open: lol never mind.

[cozen]

WHO: Open!
WHAT: A memorial that doesn’t go as planned.
WHEN: Justinian 1
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Nah.

The ceremony takes place in one of the side courtyards that’s been converted into a garden, where the oppressive architecture is offset with flowers and trees. There’s a small pyre, for those whose traditions call for pyres, but no bodies to burn. Instead there are tokens, flowers, favorite foods, treasured possessions—not yet lit.

(For the others, the Dalish and Nevarrans and anyone else with a different wish, their friends and family will have made different arrangements alongside the pyre, probably, if they aren’t universally reviled.)

Anyone who wants to speak, whether it’s a prepared speech or a single spontaneous sentence, can do so. The tone is respectful but only so solemn. It’s been more than a week. For many, the worst of the shock has passed, and the sun has continued to rise and set, and there’s room between bouts of misery for fond memories and occasionally laughter. The memorial is a door that’s closing—slowly, kindly—and tomorrow, on the other side of it, the war will continue.

Today, on this side, the only people judging anyone else for crying are the assholes.

***

Across the harbor, more than a dozen filthy and tired people come to a stop on the docks, and the loitering ferryman pauses to take stock of them, then starts laughing. There isn’t even any local mythology about ferrymen and the dead. It’s just that funny to him on its own, that he’s been rowing miserable people around all week, and here’s the source of all that misery, dirty and tired but significantly less dead than believed.

When he stops laughing, he offers to dunk everyone in the harbor before rowing them over. For the smell, you know. No one is going to be happy to see them if their eyes are watering too much to actually see them. Then he laughs some more at his hilarious joke.

But he does eventually load up his boat—and maybe there isn’t room for everyone all at once, maybe some dramatic reunions will be delayed, maybe some people will be even more fashionably late to their funeral than the others—and carries everyone across the bay, still chuckling intermittently.

***

In the courtyard, the speeches and anecdotes (and singing, perhaps) wind down to long silences peppered with murmurs or sniffling. Someone is preparing to light the pyre. And then the gate creaks open.

Comments

[rowancrowned]

“We are going home,” he assures her, bracing her against his steadiness, as well-anchored as an oak and suited for this. “I will put you with the duc, there are chairs enough, and I will fetch them and your spectacles and a change of clothing, and then we will go.”

He will mention a healer to Romain.

And, gentle with her as he could ever be, they go to her grandfather with little steps, Thranduil offering his arm and his hand on her back as she sits under Romain’s watchful eye. He will fetch the menagerie—Guilfoyle can mind the birds for the week, he refuses, but Hardie will come if he whistles right in the courtyard, if not for the bother of Leviathan and Yngvi.

He brushes back the hair from her forehead and kisses her before he goes, her hands cupped in his own. He will speak to one or two, but they must go soon—he cannot bear to have her around so many, unguarded.

[elegiaque]

Her silent assent in the form of letting him lead her, Gwenaëlle sits where she's bid and presses her hands to her face, dragging them down over her mouth as she watches the tears and reunions happening around her—unsettled, a little, by what they might have returned to if they'd not made the time they had. She hadn't thought it quick, in the moment. It hadn't been. But—

There are still places for them to step back into. It's sobering to recognise how easily, in the swift motion of a war not won, there might not have been.

“Home,” she repeats, mostly to herself. Romain and Thranduil have both called it that, nevermind how long it's been since she actually lived there—she tries to summon up some desire for some other place, Halamshiral, the quiet and closed up Vauquelin estate. Mostly, she keeps thinking of the bath, which is probably not very emotionally meaningful, she thinks. “We'll go home.”

(It would probably not hurt to be seen by a healer.)

[rowancrowned]

He returns to her no more than half an hour later, nug in one hand, kitten in the other, and a sack over his shoulder, which he shrugs to shake off his shoulder and into her lap, and gently extracts the nug from the strap before offering her the kitten, who is not clawing, but is considering something. Hardie likely joined her long ago—the first thing he’d done when in range was whistle for the dog, sharp as birdsong, and let the hound’s nose do the rest.

He’d acquired it for a purpose, and that purpose was once more real, so off to work.

“Here,” Thranduil says, tardy, burdens already hers, light as they are, and offers her his hand to help her back up. The healer will come at the house, there will be a runner to send for that and Romain’s presumed authority behind his own when he orders it. “Or would you prefer I carry you?”

This is a serious question. He would absolutely do it.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle is always far more at ease making demands of Thranduil for things she doesn't need, in moments where it doesn't particularly matter; that there is a hesitation at all is in itself something of an answer, or at least indicative that it should, probably, be yes. A matter of fact no would come quicker—a yes given because she's playing at spoiled would come quicker still. Anything that might show weakness, on the other hand,

has to be carefully weighed against her pride, and her ability to frame it in a way that she finds acceptable.

