faderift | OTA | And She Was

( granitefell and the whole terrible mess of it will wait, she decides; no sense yseult having scolded everyone for brazenly talking about time travel to playwrights only to gossip about it in front of all and sundry of hightown's most sought after seamstresses. their discretion is half their value—

but even still. better to be mindful at least a bit. )

Arlathan, ( she finally says, ) was where I left my eye. It's been more than a year, you know? There are people close to me now who never knew me otherwise.

( that has been progressively true, the better part of this past decade: there is a degree of competence and experience she is now deemed to have probably always had, because it is all they've seen. that's been a strange enough sensation to grapple with, nevermind the people who don't remember a time she had depth perception.

her mind always ranges to iorveth, then, who she never knew different. she wonders sometimes what he'd make of who she's become in his absence, when he had seen her first stumbling steps toward it. )

We had to make sacrifices, all of us that went, and that was mine. But I think I wear it well,

( determinedly upbeat, golden eye gleaming. she'd worn an emerald in their recent trip to halamshiral, a bold reminder of her former status. )

[ It's been more than a year, you know?

It tastes sour for a moment. Time does. Thinking about time. Feeling left behind, feeling like a fool for feeling left behind— she'd done the leaving, after all. And left behind from what? It's not as if losing an eye, or colour, or half of sound were an inviting prospect. It isn't the pain of it all she's found herself uncomfortably envious of. It's—

Alexandrie tsks at herself quietly. Pay attention. ]

Of course you do. I cannot think of an injury the world has done you that you have not grasped with fierce hands, gilded, and worn like a crown. The spirits ought to be spitting with envy.

[ She's not stupid. She knows it would be preferable to have the eye, and to not have been nearly bitten in half, and to have fathers and mothers and sisters and husbands and lovers living and present and kind and close, and for there to be something resembling peace... but there isn't. Life's ravages come and one can collapse beneath them or gild them and wear their glittering as a kind of vengeance and Gwenaëlle is better at spinning blood into gold than anyone else Alexandrie knows. ]

Did you choose it, or did they?

Edited 2024-02-29 23:36 (UTC)

( she would trade the other eye for her mothers, her sisters,

but it matters, too, this moment here where alexandrie says all of that and she feels — seen, maybe, in a way that in the earliest days of their friendship she couldn't have predicted. the seeing, or ... the way that it feels, a comfort instead of a threat. she sees the effort, not just the wound, not just the brazening. it had taken her longer to understand alexandrie than the reverse, she thinks; both of them easy to perceive only at surface level, and dismiss.

she's learned from that. she hopes. )

They asked for a life, first, ( she says, at length, stepping down off the dais as the muslin is taken from her and her robe offered back. ) Loxley and I both volunteered, and— it just wanted us to be willing. So, then we had our choice of sacrifices. Two options, mostly.

I didn't want to give up any of my memories.

( they made her. tampering with her mind— no, there had been no question of not surrendering her eye, instead. )

Edited 2024-03-01 09:28 (UTC)

Of course not.

[ It's soft, but a little fiercer than she expected it would be when she shaped it with her lips.

What is an eye, to the threads that weave the self?

She wouldn't always have answered that way. It had taken Alexandrie longer to understand herself too. ]

( gwenaëlle, already ranging closer, reaches for alexandrie's hand on impulse—

of course.

they understand each other, these two. if someone had told her that would be so, six years ago, regarding each other with scandal and skepticism over (probably someone else's) wine in a tent at the grand tourney, well. she doesn't know if either of them would have imagined how true it would become, but it's a comfort now. having her back here is a comfort, even if it feels selfish to think so, when there are a hundred places better to be than fucking kirkwall— she's a little selfish, sometimes. they both are.

she sits. )

There's something else I want to talk to you about. Don't worry, I'm not about to reveal a missing limb.

( she has been fully naked within the last thirty minutes, it'd honestly be impressive if it somehow was. )

If you were I would ask you also to reveal the genius behind the prosthetic, as I should like to pay them for the secrets to their paint.

[ Understanding leaves and light far better than she does skin and light is a subject upon which Alexandrie has proffered some of her choicer profanities.

