faderift | open. you believe what you want to believe.

She tenses, her shoulders tightening against her neck, and she doesn't know why. Matthias reaching for her hands shouldn't make her feel like she needs to be ready to spring back, a startled animal someone let into the Gallows rather than penning in the stable.

Too many things are happening at once, and she can't seem to sift through them quickly enough to know what to say. And really, only one thing is actually happening--it's only a conversation--but it feels like ten different demons leaping at her. Worry for Matthias, a little stab of terror at the idea that she's this important to him (the faint awareness that he might be that important to her as well), her hands trapped, the scent of his fear, listening for the others who sleep here, knowing she's said something wrong if this is his reaction (and knowing that everything she's said feels right).

And magic, all the horrible possibilities she assumed would never be a problem. Matthias makes fire, he would not do something else. Magic used for her.

"I would save you," she agrees, her voice soft. She stares down at their hands. "But--not like that. Please."

"All right." He says it quickly, grips at her hands like he's drowning. She isn't looking at him but he's looking at her, the intensity of his gaze burning into the top of her head like a brand. If she looks up now she'll catch the heat of it directly. He can't do any differently.

What he's agreed to--will he be able to keep it? If the moment comes--a moment more dangerous than the one they'd faced in the dream, a moment of real danger--will he be able to stay his hand, keep himself from saving her? But if she would rather die than be saved by him, like that--then she'll come out of it hating him. She'll leave. And that would be worse, surely, than losing her to death. Or would it? At least she would be alive, even if she wasn't alive with him.

But when Matthias thinks of the day that she'd told him she was going away on a mission--when he thinks of the sour taste of panic when she'd started climbing his ice walls, determined to get away--no, losing her like that would hurt worse.

"All right," he says again, firmly, "I won't, I swear. On my life." Keep your word, Matthias, because losing her would be the worst thing of all.

And that's what she wants, isn't it? A promise--and before that, an apology. It feels hollow, somehow, but she's not sure what else is required in a situation like this. Matthias has said everything that matters. He sounded, for a second or two, and perhaps only in her mind, like he might begin to cry.

Everything Matthias has done is right. She doesn't know what more she could ask. But she doesn't feel better.

Maybe that will take time, feeling better about any of this. It's the part of the dream that's stuck with her strongest, wedging itself beneath her skin until she might hesitate to touch his hands, despite the fact that he holds hers without fear. I am dangerous, too.

"Thank you," she whispers, lacking a better response, and finally meets his eyes. The look in his eyes, she can't name, but it makes her chest hurt. "I do not die easily. So you do not have to worry."

If Matthias' eyes are a little shiny when he looks back at her--well, that's to be expected. The hot feeling in his throat stays only a feeling; no tears spill over out of his eyes. He makes a short almost-laugh at her reassurance, and it comes out thick and stupid sounding. That bluntness that she has, so deadpan it seems like a joke. He knows that she means it.

"I know. I will, though."

He looks back down at their hands. There's a skinny little scar that runs between his knuckles, white with age. He doesn't remember where it came from. You forget things, eventually, but the dream feels like it will stay with him forever, just the way a really bad nightmare might.

And he doesn't want to ask. He wants, instead, to get up, to go outside, to walk on the battlements with Laura or go into Kirkwall or leave the city entirely, back to the woods. He thinks about Laura's pale skin, and the glow of the firelight, and the darkness of the trees. Kissing her, hard, all tangled against her. He swallows.

"Had you seen someone do it before? Blood magic?"

He worries about me right now, she thinks, looking at him. Of course he will worry when I am in danger. If there was a way to make it so he wouldn't, she'd be sorely tempted; it makes her chest tighten to realize just how her safety matters to him.

(Much more than it does to her, certainly. She shouldn't let him know that.)

She's inching a little closer, thinking that maybe she can pull him into her arms and they can let silence say everything else for them--the idea of touching him isn't so disconcerting now, not with a promise from him--when he brings up blood magic by name. And then she's frozen again, just for a moment, her teeth clenching together.

Has she seen blood magic before? She assumes so, inasmuch as it appears to mean the bad kinds of magic on the rare occasions when people bring it up. The boundaries of exactly what qualifies feel academic to someone whose lessons in magic always featured her as the test subject. For Laura, blood magic is when it took away her choices. When it terrified her. When it hurt.

So. Closer but not exactly close, looking past his head until she realizes she's doing it and makes herself focus on his eyes, she swallows. If he knows, maybe he'll have more reason not to let the dream become truth. "Sometimes I did not do what I was told."

Hearing that feels like a punch, like someone knocked the wind out of him. People don't have to have had blood magic done to them to be frightened of it. He'd thought--maybe hoped--that was all that it was for Laura, that she was peripherally aware of the taboo of it. Hearing the opposite shifts everything into terrible place.

And he doesn't need to press. Matthias can connect those words with some awful reality, something he doesn't want for her. Only it happened before him. He's a mage, and a mage is what did that to her. Shame and sorrow washes through him, and he feels, suddenly, as if he'll be sick.

