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

“A few years,” she admits, breathing it out. “They’d been gone from Riftwatch a year or two already when I separated from Thranduil, and that was — at least a year before you arrived in Thedas. Something like.”

The dates are there, if she cares to find them: she could sit down with her notes and her saved letters in the bowels of La Souveraineté and tell him down to the hour, probably. It feels strangely disorienting to think on it, on how long it’s been and how much has changed. Almost as bizarre as the fact of her own age, a thing that catches her off-guard from time to time,

a place she’d never imagined standing, nor the way she finds herself standing there.

“We’ve written, off and on, since. My uncle more, even before it got worse with her.” For different reasons, then. “But it wasn’t exactly— you know Riftwatch. Something’s always on fucking fire.”

“Something’s always on fucking fire,” Stephen grants, “and you’re literally at war. I didn’t visit often enough back home, and that was even with airplanes and motorised vehicles to make the travel easier.”

It was too easy, to blink and suddenly realise that months and years have slid by without noticing. Easy to make excuses about work piling up and urgent business and de-prioritise the visit over and over, until you abruptly lose the chance to ever do it again. Family’s complicated for both of them, but when Gwenaëlle had first floated this trip, he hadn’t hesitated before agreeing.

Without any local tethers of his own, it was his first time experiencing this particular First Day tradition, too. The holiday was for commemorating the year past, certainly, but also visiting family in remote areas; once upon a time, the annual check to make sure they were still alive.

“Anyway, it’s good you’re doing it now. Americans don’t have specific First Day traditions as such,” he says, offhand and informational, sharing in the way they dole out these little pieces of information about themselves and their respective cultures,

“but New Year’s Eve — that would’ve been the last night of Haring — there’s big parties, excessive drinking. We watch a giant light-up ball drop down a pole, which sounds insane now that I mention it, and we count down the seconds until midnight and kiss someone when the new year starts. For good luck.”

More fun than this, goes without saying.

It draws a half-smile from her, admitting—

“All the First Day celebrations I’ve ever partaken in before this were more like that.” She’d given the more rustic celebrations at Skyhold a miss, given the option, but she remembers High Quarter gatherings, some she’d enjoyed more and some less. “My lord wasn’t really one for traveling to see relatives we generally weren’t seeing the rest of the year for a reason.”

And Gwenaëlle herself hadn’t really been enthusiastic at the prospect, either. For one thing, a party in the quarter where she lived was a lot easier to slip away from unnoticed than a remote villa where her unusual presence would be harder to miss.

“He’d have rather slit his own wrists than visit l’Duc, besides,” is neither a joke nor much of an exaggeration. She hadn’t always been sure that her grandfather favoured her for any more reason than that it irritated the piss out of her father.

He’s picked up bits and pieces of it over time: all Gwenaëlle’s offhand mentions, breadcrumbs sprinkled in her wake and painting a picture of her family and all their tangled complicated dynamics, a portrait in sketched outline.

“At least,” Stephen says, still half-smiling himself, humour his usual vestige for moments like these, “the eluvians make that part easier. Getting across the continent back to Orlais. Far quicker for l’Duc to put me into cold sweats now, all things considered.”

“Oh, ouais, when he was thinking he could find a human man I’d find palatable to marry if my dirty great rifter elf husband vanished, I don’t think he had a different flavour of rifter in mind, I grant you—”

though she’s not wrong that de Coucy had seen the benefit in a starter marriage. He’d liked Thranduil; he’s a practical man, at the end of the day, and she’s almost certain he’d viewed it with an eye to warming her up to the idea of such an arrangement. There’s a joke here about how he probably won’t last long enough for her to disappoint too badly, but given the journey they’re on it feels a little like borrowing trouble to make.

A small jolt, a sudden tilt of his head to shoot a sharp look over in Gwenaëlle’s direction. If Stephen were walking on his own two feet, his inattention might have led to stumbling over some rocks and bumps in the road, but thankfully the horse keeps plodding patiently and obediently onwards. Perhaps this is the wrong sort of time to be so derailed by that implication, but —

“What, is he pushing for a second marriage?”

Is she pushing for a second marriage??

“Not to you,” is a statement that has more implications attached to it than Gwenaëlle really intends in the moment, and though there’s a short delay — between the thing she says coming out of her mouth and her, hearing it — she does, a few beats too many later, look sideways toward him. “That— I’m not trying to marry anyone.”

A moment ago, she’d just thought she was being funny. She isn’t totally convinced it isn’t, anyway, in the manner of someone whose family life has always been such that some things have to be to keep sane.

“Surname concerns notwithstanding.”

His mind is reeling a little, trying to catch up, trying to stay caught up and follow that train of thought, careening onward as it so often does with Gwenaëlle. It’s not like he wants to get married anyway, so this should be a relief to hear— but wait, does she not want to marry him, what’s wrong with marrying him, does she have plans on marrying anyone else— oh, okay, she’s not—

wait—

“Surname concerns?” Stephen repeats, lost.

Gently oblivious to the degree of chaos she’s wrought in her wake, Gwenaëlle’s already more firmly on this tangent, mulling over something that’s crossed her mind more than once and more recently,

“It was such an impulse,” she admits, “to use Baudin. But it wasn’t my mother’s maiden name— I don’t know her maiden name. She was a widow. Sharing the name that she had, that my sisters had, I don’t regret that — of course — but the man who gave it to them, I can’t know what he’d make of my taking it.”

And the acknowledgment, then, that it wasn’t — ever — given to her. There were no surviving Baudins to decide to gift it or not; she had been publicly disinherited, and she had publicly disavowed her own name, and the obvious alternative had seemed obvious. When she had married Thranduil, it had become his name, too, and sharing it with him had been one of the better arguments for marriage if she were inclined to admit there being any.

But it weighs on her, sometimes; another question, unanswered.

(Probably there’s a reason she was already thinking on it, today.)

The thing about this roadtrip, on horseback rather than by car, is that they have even more time to kill time and talk. They’ll meander across no end of topics, accidentally stumbling into this more complicated one while the horses meander on.

And because he’s the type of person he is, Stephen jumps straight to considering solutions, even if it might be territory that she’s already been over and over in the her own head.

“Is there anyone else you could ask to find out her maiden name?” he muses. Relatives is a loaded gun, but: “Tracking down a former employer, perhaps?”

Not her father, for obvious reasons.

The readiness of her response makes clear the well-trodden path, “No living relatives, and lady’s maid for my lady mother was her first formal employment. Unusual,” she admits, “for that sort of position, except that that position isn’t usually being filled by the lady’s husband.”

What Comte de Vauquelin might have prized in a lady’s maid — or how willing he might’ve been to make the position an opportunity rather than a reward — was, certainly, distinct from what a comtesse choosing her own staff might’ve done

“If anyone would know,” she decides, “it’s Guilfoyle. And I think he decided long before any of this that it wasn’t his business.”

Names matter; Stephen knows this. It’s his stubborn insistence on being called doctor even in a world where his multiple degrees don’t mean shit; it’s his stiff adherence to surnames before someone eventually earns the right to use his first one. It’s her lord father and lady mother and l’Duc. It’s Vauquelin going up in flames.

Now that Gwenaëlle’s laid it out, he understands why she might be chewing over the matter. Surname concerns.

“Old neighbours, from before she moved into the estate? There must be someone who knew her in Halamshiral before. Neighbours, babysitters, greengrocers, a landlord.”

Gwenaëlle hums, doubtful—

“It’s a needle in a stack of needles,” she says, eventually. “Was she from Halamshiral originally? Was Baudin, whatever his name was? If she was, where did the neighbours she had thirty-five years ago go after Celene burned their neighbourhood? If any records existed before that, did they still after it was burned?”

Once, she’d have been working herself up; now, it’s been too long, carrying a weight around too heavy. She’d found nothing, and found no comfort in it, either, and it’s hard to work up the same degree of agitation as she once had on the same topic.

“Guilfoyle’s the soul of tact,” after a moment, “but there’s a reason she didn’t have confidantes for me to find.”

Stephen hates an unsolvable problem, especially when the scale of this one feels like it ought to be solvable on the surface, even as it keeps going deeper. Did Thedas have private eyes? Would a detective be able to find and pull on some thread Gwenaëlle hadn’t thought of?

In the end: Probably not. A needle in a stack of needles. Their neighbourhoods had burned.

But he glances over. “How so?”

“The downside of all the perks of screwing a Comte,” is a bit of a verbal shrug. “I mean, I don’t know how much was — if anyone resented her, or if she was wary of being resented, or if she was worried about being asked favours she couldn’t really do—”

She suspects Guilfoyle doesn’t really know the answer to those questions, either; amongst the serving class, there’s still a difference between elf and human, and both Guenievre and Guilfoyle have proven to be particularly opaque in her experience. Maybe he wouldn’t have asked. Maybe she wouldn’t have answered.

“She traded a lot for us,” she says, at length, meaning: me and my sisters.

“I wish,” Stephen says, quietly, “there were more of a paper trail. Anything else for you to follow.”

Because even at a distance, you can tell that Gwenaëlle’s holding onto as many scraps of her birth mother as she can. It’s quite literally the very first thing you see as you enter the houseboat.

“Despite the fact that Earth has a bigger population, I think it was easier to find people in the cities. There’s more mechanisms for it, whether through bureaucracy or technology or magic. I once scryed for a man’s missing father using a strand of hair from his head.” Then, remembering that she knows of the people involved, he adds: “Loki’s father, actually. It was his brother’s hair.”

Another Stephen Strange in another world, with more magic to flex at his disposal, would have been able to help her better.

“I’ve got her hair,” she says, a sigh that’s not quite some sad little laugh breathing out with the words; not a miracle he could replicate here, she expects, but there’s something a little warming about the idea that maybe there are lives that could have been lived where it might have been possible. Maybe there’s a world someone’s dreaming even now where he could just solve this,

instead of this one that they live in, tying knots in everything that matters.

(She probably had some of Loki’s hair, too, years ago. A different Loki and, well, for different reasons.)

After a moment, she tilts her head toward the road ahead of them: “Well, there’s this. This is more than some people are getting— not many people’s uncles’ have turned up not dead in the war.” Not after as long as he was presumed that way.

“True. And I’m glad you have— this, whatever this turns out to be.”

Even if it winds up being shitty and complicated. And now thinking ahead to what she does have, rather than what she’s already lost, Stephen cants the subject sideways in a different tack: “So going in, what should I know about,” Coupe and Vauquelin? oh, that sounds weird and too clinical and professional, let’s try —

“Uh, Luwenna and Gervais?”

Nope. That sounds even weirder. Christ, he doesn’t know how to do this.

“Oh, I hate that,” she says with the immediacy of a thought being processed aloud in real time— it’s not wrong, it’s not inappropriate, it’s just…

Weird. Weird to hear, and it’s Luwenna that she’s tripping over, of a certainty; Yngvi had called Coupe Wren in her hearing once and there’d been a real danger of the wind changing and her face being stuck that way.

Pure, emotive kneejerk, and with no good alternative, she’s moved onto answering his question without a pause of breath between,

“He’ll be terse with you because he’s terse with everyone because he has a terrible stammer — he had a singing master as a child who was working on it, but it’s not as if anyone in the Circles gave a shit how long it took him to finish a sentence as long as he wasn’t getting possessed.” A somewhat uncharitable take, considering Gervais’s own history as an educator in the White Spire; there might’ve been another mage willing to expend a similar effort.

(That his stammer worsened over the years was a choice, but he’s made a lot of choices he and his niece don’t discuss in great detail, his wife long having been one of them.)

“He’s funny, though,” ruminatively, “when he writes. You’ll see; there’s a ‘medical’ diagram he drew of their dog he put humorous labels on framed in their house. The mabari was hers, obviously. He’s got his war bitch and she’s got hers, as it were. Maybe from the Leblancs, though I won’t swear to it and she almost certainly doesn’t remember. She was Commander at the Gallows before Riftwatch existed — when it was still an outpost of the Inquisition. Acted as midwife and then stood down; de Cedoux put something in writing about her lack of fitness to continue in the post.”

“I saw some of his writing in Riftwatch’s old records. I liked it; he’s witty.” Because of course Stephen Strange was nosy, and he’d gone digging through every last piece of Tony Stark in Thedas he could find, and there it was: Gervais Vauquelin in the margins.

Unlike a man with a stammer, Stephen talked, and talked a lot, and tended to run roughshod over people in conversation even when they could keep up. He makes a mental note, a small reminder to himself: slow down later. He can relate, a bit, to the frustration in being cut off from entire avenues of communication. He used to pin his thoughts down on paper, ideas decisively wrangled into essays, medical papers, and scholarship; part of him has missed having that outlet, no permanence to his words, every bit of writing taking ten times longer than it ought to.

“He’s Emeric’s brother— when did he and the Commander get involved? Did you grow up with either of them in your life, or was all of it it more recent?”

