faderift | (CLOSED) You wouldn't hurt them

She has been on the boat for one day past the rescue. Gwenaëlle has not asked her when she'll go and she has the impression that she won't until the length of the stay becomes concerning. Gela thinks that, logically, she should go home soon, except that this boat is warm and active, and many people and animals live on it all at the same time. They bustle about, talking, meowing, barking and checking on her. She thinks that when she has to go back to her little room she doesn't share with anybody at all, she will forget what the time is; to reach out to anybody; to go down to the dining hall to get something to eat.

The exhaustion has been fierce but she's clean and fed, so nothing is more pressing than being quiet and restful. Or, that is how it should be right now, but currently isn't because she's gathered in the bathroom to start to try and tackle her hair, to comb it nicely. She didn't have the energy for it yesterday.

Even now, she hits a snag that tests the strength of the comb she is using and slams her fist hard on the vanity. The hair has tangled around it so much that the comb has stuck.

It's Guilfoyle and not Gwenaëlle who hears the sound of a thud in the bathroom, but working on the presumption that his shoulders blotting out the light through the doorway cannot possibly improve whatever situation is behind it— it is Gwenaëlle, maybe five or ten minutes later, who knocks lightly upon the door.

“Gela?” is quiet, and with audible, restrained concern. They aren't at bust down the door, but it's not as if she hasn't a key to every room in this thing that locks. “Can I help?”

In the time it takes Gwenaëlle to knock the door, Gela has slumped onto the vanity, face down, fighting the urge to cry about it. Emotions simmer too close to the surface these days. Any good mood is fleeting, tenuous. She sits up again at the sound of knuckles on wood and stands jerkily to open the door.

Gwenaëlle could help. But it is so embarrassing to not know how to do one's own hair. She feels like a child, small and useless.

She has not cried but there is an air of hopelessness about her anyway, in the way she sags at the door and doesn't quite smile once it's open. Despite this drama it seems quite unserious; there is only an air of being overtired, in the same way a toddler becomes come early evening. She says thickly, "Hello. I can't get the comb out."

Which is not 'yes please help me' in those words exactly but in this moment, it means the same thing.

It means the same thing.

It's familiar, too, for as volatile a creature as Gwenaëlle has always been; she knows overwrought and overtired like her own skin, so she takes in Gela's dry face and shifting mouth and the comb still in her hair and places her hands lightly on her shoulders, guiding her back to the low, plush stool near to the vanity.

“It only needs a bit of help,” she says, not ungentle but not overly so, either, when sometimes to be treated delicately is simply impossible to cope with. She tilts her head, studying the mats and tangles, and turns away to a cabinet so she can find what she's looking for — scented oils, a hair pick. The shirt tucked into her thick skirts (the both secured by a wide belt that isn't quite a corset and isn't far from it) is too large for her, slides toward a shoulder, and her own hair is loose down her back; a degree of undone that she isn't seen about the Gallows.

But this is her home. And her curls are their own assurance of competent assistance.

“Alright,” a murmur, oiling her hands, first, not Gela's hair, and settling to begin the tedious, knuckle-ruining work of picking tangles out individually to comb from the bottom up. After a moment, “I had a lover with hair the same as mine or yours, once. Our hair tangled in the night and it was a wreck. She cut a chunk of my hair to free herself and you've never seen me in such a state.”

It is nice for Gwenaëlle to pretend that not much work needs to be done, gently taking the burden from her without making her feel terrible for giving it over in the first place. Gela can tell what she's doing and all she does is mumble something incoherent, an attempt at gratitude as she pushes her knuckles into her eyes and kneads.

She knows this work, she has done it for people other than herself. There is something nice about it and she tries to remind herself of this, old feeling while Gwenaëlle oils her hands and finds her pick, picking a point to start from. This little anecdote even succeeds in making her smile, thready and tiny, but there.

It drops off when she makes eye contact with herself in the mirror.

She waits for Gwenaëlle to finish picking through a tangle before she turns her head, so she won't meet her own gaze.

"... How much did she cut? Did you get a new haircut in the same day?"

Gwenaëlle's mouth tightens slightly when she thinks— oh, the mirror— but there's none of that in her voice, her hands deft in Gela's hair: “No, I refused. I wore my hair up, I used falls of false hair, and I was very particular about who I allowed to touch it at all for months. Once the worst of it had grown long enough, then I cut it, but I wouldn't have it above my shoulders.”

It is long, now, near her waist if the curl's all smoothed out; there's no lingering signs of what she had not found at all funny at the time. Distance plus time equals much funnier, even if she sort of has the impulse to immediately tie her hair up again even thinking of it.

“She has an anchor-shard so she's got to stop by the Gallows periodically, else— you know. But she has work that occupies her in Orlais, now.”

Everyone's stretched so thin, she might lament, except Gela hardly needs to hear laments right now.

Gela nods. This makes complete sense to her. She would have gone to similar lengths to hide a section of missing hair, especially when she thinks wistfully of Pavia running her hands through it in Cumberland, fiddling with her curls. She used to reach out whenever she liked and touch her absentmindedly, letting Gela be what she fidgeted with. It was nice and comforting.

"Your hair is so beautiful."

She has admired it many times, the way it cascades down her back. She wouldn't want anybody else standing here behind her now, picking out this matted mess.

Maybe it's because this is already vulnerable work they're doing together, Gwenaëlle untangling and Gela letting her, but she doesn't hesitate to ask. "Is she still your lover? Are you waiting for her to come back?"

