll argue over it while it all burns down and who has it worse than them and why. Pride and respect never come easy, it's working until you fall into bed at the end of the day and tearing your hair out but so many think they've done that. Because life has been hard. As if life isn't always hard in a hundred ways." There are a lot of things Araceli can't say a lot of the time but that feels good, sitting here in someone else's home, drinking brandy, to lance that particular wound even if it's small or petty or spiteful. Hold it in too long and she'll poison herself in the end.

[elegiaque]

What is she the daughter of - an elf with sad eyes and a man with a laugh like smashing glasses, born a war, born at war with herself before even anything else had intruded. Of a nation built to make a pretty face of its worst and ugliest excesses, impulses; there is nothing in her or in it except conflict. She wonders abstractly what it would be like, to come from something that Araceli describes. Imagines what it must be like, to come from that to this- she hasn't got to imagine, can see it in the way she holds her cup and how they unfold in conversation, petty and spiteful and not wrong.

"People were angry with me after my last publication," she observes. "Not here, obviously, no one here gives a damn about anything I write - I think most of them didn't pay the blindest bit of attention. But the Chantry sisters who'd been courting my aid, oh, I'll not hear from them again. And it was such an unkind thing to say, wasn't it, was it all worth it, all these unprecedented rights for elves."

She makes an indelicate sound in the back of her throat- "But you look at how the Empress defends those rights she handed out when she needed something from her fancy new Marquise. Oh, she doesn't defend them at all? Imagine my surprise. The complacency of it all. Corypheus is going win because no one can be bothered to look up from their own navels to fight him."

[foxsays]

Sometimes a space must be carved to let the people who have to live with the world everyone else has made for them that they have to try to prop up and repair as it falls down about be what they are. Young. Young and angry and tired of behaving for all the grown-ups because the second they don't in front of them is the moment it's used against them and they have to start again.

"There are only humans where I am from," she isn't about to complicate the matter with everything in the sea she knows to be real, not for this, that isn't what's important, "but this sort of thing still happens. How dare you treat these people like people. How dare you think they should afford the food on their tables and the roof over their heads and what makes them entitled to an education, why do they need it." It's a fight she knows because the common girl that rises too high and doesn't remember her place is the girl they don't like.

Other people look to her. They think about what they might do too. Even if she calls herself Inquisition there's that weight of being a rifter that others are going to attach to her after all.

Taking a sip, she feels her mouth twist and knows exactly the sort of anger that would come out of Leandra at Celene. How unfit she is for a throne. How unsuited for rule. "Ruling is a privilege, not a right. Generations have handed that one down. Would Celene not have served us better as a figurehead. They don't speak. They don't act. They simply are." Araceli isn't Orlesian or even Thedosian, but maybe this still counts as a seditionist statement out of her mouth for suggesting it's better to have her gagged or bound or to leave the suggestion that she's leaving out there. Surely there was a way to get what they needed from Orlais instead of supporting this farce or letting Corypheus take the lot.