closed | road trip

[dissolving]

WHO: Cedric & Gwen & a skull sippy cup
WHAT: Road trip!
WHEN: Vaguely after Satinalia
WHERE: Cumberland
NOTES: I'll edit as appropriate.

The Abbey's an ugly scene.

Thick walls, massed bureaucracy; some clerk dredged up to speak with her in quiet, clipped Orlesian. They cannot make promises for the Spire, but he will pass whatever papers she has brought along if she will just wait here, in the hall,

And no further. Young, robed things watch her sidelong. Older ones watch the doors, shaggy with humped muscle; eyes faded, skin worn hard for sixty. The hours pass. Some shift exchanges, a new man led out by the crook-curved arm. Armored, and not armed. Mouth turned down in dull, unhappy line.

An ugly scene. That was before the door slammed. Glass shatters, a breathless shout: "Carsus — !"

Amazing, the ground he can cover in a skirt. Commotion somewhere behind. The guard starts. Their eyes meet,

He looks like he means to say something. And then they're both out the doors.

Comments

after;

[dissolving]

It all feels too small: The stupid pictures he's made her post, fistfuls of fried dough, statues; a dogged insistence that this wasn't just for him. It's not enough.

They're under the cover of trees before —

"Y'don't have to tell me what's been going on," There are things they don't talk for, that aren't his to hear. Just he's started to think some of those go the same place. "I know you got folks."

Friends, lovers, acquaintances and uncles and cousins. Proper family. Just,

"You got me too."

[elegiaque]

I know you got folks, he says, and it’s strange to recognise — beyond that he’s one of them, too — that she knows so, too. Half her life spent convincing herself she doesn’t even care to be seen (easy to accept love that hurts if it’s the only kind going; harder to accept it, over time, when it has finally become harder to convince herself it’s all she can have), and here she is leaving a city she only came to because she cares for him. Because there are people in her life who would be there, if it were her. Because he’d be one of them.

(The fights she knows they’d have if she were less circumspect with him— whatever, that’s family, too. She’s taking Stephen to the woods for First Day. And maybe there’s a version of this story that doesn’t end in the fucking woods. Maybe she can tell it.)

“I told Abby this story once,” she says, “about when a whole mess of us nearly got sold into slavery. Or, well, we did get sold, we just escaped. And we all escaped, walked back into our own memorial service. This young boy had taken pains to learn how to say my name right. And she says, what did you do after that? What happened after that?”

Persistence likes the sedate pace they’re riding at. She’s no battlemount, as Bellerose, and increasingly less interested in being coaxed into more than a brisk trot for anything less than actual peril. Gwenaëlle considers the space between her ears, for a moment.

“Same thing as ever. Getting on with it.”

(Maker, she’s dramatic. But it doesn’t feel like grandstanding for his sake, brash bluster or — too much — oblivious navel-gazing; more like the painstaking work it takes to rebuild shattered armour, gluing it together with the real hurt of not trusting him with the thing she is not saying.)

[dissolving]

Sturdy ambles steady as his name. A big borrowed paint, heavier than he needs, but Riftwatch collects the tall and armored; and Cedric knows that sort of horse. There's something fine of it now: To look a little nearer canopy, higher than life.

"Wonder, sometimes," He says, and means lately, "If all the old stories are like that. All the wrong got done, and they got on with it, and the farther they walked the more that looked a story."

What did you do after that? What happened after that? He's been angrier for less, for all the things she oughtn't have seen; but there are things they don't speak for. He'd sooner meet her there now, by the edge of that gap, too cavernous to cross. Maybe someone else could, one of the old heroes,

A different sort of dead man. Already buried in a book, and not walking home, new names in their mouths.

[elegiaque]

“The people in stories all started as people,” she says, more at ease with the nature of narrative than she is with what’s been going on, even if the further she gets from it the less those two things feel separate. There’s a cargo hold full of meticulously kept notes — a grasp for control of a tale that isn’t finished and hasn’t been told yet. A lantern against the encroaching darkness of surrendering your story to the people who tell it.

(Trust her to look at it in the bleakest fashion imaginable.)

They keep walking, beneath the leaves. She says, “I thought about Andraste when I was taken to Skyhold. Not— you know,” a vague gesture that encompasses the Chantry, because whatever they’ve talked about or not, no one comes away from Gwenaëlle with an impression of pious devotion, “but, the woman who was alive and died. What she’d have made of everything that came after her. We tell stories to tell each other what the truth is.”

And then we got on with it.

“I wondered if she’d even recognise what truths we tell with—” not about, a tool and not a person, “—her.”