Given the work, and that Gela is allowing her to do it, Gwenaëlle likewise is unhesitating in unspooling this old history for her — if it's diverting, if it makes her feel less lonely or vulnerable alone, then it isn't a hardship to do. And it isn't so bad a story:

“Sabine and I were never going to last,” she says, with a certain degree of self-awareness about why that she doesn't feel the urgent need to go into. “She was my lady's maid, I was a nightmare, it was — she'd have got sick of working for me sooner if I'd been a little less pretty, probably. But we reconciled, eventually, in the Inquisition. She has a lover who's a friend of mine, a Warden. We said a few years ago if my ex-husband and her Warden ever went the way rifters and Wardens do, we'd run away to be pirates together,”

and she says it with fondness, but they had been very drunk and it was not true.

“but we'd just be pulling each other's hair again in a week. And I have met someone. You've met him. He's going to want to see you in the infirmary, probably.”

Gela tries the name out, mouthing it silently as she listens, Sabine, and her eyebrows rise the moment Gwenaëlle says the words 'my lady's maid'. She doesn't respond though. She's actually thoroughly enjoying sitting in the chair and allowing herself to zone out while her hair is segmented out into sections, rid of snags and tangles. Her little story time: Gwenaëlle and Sabine, the two of them one day stealing a boat. She's imagining them with hats.

"Have I?" She says faintly, coming back into the conversation with a little jolt like she'd fallen asleep. "I — oh!"

She doesn't know many people in the infirmary, so it is easy to narrow it down. "Dr. Strange? Congratulations. Is it new, or am I unobservant?"

In the mirror, Gwenaëlle catches the shift of those eyebrows and despite herself it tugs a rueful sort of smile at the corner of her mouth: what a fucking cliché they were, maid and mistress. Mistressing. Occasionally she worries at the idea of the power she had held, but probably Sabine would offer to beat the shit out of her again with no Thranduil to haul them apart like he was tipping cats out of a sack, if she thinks she's so fucking powerful, and so that never goes anywhere productive.

They were terrible lovers — though she remembers the sex fondly — but they are, perhaps, even unlikelier friends. It crosses her mind to be grateful.

“New,” she says, and where she might have gone into a little detail: only since Halamshiral, so not brand new, but— she doesn't, because when they were in Halamshiral and some monster wearing Vanya's face had been frowning out the ornate windows of the home in which they were guests, Gela had been languishing, her hair slowly matting to the mess that Gwenaëlle is methodically working through now. She picks apart mats carefully, with her oiled fingers and the comb, teasing them apart to comb loose; pausing, periodically, to remove loosened hair from the comb itself and discard it behind her, where it isn't immediately in evidence to Gela herself.

“It happened very slowly until it happened very quickly,” after a moment, instead. “Have you ever kissed a man with a beard? I hadn't.”

"That's so nice," Gela sighs, tired but earnest. It is nice when things are new, when they're exciting and you're still discovering all sorts of things about each other. Finding out where you're the same and different; having lots of sex, if you're that way inclined (and she has a feeling the both of them are). A relationship's new energy is somewhat irresistible.

A hum. She says, "I have. Jude," quite conversationally, nearly casually, but her gaze does flick up to the mirror right after she says it, hoping to catch Gwenaëlle's eye in the reflection.

Is the expression she makes better than the low, impressed whistle she releases? Probably not, although it's good. Well, if you're going to sit on someone's beard, why not one of the best—

(She'd love to be having a lot of new relationship sex, if the Gallows could go a full week without catastrophe.)

“Well, you certainly do not do things by halves,” she says, warmly. “I always thought it was a shame he and I wouldn't suit at all, the man was crafted by artisans—”

She giggles, the sound low and soft, trailing Gwenaëlle's whistle. Admits, "He's the most beautiful person I've ever been with." A shame it had to be short and sweet, but much better than nothing at all. Still, she wishes he was here now, giving her his hands to hold.

"... They're not bad, are they. Beards. I like the way they feel."

Scratchy in a good way she thinks, touching and being touched by them so different from memories of what it felt like to kiss Pavia that she can't possibly tangle them together and miss her even harder than she already does. Maybe that's why she likes it.

"What else. Have I missed any other gossip?"

“...probably,” Gwenaëlle concedes, a moment after she might have (very instinctively) said, no, I don't think so which is really a purely vibes based answer; she's been busy, that doesn't mean no one else was doing anything someone might gossip about. Or even that she, necessarily, is totally unaware— just that there are a lot of happenings she discards to the I don't care about that pile while sifting through her own observations. To wit: “I miss most of it and I was here the whole time. Who that reflects on, I'm sure I don't know.”

It might be her. On the other hand, has everyone else tried being more interesting?

“Though Lexie does routinely despair of me about it. And she's back, which is lovely, so there's that, actually.”

With any luck, nothing explosive will result out of the intricate cat's cradle that Lexie has made of her own love life, but Gwenaëlle is boringly discreet when it comes to other people's affairs: she only thinks so, and doesn't say it.

"Lexie," Gela echoes, wondering, "Back?"

She hasn't heard of Lexie before. Hang on, this is a much better question to ask than 'have I missed any gossip' because Gwenaëlle doesn't seem to care about such things (why, Gela does not know, why wouldn't you want to know all of the gossip??): "Are there other people around I may not have met? You should tell me their names so I don't embarrass myself."

'Sorry, I don't actually know who you are because I spent the last month and a half being kidnapped!' apparently counts, to Gela, as being embarrassing.

(CLOSED) You wouldn't hurt them

For Gwen

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