There had been lofty and ambitious intentions of doing far more interesting things with their evening, at first, looking forward to it with that heady selfish rush of two people still eager to explore new territory. But at some point throughout the long hours of crisis, wanting to yank off Gwenaëlle’s clothes had eventually turned to just wanting to talk to her,
then, eventually, just wanting to see her,
until it was merely enough to be in the same room, while she braided her hair and they talked through the remains of the day. His voice from the bed had quieted and quieted throughout the conversation, his answers drifting and turning from full sentences into unintelligible Mmhms before eventually into: nothing, just silence and perhaps an ignoble snore, sheer exhaustion dragging him under.
And he finally wakes the next morning, face still buried in the pillows as if he hasn’t moved all night, black-and-grey hair tousled and standing up at odd angles, wavier than usual. There was no particular sound to wake him except for the unmistakable crawling sensation of being watched. Stephen tilts his chin, cracks an eye open; he makes a muffled noise of surprise, and it’s uncertain whether it’s at Small Yngvi practically sitting on his head or at Gwenaëlle’s watchful fey stare looming unexpectedly close to his face (both, it’s both). He stirs slightly, but winds up pinned in place, her ankle digging in to keep him immobile.
“Hi,” he says, drowsy and fond, and, “Good morning.”
Affection threads through her echoed, “Good morning to you, too,” any disappointment she'd felt at the slow-moving crash of exhaustion unraveling whatever they'd hoped for their evening effectively dissipated by how very, very good it is, actually, just being together. Enough, then, to be comfortable and comforted by curling up together, easing into familiarity like heavenly bodies with patterns of orbit, into and out of reach.
It's given her time to think, though. Turning over the remains of the chaos; considering their own conversations. How much about her is known, broadly and to him, and how much of himself she has been patient and watchful for and still doesn't know—
She starts to move. It is not, in fact, to let him roll over or get up; she follows her ankle with her knee and sprawls lazily on his back, chin against his shoulder, one of her slowly unraveling braids falling to his upper arm as she insinuates herself into a position that is not unpleasant (her shift is thin silk, warmed by her body, slippery between her breasts and hips and his back) if sort of heavy and not immediately easy to extricate from, “It occurred to me this morning that if I'd asked you the sort of personal questions we were all using to test each other that I wouldn't have known nearly as many of the answers as you do, reversed.”
It's not not a test, that she leaves that hanging instead of continuing down the obvious path of so cough it up, Stephen.
He lets loose a small exhaled oof, Gwenaëlle’s weight (slight but not nothing) pressing some air out of his lungs. It’s like having a weighted blanket, and so, still quite nice and oddly soothing, even with his chin pressed into the mattress and her hair ticklish across his bare skin.
This is a lot to be bombarded with, when she’s clear-eyed and alert and has the advantage of him and he’s still sleep-addled, but:
“What?” Stephen asks, slowly coming awake. “That’s… absurd. You know everything that matters about me.”
— does she, though? He’s starting to wrack his mind to recall details before there’s a thoughtful pause, then an amendment, “You know more about me than anyone else here. But I can… What would you like? My middle name’s Vincent.”
(Small pieces of trivia, innocent factoids, I wanted to be a guitarist. He’s always been incredibly open with her about his life as a sorcerer, the pivot from surgery to sorcery, but there are long gaps and swathes on that canvas which remain blank. The earliest years, in particular.)
It will be very funny, at some point, to tell him that hers is Clothilde. For a moment, she's tempted, but: no. Save that for a time when being derailed by the absurdity of rescuing him from Lady Clothilde won't get in the way of what she wants to do right now, which is interrogate him to her satisfaction—
there was a time in her life that the realisation she'd come to would have frightened her into silence, instead. When she'd have lain beside him agonising over the imaginary reasons he might, secretly, not wish her to know all of those things. She isn't seeking comfort for that part of her when she briskly brushes it aside to just ask, but it is reassuring, his bewilderment, his immediate willingness. Of course she must know these things. Absurd that she doesn't. Where would she like to start.
