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WHO: Thranduil, Lady Vauquelin
WHAT: A long overdue conversation.
WHEN: Late Justinian
WHERE: chez Vauquelin
NOTES: none

The staff know how he likes his food. He thought at first that they would perhaps waver, given his foreignness, the shard in his hand, but they spare him no regard. Which he may well prefer—let him be as a ghost to them, a statue, maneuvered around and addressed only when necessary. They are all well suited to living around one another like planets in orbit, forever circling, never touching.

He hesitates to make requests of the elven staff, does not wish to lord over them. And yet, with the Men—he is not inclined either to cause trouble in Romain’s house. This is not where he will fight his battles.

So, lunch— brought out for him was a plate of greens and cheeses, a small cold sampling of what could be rabbit or nug, some dark bread. Nothing he needed utensils for, all suited for tearing up into small pieces and eating. He uses his left, frees his write to flip through the pages of a tome on Sundermount’s history. Thranduil looks up at the sound of footsteps, all the staff being trained out of the habit—and Kieran far too small to sound like this.

The food, she’ll note, is far away from the book, far away from all the books in her library.

”Gwenaëlle,” he greets, uncrossing his legs. His hand stays poised on his place in the text, one fingertip on his next word.

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Well. When he puts it that way; a moment of hesitation and then she relaxes, curling her fingers into his hair and carding through it in lazy, idle strokes. She shifts, a little, to better accommodate him in her lap, and lets her thoughts drift some.

The sting of new knowledge will not soon fade, but she learns to live with it as the rest.

"My lord didn't want anything legally binding that he couldn't easily extricate us from as required when I was so young. And I had my ways of avoiding it when I was older." A brief pause. "They did nearly trap me, once,"

she's always spoken of marriage thus, a threat to her to be avoided - maybe it makes more sense now, when he's seen more of Thedas and knows more of her heritage,

"but Asher came to my rescue as he was wont to do. Is elven marriage different?"

The Outsider did this for him. It was similarly pleasant, soothing in the way a cat would find a sunbeam soothing. He is no less leonine despite his size and species. He does not purr, but here he is, laying on the floor of her library. Eighteen months have found them in a very different place from whence they started.

"'Once'?" he echoes. He must be careful of sleep, now. Speaking distracts just enough from her hands that Thranduil fears trapping her on the floor less. "Greatly. It is... we do not make mistakes. We are steadfast, and eternal."

And often separated from spouses for decades, centuries. Gwenaëlle's ancestors had not yet arrived in Orlais when his wife had died. He does not see the need to mention that.

"Marriage is as simple as a joining of bodies."

It takes her a moment to understand what he's intimating, and that time is perhaps the only reason she doesn't blurt something as charming and clever as oh, I'd be in real trouble if that were true of the rest of us. She begins working a braid into his hair from the temple, considering.

Of course, what she does settle on is, "A simple joining of bodies got me out of a marriage," dryly, because she is herself and her smart mouth will out.

(That answers once, at any rate.)

"Everyone says they prize loyalty. In others, though. Rarely themselves."

Lonely words.

He laces his fingers and settles his hands on his chest, legs crossed at the ankles. "I understand that things are different for Men." Understood and witnessed as much. He does not blame Gwenaëlle for using the means she had available to escape a situation she felt trapped in; she accepts the limitations of his people with similar ease.

"Do you consider yourself loyal?"

They are what they were made to be. It is hard to be unvirtuous when designed never to falter. They are far from their original purpose now, and he in Thedas even further, but he still does not so much cling to the rules of Arda as he has them imprinted upon him. He could no more kinslay or turn his hand to evil purpose than teach a fish to fly.

"I am." An answer that comes easily, assured; the simple fact of the matter. For as many other things as she is, fickle isn't really one of them. Constancy is what she wants and consequently what she offers, a port in any storm for those she cares for as well as steadfast in her loves.

Mixed success, but then, she's fit a great deal of living into twenty-three years.

"I suppose it doesn't look that way from where you're sitting," in her lap? "but I've never been unfaithful to anyone. It must've been exhausting to be my lover and my handmaiden, which I will deny saying if you ever have cause to repeat it, but I can say for myself I was even faithful to Sabine. That was before all of this Inquisition. Alistair suits her better."

She's grown less sure over time that there's anything that suits her. This does, right now.

