faderift | the daughters of kings run feral through the forest ( closed )

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the daughters of kings run feral through the forest ( closed )

WHO: Thranduil & Gwenaëlle.
WHAT: Everything's fine, probably, nothing really happened while he was gone.
WHEN: Shortly after Thranduil returns from various missions.
WHERE: The Gallows.
NOTES: Just that gif of walking into fire with pizza.

Thranduil's quarters are not entirely as he left them.

For one thing, they don't appear to be just his any longer: in addition to herself and her effects, Gwenaëlle has brought with her from Hightown the sofa that Hardie sleeps on, set against the wall; there's a full length mirror where there wasn't before, and a few pieces of storage furniture that weren't either, entirely recognisable in origin. Fastidiously neat as she is, there's not a thing out of place, just...more things, though she's spared him the birds.

(They live in Casimir's office, now, where it's quiet enough they won't bother anyone excessively.)

More things, and: Gwenaëlle, occupying his side of the bed, sat up with her reading glasses perched on her nose and a writing tray in her lap, lamp burning beside her and Leviathan optimistically circling the end of the bed like she might change her mind about who's sleeping where this evening. (She will not, and sooner or later, Hardie will be wearing a nug hat.) She's frowning when the door opens, Yva having been dismissed earlier and not expecting anyone else to be opening that door, and,

“I can explain.”

And who says marriage kills the romance.

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“Because your father thought it would cost your life to be seen with me and thus sent an assassin after me and bade me swear not to tell,” he says, managing one foot out of the boots and unlacing the other. “Because I think I am clever and would prefer to reveal such a thing when it would benefit us best. Because it may indeed be that some of the elvhen yet live and I need to approach them without scandal. Because I do not like the idea of my enemies targeting you and value my privacy besides.”

Both off, now, and set to the side to be attended to in the morning. Satisfied, he looks up at her. A moment of hesitation; he focuses on her intensely once he is standing straight. “Are you with child?”

Good reasons, she thinks.

Some changed by circumstance; some, maybe not. Coupe had been right—they could maybe get away with her having borrowed his quarters in his absence without any outright admissions, he'd lived in her house, people know that they're friends even if the extent of that relationship isn't public knowledge. She didn't, despite temptation, unilaterally decide otherwise, if possibly only at Coupe's prompting.

It chafes, though.

“No,” she says, ignores the fleeting pang of some unexamined emotion in that answer, “no, not that.”

She presses her teeth into her lower lip, taps her spectacles against the edge of the tray. “No. I'm a scandal, now. You can't cost me anything that he hasn't already. Everyone knows about my mother, so...that's the end of that. I was...I'd been moving some of the money that I set aside from the house to your quarters and when I was talking to Coupe she said I should just stay here, since I kept muttering 'imperial cunt' under my breath and the empress's auditors are currently inventorying my household to better understand my lord's assets. Which will become hers when my lord's title reverts to the crown upon his death, as she will not be rewarding his deceit by allowing his bastard to inherit.”

A tilt of her hand. She's practised, by now, she can say it all very calmly, if bitingly bitter— “She can't complain about my mother's species without looking a fucking fool, but she can't let him away with it without looking weak. And I was never legitimate.”

A simple compromise. For Celene, at any rate.

“I don't know if the Duke will allow me to keep the house. I don't know that I want it. I should've been nicer to my neighbours, Thranduil, I think they're all quite pleased to see me get my comeuppance.”

He lets the thought go; to hold it for too long will only bring speculation and hope he cannot spare the time to nurture while they handle other matters.

First: the secret of her mother is out, the wolves are at her door. Everything else is small in comparison. Auditors mean the secret is known beyond the Empress and a death in the quiet of the night will not set her back where she needs to be. She has funds, good, but she expects them to stop entirely or at the very least be restricted. It is bad enough that Coupe would rather they be outed than risk Gwenaëlle’s presence around the Empress’ men.

“All will be well,” he says, and he means: I will make it right. “And this—all while I was gone. I am so sorry, Gwenaëlle. You were alone.”

