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.

Comments

[elegiaque]

“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.

[portalling]

“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.

[elegiaque]

“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.”

[portalling]

“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.

[elegiaque]

“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.”

[portalling]

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.”

[elegiaque]

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.

🎀

[portalling]

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.