[open] beach episode volume 2: gallows edition

[altusimperius]

WHO: everybody who wants
WHAT: (lukewarm) BEACH PARTY (on rubble, in harbor)
WHEN: late Justinian
WHERE: the Gallows, amidst its newly-acquired sea view
NOTES: he's trying

I. Prep

He didn't ask for help overtly, but Benedict is clearly working hard setting up the space he's designated for the company to have their beach staycation: drapings taken from his own stash and salvaged from the Gallows' erstwhile guest rooms are drawn across glyphed-in-place poles to create shade. He's hauled out a table, onto which he proceeds to place a variety of whatever canapés he could afford to procure with his own wages-- it's not a feast, all right-- and beside which he rolls two barrels of decent-ish wine.

From the baths come a stack of towels piled high in his arms, hindering his vision to such a degree that he may crash into someone not paying attention; pillows and the like come next, in armloads that take multiple trips, by the end of which he's visibly out of breath.

Lastly, it's his very own water pipe making an appearance, which he arranges amidst comfortable ground seating mimics how his room used to look: in fact, most of the accoutrements here are his personal belongings.
As such, he knows just how to set everything to create an attractive, if minimalist, space for an afternoon's leisure.


II. Party?

It may not be an all-out bash like their excursion to the sandier shores of the Waking Sea some years ago, but this, if nothing else, is an opportunity for work on the Gallows to pause in palatable increments. One can be clearing rubble or cataloguing property for the morning, then pop over for an hour of sunbathing and a glass of wine; they're all within calling out distance of the courtyard, and the party likely bleeds into the day's work in a manner somewhat more comfortable than if it were sequestered.

That said: the early summer sea water is cold, the sun is out but meek behind occasional cloud cover, and the festivities are on clean-swept stone rather than sand. The view across the water is of mainland Kirkwall, and all that that entails.
But it's none of it so bad, for anyone looking to take a break. A few musicians even show up a bit later in the afternoon, and Benedict provides a bonfire in the center of the party space as the sun goes down.

Anything brought to share is met with effusive thanks from Benedict, who ensures its appropriate placement and distribution. He doesn't spend much time relaxing himself, instead making the rounds with the air of a fussy host, where he's quick to offer refills or alternatives in libations, or diversions for unsatisfactory activities.

[make your own starters, do your thing, go hog wild-- if you have logistical questions feel free to ask on plurk or discord]

Comments

[elegiaque]

Although Gwenaëlle had been willing to remove the hated bear slanket from their bed, so as to avoid making unexpected eye contact with it in the night, it had not actually gone far. Most of the time, it lives in the gallery's conversation pit, where Small Yngvi has continued to embrace it as one of the cosiest places he can be that isn't Stephen's bath. Presently,

it is what Gwenaëlle is stretched out on in her smallclothes and a thin chemise nearby but not in his shade, sunbathing. This is sort of like participating in the social gathering, except it mostly involves having her eyes closed and not talking to anyone, which is (she is pretty certain of this) the best way to do that. Guilfoyle had shown up briefly with several bottles from the de Coucy collection (with l'jeune seigneur's compliments) and a water bucket for Hardie; she isn't sure if he actually left or lurked, and has decided it is not immediately her business.

“Are you sure I need that?” is a bit doubtful, when menaced with paste, and she doesn't actually say the words only one of us is the pastiest motherfucker in Thedas but the way she glances between her arm and his is illustrative, nevertheless. What's a skin cancer.

[portalling]

It feels like a small victory, having gotten her to come with him to this thing. Stephen thought he was the antisocial one, but it turns out any social gathering is vastly improved with your girlfriend by your side: a chance to close his eyes and try to turn off his brain (to negligible success), relax and listen to the comforting susurrus of the waves, the occasional laughter in the background. It’s not the lush tropical beach he’d taken her to on Earth, but at least there’s some sun, some drinks, and the admittedly beguiling sight of Gwenaëlle stretched out beside him, all long legs and barely-there fabric and bare skin. Listen, he’s only human.

“Okay, you probably need less of it,” Stephen admits with a faux world-weary sigh, grudging, “but you should still apply some protection. Haven’t you ever gotten sun-burned out on a ship or when you’ve been swimming too long? It’s a literal burn, you’re damaging your skin long-term.”

And he deploys the next two words with the tactical precision of an attempted strike, all portentous doom: “Premature wrinkles.”

[elegiaque]

Oh, he's good— and the moment where she transitions from about to continue protesting that she's never really burned that badly to slightly aghast at the prospect of aging visibly plays out across her expressive face exactly as he almost certainly predicted it would. Her nose wrinkles, and then — somewhat comedically — smooths out again, like she'd suddenly thought of all the lines she might be furrowing into her face. In just about precisely half a year, she'll be thirty-one, and that's properly in her thirties, and for someone who not all that long ago had been facing the prospect of growing old beside partners who mightn't,

it's actually sort of comforting that Stephen is already greying, but it's only comforting because she's started combing through her hair in front of the mirror checking. It is, one might say, a surgical strike.

She rolls over.

“Well, if you insist, you can help.”

This logic will not apply to anyone else.

[portalling]

“Well—”

Stephen shoots a vaguely self-conscious look across the rocky beach; this sort of contact is a little too uncomfortably intimate of a position for their coworkers to see him in, but. He can’t exactly dispute Gwenaëlle’s logic, when it’s genuinely hard to reach one’s back and this is a fairly normal part of going to the beach, is it not?

“Touché,” he says, bemused, and scoots over so he’s kneeling beside her, able to scoop out some of this awful paste and then start to carefully slather it onto her shoulderblades above the edge of her chemise. He maintains a discreet and frankly prudish distance for now, but his fingers dig into the meat of Gwenaëlle’s shoulder; kneading in the sunscreen, halfway to a massage.