He smells of the road, of his elk and of the stink that lays in a miasma over Mannish cities. For that reason, he does not go to her. He fetches his bathing things from the trunk that has, thankfully, remained at the foot of his bed, and he sees how she has fit herself into where he sleeps.

“I will bathe, and take supper, and then I will be here, and you will tell me everything that happened while I was gone.”

The most pressing problem, she thinks: what does it look like now, made right? It won't be made as it was. And much of it—

she's meant for some time now to leave much of that life behind. The difference between making a choice and having it made for her is more than she imagined, reckless and recalcitrant; where she might go and what she might do with all the wherewithal to do as she liked, that's not the same as making what she can out of more limited options. What happens when her father dies? It looks different, now, than it did before.

“All right,” after a moment, exhaling deeply and looking back down at her correspondence—blankly, for a moment, before she remembers she'd taken her spectacles off and replaces them.

Not much else for it but to get on with it.

He lingers before going out the way he came in, stepping quickly over to her bed to kiss her forehead, a hand cupping her cheek. He thinks she would forgive him his unkemptness but leaves anyway to bathe and put himself to rights.

Leviathan, while he is gone, gives Gwenaëlle one last longing stare and wuffle before marching resolutely to Hardie and curling up.

When he returns it is much improved, dressed for bed, all unbound and undone, still damp from the baths and smelling faintly of sage. He locked the office door when he came in, and now he closes the one to his personal quarters, mourns the original that Coupe had taken an axe to.

“What happened?” he asks, sitting on her side of the bed. “From the beginning.”

The beginning is quite near the end; there is infuriatingly little to tell, and what little there is answers few of the questions she imagines he might have. The questions she had, and then decided didn't matter—

It's unlikely answering them would change anything.

“I received a letter from the office of her majesty's imperial auditors,” she says, sifting through the correspondence in her lap until she finds it, handing it to him with another beneath, “informing me of the impending audit and my lord's need to rewrite his will to reflect the 'consequences of his actions'. A few days later, a letter from him, which is under that one, which was shorter. That was...a week or so ahead of the auditors arriving—they're still here, they're in the house currently—and they've been going through everything and identifying what belongs to who and who's paying for what and...all of that.”

Being there for that had not been productive. They didn't need her for inventorying anything, not with a perfectly able staff at hand, and she'd been perpetually a glass and a half of red wine away from saying something she'd regret a bit too audibly; better that she's here, out of the way.

“My uncle is here, now. The mage. He said my lord intends to try and buy the Duke out of the lease so I can keep the house, but that depends on how cooperative everyone is feeling and...” Her nose wrinkles. “As I say. I don't know I really want to go back.”

He pushes down the covers on his (now his) side with a heel while he looks over the letter. His brow rises as he goes, and then he is finished.

“Well,” Thranduil says. “And we were so careful.”

He folds the letter and offers it back to her, pulling the quilts up and into his lap, settling in as he had those few days when they had the benefit of a full evening together, of playing at living together.

“After the Arlathvhen,” he says. “In whatever way you should like an announcement to be made, or none at all. I cannot deny the delight simply having you move in and saying nothing would give me. Until then, I would beg your discretion. You may stay here as long as you like. I will complain about an exile to my own couch.”

He shifts closer to her, enough to drape his arm about her shoulders and tip his cheek against the top of her head. “Has the Duke done something to indicate his displeasure with you, or is it an assumption only? I should like to meet your uncle.”

Taken it for granted that her father had done enough, and themselves protected the wrong secret; the first and last time she's ever screwed for putting too much trust in that man, she thinks. Leaning slowly into the side of him, she pulls a face—

“We haven't had any word except for what I've told you, but...his least favourite in-law passed off a bastard as his grandchild for twenty-four years. I'm not expecting a great deal, there.” She may well be surprised, but it will be a surprise. The Duke de Coucy is historically about as warm as the Emprise, and about as forgiving.

Her fingers find his wrist, splay out and tangle with his, idle. After a few moments,

“I wouldn't want to make any sort of announcement. For now suppose I'll just stay until the situation with my house is resolved, and go back to Hightown, until...whenever that is. When is that?” A beat. “What is that?”

