open | and now that you don't have to be perfect,

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Baudin, et menagerie, and you?
WHAT: Baby got a houseboat, and it's move-in day. Find her at the Kirkwall docks as things are unpacked into it, or after that across the harbor at the Gallows slip where it'll be secured for the foreseeable future.
WHEN: Shortly after the return from Cumberland.
WHERE: Kirkwall harbour.
NOTES: Y'all I have coveted that houseboat since it went up on the rewards page.

Originally some manner of riverboat not intended for the purpose it presently serves, the houseboat that is for now moored perfectly in line with the anchored Walrus in the harbor is— something of a monstrosity, an eccentricity built up over time, not impossible to move under its own power but more commonly affixed to a more purposeful vessel and tugged along behind it. Having won it in a game of cards from a local who'd been tired of the lifestyle and tired of Kirkwall besides, it's taken some time for the Duke de Coucy to consider it sufficiently worthy to relinquish his granddaughter into—

which is to say, the interiors are now substantially finer, even if she'd put her foot down and insisted she didn't want anything done to the exterior that wasn't absolutely necessary. No need to turn it into obvious thief-bait, for a start, and besides: she rather likes the aesthetic. It's shabby and shambling but it was in otherwise good repair when it came into her hands, surprisingly sturdy and featuring beneath the water a wine-cellar kept cool by the ambient temperature around it where she's spent much of the morning while the rest of her belongings are brought in by de Coucy footmen and servants packing her stockpile of only slightly stolen Vauquelin wealth in the locked store-room behind the wineracks.

With only slightly stolen de Coucy wine, naturally.

Gwenaëlle emerges from below as trunks and furnishings are still being unloaded from carriages come down from Hightown, Small Yngvi the cat sleeping in a pinned up portion of the front of her skirts and Leviathan, the nug, doing laps of the exterior in an effort to understand his new environs. Hardie sits sentinel on the deck in front of the door, supervising the efforts of the de Coucy men (who are, in fact, being supervised by Guilfoyle—) and upon consideration Gwenaëlle sits down beside him, fingers in his fur, occasionally answering questions about where something needs to be put and if she would like it unpacked, also, or left to her (or Guilfoyle) to manage later.

Once everything's been securely stowed, a boat waits to haul it over to one of the empty slips surrounding the Gallows, where Gwenaëlle will finally have significantly less of a commute. The last thing to be done before that, of course—

“I have always wanted to do this,” Gwenaëlle says, and smashes a champagne bottle against the balustrade, just above the brand-new sign identifying the vessel as La Souveraineté.

Comments

[elegiaque]

It is only her great love for Flint, clearly, that prompts Gwenaëlle to pretend not to notice him visibly change tack mid-thought. It's also not very convincing, but he's known her for a few years at this point; he's unlikely to be under the impression that there's a world in which Gwenaëlle trying to make her face do something unnatural doesn't look like she's done it on purpose.

“Houseboat,” she says, mildly, of the prospect of floating it out into the sea. “Don't worry, it's on track for all of that. It's no good to me if I have eighteen splinters in my hands, knees and arse at any given time of the day, either, you know.”

It's fucking hot, for a start, so at some point she does want to be able to lay out in the harbour air for relief, and then there's the fact that she's almost certain she could, once the exterior is finished with, climb from top to bottom. And has every intention of figuring out how fast she can do it and carrying what.

“Not all black,” a bit regretfully, “it'll heat up like no one's business, I assume.”

[katabasis]

His hum of assent over the edge of the cup is something like agreement that Yes, it would turn into a spit iron for roasting, and something like approval in the sense of Good, because I've picked up slivers just by standing here and looking out this window. It precedes the point of his attention drifting once more about the room, taking in the interior's refit with a cautious eye.

The majority of his qualms must have to do with details which lie outside of this room, for when his attention returns to her—

"What prompted all this?"

That's not criticism. Not really.