This is going to become a problem when he needs to get even lower to reach the rest of her. He eventually mutters to himself (and her), “I might have misjudged this part of it.”

[elegiaque]

What's more likely? That Gwenaëlle, she of the pile of anatomy books and attentive interest in every aspect of his job that he'll share with her, who has taken an active and marked interest in his area of expertise and expressed consistently her trust in his competence and knowledge, has abruptly decided in this one specific thing to decide to dig her heels in about anything unfamiliar to the average peasant of the Marches,

or that she has simply got exactly what she wanted out of this exchange, at the low cost of a little playacting?

Yeah, it's that second one. The prudish distance he's keeping is just a concession to the fact that she has, in the largest part, totally won.

“I can take my chemise off if that makes it easier,” sounds so reasonable, the way that she says it. Reasonably.

[portalling]

“Gwenaëlle,” he says, and the way he draws out her name is a low warning, but it’s also the sound of a man who’s probably stuck in a losing fight. This is the sort of terrorism where she reigns supreme and plays him like a harp, while he turns skittish and self-conscious even over little things like her pressing a fleeting kiss to the corner of his mouth if they’re somewhere others might see.

A reason their original flirtation played out behind closed doors, in those private spaces where no one else could stick their nose into his business: they’re technically at work, like, all the time.

But he’s playing with fire now, as his hands slide down the angles of her shoulderblades and dip further beneath the edge of her chemise.

“The last time you threw off your clothes on a beach in front of me,” Stephen muses, “it was nighttime. I was incredibly gentlemanly and didn’t sneak a peek.”

It’s odd, casting his mind back to those days in pseudo-New York. He had been unerringly comfortable with her even then; if there had been any burgeoning awareness of more, he’d kept it buried at the time. Had only let himself see and notice and acknowledge his attraction to Gwenaëlle the way you might dispassionately note a good-looking painting.

[elegiaque]

“I did,” she says, instantly and without even a hint of shame. “I'm not a gentleman.”

The first time they'd met, Stephen Strange is an attractive man had been a fact she had catalogued about him, not dispassionate exactly but just: something that had not seemed relevant to her. A thing of which she had an awareness, but not something she'd imagined thinking at beyond the way she sort of always wonders what someone is like, romantically, in an almost— anthropological sense. She thinks about these things. She has theories. It's a function of meeting people, mostly,

so tall, dark and handsome had just been the sort of thing she observed, added to a list of other observations and weighted the same as things like sort of talks like a dwarf and takes correction fairly well, actually. It isn't as if most of the men and women she's spent the bulk of the past decade keeping company with haven't been shockingly attractive; there are a lot of people, even only in Riftwatch, who she has thought I can see it about and never anything else, anything more. Alexandrie is exquisite and it would simply never happen.

On that beach that didn't exist, she'd looked. She'd even imagined—

but she'd been conscious, then, of not wanting to jeopardise a friendship for the sake of something fleeting and physical. She'd known that she hadn't wanted the fleeting, physical thing she'd imagined it would be, and she'd been confident that she was finished with wanting more than that, too.

There are worse things she's been wrong about.

[portalling]

That little revelation completely tracks with everything he knows about Gwenaëlle Baudin, but it’s still a surprise—

So he laughs a startled laugh behind her, above her, and his knuckles dig into her shoulderblade. “Lech,” Stephen says, but it sounds warm and fond and not real censure. It’s all part and parcel of what he likes about her: the way she keeps knocking on the door of his comfort zone, needling him out of it, nudging him along. They’re both learning and changing.

“And— I think this might be enough on your back. Good enough for government work. I’m not straddling you in public, as interesting as that might sound.”

He rubs the last of the makeshift sunscreen into his own hands, wiping them off until they’re clean, and then withdraws to settle back down beside her again, seated with his legs stretched out on the rocky beach. And if it sounds a little like throwing in the towel and admitting defeat, well, it is; he knows when he’s about to be hopelessly outmaneuvered, and doesn’t trust himself with whatever card she might have played, or might yet play. She’s a hazard.

[elegiaque]

Good enough for government work surprises her into a laugh, rolling over and taking his little pot of cream, stretching her legs out, too. Probably this would be slightly more efficient if she sat up, but what she actually does is draw her knees up, straighten one leg and reach up to it to massage paste into her own warm skin. From most angles approaching them, this just looks incredibly lazy. From the specific angle that she's sprawled out beside him, it's slightly more confronting,

but she is wearing undergarments, so there's that.

“For the record,” she says, primly, “I prefer strumpet.”

[portalling]

So she says, and instantly proves the whole strumpet thing all over again with the provocative arch of her leg. Stephen shoots Gwenaëlle another look, implicitly communicating something along the lines of I know what you’re doing and I’m actually powerless to stop it so I’m just gonna have to sit here and suffer. Thanks.

There’s a recurring trait to the people he’s drawn to. It’s always the ones who push him, who challenge him, who don’t take his shit and leave him a little discombobulated —

“Someday we’ll get to have a little vacation on the beach in Rivain or the like,” he says, both warning and affectionate and perhaps a little wistful, “and we won’t be surrounded by our colleagues, and this will play out very differently.”

🎀

[elegiaque]

He suffers through the lazy application of paste to both of her legs, tugging her chemise up to get at the tops of her thighs and reaching underneath it to apply where she knows she's probably going to be exposed later, swimming—

and then she rolls up onto her knees, walking her hands over closer to him so she can press a kiss to the corner of his mouth in a way that would probably feel a lot more chaste under any other circumstances than these ones. From the thoughtful, sly expression on her face, she's holding him to that Rivain thing, but:

“I'll make it up to you later.”