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]

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.