He swallows that down. He holds tightly to Laura's hands. He makes himself look her in the eye. She has beautiful eyes. Beautiful, the color of the trees in early summer.

"I won't," he says, again. "I'll never."

Laura nods, and they sit there, Matthias' hands clenched around hers. Her jaw doesn't seem to want to move, her lungs unwilling to breathe out an answer.

She can't remember if she's told anyone about that part of the magic before. She probably hasn't. People see the claws, and they know enough; they don't ask for more details. For people besides Matthias, she doesn't think she'd give them. Realizing that, though, that he's the only other living person who knows, however broadly, somehow makes her feel better and worse all at once.

(Eventually, she will feel better. Someday, a burden shared will be a burden lessened. Right now, she's filled with shame and sadness and worry for Matthias, who looks at her with such intensity. Her entire body is too light, not quite in her own control, liable to dissolve entirely if no one was keeping hold of her hands.)

It takes a few breaths, and she still feels off--trembling, she realizes belatedly, shivering like they aren't inside at all--but she can do something besides look at him, lost somewhere behind her own face. Carefully, with the eerie sensation that she's not actually the one doing it, just experiencing it from afar--not blood magic, something else, some feeling of distance--she lets go of his hands and creeps forward enough that she can sit beside him on the narrow bed.

There are things that can't be said, not easily, and one is everything that she means when she wraps her arms around him, burying her head in the crook of his neck. He smells the same as always, if more fearful, more worried, than usual.

Of course Matthias puts his arms around her when Laura moves closer to him. Of course he pulls himself close to her in return. This says something without that silence being broken just yet. And as he holds her he feels the trembling in her, and in turn he feels--something. He doesn't have a word for it. Bad, is mostly what he feels, bad that this is what they've come to, bad that he made her feel this way, that she has lived a life that has made her afraid like this.

When he pulls in his next breath, it's shaky. When he holds onto her, there's no shaking to it at all. He is at least certain of this: how they fit together, how he wants her to hold to him and how he wants to hold to her too. She has to know that. No matter what was before, they have this.

Laura isn't sure how long they stay there. She forgets to listen for sounds at the door or think more than a moment or two ahead of each breath she takes in. Until her teeth no longer threaten to chatter if she unclenches her jaw, she lives in their scents as they mingle and the familiar weight of Matthias' arms.

It takes time.

When she thinks she can tolerate it (at any time she could have, if she'd had to, but with Matthias she doesn't have to, he will not make her), she lifts her head enough to peer up at his face. Her cheeks are dry, her eyes tearless, but some tension still lingers in the angles of her face. "Before that...it was not a bad dream."

Which is to say, I do not wish to talk about this anymore.

He had needed that moment very badly--maybe not as much as Laura, how can he know that--but still, very badly. Holding onto her feels like touching ground after being too far out in the middle of a lake. It's solid, it makes sense.

So Matthias even manages to give her a little bit of a smile when she pulls away. "It was a good dream," he agrees. He lifts one hand, carefully--and if she permits it, he will brush his thumb just beside her mouth, like he might work out some of that tension from her. "It felt--real. In a good way."

"Yes." She lets him touch her, not quite relaxing, but not shying back from him. "I do not want us to lose the war. But--"

But even if they seemed very, very close to losing the war, there still was joy to be had. Hard work, quiet moments, waking a sleeping man and kissing him in the middle of the night. Living like people live, others looking at her and seeing a person capable of blending into society for more than a few minutes at a time.

She can't quite bring herself to say those things aloud. The not-quite-a-memory, lying next to him beneath piles of furs and blankets, feels fragile. Mentally, she's shelved it with her best recollections of her mother, things to be remembered and guarded carefully. Instead, she tries to summon her I am teasing voice--not entirely successfully--and finishes the sentence with, "--you were very handsome."

Edited (when you decide you gotta add something like 10 hours later) 2021-03-02 00:33 (UTC)

Wherever Matthias thought she was going to go, it wasn't there. He's caught off-guard, enough so that a smile jumps to his face. He smooths his thumb back again. She isn't smiling, but he hears that note in her voice. It helps, hearing it. Something to cleave to.

"Couldn't grow a beard, still." He remembers that much. "Probably won't ever be able to. I hope that's all right with you."

You know, for the forever they promised each other in the dark of their shared tent, years from now. It feels fragile to Matthias as well, but very real at the same time. He wants to ask about it, and opens his mouth to say something before he thinks, no, hang on, wait, not yet, not after you were just talking of blood magic. Keep them separate.

"You were beautiful. Still are. Don't think any war could have changed that."

Matthias smiling was, at that moment, the objective--she realizes it when it happens, his entire face shifting. If he's handsome always (and he is), he's especially so when he looks at her like she said something worth hearing.

"Beards do not interest me." A beard would only obscure his face, and she's grown fond of seeing all of it. She reaches up, fingers alighting at his jaw, letting herself feel the plane of skin, muscle and bone beneath. Some part of her still feels like it's disconnected from the world around her, shut up someplace inside her own skull, but it's smaller than the rest of her. "And I think you are biased."

Still teasing, still not quite making herself sound teasing enough, but with a certain softness around her eyes that means a smile as much as the curve of her lips might.

