Instinctively, she thinks: no, definitely not, and is briefly diverted trying to imagine how badly one can deliver good news, but she's managed that, she's pretty sure, so actually maybe that makes perfect sense. And then she thinks, she would quite like to break another chair, or to talk about how once she banned all Grey Wardens from the de Coucy mansion and only discovered Anders even was one when he came to her in high dudgeon, presuming the decree personal and specific, and then maybe cry for a bit more, utterly unrelated. To recall: Alistair, on the ramparts, his head probably doing what hers had been days ago, if I die, you have to tell them it was a demon.
Everyone had been so much less concerned with her urgent, panicked crystal demand for a healer when they'd realised it was for Alistair and not for her, which annoys her anew remembering, and then that—
The delay is hard to read, except that maybe she is trying not to just blurt out seven unhelpful, barely-related thoughts as they bounce through her mind, distracted, distressed. She sets aside the part of the chair she's still holding with the very deliberate gesture of someone who is choosing not to throw it, and slumps sideways until she's lain her head in his lap, which is a more pleasant place to be all of these terrible things. It means she can gaze at an unimportant part of a wall, noticing the way that the floor meets it ever so slightly uneven. Where the finish is not perfect, and there is a very slight lift.
“My aunt wrote me this letter,” does not immediately seem related. So there's that. “Weeks ago. I thought I was talking to Orlov about it and it was the fucking demon. I can't stop thinking about it, now, because I'm so fucking angry with her that Casimir is dead and I'm likely never going to know why he was with the fucking Grey Wardens to die in the first place, which is why I fucking banned them from the mansion anyway, and she is— hallucinating me in the woods.”
Gwenaëlle closes her eyes. Against his thigh she has the tension of something about to move, and remains still; an active choice to do so. Difficult.
“I don't want to write to Sabine to tell her terrible news she likely already knows, I want to ask Coupe if the conversations she's having with me in her stupid cottage with my stupid uncle living in stupid political sin until she's so addled it's not safe to let her live are ever about the last fight that we had and if I've won yet and I don't. I was right. It was right. It was right to give Casimir himself back, it was wrong that he was ever treated less a person for the disconnection, it— he was a miracle,” she says, her mouth twisting, struggling to say it steady. “We made a miracle happen. Trevelyan died, I don't know why I'm surprised.”
He was a miracle to her, though, and she has never met loss but to be undone by it.
no subject
Everyone had been so much less concerned with her urgent, panicked crystal demand for a healer when they'd realised it was for Alistair and not for her, which annoys her anew remembering, and then that—
The delay is hard to read, except that maybe she is trying not to just blurt out seven unhelpful, barely-related thoughts as they bounce through her mind, distracted, distressed. She sets aside the part of the chair she's still holding with the very deliberate gesture of someone who is choosing not to throw it, and slumps sideways until she's lain her head in his lap, which is a more pleasant place to be all of these terrible things. It means she can gaze at an unimportant part of a wall, noticing the way that the floor meets it ever so slightly uneven. Where the finish is not perfect, and there is a very slight lift.
“My aunt wrote me this letter,” does not immediately seem related. So there's that. “Weeks ago. I thought I was talking to Orlov about it and it was the fucking demon. I can't stop thinking about it, now, because I'm so fucking angry with her that Casimir is dead and I'm likely never going to know why he was with the fucking Grey Wardens to die in the first place, which is why I fucking banned them from the mansion anyway, and she is— hallucinating me in the woods.”
Gwenaëlle closes her eyes. Against his thigh she has the tension of something about to move, and remains still; an active choice to do so. Difficult.
“I don't want to write to Sabine to tell her terrible news she likely already knows, I want to ask Coupe if the conversations she's having with me in her stupid cottage with my stupid uncle living in stupid political sin until she's so addled it's not safe to let her live are ever about the last fight that we had and if I've won yet and I don't. I was right. It was right. It was right to give Casimir himself back, it was wrong that he was ever treated less a person for the disconnection, it— he was a miracle,” she says, her mouth twisting, struggling to say it steady. “We made a miracle happen. Trevelyan died, I don't know why I'm surprised.”
He was a miracle to her, though, and she has never met loss but to be undone by it.