The offered hand is reached back for, pressed in a warm sure way. This, and the earnest attentiveness of her gaze, the little rise and fall of minute readjustment on the couch to 'make room', says tell me more clearly than if she'd spoken it. ]

( the jest nets a crooked smile, pulled at the corner of her mouth, and she's visibly considering how to start. gwenaëlle has not, in alexandrie's absence, grown any more difficult a person to read.

finally, )

You remember all those dramatic things I said about never loving again.

( she had really fucking meant them, at the time. she had whispered and wailed them in the privacy of alexandrie's bedroom, crawling into her arms at the height of her misery; she had repeated them calmer, more publicly, with the blunt and matter of fact certainty she approaches that in which she is most confident.

it had felt true. it had felt impossible that anything else would ever be true. )

[ Minute expressions flit across Alexandrie's face like a shuffled deck in the hands of a magician (or a card sharp). All there, distinct, one after the next; if someone were watching carefully, they could see them all: surprise, curiosity, interest, sympathy— a brief squeeze of the hand she holds to accompany this because yes, she remembers. The agony of it, as real and true and stark and bare as any dying thing— curiosity again, this time tinged with a sort of muted wonder. It settles there, puts down roots, the wonder blooming softly into a tentative hope because of all things, Alexandrie has always loved love the best. ]

Y-es?

( that hope is reassuring.

it's the comfort of familiarity, understanding, we two are the same, we are alike; it's the fleeting fear of mockery and embarrassment and landing somewhere safe, somewhere she can still trust. they've loved each other at their lowest, so: who would better understand how foolish she feels, beginning the process of walking those things back. maybe someone who had bared her own fears, and received skin-flaying honesty but never unkindness.

still, finding the words for what she wants to say is ... tricky. she mulls it over, their hands clasped together, red curls and brown tilted towards each other. little mirrors, in this room surrounded by mirrors. )

I didn't ... plan. ( well, that's just often true. that one maybe can just be taken as read, in general. ) It felt like— you know, the end of ... it felt so stupid to be hurt so profoundly when I had unmade us and I had pushed him away but I was,

( alexandrie doesn't need to be told, but maybe gwenaëlle needs to say. to work her way through how far she's come, in her own time. )

And even when I couldn't even believe that we'd been married, I couldn't stomach the idea of being— it felt like unfaithfulness. It felt like it would be. I don't know if I hated the idea more that I would hurt him the same way, or that ... I wouldn't.

( if she had fucked astarion and thranduil had forgiven her, it would have been worse. worse in a way she's not sure she could have repaired from, but then she's never given herself much credit in that department and yet here she is, abiding. )

And I just put that aside. I just set aside that whole part of myself, and I was done with it, and I wasn't entertaining anything, and I— I have this friend. I'm not sure I've ever even described him that way. I've certainly never said it to him, I know that. And I fucked him in Halamshiral, just to get that out of the way, we did — it's not not the point. It's been, I've known him a year and a half, I think. We understood each other very quickly. And I think ... Halamshiral felt sudden, but it wasn't. I never talked about it. I don't know if I only... if someone had asked, I'd have said, of course we aren't anything, but I think I didn't want to be asked. So I didn't have to say.

( because—

maybe they were. )

Am I awful, ( finally, ) that my heart wasn't broken forever?

( is this allowed. is she allowed to have this. it's there in her face, nakedly open: she wants this so badly. )

Edited 2024-03-06 08:14 (UTC)

[ Alexandrie pauses for a moment, is so still in the presence of the raw tender truth she has been offered that she feels acutely the long breath in she takes.

She had never sworn such a thing as Gwenaëlle had, but she had sometimes found herself looking in the mirror in passing, catching the muss of her hair and the peaceful lassitude in a body recently held close, the red swell of lips kissed and bitten that had spoken words of love, and thought is this the heart you promised him? and for a moment tasted ashes.

He is dead. He is not dead. He is gone. I am not looking. I have replaced him. He cannot be replaced. How dare I smile? How dare I, how dare I, how dare I?

But yet, even so, her heart blooms without permission.

Finally:]

No.

[ Another breath, then, ] I think...

I think we are always healing, even when we do not wish to. We receive a wound, and the wound means something, and sometimes it is all we have to prove there was anything there that meant anything at all.