His grin shifts his face again, changing the angles that her fingertips are pressed to. It's a small grin on the Matthias scale--he has a variety, usually wider than not--but it's still a grin. And things move one notch closer to better.

"No, that's not it. 'Cause you are, and you don't need me to say it. Like I will say it, 'course, but it's also true on its own." He shifts his hand, pushes back to carefully tuck some of her hair back behind her ear. And here's her face, close to his, perfect and pretty. "I reckon I could look at you forever. You really don't like beards at all?"

She doesn't strictly disagree. However she might feel about the scars blanketing her limbs, Laura's aware that she's generally not unpleasant to look at. And Matthias is the only person in the world from whom she likes hearing opinions, when it comes to the subject of her appearance. But she has yet to find a way to accept the compliment easily.

So instead, shrugging at his answer--but with the corner of her mouth twitching up slightly, something shy coming into her face--she tells him, "I would see less of your face."

It's better than the other answers at hand: sometimes they smell bad, they can be unpleasantly bristly, they remind her of other people she'd rather forget.

Edited (fixing a bad sentence) 2021-03-04 14:30 (UTC)

"Yeah, true. Might not always be a bad thing."

He rubs at his chin, thinking--then, spurred to sudden action, reaches for some of her hair. It's long enough that he can get a bit of it and lean in as he pulls it closer--and holds it over his upper lip, making a long and droopy moustache of it.

"But just look at this," he says through her hair.

Hers is the startled laugh of someone who didn't realize a moustache made of her hair was even an option. Laura shakes her head--minutely, careful not to disrupt his attempt at facial hair.

"You look like Bastien." (He doesn't, really. The only point of comparison is some dark hair over his upper lip. But for their purposes, that's enough, and it's the first thing Laura thinks of, anyway.) "I couldn't kiss Bastien."

"He is old," Matthias concedes, and, trying out a very bad Orlesian accent, repeats, "old."

But he doesn't take her hair away from his face just yet. Instead he curls it around so it makes a loop, and holds that to his lip to make a very bad pseudo beard. "Less Bastieny," he guesses, though he can't see for himself. "Maybe the trouble is that it doesn't match my hair, yeah? When I was small we said it was demons that had hair that didn't match their beards. Stupid."

"Ancien," she agrees, with only a little Nevarran colouring her Orlesian, a hand going to her mouth as she tries not to laugh more at the sight of her hair wrapping about Matthias' chin. Why it's so amusing, she wouldn't be able say if asked. A lifetime spent mostly without small moments of silliness, perhaps, and the continuing surprise at being able to sit with someone and have moments like these. "Beards are always darker. That would make every man a demon."

"Ancien," he repeats dutifully, and sticks his nose up in the air. This is in part to balance the hair and in part to be posh and Orlesian--not Bastien-Orlesian, whatever else might be said of Bastien (not much by Matthias, Bastien confuses him), he isn't posh.

"Beards might be a bit darker, but I mean like if I really had a beard what grew in as black as your hair, but I had my hair along with it. That's too much a difference, yeah? I ought to have at least a brown beard to go with brown hair. And if I hadn't, then," he clicks his tongue against his teeth, "demon, obviously."

"You are a mage," she points out, leaning in a little to help him with the extremely important matter of keeping his facial hair on his face. "You could make your beard any colour."

Of course, a child like he was might see a mage and think one step from a demon. Laura wouldn't be able to blame them. She doesn't say it, just aware enough to realize they likely shouldn't return to the subject of all the ways Matthias' magic might endanger others. Instead, she tells him, "Brown hair and a green beard."

He laughs, and some of her hair falls into his mouth. Gross, mostly for her, but also not great for him. Carefully he tries to push it out, maybe wipe it off.

"Tell you what, when I've learnt the spell for hair coloring, I'll grow a beard then. Or I'll try. At least for a bit, only so I can change the color around. Brown hair and a red beard, but proper red. Like crimson red. Not ginger."

"I would like your with a red beard." Her hair falling into his mouth is, for her, the end of this particular bit of entertainment. It's nowhere close to the least pleasant place her hair has been, and yet--she takes the locks he borrowed carefully from his grasp, letting them fall back against her shoulder again. Still smiling, lips and all now, though, and touching his jaw again lightly. "But then I would like shaving it off again."

"All right, then." He turns his head just a little, leans in to her touch with a grin. "That's what I'll be working on. I'll let Enchanter Leander know, all other work has got to stop for a bit so's I can learn to grow a beard and color it red."

Under other circumstances, she might draw her hand away a moment later--but he seems to like it, in the same way their cat appreciates being petted, and there's a sort of relief that comes from being able to touch his face and know the things he's promised. So her fingertips rest idle, there at his jaw, a little longer.

"Good." There's a pause, as she wonders what to say--unlike Matthias, she hasn't jokes at the ready. After a moment, she settles on, "What kind of work will have to stop?"

It's conciliatory--tell me about your magic, the kind I'm trying to understand--and it's a test of sorts. His enchanter hasn't been teaching him blood magic, surely, but.

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