“If you'd like to,” is what she settles on, though there is something about the set of her jaw that suggests she might regret her answer if he says he wouldn't. Smaller Yngvi, in her arms, would quite like no one to be carried by anyone, but much like slightly larger Yngvi, no one has asked his opinion.

[rowancrowned]

“Come here, beloved,” he says, in the quiet voice that very few get to hear—her, and Legolas, and mayhap one or two more, but no one else so regular, as he makes sure she has a good hold on the animals and the bag before he picks her up, tucked against him.

She is, in all truth, an invalid; she may be carried like one.

Her ear is not so far from his mouth, he can speak, low, and trust the sound to carry easily, to both her and Romain.

“What has been already planned?” he asks, as they head towards the ferry. “A bath, I think, but the healer first.”

[toujoursdroit]

The fact that she allows Thranaduil to carry her tells Romain all he needs to know about the state of granddaughter, for the moment. "The healer, a bath, then rest," she says, quiet and clipped. "No visitors for the time being. It's going to be chaos in the Gallows, and likely beyond, for a while. Anything that needs arranging, I can arrange. I've sent ahead to Guilfoyle, he'll have everything ready in the immediate."

He is quiet, for a moment, thinking through a few other things. He needs to send a few ravens, his plans altered slightly with new information. But neither his granddaughter nor her husband needed to worry about that.

After a moment, he adds to Gwenaëlle: "I'll keep the boys clear, for now. They'll be happy to see you, though, when you feel up to it."

[elegiaque]

The fact that she doesn't argue with either of them about the healer speaks volumes as well, though she expects it to be brief, predictable. She was cold and hungry and tired and she will need warmth and food and rest, probably, but it will soothe them both to hear it from someone else and the rest will heal. Will keep.

“Tomorrow,” she says, as if she's just decided when she's going to feel up to it, and will expect her reality to arrange itself accordingly. “Tomorrow afternoon,” by way of concession to the fact it might not, precisely.

[rowancrowned]

How wonderful, to have family willing and able to support you. He thinks her at first referring to the healer, and is about to insist on otherwise, but no, she means the boys, whom Thranduil has seen only at a distance so far, so he keeps quiet and focuses mostly on getting her safely into the boat—a process that involves putting her down, shuffling bag and kitten and nug into the boat, and then offering her his arm to help her step down.

“Is Guilfoyle already on the city?” he asks Romain. He didn’t see him pass by, but that means nothing at all.

[toujoursdroit]

"He hasn't left yet." He'd had uses for Guilfoyle, if Guilfoyle was inclined to be put to them, outside of Kirkwall; those can wait, for now, and he knows exactly where the valet's loyalty resides regardless.

He settles himself in the boat once Thranduil has arranged the menagerie accordingly. "He was disinclined to attend the memorial. Assuming my message found him promptly, he'll have everything arranged by the time we arrive, I've no doubt."

For all his antipathy for Emeric didn't die when the comte did, Guilfoyle is undeniably capable.

[elegiaque]

Once she's settled in between husband and grandfather and assortment of small and less small animals, Gwenaëlle briefly contemplates Guilfoyle in a world without any Vauquelins left, and—dislikes it. She thinks, he shouldn't have to outlive me in much the same way she might think of a parent losing a child, and ignores the several different ways in which that's mildly to extremely troubling.

(Orlais.)

“I told you,” she murmurs, managing to be somewhat self-satisfied, “what's mine is yours and yours is mine.”

Thranduil may or may not actually remember his steadfast refusal to consider any of her inheritance from her father theirs, including Guilfoyle, but Gwenaëlle is smug in the face of being proven correct in how easily he fits his niche. The more for surviving to see it.

[rowancrowned]

“Beloved,” Thranduil murmurs, glad once the ferryman starts to row, “—a man is not your jewelry collection.”

Of which they likely share and share alike. She has some particularly nice hair ornaments. With her back against his chest, he relaxes, strokes his fingers down the curve of her cheek. Her weight in his lap is comforting for a variety of reasons, the beat of her pulse through her neck even better. He does not restrain himself in his open affection. There is nothing he wants to do that Romain could not witness and besides, he is too glad to have her back.

“He would be more useful,” he does admit.

[toujoursdroit]

"If there is one thing that can be said about Guilfoyle," Romain observes, arch, of his usefulness. While Thranduil's open affection might concern him in other circumstances, Romain is indeed inclined to let it pass in these. They've both reacted in ways they might otherwise not. It was a strange time.

After a moment, he says, "You did give us a fright," to Gwen. Considering the source, it is quite an admission. He's gone back to inscrutability, behind his mask in the opposite corner of the boat, but... the words themselves are telling.