[ She is mourning, on a swing hung in a perfect summer trapped in amber. A woman who is scarred and holy and wild is telling her of winter. That some things are meant to be cut so they can grow again when the season is right. ]

And so your heart, even in its winter, healed when you were not looking. You cut the it to the ground, locked the garden, but the roots lived, and— and perhaps that is a kind of wound in and of itself.

[ Alexandrie's eyes are glassy, the sharpness of their blue tamed slightly by tears that belong, in a way, to them both. ]

Perhaps you shall find you need to heal that, too. But whether or not you wish your heart to be ready, it seems it is.

Are you ready? [ It's said tentatively, accompanied by a watery smile, small but sure. Some sorrow, for the pain of it. Hope, for the promise of its joy. An encouraging squeeze, for the hand she holds. ] For it to not be broken?

( gwenaëlle takes a breath.

and it feels a little like having her chest opened up and examined, like she's sitting here transparent as glass, to be leaned into and read at alexandrie's leisure, the way she had realised one day that the last conversation she'd ever had with thranduil had been and gone, unremarkable. that every worst thing to ever happen to her, she's survived. and that one, too.

there is a grief to knowing what you can survive. but the quiet, slow, unassuming process of becoming—

maybe if she'd looked it right in the eye, they'd never have got here. she breathes out. )

I want to be, ( she says, simply. ) We haven't even— I know I need to talk to him, but we've both been so busy, every time we're near each other something comes up and I might as well go fuck myself,

( her irritation at that is mild, at best, and will probably be completely forgotten by the time she manages to actually corner him for a prolonged conversation about something other than inventory and scheduling, )

I want him. Not just climbing in a window and illicitly bonking in a guest room and sneaking out—

( gosh that sounds specific. )

[ Alexandrie's eyes brighten, delighted by the very idea, and the little smile turns wicked. ]

Did you? In a gown?

[ Get it, girl. ]

It feels like we must always pick the pockets of this war for time, but... I think if you ask, he will make it for you. [ If Alexandrie knew the subject of their conversation better, this last would be delivered differently. As it is, it is only earnest. ] You need not wait for the perfect moment to drop out of a rift.

( he had said, she told abby, that he'd have liked her to stay. abby had said, then he's waiting at the halfway point. and they're both right, aren't they, which is the thing that she lingers on even as a smile tugs the corner of her mouth in answer (yeah, she did).

wouldn't it be so nice if the perfect moment dropped out of a rift, though? or if she somehow became much better at speaking her feelings, and had any remote idea about what it is she's going to say to him, because it has to be something. )

It's Stephen,

( at last, instead. )

Stephen Strange, the head healer.

[ A frown— her thinking one, not her disapproving one— as Alexandrie searches through her memory and finds... what. A bare mention, upon having made inquiries as to the current roster of the Riftwatch leadership. She lifts her shoulders slightly, her face an amiable blank page. ]

I admit no knowledge at all of the man.

[ She might guess some things, given that he has the strings of Gwenaëlle's heart caught on him, but she will not. She prefers to smile privately to herself if later he is tall, quick-minded, searingly competent (and deservedly arrogant), with an impeccable veneer that smells of carefully kept secrets, the surety of tumult and passion beneath it, and intense vulnerability beneath that.

(They like the same things.)

Instead, with sparkling eyes, and momentarily abandoning her own glass of wine on the side table to fetch the one waiting for her friend and offer it: ]

Tell me all of the small things you are fond of about him, and absolutely nothing of normal importance.

( the little smiles that have been threatening all this time, through the slightly wet eyes they've been mirroring at each other — who can you get all the way in your feelings with, if not your best girl? — that blooms now into full beaming all in spite of herself. for more than a year she's kept whatever this push and pull between them has been locked up to herself and she's sort of bursting to overflow with it, playful with abby, mildly overwrought with lexie.

she doesn't need convincing, in other words, taking the wine and trying to decide where to start. )

He thinks he's funny, ( she decides upon, and it sounds like she agrees. ) He's— methodical, how he approaches things, he's deliberate about it. He spreads paper around himself when he's reading the way that I do.

