open | wherever we go, we'll never be lost

[supersonic]

WHO: Pietro Maximoff & YOU
WHAT: Arriving, complaining, settling in, poking his nose into things, etc.
WHEN: Anytime in April
WHERE: The Gallows, around Kirkwall
NOTES: Feel free to toss your own starter at this post! Gimme anything and I'll find a reason for Pietro to be there.

Arriving;

As accommodations go, the Gallows is one Pietro doubts he'll soon forget. After a long day of travel, longer still from Skyhold and the Brotherhood's latest camp beyond, watching those great white walls rise higher and higher from the approaching ferry, he's surprised he doesn't get a crick in his neck by the time they dock. When he finally comes to be standing on its front steps, feeling approximately the size of a pebble, he's started to wonder if all this was really such a great idea. Leaving. Pledging his loyalty to an organization he doesn't yet know if he trusts. Going to Kirkwall, of all places.

At least it's something different.

"Is all Tevinter architecture so oppressive?" he gripes under his breath as he starts up. "And spiky?" This seems like an unnecessary number of spikes. He's just saying.

—The garish pink birds milling about do help lighten the mood, he'll admit.

Group Quarters;

Inside the mages' tower, the long open rooms and rows of bunks are a little less intimidating, if no more welcome. It's been years since he's slept in an apprentice's hall, his sister tucked into the bunk above him, seeing who could whisper quietest as they fell asleep — or how silently she could toss a pillow at him for whispering something rude, often as not. Nostalgia isn't the right word for the memory of a time you wouldn't repeat, for the particular closeness that comes from living in shared fear, but it's heavy on his limbs the same way.

Still, this is the prudent choice. The choice their father would tell him to make. Best to have reason to linger within earshot of his fellow recruits. He wastes little time finding an unoccupied bed, dropping his travel pack and staff onto it with a resigned whumph.

"Just like old times," is wry.

Only the doors to this cage aren't locked anymore. One hopes. (He checks, actually, just a quick brush of his fingers over the mechanism, a glance for fresh wear on his way to the bath. Just in case.)

The Gallows;

Once he's had a chance to clean the dust and smell of hay and travel from himself, Pietro sets about getting the lay of the land. A new lean elf can be found surveying the training grounds with a close eye, not necessarily looking to participate but— appreciating. Magnus's training had been thorough, but he hadn't had anything so permanent to offer.

The herb garden and adjoining alchemy rooms earn a passing-through too, but it's the library that sees him pulled in for a longer visit. Careful fingers ghost over the spines of the books there, reading each title before pausing to pull one or two from their shelves with a sort of uncertain side-glance and a lift of the chin, as if daring anyone to question his right to them. If he is to work on behalf of this Inquisition, he ought to get something out of it. A history, perhaps, or a particularly esoteric-looking tome on magic, or even a book of myths might earn his attention, and a spot on the nearby reading table he's temporarily claimed.

Ostensibly, he ought to be looking for the proper office to report his arrival to, but — well, he doesn't seem to be in any hurry.

Wildcard;

[[Feel free to run into Pietro somewhere else in the Gallows or around Kirkwall, e.g. running errands or loitering in pubs in Lowtown, hanging around the alienage when he gets tired of shemlen, or plurk ping me for a closed starter, I just ran out of steam for more general starters tonight... x_x ]]

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the gallows ;

[elegiaque]

For the duration of Gwenaëlle's stay in the Gallows, this time, she's been using the heated communal baths in the former Templar tower. She's made herself a touch too comfortable in Thranduil's quarters, more than the last time she'd been sleeping in them, and there's no sense in inviting serving staff up the stairs with hot water to see as much—at least not yet. So, with nearly as much regularity as she'd indulge in her own home, she has made the trek all the way down to bathe. She's never been shy, particularly, and steeling herself to use the hot springs in Skyhold had worn down some of her discomfort at sharing the scars she's grown more used to, now—

She knows that silhouette. Dimly. Recognition is not instant, which is why she's still standing there when Pietro rises all the way out of the water, instead of having prudently fled to deal with this some other way, preferably while both of them are wearing more clothes.

She's got a robe on, at least. She hadn't actually taken it off.

Before her mind can catch up with her mouth, it's already said, “Fancy meeting you here,” like an idiot.