Edited 2018-04-03 04:44 (UTC)

He settles his hand into hers and is content. He was made for this, to embrace another and feel settled by it, just as he was made to endure eternally, to shoulder the burden of years.

“Leave Hightown,” he says. “If it does not please you, do not stay. Take a townhouse over an estate, if there are still funds for it. I would hope for something with a garden for our friends, but what is the point now in doing things that displease you?”

Sense, he supposes. The fact that she has even more enemies, now. But something so simple—downsizing from an estate intended for fifteen to a building intended for ten might help.

“This summer. The once-a-decade gathering of all the Dalish.”

The Dalish; of course. A most thoroughly elven word, 'arlathvhen', context ought to have provided sufficient clues. Certainly, she doesn't need to ask why he might prefer to wait until it's done—why it might be more politic not to show up to something like that openly wed to a woman until quite recently a member of Orlais' elite, still benefiting off the back of elves even as she teeters more precariously in place.

No. If he has any goals to be served there, tying his name to hers won't help them. She can wait.

"Kirkwall doesn't please me. Getting another house isn't more pleasing than going back to the one I have," she observes, instead of airing the opinions he's already quite aware she holds on the poor wisdom of being married to her at all if he wants to hold onto any sort of elven credibility in the long run. "I'm not going to find more sympathetic neighbours anywhere else, either, I'm sure everyone would just love it if I left my walls and they could just look in my windows and see what an embarrassment I've become."

It's not an ideal situation, but there are no ideal situations. The thought of not having those walls at all makes her skin crawl, for all that she's not sure they've done much good.

"And it's a great deal of upheaval if it's only to last til the summer. If it's temporary, at least I might stay long enough to find out who broke in during the quarantine." That's sort of a bright side. "Assuming I can, anyway, if the Duke won't relinquish it then it's all moot."

Edited 2018-04-04 04:21 (UTC)

He plays with the hair next to her ear, idly twining his fingers through it. There are things he will never be able to understand about her family simply by virtue of not having been there, of not knowing certain characters in her story. Thedas has not sunk into his bones the way Arda did. He still makes mistakes.

“You will need to elaborate on the breaking in,” he says pleasantly. “And I think the Duke may surprise you; he struck me as a sensible man. Especially if you were to mention the breaking-in.”

An insult against him, too, and the Orlesians were predictably incised by these things, though he suspects Romain the sort to handle it with the calm regard that Thranduil remembers him by. Very sensible, for a Man. He wonders what sort her blood grandfather was.

A number of her relatives in truth and otherwise, she doesn't quite know what to do with; supposes she'll let them be and hope that if they don't care for developments they'll do the same. Her grandfather, much as she is fond of him, is on that list of those she wouldn't be displeased to hear from, but—if he prefers to conduct the remains of this connection through intermediaries, she won't be the one who writes.

Marcellin is a problem she worries over more pressingly, one she can't entrust to the care of household accounts. Or, Maker forbid, her father.

"My belongings were interfered with while I was gone, I'm sure of it," she says, tilting her head to his shoulder to let him free reign of her hair. "Nothing of value that an opportunist might want to sell—my writings, my desk, where I kept my research and my journals. Where I might keep things related to the Inquisition, looked at by someone who knew I'd shut up the house."

Abruptly, "Do you remember that overdressed twat that called me Gigi at the Winter Palace?"

Edited 2018-04-05 03:03 (UTC)

"Which journals?" he asks. She is often clever enough to get away with most things, he thinks he smart enough not to have committed to paper anything about them, in particular (it will be interesting to explain to whomever asks first why all her things are in his rooms; he will complain about it to someone in his division and it will travel like wildfire, enough to bed the rumors) but there are other things in her home that may well have interested someone up to mischief.

"Personal ones, account books? What manner of research?"

Her book, the shards? One will be more difficult to explain if there is to be a report filed about this.

"I do," he says. "Faintly. Only my delight that someone dared it."

"He's my brother."

She might say more, on that; she will, eventually, but there's a great deal else.

Leaning back against him and bracing to shift, adjust, resettle—she waves the rest off, explaining, "It'd have been all of that, but I'm not a fool. None of it was there to be found, I didn't leave anything sensitive in the house without me. But where it would be, that's what seems to've been tampered with."

