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]

"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.