"Sabine?" he says, note rising, because he certainly remembers her. "Were you so at odds that you considered being unfaithful?"

He is relaxed. How nice it is, to lay and simply feel, to notice the smell of the library and the feel of Gwenaëlle's hands through his hair. There is also the firm floor under his back, the softness of her dress and her thigh under that.

"There is a firmer line for us. Wed and unwed." And once the line has been crossed, there is no way to step back. "There is much less grey in our lives. It must be freeing, to have so many choices."

And a burden to have all the pain that comes with it, but with how easily he's seen so many entangle themselves, it must be worth it all.

Not then, she thinks, not when they were tangled together and Sabine had seemed like the most wonderful and wonderfully exciting person in all of Orlais - afterwards, maybe, when she was flinging herself angrily around in Sabine's absence, making lists of all the awful things she hadn't done and therefore didn't deserve to be abandoned in that fashion, or the affront she'd been dealt beforehand -

"I'm sure there are people who feel that way," neutrally, in the tone of someone who doesn't. "I didn't find anything freeing about her cutting my hair."

It's long since grown back, curling down to her waist as it does when unbound, but she's still a bit sore about that. She'll probably still be referring to it thirty years from now, remember that time. Hearing the story had made Alistair feel better, though, so maybe it's not all bad.

He unfurls a hand and reaches, pausing somewhere by her hip. Their eyes meet, he's very careful on that, and when her face doesn't register displeasure or disagreement, he catches a strand of hair in his fingers, thumb brushing over the ends and his hand balanced against her waist.

"Should you grow displeased with me, would you try the same?" Which isn't the sort of thing to be discussed in low murmurs, half in her lap in a position that needn't be seen as compromising by only elves, and yet--

"Sabine is inimitable," he admits. "Least of all by myself."

He lacks the resources and the time to be as he was. He has felt so strange since he fell through the Rift, his actions like ones through a looking-glass, his skin oddly foreign. His convictions still hold, but it is disorienting to reach for an ability you knew you had and feel a lack of response from your own body. To have a response when none should be.

"I wouldn't have done it to her, either," the comfort of his closeness doing much to blunt the edge of what might have otherwise been affront at the question. She shifts only to ease where her corset presses bruises into her waist at the angle she's come to rest, her hand falling to settle at his shoulder, fingers tangled in his hair and holding, not tugging.

After a moment, "You displease me constantly."

It sounds more affectionate than the words she uses have any right to.

He smiles up at her, the cat who caught the canary, head lolled back into her lap and the rest of him draped over her library floor, the velvet of his pants scraping against the wool of her (grandfather's) rug. He cannot see much of her face, less of her dress, but the light from the windows puts a halo of brightness around her hair. She isn't an elf- he'll do his own math for that later- but she has lovely hair.

"Even now?" he says, aware he is displaying himself to his advantage. It is vanity, sharper than pride, that has him preening, only half for her amusement, for a laugh and perhaps a rebuke. She hasn't pulled his hair once.

Her faint smile is a little crooked, rueful - "Yes," tartly delivered, an exhalation and the coiled tension under it all the warning he has for an experiment she's already half-regretting before she's done it -

As tightly laced as she is, she'd never be able to reach him if he weren't so damned over-large, but she doesn't have to bend far so the press of her lips (soft, warm, the taste of a floral tea) is decisive, her hair coming down a curtain around them, curled from her braids and not pulled up as it will be by evening.

Her fingertips touch very lightly to his jaw, slide more purposefully to his hair, his nape. It has the air of curiosity -

She remembers the conversation they had, about hair and intimacy and what it means. She's been telling herself for some time not to think - but maybe she was wrong? Maybe he is for her, after all. Maybe this is a terrible mistake and she's ruined everything, that would be just like her.

Well, if she has she'd better make the most of this.

He cannot say he wasn't expecting her to kiss him, that he is in anyway innocent or free from blame. Thranduil encouraged this, and is there to meet her as her lips press against his, his eyes falling shut. His hands do not wander. One cups the side of her face, and the other releases her hair to settle at the back of her neck. He does not presume to hold her, but neither does he keep his touch light.

It comes on him all at once, a realization sweeping through his mind: he wants this.