[elegiaque]

The truth is—

there are a few truths. She won it in a card game; a serendipitous moment for herself and the man who'd wanted rid of it, and shot of Kirkwall, and they'd both walked away pleased enough after he'd won a generous purse back in the next hand. And Julius's observation about being tired of Hightown, well, that's not wrong, either. Especially in the weeks and months since Margaery left, and she's been holding up their end of Loxley's investigation without the buffer and benefit of Margaery's charm—

and Marcus Rowntree at Cumberland, telling her she ought to imagine the future. The houseboat had been well underway by then, so it can't be said to have prompted anything, except the realisation that sitting around mourning the future she doesn't have any more isn't going to build her anything new.

What she says, finally, is—

“I hated that I didn't know where we were going, when I was married. I'm mouthy and a bad liar so Thranduil always kept things from me, so I couldn't tell anyone about them by accident, and I understood that—” she is mouthy and a bad liar, however many secrets she managed to keep for so long, “I did. We'd argue about that because honestly there have got to be some fucking limits or we're just tripping over each other and he'd just blindside me with things and it pissed me off because I'd thought that we were waiting for the end of the war to make plans but he'd make them without me and he'd be frustrated and annoyed when I didn't react however he imagined I would.”

Gwenaëlle shrugs, taking a drink.

“Nothing here is permanent. I don't have anywhere to go, when it ends, if we're all alive when that happens. I'm allowed to think about what I want my life to look like. I can make my own plans. I want to live on a fucking boat and now I do and it's mine.”

The words are sharp, but she's relaxed— maybe in a way she hasn't been, not for long enough to have nearly forgotten what it looked like. It's hers, not temporarily, not dependent on who she's in the good graces of or who she's fucking or how many resources she still has at her disposal. Only her own, to live in as pleases her.

[katabasis]

Strange, how present that specter of after has become. Maybe it's the nearness of the war's front line, or it's due to none of them having had a good night's sleep in months, or maybe it's because the whole world has been at this for so long that it's only natural that thoughts should have made a habit of projecting toward some future where that isn't the case. There are plenty of reasons a body might be tired of this. That one might be compelled to think of what shape a life is meant to bend toward in the aftermath of all this.

And if the subject is at all like a burr against the skin, Flint has the good sense to ignore its scrape in favor of making some small, congratulatory gesture with the cup before drinking from it. It's only afterward, having swiftly elected that 'I can't say that I ever understood what you found appealing about Thranduil to begin with' might alter the trajectory of the conversation toward an even less desirable direction, that he asks:

"Do you imagine you might return to your writing?"

[elegiaque]

“I only stopped publishing,” she says, with a shrug, “I never stopped writing, and I still have a literary agent in Orlais. She's made it clear that if there's something I want published, she expects to be the first to hear from me.”

Which—

feels good? It feels good. To still have value to someone from that part of her life, when her letters to Marcellin go returned and unanswered and she knows she will never set foot again in the homes she knew as a girl. Not by choice, now, but by decree. That there's someone there who's in her corner, on her side, even if it's hardly selfless. Fine. No one in Orlais is selfless; none of them can afford it.

“I have some ideas of what that will look like,” is an understatement, “but I'm not in a rush for that.”

[katabasis]

A long time ago, he'd recognized her from an etching in the back of a paper pamphlet. It seems both very distant and very immediate now. He doesn't recall what her portrait had looked like, just Gwenaëlle in a fur trimmed traveling coat coming ashore at the Gallows' ferry landing—a strip of the island's dock space so near to the one in which they're presently standing that one of them might cast a stone and strike it were the inconvenience of walls removed.

(A part of him is convinced she'd read as older from that unfamiliar vantage. The rest of him is certain that isn't true.)

"I'm pleased to hear it." Those pamphlets had been sharply rendered before the succession at the Winter Palace had defanged them.

He takes another drink from his cup. The weather is sticky and clinging, and all the varnish in the room perpetuates enough of the sunlight slanting in through the windows that it would be difficult to forget summer's stooping presence. Having something to drink, even if it isn't particularly cold, is something of a respite.

"Although."