Gwenaëlle presses a kiss to the back of his neck, undone by fondness, and has to take a moment to decide what she would like. Even though it's obvious, really, because always you start at the beginning if you're going to start anywhere, probably,
“You know about my mothers,” she says, “I've mentioned my sisters.” One of them. “Tell me about your farm, before you were insufferable nouveau riche. Who was there?”
Had he not said? Surely he must have said, or mentioned, at some point—
But try as he might, combing back through his considerably accurate memory, Stephen can’t remember breathing his family’s names even once, in the year-and-a-half that he’s been here. It’s an unsettling realisation to have about himself when it’s not something that he did on purpose, just— it was a black hole in his history that he had automatically and unconsciously walked around, skirted, avoided.
He buries his face in the mattress more fully, temporarily holding his breath and not breathing. Just anchoring himself in this: the physical sensation, the warmth of Gwenaëlle’s lips against the nape of his neck, the heat and weight of her sprawled over all of his limbs.
Perhaps it’s a little easier this way, to speak without looking her in the eye, without having to gauge and watch her expressions at the same time as he peels back the layers, picks at the scabs. He readjusts slightly as he comes up for air again, drawing both arms up to fold his forearms beneath his chin, shoulderblades stretching and rippling beneath her. (There’s an offended mrowl from Small Yngvi, before the cat settles again.)
“Besides all the barnyard animals,” said dryly, obfuscating, he’s never actually realised until this moment how very much he obfuscates this exact topic and so she probably has a point,
“A father, a mother, a younger sister and brother. Eugene, Beverly,” there is the briefest pause before the next set of names, “Donna and Victor. Despite the surname, we Stranges were all tremendously, horrendously normal. No millionaire inheritance, no secret ancestral magic, no being bitten by radioactive spiders and granted superpowers. Just a lot of cow dung and hard work and early mornings and fire-and-brimstone church sermons on Sundays. Closed-minded. Pastoral.”
Some people might say pastoral with a touch of dreamy nostalgia, a longing for a simple rural existence; Gwenaëlle can hear the faint bitter derision in it instead. Closed-minded.
Gwenaëlle has leaned one arm, similarly, underneath herself (on top of him), and her other hand rests lightly on his elbow, her cheek against his bare skin as she settles to listen, to let him work through it if not perfectly in his own time then not outright rushed, now that he's sketching the picture of it for her. Eugene, Beverly, Donna, Victor. The origin, she supposes as well, of some skills and knowledge that must have been proving more useful to him in Thedas than in New York—
Nothing he had missed about living that life. It catches her ear, the disdain — she thinks about how much he sounds like Stark, often, who had certainly not come from a life like that, about his fastidiousness and his appreciation of fine things. Crass new money, he had said, unabashed about it. How extremely willing he'd been to let her dress him up like a handsome doll when they'd barely known each other, shrugging into the finest version of himself available to him here,
yes. It isn't familiar, exactly, but she thinks wryly that he's not far wrong, you know everything that matters. He isn't telling her things that change him. He is a man she understands.
It also isn't the only part of what he says that catches her, tracing circles on his arm with her thumb. We were, when he was a part of them. Fair. But it's a telling past tense, she thinks, when nothing about his framing suggests that they had shed that life the way he has, and after a moment,
“What happened to them?”
Maybe she's wrong. Maybe he'll say, my sister married some hick and my brother became one, or I could have introduced you in New York but they wouldn't have been real or—
“They’re all dead,” Stephen says, as cleanly as he can, with the same kind of brutal matter-of-factness that Gwenaëlle employs so often.
This, too, is a thing they have in common: the steady loss across their family tree. And she’s clever; she’d already deduced the shape of it. He’s always very clinical and purposeful with his choice of words.
There’s another exhaled sigh. His next lead-in is a vague aim at flippancy and faint gallow’s humour, but it’s a thin attempt. “Also nothing extraordinary. No tragic murders, no supervillains seeking vengeance; it happened while I was in training for neurosurgery, years before I became a sorcerer. Our parents were elderly, so it was just inevitable, those run-of-the-mill incurable diseases like cancers and kidney failures. Victor was hit by a car.”
