when they tell you you are made of stars, tell them you know.

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, Petrana de Cedoux, Benevenuta Thevenet & Galatea Lourdes + SPECIAL GUEST: YOU.
WHAT: A Wintermarch catch-all.
WHEN: Wintermarch.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: Somewhere for me to put planned, closed threads! Hit me up on keanuleaves or libbitybibbit#8828 if you desire one.

Comments

[rowancrowned]

His hair does not get pulled, and he is happy enough to continue. “Thingol was my lord, when I was young. He had a daughter, who married a mortal, Elros is of this line—but that does not matter. What does matter was that losing Luthien, his only child, broke something in him. I saw that, in your father’s face, and I—he is a fool. He hurt you, he failed you. I had ambitions to ask after that time you mentioned, the explanation taken from you, but I pitied him too much to ask.”

His hand curls around her ankle, thumb rubbing at the malleolus. “Darton takes advantage of his family’s cushioning, fashions himself a pretty little home of it, and complains still. I am not suggesting you go the same, but he is prepared to make things easier for you, at great expense, and this easiness will not last forever. When the time comes, we will-- we-- figure out how we mean to handle it, but for now you needn’t think of it. He may be a wretched father in other ways, but he is very good at this one thing, and for as long as it lasts we may as well make use of it—without making too much use of it. I would never have killed him—you would have been Comtesse, and amidst the Game.

And I do not want to be an Orlesian comte. I would rather be an Elven king.”

[elegiaque]

He speaks a great deal of sense, even if it isn't all sense that she wants to hear—he is right and she knows it, even if anger and defiance whisper alternatives. They would cut off her own nose to spite her face and she knows it better than she wishes she did, exhaling a sigh and dropping the foot he doesn't hold from the bed to the floor beside him, her knee against his shoulder and her calf against his arm, framing him in.

“I don't particularly want to be an Orlesian comtesse.”

Jehan had had words for her on this subject, and that had been hers; much of what she gives up in doing this, she is prepared to live without. She doesn't imagine it will be as easy as it feels in this moment, assassination attempts aside—because he's right, infuriatingly, consistently right. Emeric has shielded her with his name, with his money, with his deft hands and when that's gone...

More will change for her than has yet.

“He loves me, you know,” she says, after a moment. It feels hollow, tastes cold in her mouth. “I should be disowned for my behaviour. I know that.”

[rowancrowned]

“Then be my lady,” he says. “Have our children and let me find a forest to hide us all away in once things are settled. Braid flowers into my hair and I will hunt deer and learn to till the soil. But no one need know that is what we want until we have it.”

He does not want to push things, but someone needs to say things to her.

“I know he loves you. I read your poems,” he says. “Ilde’s poems. He failed you. He loves you and he failed you, and I would tear his heart from his chest and offer it to you, if it would fix anything, if it would make you happy, if it would make the younger you happy. He has not disowned you. You can love him for the right he did and still hold him accountable for what he failed in. You are an adult, now.”

He opens his eyes, turns his head to look at her, even if his hair falls from his grasp. “There must be someone you trust to transport private letters. The distance may help—and he aches for his daughter. I do not know him well enough to guess, but if there were a better time to ask him for answers to questions you have had for a long time, secrets that you were forbidden—now would be the best moment to strike.”

[elegiaque]

I don't want to, she thinks, not the thought of a woman grown but the clutching hands of a child to her mother's skirts; the heat in the room from the brazier feels suddenly oppressive, a sense-memory that creeps up her back to tighten her shoulders, heavy drapes pulled over curtains and Anne's hand under hers somehow still cold.

Even now, it feels like betrayal to bend where she had not.

“I've no questions,” she says, looking up at nothing over his head.

[rowancrowned]

“It is rare to have someone who will do anything for you,” he says, and turns onto his knees before planning his hands on either side of her knees, and rising, his torso guiding them apart. Bring her back, he thinks. “You know I am at your command.”

To some degree. He is no Guilfoyle, but Guilfoyle has the look about him that suggest he has a courtier’s way of redirection, of guidance, that he is sure he puts to use with Emeric.

“My wife,” he says, and hopes ‘not too much’. “My love. I missed you very much. Do you have a looking glass? I want to see my hair.”

[elegiaque]

It takes her a moment to reorient, to draw herself out of memory and a grief that had still felt new when it had yet to be layered over with more recent aches—when she softens again it's a purposeful yielding, breathing out and meeting his eyes, her skirts tangled around her knees and him as well.

“Of course,” she says, touching her thumb to his mouth, so lightly. They're apart more than they aren't, it feels like, and she dislikes it—bury themselves in the wood somewhere and never be apart again, live quietly...

She could do it, she thinks. She could learn that. Maybe.

“Let me get it.”