faderift | ( open* ) for all i know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life,

The claws stay out, but it's remarkable all the same how much more pliant she is for being touched at all—it doesn't change the shape of the things that she says, but very little ever does. Tangible, still, how susceptible she is to the tactile; how much more tolerant, how much more readily persuaded. It seems so improbable that she could somehow still be so starved for touch as seems to run through her,

but probably she'd protest a bit louder if she weren't relaxing under his hands.

“Oh, I won't be,” is droll, anyway. She watches him from beneath her lashes, more contemplative than anything else, and then: “Do you think I'll be able to convincingly look as if I fancy her?” which is only a half idle question. “It seems like the easiest way to launch her on society.”

The visual of smashing a champagne bottle across Margaery Tyrell's arse is fairly compelling. The HMS We're Desperate.

“Well that depends, my dear.” Conversational, his tone— uniquely so. The majority of his attention focused on his work: thumb running high, knuckles meeting the pad of her foot, kneading in alternating rhythms.

He is, to his credit, exceptionally good at this.

“Have you ever done it before? Pretended, I mean. In depth.”

Gwenaëlle assumes he's expecting the answer that she gives, because he's met her—

“Of course I haven't.”

Maybe it isn't of course. There are a lot of reasons why someone might have to do that, and a lot of scenarios in which there might have theoretically been a time before Gwenaëlle's cushioned fall from grace where perhaps she might have tried harder to be something else. She did try, she thinks, but it was effort to a particular end, and self-protective, and drawing the attention of someone whose attention she didn't actually want would not have served the precariously balanced priorities she was juggling (badly).

There were other ways, but Gwenaëlle is a hammer and everything looked like a nail. It's a direct approach to problem-solving.

She tips her head back against the arm of the chaise, sinking lower— “I've pretended I was just generally aloof and didn't specifically hate particular people. I'm good at that.” Better to be thought cold and haughty than frightened; an easier disguise for her to wear when he can observe for himself she's not exactly without a curious amount of arrogance for someone with so little inherent self-worth. “I can be haughty.”

But softness comes less naturally.

“Mm.”

It’s quiet, that thoughtful sound, made as he continues working at her with absent, rhythmic strokes.

For a moment, there is nothing else— and then his red eyes lift, surveying the look on her face where she’s slung across the opposite end of the chaise.

“Practice with me, then.”

Gwenaëlle's incredulous look could speak for itself, all by itself, but:

“What's that supposed to help? I am attracted to you.”

“You— “

It takes him by surprise, that admission. Maybe it shouldn’t, given the ferocity spanning the last few months: how he’d chased her, and how— despite turning away from his more immediate advances— she’d still reached out to smooth over the worst of their grievances. Misunderstandings. Snared claws. Whatever you want to call it.

Animosity and passion aren’t so dissimilar. Particularly not in wild creatures.

It had taken all of Fenris to calm him once, in regards to her and his own cold fury. Now he studies her face, and finds himself utterly at ease. Pleased, in fact.

Flattered, even.

He pinches her ankle between his fingers, working out tension. His lips twist ever so slightly.

“Then why are you so far from me.”

By contrast, Gwenaëlle doesn't look as if she thinks she's paid him a compliment or done anything pleasing; has not announced it in anything like the hopes of making good on it. Rather, the elegant shrug seems to suggest that the answer to that should be as obvious as all the rest.

She's also wanted to throw herself off a tower. What's she meant to do, trust the things she wants?

Based on what.

“Well, let's just look at how that's worked out for me in the recent past,” she says, dry, holding up one finger. “Fucking died.” Two fingers. “Found out I was elfblooded and left me,” an unfair conflation that she has mostly forgiven Alexander for, and a third finger: “decided he would literally rather be prepared to die than love me,” number four, “betrayed us all and probably only wanted to fuck my husband anyway,” and—

Her thumb tilts out. She lowers her hand, and looks down at it.

“And that's the short list,” shortly, instead of finishing it.

“Well, it certainly is a tragic list, I’ll give you that.” And a storied one, given how young she no doubt is. Misfortune picks its prey, always. “But I don’t see what that’s got to do with me,” his hold snakes higher around her calf, a pulling motion, as if he intends to drag her across the lounger— if it comes to it.

“I’m not after your heart, I don’t care about your wealth or your ears— and I’ve already fucked your dazzling hart of a husband: I don’t need you to get to him, if that’s what has you so worried.”

Someone else might shy away from confessing it. Never mind that she’s snared in his grasp, that she’s admitted some degree of attraction, that she and her beloved are out of sorts for the time being: none of that would change what he’s laid out on the figurative table before them.

“And as for betrayal, well. That might happen, if the walls come closing in on us. But at least I’ll be honest about that much.”

He’s no wolf in sheep’s clothing, after all. Just a wolf.

—Gwenaëlle doesn't hear anything he says, after I've fucked your dazzling hart of a husband.