( imagine if they ever had to share office space. terrifying. )

He's fond of animals, but my horrible little cat is his favourite. He tells me what he's thinking,

( a thing she has truly learned to value, )

—he always asks what I think. My advice. My opinions. He's always treated me... like we're the same.

[ And Alexandrie is smiling too, her own glass retrieved, listening to the small litany of small things that mean bigger things.

Gwenaëlle had loved her husband, for a surety. With the kind of passionate intensity that inspires women like them to want to carve their names into their lovers. To raze their own hearts to bedrock when betrayed. But Alexandrie cannot recall that she'd ever seen this. The soft bright sweet effervescence. A smile with light and room behind it. A safe Gwenaëlle.

She circles the glass, wordless encouragement— good, yes, more. ]

He'll say absolutely mad shit very casually, ( she says, tucking her feet up underneath herself and leaning her elbow against the back of the sofa, relaxing into it. ) Off the cuff. And then explain it, which sometimes makes it madder, sometimes not.

( if alexandrie were perhaps to cast her mind back over the years of their friendship and think that that also sounds like some shit gwenaëlle also does, she's not wrong. )

He has these two streaks of silver in his hair at his temples and when this particular curl falls into his forehead when he's exerting himself it's distracting, ( a thing she may only now, in this moment, be even acknowledging. ) a little. He's sentimental about his cloak from home, so he has another that he wears here.

He used to play the piano. He's taught me a little of the melodies — his hands, he can't do everything he used to be able to. And he brought me poetry back from Val Royeaux when he went, I don't know if you — you might have heard, Research sent a delegation to the university to show off. He's the one who set that godawful fashion for plaster casts, they are actually very useful to heal a broken bone—

( can you BELIEVE that ORLESIAN NOBLES turned that into a FASHION STATEMENT? yes, that sounds extremely normal and predictable. she is embarrassingly into him. )

[ The last nets a bright sharp laugh of surprise— ]

Oh là! Is that— I have a pair of those! Lady Géraldine gifted them to me on the occasion of my return to court, and I could not begin to understand why anyone should want to purposefully fix their wrists into place, although I admit admiring some of the architectural details.

[ She takes a sip of wine and then immediately half-chokes on it as a memory surfaces. ]

Two young men got into an incredibly earnest duel whilst wearing them and I had to use every moment of my Bard training to avoid expiring from mirth.

[ Nothing to stop her from laughing now. Alexandrie tucks up her own feet in mirror, fluffing her feathers and settling in like a hen to warm each moment of this reconnection. ]

Shall I assume you have saved him from being obliged to play on an inferior piano already? And where is home?

( the exasperated, withering look that gwenaëlle fixes alexandrie with is one that the latter is already well immune to, lacking the bite of any real irritation: of course she had a set, that does make a great deal of sense. if they were only alike all the way down this wouldn't be nearly as much fun.

for both of them, but definitely for alexandrie, who gwenaëlle strongly suspects thrives on occasionally inspiring the people around her to throw their hands in the air.

also, it's a little funny. a little. )

He's a rifter, ( she says, allowing the piano thing to be correctly assumed and the matter of an earnest duel dismissed with a roll of her eyes, ) from the same as Tony Stark, and Loki. We even— I've seen a mimicry of their world, through the Fade. Stark's home and his.

[ It's the combination that does it. While her mind is reorganizing itself quickly around rifter and what that means, from Loki's world throws her further, and then—

For an unbalanced moment there's a naked flash of envy in her eyes. Hunger to have known, to have seen, to have shared. Even if it wasn't Asgard. Even if it wasn't real. She has to unclench her hand from where it went tight around the stem of her glass, feel her way back to the place of delight and curiosity she'd fallen from. We are happy for our friend.

Alexandrie could ask about the trees, the birds, but her heart has ever been a moth to the flame of things that bruise and so instead she softly asks: ]

What did it mean to you? To see where he came from.

[ Unsaid: If it meant a great deal, you will forgive me this, I hope. ]

It's str— ( don't say strange, ) ... thinking back on it, it's odd, I guess, because more now? Much more now than then— we'd known each other for, I don't know, four months or something?