The technical aspects, the hows-and-whys, those are lost in favor of the sweet smell of her skin, the taste of her mouth- a curious probe before he deepens the kiss in search of more- and the feeling of--

of wanting.

He is, perhaps, out of practice. He must pull back at some point, or perhaps she does. His eyes open, he watches her for a moment before he lifts himself off her lap, pressing his lips to her forehead before laying back down.

"Well," Thranduil says, and exhales. He pulls the hand at her neck away, keeps the other on her cheek, thumb stroking her skin.

The way she tilts into his hand is unplanned, unguarded; some of her edges softened by the startling warmth of being welcome. She'd been so ready to be pushed away that there's a moment she has absolutely no idea what to do when he doesn't, uncharacteristically quiet. He says well, but he's still touching her, so she takes her time. Turns her face into his palm and presses her lips there, briefly sparing her the need to think of something intelligent to say.

"I thought," she starts, stops.

Then, "If you want to pretend it didn't happen," please don't want that in the glance she casts from under her lashes, studiously avoiding her own thread of uncertainty, "I won't tell Morrigan."

Spare him overprotective retribution, she means, but she'd sell her ease with letting him go a little more convincingly if she weren't still holding his wrist near her so tightly.

Don't want that.

His smile is affectionate as she kisses his hand, warm with all the edges sanded off. "Do not," Thranduil starts. The implications- he does not want to consider them, not when he cannot risk upsetting her as pieces of revelations fall into place.

Curious- and hardly forgetting Morrigan's oft spider-themed reminders- he marches along, repurposing his words. "Do you tell Morrigan about all your trysts?"

They gossip, he knows that, and he watches her closely. It's impossible to ignore the firm grip she has on him. She allows herself to be read so easily, but he cannot act as if he's guarded either.

After a pause, he shakes his head. "No. There is no need. I would ask that you mind whom you mention it to, I..."

And what to say here? If she knew Arda better, if she had allowed him to prattle on about the elves more, perhaps she would have grasped this without needing to be told in halting, careful tones. "This was, perhaps, more to me than it was to you. You have said you have never been betrothed."

He thinks, briefly, of the Outsider, whom he had touched nearly as affectionately. Never quite to this degree, and desire had not pushed him to this final step. Had the Veil so torn him from Arda that he was akin to a Man? Could he feel this temptation freely? But the Outsider is not here for him to test this theory, and even if he was, well. What answer would he want?

She's stirring to dispute that point, he can see it, it is a great deal to her, thank you when he says betrothed and her mouth snaps shut. He's right, and if she doesn't know what he's thinking she is already along similar lines: if only she'd listened to him a little closer, if only she hadn't been so averse to seeming interested.

At length, "There hasn't been anyone since Alexander. Seeker Pentaghast told me then when I asked that I would be allowed to hold a wedding in Skyhold if I wanted to."

They hadn't been betrothed, but she is aware pretending she hadn't wished it is disingenuous -

It isn't that she still wants. In her awkward, fumbling way, what she means to say is: I'm not reaching for less than that, it's not nothing, I've thought--

She doesn't let go his wrist.

"I always tell her about the things important to me. Morrigan." And you are.

Amused, despite the situation, a smile plays along his lips. No, the Quenya do not do things by half-measure, Eru made them unbending, unyielding, and that he can give ground at all, that he is able to consider kissing her again with anything other than boredom is--

He will speak to someone wiser. There is a division head who will know more, because these questions are not ones to go unanswered.

"Tell Morrigan. Tell Yngvi, if you must. I ask only--"

That she consider how it looks. That she not bandy him about in such a way that he might appear no different that another Orlesian noble's elven toy. Discretion. Grace. He does not wish for the Inquisition to know.

"Remember why I am here."

For his kin. For the Dalish, the city elves. They will be everything, until this body fails him or until he is returned to Arda. Would she be able to bear that?

He extracts herself from her lap, sitting up slowly, allowing her to keep her hold on him.

"Ah, the Seeker. As tempted as I am for you to propose such a thing, I would beg your patience. We needn't..." He cups her hand where she holds his wrist. "We needn't rush this. I would beg you for time. That we might both consider."

This does not come to elves easily. Eighteen months in the making, and he knows the name for these feelings, but she-- she must have time. To consider all the implications, how this will affect her life. Then, they will speak. He will not trap her.

