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]

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.