i try my best to become poetry. i take a bath and stain the water with black ink.

[trouvaille]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin + YOU.
WHAT: Gwenaëlle arrives in Skyhold, etcetera.
WHEN: The current AC period.
WHERE: Skyhold.
NOTES: She is arriving with a retinue, including resources for the Inquisition (a physician who will join the healers included) and her own maid. Also, if you prefer spam to prose, no problem! I will match however you tag in.

( FOR ANDERS )
Gwenaëlle does not seek out a healer herself.

She sends her lady's maid - Katell, a Halamshiral-born elf - to give the anxious request that her lady does not wish to come to the healer's tents and won't he please accompany her back to the lady's rooms?

The small suite that Katell shows him and his accompaniment to is still in the midst of being unpacked for Gwenaëlle's comfort, but even in the arrival chaos it's plain that someone (presumably the Comte Vauquelin) has gone to great efforts to make her as comfortable as can be done, making the rooms a small oasis of Orlesian familiarity, decorated as befits a young woman of her station and inclinations. Silk hangings, art, an already mostly full bookshelf, a full length mirror, her own bedding - and the prideful creature herself sitting on a cushioned chaise, her back stiff and straight, her small hands fidgeting anxiously with the edge of her robe until a moment after the door opens, flattening immediately.

It presents an immediate explanation as to why she might not have wanted to come down to the healing tents; the bandages pressed against the thin robe tell a story that she might not want to go down where she doesn't feel entirely safe to undress.

( FOR ADELAIDE )
It's with some reluctance that Gwenaëlle seeks out the woman she persists in thinking of as Councilor Leblanc rather than Gregoire's sister; he had been persuasive, but she hadn't forgotten that he'd never actually met his older sister. A person could write anything in a letter. Had they even exchanged letters? It hadn't occurred to her to ask, too fixated on the fact he hadn't done anything else - only there's no one else here she might claim anything like acquaintance with and he did promise, and inasmuch as she trusts anyone, she might trust that Gregoire wouldn't make her a promise he didn't at least try to keep. She will, she decides, graciously not blame him for it when this goes awry. She won't even say she told him so. She will let her disappointed silence speak for itself. It will be a very short letter.

He will be so sorry.

At least Cyprienne isn't here to see her fall on her face. She squares her shoulders and dismisses Katell, carrying on up to the battlements (a bit of privacy at this hour - no one needs to see her fall on her face) unaccompanied with a shawl pulled close against the chill in the air, her face bare of the Orlesian mask she'd worn on her journey. It feels strange and uncomfortable to go without it, but she's observed enough of Skyhold in the short time she's been here to hesitate to so visually separate herself, however much she might like to be separate in as many way as possible. Even Madame de Fer is seen here bare-faced -

And if it's good enough for her, then Gwenaëlle is not going to be the one to suggest Lady Vivienne has misstepped. She's stuck here for the foreseeable future; she has to try to adapt. To learn. To be smart whether it's comfortable or not.

"Lady Leblanc?"

( FOR ANYONE )
Having reached the end of her journey to Skyhold, Gwenaëlle isn't entirely sure what - happens next. Her father had sent her here because what else could he do, but he'd been understandably vague about what he imagined being there might entail for her, and she had her doubts that anyone would be interested in helping her figure it out. They all had better things to be doing than paying any heed to some Orlesian debutante with a shard in her hand; what use is that going to be to the Inquisition? It isn't as if they could send her off to close rifts.

It probably isn't as if they'd do that, she thinks, with a spike of fear.

So- for a lack of anything to do with herself (and with Katell engaged in the business of unpacking and organising her accommodation, and for the time being no relief to be found in retreating there), she explores. She goes to see what everyone else does with their time, peering into anywhere she isn't hurried away from, huge eyed and a little bit suspicious.

Comments

[trouvaille]

"I count myself very lucky she's so unobjectionable," is the very arch response a moment or so later, Gwenaëlle's lips quirking into a smile that favours not only her father (the incorrigible flirt) but her uncle as well (more charming than he ever notices himself being). "Imagine the gossip if I took her in too particular dislike. Imagine Gregoire inevitably dramatizing the rumours and casting himself as the most irresistible thing in Orlais."

As dearly as she loves her friend, she absolutely does not trust him to have the restraint not to seize on the dramatic potential in a love triangle of that nature, and she would be morally obligated to hold him down and choke him with his own manuscript.

"He's too tall to push into the mud now, I'd have to do something drastic."

Like forcefeed him his own manuscript.

[fleurdesel]

"He would." She knows this even from the letters- Gregoire's flair for the dramatic, his romanticizing every little thing either for fun or for literary fodder. She'd thought perhaps it was reading too deeply into those notes- but if Gwen's expression is anything to go by, the twist to her voice? It is more than a little true, more than a little exasperating.

Ignoring the faint twist in her chest at an echo of something familiar (hadn't she loathed comparisons to her sisters, her family?), Adelaide snorts a laugh at the image of this girl, younger, and her brother pushing one another thusly. Mother would have had a fit.

She must disapprove terribly.

All the better. "I shudder to think what that might be."

[trouvaille]

"I'd simply have to make him eat his words," she says, serenely.

(It sounds figurative, when she says it like that. Gregoire, probably, would know better than to think she didn't mean to kneel on his chest and force his mouth open with her pristinely manicured fingers.)

And then a shrug, elegant, smiling-- "If he harbors doubts he hasn't shared them with me, and I can't think where else he'd confide first. I suppose she might be pleased I'm gone." But what Gregoire's intended bride prefers, as a rule, interests her very little so long as Solange doesn't intervene in their friendship. If she fancies that a wife might do so more effectively than a fiancee, well, she'll burn that bridge when they come to it.

[fleurdesel]

"Marianne had mentioned some surprise that you and he were not paired off some time ago." She hadn't known who Gwen was beyond 'a close confidant of your younger brother' as her sister so delicately put it. But LeBlancs knew better to mistake friendship for compatibility and eligibility- but it spoke to how close the two were if even her older sister assumed they'd be matched.

Perhaps her father hadn't approved.

Perhaps mother wanted someone a little less artistic.

[trouvaille]

Or the answer might be as simple as the expression Gwenaëlle's face twists into when Adelaide mentions it, nose wrinkling in the midst of a grimace that has her quite literally recoiling from the mere suggestion of marriage to Gregoire and all that might conceivably (as it were) entail. It isn't the first time someone's suggested as much to her, and like as not Gregoire himself has heard it as often - she feels no compunction to protect his feelings by disguising her apparently quite visceral response. If he wanted a friend who'd protect his feelings in such things, he wouldn't have picked one who keeps an itemized list of his shortcomings to go over when he's irritating or she's bored.

"I can't imagine why," she says, "as she must expect him to have an heir of his own. Gregoire values his hands attached to his body too much to ever put them on me. He'd soon find himself dictating those appalling novels he writes if he ever tried it."