She can hear her blood roaring in her ears and some horrible, hot feeling on the back of her shoulders, grasping the base of her neck; she looks blankly through him, flushed abruptly, the not-unfamiliar feeling of the whole world tilting on its axis around a surge of adrenaline she doesn't need. She's not in danger. Nothing terrible is happening. In fact, nothing he just said is even her business,

but her stomach twists so violently she thinks she's going to be sick, actually, and that isn't fair, not fair, not fair to Thranduil who she had made it abundantly clear could do whatever he liked without her say-so and if that includes Astarion then there's absolutely no reason for it to stop her breath. He can do anything he wants. And she's perfectly safe.

Gwenaëlle stands so abruptly the attendants nearly scatter; when she starts purposefully for the door, barefoot in a robe, several of them begin to flutter anxiously around her, coaxing, persuading, talking her down, she doesn't want to go out there dressed like that, would she like some water, would she like her guest to leave, perhaps the wine, please won't she sit again—?

Her skin feels hot and tight and it shouldn't, and she can't breathe with all of these people near her.

Well. It’s not the response he’d anticipated. Nor the one he’d hoped for, in fact.

But he’s no fretting adolescent, no simpering, lovesick fool: the world tips the scales and Astarion— entirely confident in his own ability to press back— opts immediately to give chase.

Soundless steps, a hand outstretched, and he means to snare her by her wrist in an anchoring grip strong enough to counter momentum when he pulls against the grain.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

Fleeing a place like this, dressed like that; it’ll only spark the worst sort of rumors. The most irritating gossip.

The sort of thing that’s a tiresome nuisance to sweep up after.

Underneath his hand, her pulse is a racing, fluttering thing—she spins and nearly punches him straight in the stomach for it, and everyone in the room can see the moment she catches herself, and opens her fist, and holds herself from swaying like some hysterical damsel with such tension that all of her, somehow, is a white knuckle.

The attendants clear out.

Gwenaëlle presses her eyes shut against the onset of a headache as if maybe she can stave it off; maybe when she opens them again, he will also be gone and she won't have to deal with this, with being expected to still somehow have a conversation or know what to say or find something to say that isn't,

that it will be all right, somehow. That she will not be unreasonable.

Edited 2021-09-05 10:44 (UTC)

She’s spinning. Spiraling. Clear as the agonized look on her face.

So his hold on her stays fixed, cooler fingers nestled around the fine bones of her wrist, left angled somewhere between them in the suite’s exceedingly perfumed air.

And it’s no miserable gambit when his other hand fits itself to the edge of her jaw, bracing light for the almost uniquely delicate kiss that chases it.

Something to break the deadlock of her own dizzyingly high fall.

Gwenaëlle feels as if she has been spinning for weeks,

and stills, that small thing landing with so much more impact. He kisses her and it is nothing she expects, right now, at what she can only assume to be her very least alluring. She cannot decide, immediately, if it's a kindness or a blow but either way she can't just pretend he isn't there until it's true. Instead—she sags, drags a breath in all the way down and breathes it out against his mouth.

Does he breathe? Have a heartbeat? These are not questions she thinks to ask—his explanation of precisely what a vampire is hadn't been heavy on the technicalities, the way she remembers it—but there is something telling in the way that now it seems instinctive for her to press her palm flat against his chest, to pull the hand he has on her wrist toward her own, to struggle through slowing her breathing, reaching for a steadier mirror.

She tips her forehead against his. It doesn't feel good, but she can't bear the thought of letting go yet.

(You're safe, a dead man says, sitting her on his knee so she can reach his heart, too. You're safe. It only feels like you aren't. You're safe.)

Edited 2021-09-05 13:44 (UTC)

Allure isn’t part of the equation at the moment. For better or worse, the only thing Astarion has to offer is the simplicity of touch without any amount of true feeling behind it. Because it isn’t empathy, or misery, or even remorse for the pain he’s clearly caused— just an interruption to the worst her mind has to offer. An interlude, by way of how he stays close.

His heart beats beneath her hand, albeit slower; his skin is cooler because of it, though not half as frigid as it used to be before Thedas decided it was fair game to breathe life back into an unliving corpse.

Not that he's complaining.

Still, that tightened grip goes slack when the warm press of her profile finds its way against his, amber and sandalwood scent clinging, tangled up in the mess they’ve managed to make yet again of an otherwise perfectly fair afternoon. And, surprisingly tame for that attention, she’s left the smallest gift of whatever time she needs in return.

Despite his own beastly nature, he doesn’t press or pull. Doesn’t force her to wake just yet.

It is — perceptible, the way that she gathers her dignity up around her when she does, eventually, pull away. Make sure that her robe is knotted still, and that she doesn't dart her glances around like a frightened animal; she looks at a fixed point over his shoulder and says,

“I've appointments all week, I'll finish my fitting tomorrow. I'm going to go home. Excuse me, I need to dress before I leave.”

What's she meant to say.

( open* ) for all i know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life,

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject