closed. the number of hours we have together is actually not so large.

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle, Stephen, and special guests.
WHAT: Gwenaëlle and Stephen go to visit her family for First Day.
WHEN: First Day.
WHERE: A small cottage in the woods, the Free Marches.
NOTES: Content warnings for dealing with lyrium addiction and decline, family member dementia, end of life care, caregiver burnout, grief, loss. Potentially a huge downer of a time.

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[elegiaque]

How peculiar to find herself playing, again, the dutiful daughter—

niece. Whatever. Gwenaëlle lets go Percy’s reins, certain of the horse’s placid nature, and offers her hands to Coupe — looking by habit for the rings she expects to see on hers, though in the same moment she suddenly isn’t sure. She’s so thin, “Here we are,” she says, “as promised and on time. You haven’t met Stephen,” is both introduction and reassurance.

This one isn’t her mind playing tricks, only unfamiliar because he’s a new face.

“Doctor Stephen Strange, Riftwatch’s head healer.” That’s not why he’s here. “Stephen,” she’s now said his name at least three times, at what point does it become weird, “this is former Commander Luwenna Coupe.”

—alright, that feels weird, but somehow my aunt feels weirder in person, for as casually as she’s thrown around the descriptor at home. There’s a moment where the idea of being so familiar makes her wither inside, and maybe that’s exactly the thing that makes her add,

“Healers have their uses, don’t they, Tantine Wren?”

Gervais’s voice, from the doorframe of the cottage, comes mild: “P-p-p-pert, Naëlle.” Stephen merits a nod; the way he’d stumbled over the word probably explains his terseness, when it doesn’t sound unfriendly. The last Vauquelin is a handsome man, probably not as old as his niece had guessed but wearing his age with a particular kind of weariness. He’s still broad, if lean, weathered from the work,

glad to see them.

[portalling]

Behind them, while Gwenaëlle approached, Stephen had swung himself out of the saddle with a little less grace and loosely tied the horses together (he’s less certain of his own staying put, unruly and rented from Kirkwall stables, not as familiar to him as Percy to Gwenaëlle), but he soon sets that task aside and walks up beside her. Takes in both aunt and uncle alike.

“A pleasure to meet you,” he says, all that frigid politeness unconsciously settling into place; he reaches out a palm to the woman for a handshake. “I’ve heard so much about you both.”

The Head Healer is tall as Coupe, lean, dressed in that knee-length dark-red coat with the Riftwatch research sigil in metal at the lapels, hands gloved for the cold. There’s a veil quartz mage’s staff lashed to his mount’s saddlebags. He looks a little rumpled from the road but still mostly sharp, professional. On his best behaviour for familial connotations and organisational ones alike: he is so painfully aware that this is the former Commander, the aunt, the wound in Gwenaëlle’s side that never healed quite right.

[limier]

Naelle, and that's what she was looking for. He's said her name a great deal that morning. He'll keep doing so.

Her eyes draw back to those hands, to a routine foreign in its affection as the name Gwenaelle calls her by. Pert, yes –

"Always quick," Dry. As promised, and on time, and she's sharp enough now to add: "As though I would recognize the hour."

But she takes her hands, rings hung lank and clanking about a scarred neck. Cold, and she hasn't bothered with gloves; colder when she lifts a palm, to lay it searching over Gwen's cheek.

(The eye, of course. She's been told of the eye, and it is one thing to know, and another to see it. Worry works unguarded over brow before habit asserts – before she thinks to shutter the view –)

"Doctor," Too stubborn to choose informality, while she may. Stephen. Gwenaelle, and Stephen, and the little boy behind them. "Thank you for coming all this way."

Thumb presses to her knuckle, and falls away. He used to be taller. She doesn't shake his hand, and after a moment, it's clear that she doesn't know what to do with it. The bruise of that hangs, embarrassed,

Before she turns, makes for the house without another word. Her bad knee drags a line through the snow.

[elegiaque]

The press of Coupe’s cold hand to her cheek is easier than the weight of her worry, shifted across her face in a way that feels as unfamiliar as Tantine Wren, and this would be easier if there was a familiar groove to fit into —

that it was always love, of a sort, is not the same as that having been anything of use now. Probably the awkwardness is better than just starting a fight so they feel normal. Maybe. Maybe later she’ll say something like, I think she would have liked it better if I just picked a fucking fight with her, into Stephen’s shoulder and neither of them will know how serious she is.

“We can stay a bit,” she says, following her in, more to her uncle— “A day or two. Make ourselves useful while we’re here.”

