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

The second time in only a handful of months that Gwenaëlle has found herself saddling her mare and leaving her — marvellously indiscreet — dracolisk at home, setting out for probably not an uncomplicated time. Probably this time there’ll be fewer souvenirs, although it’s not totally out of the question that her uncle might send them back with belated Satinalia gifts; she’s packed some of her own for them, after all. Probably no one is going to get tattooed, although some sort of if found, return to on Coupe might have merit—

“Sorry,” she says, “I—”

there’s a moment where she almost does try a polite excuse, and then,

“—completely wasn’t listening.” The distraction is not exactly unexpected, even if the precise nature of the thoughts that she’s been absorbed in … actually, Stephen knows her too well to be all that surprised by the tangled paths her mind takes when she’s under stress.

The road ahead of them stretches, but not too far: if they push it, they can manage only one night’s camping between Kirkwall and the cottage, she thinks. It almost certainly ought to be two, mind.

“Miles away. Hi.”

They arrive the eve before First Day.

On the last approach, Gwenaëlle finds herself slowing down; it’s been years, now, since she last saw either of them in person. Feels like none and a century at once, and she feels… unprepared. The letters don’t feel anything like adequate preparation for this reunion, and her fingers itch to twitch the reins, turn around, change her mind—

she doesn’t, of course. Of course. She squares her shoulders, ignores the twitch of wings at her back (much good they do her, couldn’t fucking fly away from this problem even unbound), and slides down from her mount to lead the horse the last distance.

Slower, that way, but: she feels steadier, on the sturdy ground herself.

“Hi,” Stephen says, looking over to where Gwenaëlle rides alongside him, and there’s that irrepressible fondness in his voice.

He’s not a very talented horseman, but Thedas has given him plentiful experience until he’s become tolerable at it; it’s still a somewhat bumpy and jostling ride, the way they’re pushing hard to reach a proper inn at the rough halfway point. He was saying something about lenses and Serrault and microscopes and how he might have inadvertently fed some technology to the Qun, but it passed in a blur of comfortable one-sided conversation, the roll of his voice killing time. He’s a yapper, and doesn’t mind if she drifted away for a moment. She’s back now.

“It wasn’t important,” he says. And, “How are you feeling? We’ve probably still got time to backtrack and do that beach vacation in Rivain instead. Escape the winter.”

Light, joking. The Marches in winter are bleak and unpleasant, dreary overcast grey, the horses’ hooves churning up mud beneath them.

But he is still here. He’s making this trip with her.

“Don’t tempt me,” she sighs, and if she were closer to him, she’d reach out — but her hands stay on her reins, her glance having to suffice. It’s warm enough to nearly qualify as a touch, at least.

At least some of the last few minutes are definitely there, if she focuses and casts her mind back to what she’d absorbed without really listening. The thought of skipping the question and picking a reasonably intelligent question about Serrault glass that might set him off again — it’s soothing to listen to him and when she’s actually doing it, interesting besides — but she says, instead,

“I sort of thought it might be like with my father,” a rare use of the term for the man in question. “I was with both my mothers when they died, and I spent years at my mother’s bedside, and— I don’t know. Weeks, at Asher’s. It felt like that. Maybe it was days. But they were all…”

Those were different declines. Or, in the case of the Comte, brutally sudden.

“I don’t feel as brave about it,” she admits, “as I did when I was making the plans.”

There’s nothing in her voice to suggest she’s wavering, that she might actually turn her horse around— it’s just the truth. It’s one thing to bustle around La Souveraineté, deciding what to pack, strategizing the things they can help with before they return to Kirkwall, and it’s another to be on their way.

Frozen grass crunches underfoot. Dead standing, and stiff of it.

The cabin is a hand-built thing (those hands inexperienced) but after five years, it hasn't fallen in. There's care worked for these beams, for the nearby shed, a coop pecked over by rangy chickens; firewood dwindling too early in the season. The nearest village is an hour's walk. Even with money, life out here can be hard. Harder on one set of hands.

They approach, and a cat rockets from step, sends a figure creaking up. Tall as Stephen, powerful frame gone sallow with disuse; a man's shirt hanging where it must have once stretched broad. She isn't so very old. She looks older.

"You've come," Rasping Orlesian. This is a good day, "Here, let me see you."

The scrutiny isn't so strange: Years now, since they last spoke in person — and she's always been a suspicious bitch. It's only that she doesn't choose their names. It's only that her rigid manner drifts, that her gaze lingers somewhere behind them. This is a good day. There are fewer of those.