( just a guess; it might have been less than that, even. she mulls it over, conscious of the way that alexandrie's been struck and preferring that it happen here, them together, that she doesn't hear later that gwenaëlle hadn't told her. )

I wanted to be good at it, ( after a moment. ) Do you know? I know it's all very— I know so many rifters, I've fucked three of them, I know rifters might not necessarily first think of me as the most sympathetic to them but certainly all of Hightown does. The court. But I hold them to a high standard, I know that.

( and they're not bad people if they don't meet it, but she doesn't exactly make a secret of thinking less of them for it anyway. )

I felt that I had to ... I don't know if anyone else cared about what I did or not, but I felt that I should hold myself to the same. So I wanted to see everything, and learn everything, and— I made Stark give me money and I roped Stephen into taking me to buy clothes the way they do it, which is not as dissimilar as Stark made it sound like it would be, ( very expressly because she took a credit card and a manhattanite and swanned around private boutiques with personal shoppers, it's not like she went to a mall, ) and I tried to blend in. We spent a lot of time ... he showed me his Sanctum, he made a portal to take me halfway around the world like an eluvian because I wanted to go swimming—

they were both, I think, they were so excited to share it. That whole experience was mad, but I wanted to soak it all up. I wanted to do it well. And now there are just things that I— remember. That I can talk to him about. That I understand, that I wouldn't have understood, but it felt as if I saw and touched and experienced them.

( it's still so vivid, when she thinks of it. she thinks sometimes about recreating some of the clothing that she'd bought, the things she'd liked. )

I am glad of it.

[ Still soft. A cushion for herself, as she moves thought-fingers internally, checking to see what is hurt and where and how much. The next time she and Loki are together she will kiss him very softly, and he will look a little lost and not know why.

His return is already a gift. How much more does she need? ]

It is so lonely, I think. To be the only one who knows a place. Its people. Its small things. If I could put my hands around that and hold it even a little, I would wish to.

[ Alexandrie sheds tears for it, sometimes, his lost home. She calls him kjæreste. She does what she can. ]

I am glad you can.

[ And that is a true thing, if not an easy one. A pause, then a little crooked smile to show she has found her bearings again. ]

Although I admit freely, if it had been Asgard you had traveled I would have waited until you left and then told the modiste you had changed your mind and wanted the yellow.

( gwenaëlle is maybe going to say — something, to reflect on how she'd become conversant in sindarin and familiar enough with elder speech to know it upon hearing — but the last thing takes her off-guard and it's a small explosion of laughter, holding her wine glass not to spill, her eyes softening with affection.

her gaze is different, with only one true eye, but at the same time: no, it isn't. )

I would have led with it, ( she promises, ) not all this other nonsense, and I wouldn't even be very mad about the yellow.

( you know, a bit. still. but alexandrie says small things, and she thinks, )

...it's how I got here, though, I think. Little things. We drank tea in his kitchen. We've had tea in mine. In Halamshiral, I was only thinking— if you were in the middle of someone, ( byerly, loki ... bastien? ) or Maker forbid, I bothered Julius and Captain Rowntree just heard I'd been tapping on his window at night—

You know, it had just become natural that I should go to Stephen. It has.

[ Alexandrie hums softly, pleased again. ]

It is...

[ A friendship. A good one. Something real, already. Love is an addition, not a change. Another colour added to make the painting of them richer. ]

It is well built, Gigi.

[ A sip, thoughtful. Alexandrie rolls the flavour around her mouth, noting the tastes of her home. The grape, the soil, the water, the weather. Every moment of its growth recorded and poured into a glass to be remembered all at once. ]

I was wrong, I think, about the perfect moment. You need not wait for it; it is already here and is waiting patiently for the both of you.

And you are not awful, to take it.

( it had just been so suddenly, crystal clear as he'd knelt down to help her pull her boots off — whatever story she'd been telling herself about that friendship, it wouldn't have been the same if it had been alexandrie doing it, or loxley. then she'd have balanced on a shoulder, made a joke, kicked her boots off—

thought nothing of it. the casual intimacies of friendship. the easiness. he had been close to her and it had felt different. easy, too, but not the same.

she takes a long breath in. drinks her wine. sits quietly in you are not awful to take it for a while, lets it sink in. at length, )

Lexie, he gave incredible head.

OTA | And She Was

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