i want to love, but ( closed )

[ipseite]

WHO: Petrana de Cedoux & Marcus Rowntree.
WHAT: Business in Hightown.
WHEN: Current.
WHERE: Hightown.
NOTES: Content warnings will be added if necessary!

Increasingly, Petrana accustoms Hightown to the sight of Marcus Rowntree by requiring his accompaniment there on various outings. On this outing, obliging him to the minor absurdity of sharing her wide parasol when the rain that had cleared up during their journey up to Kirkwall's highest echelons decides to start falling again. The enchantment that is making this largely decorative piece of nonsense functional will not long hold, and is not immediately obvious except in that it's rather impressive how it hasn't wilted under the weather's efforts. Or by proximity to such stoicism.

It matches a hat that she was gifted, and is presently wearing, and so.

“The jeweler's is not far,” she promises. “We might have something to drink in out of the rain, after.”

Comments

[luaithre]

Marcus shakes his head, no.

He believes himself to be patient, as a person, while others may disagree if they've been on the blunter end of curt words and short conversation. When it comes to simply talking to someone for whom he has an immense amount of time for, however, he doesn't mind whatever pace they choose to set. He will just quietly hold onto that curious thread, and let her do the unravelling.

[ipseite]

“Well,” she says, with some quiet wryness, “I believe it to be — effectively broken, if not simply nonexistent in its Thedosian incarnation in the first place. It was, in native terms, a sort of phylactery.”

Her fingers flex, in front of her. It has been so long now since she wore it that there is no longer any thin, pale band of skin where it once sat; she had worked it off her finger and set it down, and then put it away, and then put it mostly out of mind. James had recommended that she burn the portrait, and she had thought more than once of destroying this ring, but when she thinks about it...

Why should those things she has survived not serve her. If she might purchase herself a more promising tomorrow, and leave them behind.

“A few drops of my blood, and a spell I believe to have been reworked from something he had discovered, and—for safekeeping, we agreed, so long as I wore my ring he could always find me.” What choice had she had, but to agree.

[luaithre]

This does spark some memory. She had mentioned it once, in passing, but in the midst of a broader scope of information that Marcus' recall of the ring's significance comes late. So there is a dipped nod of understanding as she explains, at her summoning of the word 'phylactery'.

Which rings even odder now, in this moment, as they roam the rainy Hightown street. Phylacteries are a tool of the Chantry and so, as ever, spoken of in double terms. Spoken of as a form of protection, rather than bondage, but bondage being an innate quality, intrinsic to the Circles' notion of protection. He can imagine a more romantic iteration of such magic, between husband and wife, particularly in the sort of precarious circumstances that Petrana has described.

Romantic things aren't typically sold. He knows his partners are not romantics, which is a part of their charm, but all the same—

"Why not keep it? For sentiment."

[ipseite]

“Because the agreement was a lie we told ourselves to make an ugly thing palatable,” she says, gazing ahead rather than looking up at Marcus beside her. “He preferred to believe me wholeheartedly consenting to what he had arranged so I could not do otherwise and I did not wish to allow myself to see that the decision to do so had been taken out of my hands.”

It releases something, to say it in such clear terms. Out loud, and directly.

“Commander Flint is keeping a portrait for me, that came through a rift. It must have been painted after my death; it is an imagined scene, if I had been empress while my firstborn still lived. A beautiful, lush scene where I teach her magic in the palace gardens, and my husband has edited the skyline above those gardens to omit the tower from which I was thrown unceremoniously to my death. I have it in mind to sell that, as well.”

A small sound, a tch of her tongue against her teeth.

“What good would seeing it have done me, then. But what good does clinging to it do me, now?”

[luaithre]

Something about what she says prickles cold over him, but he is quiet, letting her finish. However, he does reconfigure them slightly, drawing his arm out of the corner he'd offered her to hold onto and instead tangle his fingers with hers.

"I've no sense of you clinging to anything," he says, quietly, almost beneath the friendly patter of rainwater against the parasol. "Was I mistaken, in that?"

It's not accusatory, the question, but a straight forward attempt to gauge exactly the nature of the conversation, the nature of things gone unspoken.

[ipseite]

Her fingers curl in between his, and then she does look up.

“To pretenses. I took the ring off when I made up my mind to make an earnest try of it, with Julius. And if anything I have thrust away my history with both hands. But I have clung to certain pretenses, and with Thaïs here...”

A great sigh, and the slight shift of her weight as they walk as if she might lean on him, if they weren't.