He wants to know what Gwenaëlle’s relationship to aunt-and-uncle looked like; he’s not sure how much it’ll help, but maybe it’ll help him navigate what’s waiting for them at the end of the forest road.

“He would write to my lord from the circle, but he was taken away as a child— I only met him in Kirkwall. Both of them, separately, in Kirkwall. When she came, he was still— we thought he was dead, still, and I didn’t know it was anything to her that he wasn’t when I found out otherwise. In retrospect, I ought to have caught on sooner but I thought he was just really into bird-watching. My lord would read from his letters, sometimes. La roitelet.”

Subtle. He’d been really convincingly interested in bird-watching.

“People call her Wren. Not me. And I don’t actually know how many friends she has, what with her personality,”

girl,

“but they did. She was close to Yngvi.” Not the cat, who she scrupulously has never failed to specify is Small Yngvi. She considers this pensively — wonders, horribly, if Coupe will ask after him and she’ll have to say the dissatisfying little that she knows — and then goes on, “I spent more time with her than with him. She made me learn to fight, so there was that, which I couldn’t put her off doing and I really put my back into trying. It’s incredible she never backhanded me into the harbour.”

And the conversation continues: Stephen picking Gwenaëlle’s brain and ransacking her family memories, trying to gather a sense of the couple they’re about to see, girding himself for the complicated situation awaiting them. He doesn’t have a family anymore for her to meet, and even if he did, they’d be inaccessible an entire universe away. So he’ll have to do his damned best to make a good impression here.

The conversation meanders just as they meander, and it eventually winds up on other topics. By the time they reach the small town they’re overnighting in, midway to the cottage, his ass hurts from the horseback ride and he’s ready for a rest. Clambering off, stabling their houses, paying for a room at some shabby inn along the Marcher road, ordering food brought up to them later.

It’s not until they’re in their private room and the door’s firmly locked behind them that Gwenaëlle’s finally able to loosen her clothes and shrug off her coverings. By automatic rote habit, Stephen moves to stand behind her, helping to unwind the wrappings pinning her wings to her body, and nimbly ducks his head out of the way when they unfold and stretch. He presses a kiss to the nape of her neck, unspoken support.

Tomorrow. They’ll get there tomorrow.

And then, the thought suddenly occurring to him, as he looks at unfamiliar walls and an unfamiliar bed and a small overnight bag to unpack and knowing that once upon a time, this would’ve been expensive sheets and a piping-hot shower in some Ritz-Carlton suite —

“You know,” he says, “I just realised, this is sort of our first trip as a couple. I mean, there was visiting your grandfather, but that was mostly under the guise of a work trip, and we had the eluvians to get the fuck out whenever we wanted.”

Early attempts had been experimental, tricky; in the weeks and months since Sarrux, she’s taken her time designing bindings for comfort as much as practicality— thin silk that wraps around her, wider where it presses wings to skin, narrower where it fastens in place. It’s still a relief to unfurl them privately, arching her back and letting them stretch out, sighing, like the sensation of loosening a corset times a thousand—

they lower as he leans close, fluttering between their bodies, and of all the things he might’ve said in that moment she is sort of delighted to have not been expecting that at all.

A beat passes, probably Gwenaëlle almost quibbling and then doing the math and, “I think you’re right. I mean, if we aren’t counting trips we’ve taken for work, then…”

And fair play to him not to, all things being equal. What a novelty it suddenly is, to travel only because she wishes to. Even for this.

“And that didn’t count, we had to go to parties.”

The prospect of having to do hard physical labour for the maintenance of Gervais and Coupe’s lifestyle cottage still sounds more like leisure than attending a masque.

Stephen laughs at her withering tone, and drifts to the side as Gwenaëlle nimbly helps unbutton his coat, quicker and easier on his hands. “It’s perpetually amusing to me that I like the parties more than you. I can take one for the team, next time we have an invite.”

It’s simpler for him: he’s the foreign rifter curiosity, but there’s less court baggage, no family history to trample on.

They settle into the inn’s bedroom; comfortable, a little rundown, but the business is glad of the patronage, their guestbooks having suffered so near occupied Starkhaven.

First trip as a couple. They’re collecting the milestones as they go, more and more for the stack: often going about it all backwards, first a hookup then the relationship, moving in together then deciding to live together. First time meeting her family, again and again. First Satinalia in bed. (First anniversary. First fight.)

He should be terrified, probably. Navigating a relationship like this is still alien and unfamiliar and frightening, but— it’s worth it.

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

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🎀