faderift | Her dirty paws and furry coat

Surely having given birth to Valentine is terrifying enough-

In lieu of any of the things she might say - about the excuses she intends to find to be near the Gallows more frequently than she has, about Valentine de Fonce and the many things that are wrong with him and the likelihood that he has never followed through anything, probably, in his miserable life - Gwenaëlle answers with a recitation, closing hands around the teacup, looking at nothing in particular to recall the words:

“I think that I must be beautiful now - like this - a portrait of the artist in repose. Such use of colour - they would say - bloomed upon my cheekbone, your signet's seal in impression. I am waxen and pressed to paper, a secret folded in itself, and am I not lovely, so kept? Is there not promise in the unfolding? Unlovely in mundane fact, I must be ever as I am now - a cut glance - a murmur - the touch of fingertips. Dans le masque I am what pleases you; how ruinous, to have a heart after all.”

Pretty, but not gentle; her poetry, and her heart, besides.

The woman is afraid of moths, allegedly, what chance did she have.

Poetry is an old thing. A thing in crumbling books where the gilding had faded and the bindings had cracked. Poetry is ancient elven translated to twist upon itself until Morrigan wonders if she ever knew the meaning of it, if there was ever a meaning, if the Dalish even know what they're speaking when the language is as complex as it is with the written fragments that survive now. She's heard bards all over and bards in Orlais, heard all sorts plying their trade but again there's this.

"Gwenaëlle--" A rare thing for Morrigan to not have something ready to say but how rare it is to be surprised in the best way, to be delighted. (The magpie in her, wanting to collect bright and shining things no matter what they are, and are secret things not the most bright and shining of them all?) "How long have you written such works? Something so beautiful?"

This is Morrigan after all. Live gloriously she says when she speaks of her mother over the sending crystals, of the truth of the legend bloody as it is, real as it is, tearing your skin free and leaving bits of yourself behind. It can be beautiful because sometimes you have to find it or what are you left with?

“Since always,” with a bit of a laugh, ducking her head and looking down into her tea - if there's a bit of embarrassment, it's a gentle thing, and impossible to miss that it comes hand in hand with the giddy pleasure of sharing something that means so much to her with someone who means so much to her, and finding only approval. “I've written so long as I can remember- it's been...I suppose five years? That I've published? Under my own name I only wrote, you know, art critique and propaganda-”

the latter more recently, though it's been nearly a full year since she stopped,

“-but as Ilde Sauvageon, I've written so much poetry. It's- that's what I am.”

A poet. This is what she returns to, always, how she expresses herself, what she is most proud of.

"There have always been tales of Witches of the Wilds for as long as there have been Wilds and witches to dwell in them." Now which came first is likely to be a matter of some debate but Morrigan knows that it was Flemeth who swept her way down, into the Korcari Wilds, settled herself there to allow the legends to grow roots deeper than the gnarled trees disappearing into the swamps and bogs. "Some things--" Morrigan stops, sips her tea and starts again.

This isn't quite the same but there's this: the Game is a story too, everyone plays a part but everyone else will tell it. "Some things you might live, are they not easier when not attached to yourself?"

She isn't proud of being Flemeth's daughter. A prickling burr wormed deep in her that her fingers can't pluck out; how they tell a story as if it isn't her flesh, her blood. How they tell stories too of Gwenaëlle and people like her as if the same isn't true for her also.

“It's the opposite, almost,” she says, slowly, slow in the way of a young woman who has known words all her life finally putting them to something long unexamined, resented and pressed at but never discussed. Never addressed. Never looked at, long and hard, and known for what it is.

It takes her a moment to order her thoughts.

“Everything that's attached to me,” she says, finally, “is someone else's. I told de Fonce the poems were mine because the reason I didn't claim them before wasn't mine. And I've been coming to think I should be a bit more considered, henceforth, about doing things for other people's reasons.”

Live gloriously. She fucking well will.

Edited 2017-10-12 11:42 (UTC)

A girl wandered into Morrigan's study when she came to Skyhold, that girl that revealed herself to be a young woman, a treasured friend and so dear, now after everything, now they're here Morrigan hears what she's wanted to hear. Not that she's ever been disappointed when she knows things take time (how could she not, she lived a life of making that discovery after all) but here she sits. There you are, Morrigan almost says but doesn't, allows her smile over the lip of her cup to say it for her.

"We live different lives, I remind them all of Flemeth's legends when they would ignore the inconvenient truths, shape her from something that isn't blood not wholly her own but you are right. This is your life, after all, to live on your terms," as much as that's ever possible but does she do it now, does she take those steps Morrigan believes so. "Poetry is remembered for as long as all other things. Longer, I would think. 'Tis a record. Claim it, make sure they know who it belonged to."

Legacy, after all, isn't a beast you get to choose all of so best start fashioning as much as you can while you have the breath in you to do it.

“I wish there was more of a middle-ground in the meanwhile.”

Hiding away in someone else's shadow or stepping forthrightly into the light of acknowledgment for herself- if there could perhaps be some assurance that claiming her own legacy could be done quietly, on her own time, without so much scrutiny. If she could assert herself and have it be of no moment to anybody else whatsoever...

And she's not such a bright light that nothing will ever outshine her, she doesn't imagine whatever attention she might draw will be so persistent as all that, that she could never quietly have her affairs her own without somehow being forced to do it in a withdrawal, but.

The secrets of her parents have instilled fear of that scrutiny down to her bones, it's true, but there's a part of her that would have chafed at it regardless, that wants to wriggle free of confines and do as she pleases and wishes she were someone who could do it without somehow becoming someone whose business other people care to notice in the first place.

“I'd quite like to be remembered as poets usually are,” with a glint of humor that doesn't belie the truth of the assertion, “posthumously. I hate to be bothered.”