“You see it has only been Vysvolod, before. But what she knows of that life is so different to what I lived, and I have pretended that it isn't, and it has struck me again and again of late that I cannot bear to pretend it any more. I don't know what I'll make of that, with her. But I need be rid of these things. And of pretending they're other than they are.”

[luaithre]

He considers asking her the reason for her pretense before judging it a foolish sort of question, at least foolish to be asked so directly. Much can be inferred, about why anyone pretends anything, and anything that can't can be drawn out with better grace than that.

"Aye, but," he says, "I don't know if your mind would settle, with such a portrait being hung on the wall, somewhere. Or even a ring and all its meaning, being worn on another woman's hand. I think I would think about it."

And it would bother him. Maybe it would bother him now, too, on account of all the caring.

"Banishing the things could easily become another form of pretending." And he does kind of. Stop them, there, as if to make a point about this inevitable-feeling trajectory towards the appraiser's. He has her hand and the parasol, so she has little choice but to pause with him.

[ipseite]

It is an invigorating sort of honesty with which she says, “I don't know if it would, either,” as she stops, her skirts continuing to sway past the point at which she has ceased to move, turning to face him. (On the street, in the rain. It would make another lovely portrait, if she knew an artist with less of her blood on his hands.) “I've not committed to the doing, but I want to see how it feels. To begin.”

She ducks her head, a little, to make sure she's still under the parasol's protection. She says, “I have reinvented myself any number of times, now. I've made whole new lives for myself, each in the wreckage of the last. Quite aside from—from sentiment, they are valuable pieces. I bled for that empire that made them. I am owed something from it, I think.”

A breath of hesitation.

“I have reached out to Thaïs to ask her thoughts, particularly, on the sale of the painting. Likely she knew it better than I; she may have some attachment to it, and prefer it not. I won't decide without knowing.”

[luaithre]

"Alright."

Spoken cautiously. Her hand is released only so that he can touch her face, and it's instinct that keeps such a gesture light, unobtrusive, unproprietary. "But I think that you owe it to yourself, to let her see the truth of things as well. Of what the painting masks from her. And perhaps to speak on all of this more, with all of us."

He doesn't mean Thaïs, in this instance, but the absent third of their arrangement. Not that Petrana needs anyone's blessing, but all of this feels, to Marcus, knitted together too tightly, and wants for some unravelling. Better to do such things in trustworthy company.

"You know we both love who you've been as well as who you are now."

[ipseite]

Her eyes are bright, and there is no rain to blame that on beneath the parasol, when she admits, “I worry that I will be less than persuasive on the matter of whose truth. With her. I don't know what he told her, but I know what my mother said of me even before.”

She had seen the purpose of placing the Marquise in her daughter's household; the benefits that it offered, how it was seen outside of the palace. She had never liked the consequences of that choice, within it.

“I suppose that is something we might discuss.” The three of them.

[luaithre]

"It's your decision, and instinct," Marcus says. "But it needn't be all your burden."

Not when she is so ready to share in theirs, and keep hers to herself. At least, for the most part. The universe has seen fit to prompt her to loosen her grip and she's allowed that much. He can't imagine it, himself, being brought to a completely different world, and being given the opportunity to discard all the hurt and anger of his past, or bury it somewhere within himself, in favour of something new.

He's not sure what all would be left, but that's a different sort of discussion, and Petrana is a different sort of person. Mercurial and clever and attuned to doing good and powerful things.

[ipseite]

“It is a long habit, and difficult to set down.” There's a trace of apology in that; acknowledgment, too, that she is and wishes to make the effort to set it down. It only took more than a full year after removing herself from the most direct authority to manage to make a handful of friends,

and longer than she cares to admit to consider leaning on anyone for longer than a moment, under duress.

[luaithre]

The parasol protects most of them, but not the hems of Petrana's skirts or the slightly worn down edges of Marcus's boots. At least the water that's beginning to seep in isn't cold, but does spur him to keep a hold of her hand and move to resume their journey.

The appraiser, then, so that monetary worth can be considered alongside every other measurement of value.

"And Thaïs," he says, because forward motion doesn't mean the conversation is necessarily over, just likewise moving in a trajectory. "Has she been—" He pauses over word choice, but he wants to know first, and settles on, "Kind?"

[ipseite]

“She has not been unkind,” is what she settles on, eventually. “We are—uncertain, I think, what to be to one another. And, indeed, how. I imagine no matter what stories of me she has heard, and who did the telling, I am not much the woman in them.”

What Thaïs makes of that, she's less sure, and the edges of her anxiety about it are palpable even when she's harder to study, in motion alongside one another.