His eyebrow quirks, a question, while he holds the door open and doesn’t immediately rush to intercept his wife because that won’t help,

“The boat isn’t staffed like the manor,” Gwenaëlle says. “We’re useful. Use us.”

[portalling]

Stephen is once again, like in Val Royeaux, suddenly and mortifyingly hyper-aware of the fact that he never met any other girlfriend’s family and so still doesn’t really know how these things are supposed to go. But meeting Romain de Coucy for the first time had, in a way, been easier: thanks to Gwenaëlle’s careless ease and comfort around him, indulgent grandfather and favoured grandchild, that was an easier story to tell and to read than… this. Whatever in the world this is.

The older woman’s walk is slow, and so Stephen steals one last moment to tend to the horses: nose-bags affixed, filling them with some of the grain they’d purchased and brought along the way, the horses can graze and fill their bellies while the humans talk. The sparse winter ground here won’t do. For a moment he’s dreadfully tempted to stay out here like some stablehand (animals are easier than people—), but he eventually joins them at the entry, stomping the snow off his boots at the threshold to the cabin.

“I grew up on a farm,” Stephen offers; which was usually the piece of personal information that he buried, eradicating all trace of it, but now at this rustic cottage he finds that it’s the first thing he reaches for. Feels weird. Not sure he likes it.

“So I’m not above chopping firewood or hauling water or whatever other chores need doing.”

We’re useful. Use us.

[limier]

Fingers tug the edge of Gervais' sleeve, nail knocking skin. Brief, before she's gone, stumping through the little kitchen and away; tracking slush across the boards. It's a small home, there's nowhere very much to hide. She braces between the bedposts, just for a moment. Just until the world stops spinning, until she can catch her breath on now,

Not tomorrow. Not the next hour, or a decade gone. The thing in her veins coalesces without tense. When she is not careful, it forgets how to wear her shape. How to be a small thing, and singular, and singing its dirge on each beat, beat, beat,

Now. Palm thumps bedpost. She must have been at it a while, by the sting of red. Shit.

The bedroom creaks open. The doctor grew up on a farm. A non-sequitur, a bid to restore some control –

"The pigs are gone," Hasn't kept them since she grew up herself. "But we could use water. The well is frozen, help me break the ice."

Late in the day for that to go undone. Like as not Gervais has already, it only takes a minute to break the fragile skim. Still, something in her face suggests this isn't another slip. Conscious of the true comment, this is fucking awkward.

Less so, on the limb of a task.

"Catch up with your uncle. We will speak."

She and Strange. Coupe lingers before she turns aside, hunting for the bucket that hangs neat as any. There's a great dog by the fire. There's a rack above the mantle, without blade; there's a splinter of wall that suggests fists. She looks at them all. Sight without recognition.

The dog groans, and lifts eyes gone white and rheumy. A year ago, the mabari might have found it. Now,

"Ger?"

A question. Empty, anticipated: That he'll know what it is she meant to ask.

[elegiaque]

Anticipated: taking it from its hook when her gaze glossed past it, Gervais hands her the bucket he’s already holding, pressing it into her hand with a quiet, constant affection that allows the way he folds her fingers around its handle not to seem an unkindness.

(Between them, they have known enough unkindness.)

“I won’t tell you to be nice,” Gwenaëlle says, her eye falling on Stephen instead, but now would be a great time for you to demonstrate superhuman patience conveyed in the remaining bright amber. She busies herself, instead, with unfastening the bag she’s been carrying on her hip,

not all they brought, saddlebags still needing unpacked, but a start.

“We’ll catch up. The news, and all.”

[portalling]

There’s so much unspoken happening in this room, this little cottage, the feeling of familiar routine made predictable and rote to wear it into the grooves of their existence. Something known and expected and easier for the woman to remember. Easier, than change and chaos and all their routines being overturned by something new and unexpected like a long-distant niece coming to visit. Easier, than the Riftwatchers’ trip throwing it all into disarray.

(Is this what Stephen and Gwenaëlle might look like, given enough time? Is this what comfortable domesticity and leaning on each other looks like?)

“And all,” Stephen echoes, and he obediently follows Coupe back outside into the brisk winter air. Be nice, he thinks. He’s not very good at it, but he’ll try for her.

Outside and circling the cottage, heading towards the well, to the frozen water. Stephen’s own steps slow down as they approach that stone shape and his mouth firms, looking over the edge. (Hands battering themselves bloody against a frozen lake surface, cold frigid water dark underneath—)

“Do you have a chisel? A hammer?” he asks.