[supersonic]

Pietro hasn't got a robe on.

Privacy isn't something he's learned to expect in much abundance; certainly the facilities in Ghislain hadn't been so different from this, and living rough had done little to improve his options. But this isn't Ghislain, or an isolated farmhouse, or a creek in the blasted woods. This standing up stark naked in the middle of what seems suddenly a very large, very empty room, and turning his head to see it's populated only by Gwenaëlle Vauquelin brandishing an awkward pick-up line.

(He's had nightmares like this, he's sure.)

At least his back is still to her. Mostly. Not that she had any interest in any side of an elf, as she'd made abundantly clear the last time they spoke. Pointedly, his eyes drop from her. To hell with it, he's going for his towel.

"Mademoiselle Vauquelin," he manages, wedging formality between them with all the subtlety of a crowbar as water sloshes around his ankles. "I did not mean to—" be this naked? Get here first? Contaminate her bath water? He's very swift in getting that towel around his waist. "—I was not aware you were in Kirkwall."

Or he might have turned around and left. That seems simpler.

[elegiaque]

“Baudin,” she corrects him—without thinking, something that's swiftly becoming habitual, digging her heels in and taking back what she can of her own fall from grace with her nails. It's only after she's already said it that it crosses her mind that name will mean something to him, and...and. And she'd almost rather not be so easily untangled; had always rather been cruel than pathetic.

He looks different than he did when they were barely more than children. She wraps her robe tighter over her scars, and annoyance tightens her expression when she realises she's doing it, as if she should be self-conscious. As if it would matter if she were found wanting in comparison to what she'd been—she'd been awful, that's what she'd been, she's sure what he remembers about her isn't that she was pretty.

In any case, it could be a married name, but isn't: “Mademoiselle Baudin. I wasn't aware you were alive.”

That sounds—worse. Than she'd thought it would.

Optimistically, she thinks perhaps they'll skate past the rest if he's too affronted to care.

[supersonic]

Married is precisely what he thinks first. Because of course she would be. That is what young Orlesian noble ladies do, isn't it? Seek out an advantageous arrangement? Play the Game? And in her absence, it had been easier to imagine Gwen as one of them, a cruel stereotype instead of the sharp-witted girl he once thought he knew, or the real woman who stands in front of him now, both of them having grown into their bones.

—But she isn't married.

"Sorry to disappoint," comes out automatically, in t's sharp enough to cut glass, and if the words were much more than reflex, that might be sufficient to distract him, but as it stands the opposite is more true. Pieces continue to click unstoppably into place one by one. Uncertainty cracks the surface of his cool regard.

"...Baudin, as in Gueniévre?" It's mildly incredulous, and only mildly because if she is not married, then why on earth else would she—

[elegiaque]

Always, Gwenaëlle has been so easily read; wearing her broken heart on her sleeve, and lashing out with sharp claws in the direction of any who foolishly notice. Masks never hid the tension in her shoulders or the shift of her weight or the curl of her lip, and without a mask—Maker, without more than a dressing gown—the way Guenievre's own name twists like a knife in her gut is hard to miss. That she's braced for it, that she's spoken of her so much lately—

It's not that it's Pietro, particularly, saying it, except that it is—that her name is this time in the mouth of someone who had known her. Maybe even better, in that brief way, than she had; the weeks they'd spent together before her death marked mostly by distance, and weighted silences, and how there had been no last words and it was so unfair in the most fittingly awful way. The elaborate dance of dealing with the nobility, that tightrope—Gwenaëlle still cannot imagine what Guenievre might have been like behind the closed doors of the servants wing.

What sort of things might she have said to people whose good opinion was not a knife to her throat? Had she liked Pietro, or his sister? It occurs to her that she'd never wondered, at the time, never wondered what Guenievre might have thought of...well. If she'd known, if she'd not known. They were a problem that solved itself, if she had—

That Gwenaëlle had solved.

That she is not terribly proud of solving.

“Yes, well, it turns out protecting my reputation wouldn't have mattered,” she says, expression tightening into something that looks like a smile, if an observer were to be very generous. “As it's now 'uppity elfblooded cunt', which I think you'll agree is broadly accurate.”

Under the circumstances.