This single word spoken across the edge of the glass has the tenor of a thought that has occurred to him before this moment, however much pretending otherwise might serve as a happy distraction from the state of her houseboat

"If you're ever of a mind to take suggestions,"—(ha)—"I could think of a few directions in which we might apply your pen."

[elegiaque]

That Gwenaëlle, noted for her interest in taking suggestions. Flint, unique in having his suggestions not routinely met with an immediate, flat, no-need-to-hear-what-it-is no. (Well, not from her, at least. Can't speak to his hit rate elsewhere.)

“I'm out of the propaganda business,” she says, mildly, instead of fuck off. “Coupe only gave me an excuse to do what I'd already done and put an end to it, instead of pretending as if I ever intended to pick it back up again.”

It feels true — she had no stomach for it after she'd looked at what she'd written after that short, dirty fight on a no where stretch of road in Orlais that so few people will ever know or care about and had known she wouldn't publish it. A Lady's Observations did not die in the Winter Palace; it died in the dirt with her mother.

Maybe it wouldn't have failed, if she'd kept going. Maybe it would have been what she'd imagined it could be. Maybe she could have learned to live with the thing Coupe had thought her doing on purpose, but in the moment

in the moment she had hated it, and it had been unendurable, and those two things had been enough even if maybe, looking back, they had not been the same.

Finally, “It would need to be an incredibly good fucking suggestion.”

[katabasis]

Yes, it would have to be wouldn't it?

For a moment, standing there in the haze of fresh paint and wax varnish—not stooping under the room's ceiling beams only due to a lifetime of practice at knowing exactly the measurement between the top of his head and a hard knock—there is the urge to keep that incredibly good fucking suggestion in his proverbial coat pocket. He might turn the glass about in his hand, take another drink from it, and easily diverge from the whole subject with little more than a quirk of the brow and some low, considering noise readily translated to, I'll keep that in mind.

"Byerly and I have aims to unshackle a considerable contingent of Imperium slaves," is what he says instead as if he'd never considered doing otherwise. Never mind that it should sound like a silly, hopeless thing dreamed up by an idealistic child. Flint says it, and it seems feasible.

"Success on any real scale will require more of a distraction than my sword or his office can hope to manage." It's a big fucking empire. "So it would be best if we could encourage Tevinter to argue about something else while we're at it. A reminder to the soporati that they've more in common with the liberati and those who serve the seats in the Magisterium than they do anyone sitting in them, for starters."

[elegiaque]

It isn't immediately obvious to Gwenaëlle that this is a suggestion.

Certainly the subject is not an unwelcome or uninteresting one, recent months having found her taking more of an interest in various prospects of freedom and independence for various groups, and delivered by Flint it has a comforting weight of practicality and potential that appeals to her. The goal is a good one and the idea sound, but it is not apparent to her that she ought to be in any way involved in it, or in what way. It is far removed from what she had attempted — and failed — to do, and although none of the words he uses are unfamiliar to her, neither are they anything about which she'd confidently speak.

Or confidently assert she could define them, without double-checking. Speaking of: “What are the liberati, particularly?” is an honest question, offered with unself-conscious curiosity; she's not unaware of how much of the world she does not know, even within the borders of Orlais itself. A strata of Tevinter's society, she knows, but specifics beyond that — she'd rather ask than blunder, when the point is obviously an important one to keeping up with the conversation at all.

[katabasis]

If the fashion in which Flint answers is anything to go by—without hesitation and shifting so smoothly toward this trajectory that it's as if he'd somehow intended it—, there are worse questions she might have asked.

"They're what becomes of a freed slave in Tevinter. It's not entirely uncommon for a person to leave behind orders of emancipation in their wills, or as reward very dedicated and highly replaceable service. When that happens, they're granted rights as a freed resident. Not a citizen, mind, but afforded certain protections and privileges that no slave is. Education, property, a right to any children they might have while in that state."

Surely he doesn't have to actually say the words Orlesian alienages for the parallel to be drawn.