“You’re the bravest woman I know,” Stephen says without missing a beat, matter-of-fact statement rather than flattery. “Braver than me, certainly.”

He doesn’t have to say it aloud, doesn’t want to make any of this about himself, but she already knows: this is exactly the sort of familial responsibility he’d shirked and fled. He hadn’t ever wanted to witness that decline, to sit helpless and impotent by an unpleasant bedside that he couldn’t do anything about.

The road’s empty enough that they can ride side-by-side, only occasionally having to move into single file whenever a carriage or cart or another rider passes in the other direction. For now, however, they’ve got the lane to themselves and he’s able to ride his horse alongside Gwenaëlle’s, able to look over and measure her expression.

“Just because you’ve done this before and seen this before doesn’t mean it’s any less shitty, facing it again.”

The letters, after all, don’t bode well.

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.

The way she wants, momentarily, to pick a fight about bravery and how brave she desperately doesn’t feel right now — it’s not how stupid that would be that derails her but the tug of memory. I regret to inform you that someone can still be heroic even when those heroes are being fractious, squabbling, difficult, and it was actually quite restrained of her just to yank his jacket instead of shoving a pin in his armpit for his trouble.

He knows her far better and far more intimately now than he had, annoying her with his echoes of Stark, and he’s just called her the bravest woman he knows. And also, he’s said all that and she still slept with him. Continues to do so, even.

“I don’t know which of our judgment is more impaired,” definitely isn’t the worst thing she could have said, dryly resigned.

Hers for being here. Or for falling in love with someone who thinks she’s brave and good. His, for doing that.

The troubled cast of shadow hasn’t gone, altogether, but amusement and annoyance and fondness have softened its edges, even in the set of her mouth when he looks at her.

After a beat, “If we’re going to talk about bravery, I wasn’t sure you’d come with me.”

The exact sort of familial responsibility he’d fled.

Stephen shakes his head, gaze temporarily redirected to the muddy lane ahead of them — keep your eyes on the road, a lesson which had come so hard-won — and considers.

“They’re your family, not mine,” he says, and it isn’t meant to sound like a dismissal, but he trusts Gwenaëlle knows him well enough to know what he means. “I’m here to help you carry that cross, and to support you in any way I can, but— in the end, it doesn’t affect me the same way. In this equation, I care about you and the effect and impact it has on you. I mean, yes, I’m happy to continue meeting your family, although between the Duke and now Coupe you’re rather setting a standard for terrifying family members,”

he started off so well but now he’s rambling a little, derailed on a tangent, but he eventually manages to rein himself back in,

“but my point remains. I’m here for you, primarily.”

He does fear a little that when he meets the inimitable former Commander he might instinctively snap back into physician mode, clinical and impersonal and detached; but he’ll bite that down and try anyway.

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.

Edited (typoooo) 2025-01-15 00:45 (UTC)

That she knows what he means is separate from whether or not she’s momentarily inclined to pick a fight about how it sounds anyway,

which has more to do with the delay in answering than any real need to mull over an answer. It’s a tempting release valve — and an open goal, neither of them being known for their skill with tactful phrasing — but what she settles on is more or less the precise opposite of that: “Your point works off the premise that it not being about you is enough, whereas giving you credit for it works off the acknowledgment that a lot of other people would’ve made it about themselves and also not come.”

As compliments go, it’s not so much that it is backhanded as there’s probably specific people she has in mind actively catching strays in this moment.

“Wouldn’t have liked the reminder.” Either of the things they didn’t want to do, or that they’d failed to do them, a distinction which does matter but in this case is moot regardless because he’s here.

Gwenaëlle perceives it as speaking to his character; that it speaks to her low expectations of being loved as well is less obvious from the inside.

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.

Both of them squirm at receiving certain sincere flattery, bristling under the skin, restless and ill-at-ease; but she makes a good point, and it does mean he has to take the compliment as it’s intended.

“To be fair, I don’t like the reminder either,” Stephen says, the gentlest of humour, “but there are worse things.”

So he’ll push himself to face it anyway. Relentless mental deterioration, ailing older family members, the helplessness of disease, a problem he can’t solve for her.

He clears his throat, and doesn’t rebuff, and just keeps his horse moving forward. If they’d been walking closer, he might have been able to nudge her gently in the side, or pat her knee, or any small innumerable physical gestures of affection that Gwenaëlle’s taught him to be more comfortable both giving and receiving.

Instead: “How long has it been? Since you’ve seen either of them.”

Edited (repetition!!) 2025-01-29 01:48 (UTC)

“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.”

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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Edited 2025-02-17 02:29 (UTC)

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

the journey out.

the last night.

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🎀