[supersonic]

He'd thought once, a long time ago, that he would like to be the one to keep wounds from ever needing blossom in her the way they are so evidently now — as if, of the two of them, she was the one in a vulnerable position. (As if her happiness was the only one that mattered, perhaps; as if he'd never learned to love another way.) To see her hurting now, whatever the reason, strikes through his chest in a way that he—

aggressively pushes back down again, which is made all the easier by the way her words sort of drop a lit torch into the chasm that seems to have opened up inside him, and set everything on fire.

Uppity elf-blooded—

Those aren't the words he would have chosen, if the abrupt tightening in his jaw is anything to go by, but he doesn't have the wherewithal to argue semantics with her right this moment. For a stupid, fleeting fraction of a second he thinks, maybe that fixes everything. There isn't so much difference between them. There never had been.

There never had been.

"And you knew," comes slower, the words measured out like spoonfuls of poison. "All this time." They haven't spoken in years, and might have gone the rest of their lives without speaking again, but he'd lived with this old knot of rot beneath the ribs, all that time. His next exhale could be a laugh if it didn't sound so close to drowning.

"You knew and you just— what, thought it didn't matter as long as you still had someone to step on?"

[elegiaque]

“My mother,”

a breath, and—

she wants to defend herself, because of course she does, because she's a soft stupid mortal thing with feelings and the only thing she's ever known to do is lash out (preferably first, preferably harder), but if that were all then she wouldn't, she thinks, because Maker, he might as well think whatever he wants of her. What she did was small and cruel and if they had never seen each other again, then that would be all she was to him; that could still be all she is to him.

It's just,

“My mothers, they—I was the worst fucking thing that ever happened to them. Do you think it was bad, what I did?”

Yes. Because it was.

“It was nothing. It was stupid. We were children. Here is what mattered: my father drained the life out of two women he did not deserve and they put everything into me, into what I was supposed to be, and I was not supposed to throw it away on some fucking runaway elf nobody because it was not mine to give away. My mama didn't spend my entire life yes my lord and no my lording that selfish, worthless, spineless—”

(even then there had been ice between them, Gwenaëlle and her doting, determined papa)

“She didn't do that and give me to him when he asked, like a Comte has ever 'asked' an elf for anything. For that. For this. And now she's dead and none of it matters at all, so that's brilliant, anyway, I might as well have been an embarrassment then for all the fucking difference it'd have made. What if I'd had a baby? Chain you to me, like he did. Honestly,” in the tone of someone about to say something incredibly inflammatory, “I did you a favour.”

[supersonic]

"A favour?"

It is dizzying, listening to her, when he can so clearly imagine the lifetime of small, terrible acquiescences that had gone into keeping her reputation intact. He may never have been much for my lording anyone, Maker knows he's never had a talent for balancing anyone's good opinion on a dining table let alone a knife's edge, but he hasn't survived this long without learning to cut pieces from himself to become more palatable to the wolves at his door, and it is not difficult to picture Gueniévre doing the same with far more efficient resolve. The thought of a life spent and lost that way makes him– feel a little ill.

It does not, however, make what happened between the two of them nothing, Gwen, Maker's breath—

"You made me believe I wasn't worth the mud scraped off your boot, Gwenaëlle," as if she'd been the only one, the root instead of just the tipping point. "That everyone else in the world was right about me, about what little an elf would ever matter to anyone, and I'd been a bloody idiot to even dream of—"

Not of bedding her. If she hadn't noticed what sort of boy he'd been all those years ago, if there hadn't been time to say then what he won't say now, perhaps the fact that he won't, that even nearly giving voice to something so painfully naive is enough to make him bite back the words in shame — perhaps that is a clue. (She needn't have had a baby, to chain him to her.)

"Is that what you imagine your mother worked so hard for you to do?"

—is probably not a fair question, all things considered. Maybe later, that will matter to him.

[elegiaque]

A hundred different things want to happen all at once, namely: that she barrel forward and knock him clear into the heated water, hands fisted around his throat so he can never, ever say anything to her like that ever—

when she takes an unsteady step backwards, she looks as if she's been struck. She wants, quite badly, to strike him. The voice in her head that murmurs really, that's how you're going to make them proud, now, is it sounds like Alix, and her hands ball into fists and she

turns. Straightens her shoulders. Calmly, and deliberately: flees.