"Thedas does not have a good history with that. You are my enemy or not, seldom my friend. You are either side of the river, either side of the blade."

That first foray out into the world in truth taught her that well enough when there was certainly so much grey but how many of them even see it? Certainly for now so much red it makes it all the more difficult but come a war and even now the old battlelines are drawn ever as they try to move forward.

Your grief must come later, in the dark shadows before you take vengeance. Flemeth had told her that once but it hadn't been a thing she could say to someone with grief raw and wet before her, still it comes to her because when is there not some grief for all the things that cannot be? That cannot be had, cannot be said, must be set aside for the now, the future that might be if you plan well enough for it--

Perhaps that is vengenace then, deciding to take what is yours and take it. To be what you wish to be.

"You shall find yourself a great deal more troubled making your face more seen about the Gallows, for Thranduil has never struck me as one to sit idle, and Ser Coupe is not a Templar to merely occupy a space while she takes up her ration of lyrium spouting empty verse." Kieran chatters, as any boy chatters (well no, not quite) but beyond that more speaks to involvement and bothering, not all of it on the part of the one doing the bothering.

Gwenaëlle's expression has pulled into a moue of displeasure before Morrigan is even finished her sentence on the matter of what Ser Coupe is and is not-

“I truly detest that woman,” with a sigh.

Not disagreement; the assessment is a fair one, and she doesn't doubt that that woman will stick her unwelcome oar in wherever she bloody well pleases if given further opportunities to do so (as if it isn't bad enough that she comes and goes from Gwenaëlle's own home, sees fit to question her as if she's any right to hear answers). She resents the truth of it, that inexplicable and unasked for presence in her life. The judgment she perceives, as if anyone even cares what she thinks, as if it matters, as if she's any right.

What business is it of hers? She's made it so, that's apparent, but to what end?

She doesn't know, and so: she never allows herself to forget that she doesn't know, and does not trust her.

Edited 2017-10-16 08:22 (UTC)

"When one is a mage, and given the rest of them, 'tis best to have someone that inspires feeling. She tells tales more interesting than I thought a Templar would have the mind left for."

Spare her Norrington, as useless as they come from what she recalls of their meeting.

And there's the other matter as she pours fresh tea, bites into a small hearthcake she'd been taught to make from leftovers still as good as it was then. "You no longer take lessons with her then?"

Not everything is something she can know when her eluvian is in Skyhold and the keeping of Merrill's entrusted to her as well, being as she is the one who knows most of them. It had pleased her and she'd made no secret of it, words and blade, armed no matter what might come for her with increasing likelihood now. Rifters and elves are not well-loved, to be both at once, to rise so high so fast in Kirkwall amongst those already chosen?

Thranduil at the Gallows but anyone who thinks the Gallows is safe is a damned fool throwing themselves willingly into the fire.

"I wish," she says, perhaps more frankly than she'd meant when she had so carefully concealed this particular weakness from Morrigan's eye- it's easier, now it's not so new and sharp a sting. Honest as better suits her, she says, "I was never doing it by choice. If an accident happened to befall her,"

she sips her tea,

"It couldn't happen to a more unpleasant woman. I can't wait for the day she gets bored of whatever inexplicable reasons she has for being so incapable of staying the fuck out of my business."

Well.

She looks like she feels better for having said it.

"We are in Kirkwall. Not one of us are welcomed here, not even Templars after the great debacle." What do they even call it, everything that kickstarted the war here, the clumsiness, the mishandlings, the ignorance, so many eyes and hands that no matter if people were personally involved they're all still given a portion of the shared blame for it. Had it been any other Templar coming to her about the forest appearing overnight though, she wouldn't have been so willing to aid.

You don't ever give your trust to a Templar, that's falling upon their blade for them, taking it out of the damned sheathe too yet compared to others trying to handle certain messes in the past that she's watched from the sidelines, it seemed one that might not end badly for everyone involved. Not jumping to conclusions. Not reactionary shrieking from all sides. (Fade-training, Harrowings by any other name, so willing to show just where the weak points were.)

I've missed these talks, Morrigan's smile says, the days of venting her own bile of Vivienne, the little Circle back in Skyhold, the good it did her to be able to say all of that. "Yet she persists." Not a question but not wholly a statement. Alistair was for the assistance of how to use her hand but not blades, and Templars born of a family such as Wren's-- well she's never had reason to believe that the Vauquelins were particularly devout no matter how the Game was played.

The momentary satisfaction is--

momentary, and then she remembers why she hadn't said it before. The smile that mirrors Morrigan's doesn't, really; it mirrors the first smile that Gwenaëlle had pressed her mouth into, the first day they met, fixed and false. A thin gloss over something swiftly withdrawn.

“Yes,” she says, in answer to that prompt, some desperate loneliness opening up underneath it. And a surge of furious resentment: that even this, somehow, Luwenna Coupe can touch and in doing so taint. The tea is warm and the place is right and she's missed Morrigan so much and even this isn't safe, isn't hers. There is nothing that woman isn't bound and determined to ruin for her.

She stares down into the teacup and finds she has no stomach for it, any more. She says, “I'd prefer not to speak of her.” Now.

Ever.

What volumes it speaks that Morrigan doesn't press.

Alistair she might if she thought it was for his own good or could say it was for Kieran, others she does because why should she care for their feelings when there's work to be done, when there are few who would ever, have ever cared for hers.

(How she survived the Game, comes again, unbidden. Morrigan had a smirk. Maybe that's the difference between civilised and not.)

"I understand." As much as she can so in the only thing she can think of that might change things- "How long has some fade-touched pony lived in your garden? Kieran kept remarkably silent."

Her dirty paws and furry coat

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