If nothing else, the thought of the frustration that might have engendered is satisfying. Sod them, she thinks, for thinking me so simple a mark.

"But if someone wants it. That's a concern."

One she'd decided he didn't need to be fretting over in absentia, but she's had frustratingly little progress regardless. She fidgets with his hand, palm to palm and stretching her fingers as if she could match the span of his.

(She cannot.)

"No. I had it all with me, and I've since stored my shard notes with Solas, so it isn't all together any more."

“Do you have any other family of which I ought to be made aware?”

Not chiding, not really, but they’ve banded themselves together and something like that is important. Granted, she’s all out of father’s brothers and mother’s siblings to come out of the woodwork. All that is left are Emeric Vauquelin and his wild oats, as they are—what a difficult man, but how easy it is to draw lines between him and his daughter’s actions.

“Have you informed your grandfather?” The Duke is a far cleverer player of the Game. Thranduil suspects it will be a good diversion (even as Romain is wholly aware of it) for him to hunt something down that is hurting his granddaughter and is not her Imperial Majesty.

He watches her set her hand against his own and resists the urge to curl his fingers into the spaces between hers. How invigorated he is by even the simplest touches of hers—what a wonder. This is not the path he would have ever seen his life taking.

“It remains to be seen if the Duke,” a term of address that almost seems more a reminder to herself than to him—that she must not presume on a relationship based upon a lie now revealed, that he is a clever player of the Game and that she should expect him to play it, “is interested in hearing anything at all from me beyond when I intend to move my belongings out of his property,” a little drolly.

“The Inquisition never seemed to particularly interest him in itself. I don't think he'd be that interested in their security problems, if he isn't interested in mine. I'm not going to try to predict what he'll think of any of this.”

(Though her lack of optimism is, in itself, a sort of prediction.)

She threads her fingers through his and curls them tight over the back of his hand, less restrained, and exhales. “And I don't know what my idiot fucking brother will make of any of it, either,” and that's the admission that matters. She distances herself from worries about her grandfather, but the prospect of losing Marcellin—a relationship that she's held close in her hands and not spoken of, something that when she finally drags it out is so clearly precious to her—is one that comes as a blow. “He's a selfish little bastard and there's no one to speak for me to him.”

Gwenaëlle grimaces, turning her face against his shoulder; stays there only a moment before (inevitably, like the tide) pushing blankets and tangles of robe out of her way enough to settle at home in his lap, still holding his hand. Every time he's away is too long. She is so much more acutely aware now of the possibility that something more tangible than disgrace might take him from her. “I'm tired of myself. Tell me about Morrigan's dreadful elves and all you've been doing.”

"So we wait," Thranduil murmurs, and suddenly finds himself with a lapful of her. He adjusts; reaches out to put out the last candle and then wraps his arms about her, winding them under the covers and actually in bed, now.

It is a we. They are bound together. Whither thou goest--

"Wild, and free, when free means none can catch you for long enough to hold you accountable, but their way of life is not sustainable. They worship different gods," he is absolutely simplifying this for her, "-- and do not diversify their bloodlines. It will lead to naught but trouble for them, and I suspect other clans have been punished for their actions."

But it had been informative anyway.

"I returned from that in time to be directed to go south and join with the rest of the forces at the latest rift, but was recalled before reaching them. They were successful and had no need of me. And now I am here, with you."

"Best place for you," she says, staunchly, finding the side table in the dark and leaving her reading glasses there, settling beneath the coverlet, her back pressed to his chest and her loose curling hair a nightly hazard to navigate.

Better with her than arsing about a forest, watching inbred elves slowly wiping themselves out. Some twinge like conscience reminds her, punished for their actions, she thinks of that unpublished draft that still sits in the bottom of her desk; all her rage given courteous and brutal outlet. She had held off.

Others did not. It had only ever been an option because others would not.

"Leviathan missed you," she offers, "but only for a moment. Hardie's very charming." Then, "You aren't dashing off again immediately, are you?"

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the daughters of kings run feral through the forest ( closed )

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