Before he's finished speaking, she's already shaking her head - not in dispute, precisely, because on this they are wholly in agreement, but:

"Yngvi doesn't want to know." He is as dear to her as Marcellin and much more endearing; a dirty little brother she very rarely has to have the law bent to rescue; he doesn't care for Thranduil in the slightest and would not be thrilled to hear about this new development. (Imagine if he started fucking Coupe, ugh, that would be the worst thing-) "And I don't - if my lord were to get wind of this, if I were to...I mean, I don't think it's even legal."

To marry him, she means, however much the idea of throwing it in the teeth of about half a dozen people might please her. And it would, if she could get away with it.

But that's not why, not the important thing.

"I'd be ruined in Orlais. I'd be in the back of a carriage bound for the highest and most thoroughly locked tower my lord could find for me. We'd never see each other again."

(It's very sweet that she thinks this. Emeric, though, he knows better of trying to prevent her through such ineffective means; it would be Guilfoyle with a blade and readiness to console her grief afterwards. She would weep, of course, but there would be no undoing it and grief eases, in time.)

...she doesn't argue his plea for time, but it is apparent even from this much that she's been thinking on it longer and in more detail, perhaps, than he imagines, knows the look of it well, knows the knife edge that she walks with her reputation even as hard as she tries to be good. But-- marriage is as simple as a joining of bodies. Even if they were not to tell, that is quite the commitment, isn't it. (Isn't he--? How would that--?)

He considers what she's said about Yngvi, balances that against the potential hurt of Yngvi finding out at a later date, and gives her this. He has no intention of being the gossip of Hightown, let alone the Inquisition. Whatever conclusions have been drawn by the staff are dismissed every time the laundry is done, and he has no intention of wedding her until he has answers. For both her sake and his.

He smiles, and pulls his wrist towards his mouth, and her hand attached to it. Thranduil kisses the back of her hand, his manners too well taught to avoid the chance to be courtly. "Oh, Gwenaëlle, you underestimate me."

There will be things he has to tell her, certain histories she will need to be made aware of. And he-- well, as much as he can confess to enjoying the act, he will want children, someday. Another thing to add to the list. Very slowly, he stands-- offering his arm, the strength of his stance to aid her in standing too.

"I will not leave Kirkwall," he vows. "Not without letting you know, but there are things I must know, if we are to do this."

Allowing him to help her up, she straightens - bare feet on the hardwood floors beneath them, her toes curling underneath, rising up on them for a moment to add that tiny amount of height that makes not a blind bit of difference to how much larger than her he is. It's easy to recall, still, the first time they spoke on the ramparts; the biggest elf she'd ever seen.

The space around him adapts to him, as much as the other way around. It had taken her time to notice. She wonders, sometimes, how much of her has adapted, too - how many places they've met in the middle. How hard would it be, now, to untangle him from the whole of her? If she had to let him go--

She doesn't have to. She won't. She'll figure something out, find a way.

"What things?" More than just herself, she supposes, since he could ask, although- she's not going to pretend she doesn't know how damned difficult she's been in the past, when he has asked of her. Her hands fall when they stand, but not far - stop on his waist, lightly.

(His hands would about span hers.)

Then, more importantly: "You can't leave me," as if he's suggested that actually in the morning there's been a change of plans and the moon will be rising. "If you had something to do. But not just to go." He went to Solasan, to the Korcari Wilds, without so much as a frown.

--without a frown anyone saw. Something might've happened. People get hurt. It would...displease her.

"We love once, and only once." Finwë aside- firmly aside, Thranduil glad he will not need to think of him, does not have his granddaughter here in Galadriel to judge him for his actions or understand them with the full grasp of the Quendi- they are devout. "That I am able to indicates some-- oddities. I am not from here, and the Veil..."

Long had he blamed it for his current state, as if it was a sieve that held the most solid pieces of himself in the Fade, his fëa diminished, his natural state cleaved. If these feelings are an abomination of the ruin of his spirit, he--

It does not feel like that, he reminds himself. It feels right, and whatever those reasons are, he must find them, and put his own mind to rest.

"I will not leave you," he promises, settling his hands about her waist, his fingers nearly-not-quite touching, but he's not trying. "I may need to visit Sundermount, to go to the Gallows as I always do. Inquisition business may well call me to Orlais again. I will tell you. Unless it is dire, I will never make off like a thief in the night. I owe you that."

And he will firmly avoid-- he will not allow what happened to Legolas to happen to him.

Gwenaëlle does not think of the rifters who came and went, who melted away in the night and for whom there were no explanations - she does not wish to, so she doesn't. (She thinks once of Martel Leblanc, a footnote in her last publication, the rifter who died at the Winter Palace - Thranduil has much more practise at not dying than anyone, though, so surely-)

Reassured on the subject of being left (not being left, most importantly, and it troubles her a little that she trusts but he has yet to disappoint her and so), she worries instead at the oddities he raises, lingering on what is implied in the observations he makes, and does not make. That he is able to love. He doesn't say it, in so many words, so she hasn't got to answer it in so many words, and all the same: it lingers.

"Spirits and demons," she says, after a long pause, "are different either side of the Veil, aren't they. One thing in the Fade, and one thing here. What if it's...that? You loved once, there, and you're - different, here, so you have - new opportunities. To do things once. On the other side."

Occasionally, it's apparent that Gwenaëlle is both brighter and more observant than her frequent, loud tendency to kick off at the slightest provocation tend to suggest about her. In this instance, she even demonstrates the restraint many would be forgiven for not realising she's capable of and does not make any crack as her first thought inspires about how he's probably definitely a demon, then, after all.

This is probably not the time.

(She saves it up, though. He'll find it funny once he's found himself some proof to the contrary, she thinks.)

"Calenmiriel," he says, and for once it doesn't feel like ripping stitches. "She was my wife. She was Legolas' mother."

And she was-- everything. He has never been good at small gestures. He never commits himself to anything halfheartedly. He remembers her face, her laughter, the smell of her hair, every moment they spent together. Thranduil is grateful that he is not a moral who would lose those precious memories.

"If I go back," if, if, Valinor is not an if but a when, the same as Mirkwood, for all the events Legolas told him have already come to pass, and-

(How is he here, if Eru himself did not interfere?)

"I will not shame her or you, Gwenaëlle." Emphatic. "I will not-- these feelings are unnatural, unless they are not, in which case I need answers even moreso than I did before."

He shakes his head. The things she's said, he almost-- hopes? for them, in some odd way, because isn't that neater? But he is flesh and blood, though it is different here. He is not a man, but not Elvhen, but yet not still Quendi.

It's hard not to take the word unnatural as a blow, her gaze dropping to her hands, his hands - presses her lips together and presses against the instinct that tells her to pull away from him at once, if it's so fucking unnatural -

The weight of what he's talking about is...

She can't begrudge it, not in earnest. She wants answers, too, wants the certainty that they aren't making a terrible mistake, that it won't unravel because of what he is; he wants answers because he wants her, that means something, more than how his choice of words prick at her pride. Look at this way, she tells herself, you've seduced someone past their own nature, that's probably sort of impressive, actually. Well done, you, Gwenaëlle.

(She doesn't want to think about him going back.)

"But in the meantime," after another long pause, gathering her composure and her ability to answer him without being snippy about it, "if we're - sort of - engaged..."

Is kissing over now, or.

He sighs, and leans forward, pulling her just that bit closer. He has many faults; he can be roused to jealousy fairly easily, he tends, tended, to split his life with a line into state and personal business, and starve the personal side, and he his fiercely proud.

(Thranduil has not forgotten the stag in the Fade.)

He presses his lips to her forehead; breathes in the smell of her like he is so weak as to forget it. As if he ever forgot it, or stopped knowing it for a moment. He cannot allow himself to dwell on this, it does not deserve to consume him. He will find his answers, and return to his work.

"It is not as though I can un-kiss you, my lady." He brushes her hair over her shoulder, quietly fond. "I- would ask that we stop for the day. Please."

He draws her into his arms and she leans there, turning her face and exhaling a sigh against his shoulder.

"What about tomorrow," slightly muffled.

"Ask me tomorrow," he replies. He knows what his answer will be. The prospect of refusing her if they touch too often, if she combs his hair again, if she strokes his cheek or kisses his neck or does any of the hundred other things he's (infuriatingly) sure she'll find, well.

Winter is coming, and that means heavier robes. She doesn't need any encouragement to be a temptation.

A little more insouciant--

"I will."

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