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

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Baudin + &c
WHAT: A catch-all for pre-planned threads. * open for BUSINESS by ARRANGEMENT.
WHEN: September.
WHERE: Various.
NOTES: Content warnings TBA if necessary! Feel free to hit me up if you want to do something here; I am notoriously terrible at creating open posts but I'm always happy to brainstorm something bespoke.

starters in the comments.

Comments

[rowancrowned]

“I need you to be honest with me,” he says, and he’s thinking back to the dock, to their conversation there. He wants so badly for her to master this one thing. “No one will hear. No one will bother us.”

[elegiaque]

“About what.”

—oh, Gwenaëlle.

[rowancrowned]

2/2 I GUESS

[rowancrowned]

“About your feelings regarding how I took someone else to bed,” he says, in the tone of a man who has played this game before.

[elegiaque]

Steadily, “I want to be sick when I look at you.”

[rowancrowned]

“Anger?” he asks, committed to weaseling it all out of her. “Disgust? Sadness?”

[elegiaque]

If she's no right to be upset then he's no right to this, she thinks, but she bites out: “Shame,” because it's true, and because she thinks it might hurt him to hear it.

[rowancrowned]

He makes as if to reach for her hand, a familiar gesture of comfort, but pauses, mid-air, where it hangs like a question.

“Why?”

[elegiaque]

“Because I was surprised,” she says, quietly.

It caught her so off-guard, and hurt her so badly, and how can she not be ashamed of that? Of behaving like the wounded party as if she hadn't held the knife. It's—

she's hardly going to be proud of it.

[rowancrowned]

“I thought,” he admits, and it is quiet, and not without his own shame. “That I would have to watch you go through a parade of suitors.”

Some of whom who would surely delight in encouraging her more destructive tendencies.

“I do not want to see you hurt.”

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle, too, had envisioned more of a sexy Orlesian depression, but it seems that that is an Orlais exclusive. Out here, she's having to endure the ordinary, mundane sort of alienating people and crying a great deal, and buying things that don't make her feel any better. She's not proud of thinking she'd have rather the destructive parade of suitors to whatever the fuck this is.

Papa made self-destruction look so much better. Is this how he'd felt, all the time? She had kept the worst of herself from him thinking that he'd interfere, and perhaps he would have done, but now she wonders if it would have hurt him more to know they were just alike.

“Don't look, then,” is withering, defensive.

[rowancrowned]

"No," he says, then, "I think even if I loathed you and I was half the world away, I would still wonder if you were safe and well."

Finally, he sets his hand down on her knee.

"Even if we do not- even if we are merely- merely," his own voice withering, "- comrades, I will still want you to be well. I would not want to hurt you."

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle does not trust herself to respond to that, for what feels like an impossibly long time. There is nothing she can say to it that isn't hurtful, or unfair, and she is trying very hard. Maybe that's terrible, too, that it is so difficult. That this moment is fragile, and all she can do is think of tearing it apart.

“Great,” she says, dragging her voice back from a great distance. “Noted.”

[rowancrowned]

He has tried. It is late, and a great deal has been asked of her as of late, and he is all too willing to keep giving.

“Would you like to go home?” he asks, quietly. How much better would this all be, if he was able to do it wearing his own face.

[elegiaque]

“I want to go to Markham and fuck Alexander and see how you like it,” she says, a little too viciously to be entirely convincing. The impulse is there,

and the awareness that probably, that also won't make her feel any better. It'd take too long to get to Markham. She'd have thought better of it, by the time she got there.

[rowancrowned]

“It would hurt me,” he admits, standing. “All of the old doubts would come back- am I enough, will she stay with an elf, is a Rifter who cannot promise her forever the best choice?”

He smiles, wry. The thought had occurred to him. That he would wake and find she had left the city, to visit her former betrothed. “I can be very jealous, Gwenaëlle. There were days where I loathed him, loathed him touching you, looking at you, and could not fathom why.”

[elegiaque]

“He believed in me,” she says, fixing her gaze somewhere past Thranduil's shoulder, her fingers curled in her skirts, her voice feeling strange and her throat tight. “In the strangest way, in this—that if my lord had taken his protection away, that I would have been fine. That I'd have figured this out, that I can do it. He believed I can do this, here, this sort of bullshit—if I have to, if it matters.”

She's been thinking about that a great deal, the past days, perhaps understandably; reminded of it by this necessity, and sorting through feelings left over from Alexander's absence that she'd never really looked at.

“And you have kept secrets from me because I can't. Maybe you're right, and he's wrong, but imagine how it feels that you've got all the closer to me, and you haven't the same faith in me. What the fuck am I going to do with that.”

[rowancrowned]

“Did he? Truly?” Thranduil asks, sharp. “Or did he say the things that would make you feel confident, flatter you, promise you the world you wanted, and then leave?”

He shouldn’t be harsh, should manage to straddle the knife’s edge of stern and persuasive. He knows how to handle her, but this subject is tender. This subject makes him intense, intent on her. “A scant handful of months, fewer letters. When we thought you had died, when you have vanished— not a letter of condolence, not one remark, not in years, for good or bad news. He told you pretty things; he left. Convenient for him. We sit, we speak, we talk through matters, you train with Captain Flint, you spend time with Morrigan and learn, you come to know yourself.”

He scoffs. “If you think I have not put my trust in you— I have tied myself to you forever, for all that you threw it back in my face and laughed— Gwenaëlle, this is a fight we have had a dozen times before. What do you imagine your life would have been like, had you gone with him.”

He shakes his head, raises his hand. “‘Not this’, I suspect. Have the fantasy. If this is that repulsive to you, I will go. I have held my hand out enough.”

[elegiaque]

“Am I laughing, Thranduil,” she says, quiet.

He gives up, disgusted, and she knows that this is where she should feel

something, different. An agony at the thought of it. In a way, it's still there; she can feel the edges of it, where it might grow. It hurts to be apart from him, it aches that she tells him this specific hurt and he mocks her for it, but what can she say to him when the thought of his touching her now, in this moment, still turns her stomach? She imagines reaching out instead, and how it would feel if he relented, and the thought of doing it feels like pushing a knife into her own gut.

“I'm not imagining that life,” she says, steady. “I'm imagining what it would have felt like if you listened to me right now. But I get it. You're done listening to me. And why should you? The idea of you touching me again is awful. It probably won't always be, but...”

She does laugh, then, a little, awful sound. “But it is. I can't tell you that it isn't. That I want you to try. You'll be done with me entirely, by the time I can imagine that.”

[rowancrowned]

He lets the quiet sit for a moment. He is so tired. He wonders what it feels like for Rifters when they fade away, if there is a moment long enough for them to realize, or if it is instant. Naturally, it is never when anyone is looking. Everyone ceases to think of them, and they vanish.

"I think I have loved you from the moment on the battlements," he says, finally. "I would wait for as long as it took."

If she would ask him. It is probably useless to say this or anything else to her as she is now, and he is too near to a depth of emotion he would prefer not to feel. He could say other things, but instead he stands.

"I will get you to the carriages," he says. "Whatever you were doing here, it does not need to be disturbed. No one will notice or comment upon your exit."