Banal, everyday, horrible.
The worst one comes last, and there’s another palpable hesitation here; he’s so very unaccustomed to speaking about this, to baring this part of himself, like prying open the cover to a pocketwatch and seeing all his cogs and moving gears open and vulnerable to view. The last person he said this to was in fact himself—
“Donna was just a kid,” he says, and that’s the real sorrow in it. “Ten years old. I was twelve. We were playing at a lake nearby, which we often did. She was a good swimmer but she got a cramp and drowned. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know CPR at the time. Water in the lungs, such a goddamned fixable— It’s what made me decide to be a doctor.”
Which hadn’t, however, helped at all with the other three either. But it does continue to flesh out the shape of him: the control issues, the urge to play god, the hand that wants to hold the knife.
Ordinary deaths at the end of ordinary lives, and it doesn't feel like that would be better, truly. Particularly not for a physician, spurred to his calling by a brutal loss, only for more to slip through his fingers before they'd gnarled with pain and time and the enemies he's since made for himself. She thinks fleetingly of Abby and her Lev, or Morrigan unwilling to see Kieran housed in the Gallows for anything, but it's different again: he had been a child, too.
This time, when she presses a kiss to the nearest patch of skin she stays there for a moment, quiet and warm, offering the sort of tactile comfort that is most familiar to her and easiest to reach for— when saying something is hard, and crafting something that probably will still feel wildly insufficient takes time, she can just be near. She can do that.
“I'm sorry,” she says, finally, because it's true. For the loss; for the echo of responsibility he hasn't shaken off. Donna Strange's life could have been longer and it wasn't. And, the same stubbornness shaded into her care that had prompted her to tell Clarisse in so many words, you're worth coming back for, “These are things that matter, too, Stephen.”
The shape of him, she has; shading in the empty space where something has always been, though.
It is so much better, with her touch and presence saying what her words can’t. Because even with Gwenaëlle, this person most precious to him in all of Thedas, he doesn’t want to see if there’s a ripple of pity or shared grief across her expression, or for her to see whatever his face is doing now (is it wounded? is it too cold and callous and not wounded enough?).
But all things considered, it’s the world’s most benign interrogation. Any innocent question to Gwenaëlle had always led to her giving him more than he’d expected, all her most gruesome details in a row; whereas she has to dig in a little harder, rattle it loose from him, until his history comes spilling loose in neat recitation. It’s like dislodging a stubborn boulder, slowly rolling it away.
These are things that matter, too, is such a simple statement and yet the simplicity of it almost undoes him. There’s a hollow ache in his chest, for a wound so old and worn and rarely-travelled. For how methodically Stephen Strange has excised this part of himself, carving it out like a tumour.
“They’re long-dead, and it happened in another universe, multiple lifetimes ago,” he says, which isn’t technically true but she gets the spirit.
Slowly, as he works through it aloud: “I know I can be habitually secretive; annoyingly so. I don’t mean to be, at least not with you. But it just… it’s like I buried that part of my life. It became irrelevant. Does that make any sense? The sorcerer is barely recognisable as the surgeon I was, and in turn he’s unrecognisable from the farmboy. I left it behind and then I consciously, purposefully, worked very hard to not be that person anymore. I haven’t spoken of them in years.”
It’s not that it’s Gwenaëlle he resisted speaking to, in short.
Despite herself, she hears an echo — but of something she has yet to look in the face, and this moment isn't about her, so it's actually very reasonable of her to keep repressing that, this isn't the time to unpack it, a thing that she never intends to unpack. She sets that aside, and sinks into what he's telling her, absorbs the slow impact of wishing that it wasn't something that made so much sense.
She understands well enough to wish he didn't. It's hard not to only say that, and she's so close to him that he can almost feel against his skin the way her lips purse, holding something in,
“I know a little of reinvention,” she says, finally. Slower, and less deliberate, but: “All the things I told you— when I was first taken to the Inquisition, I thought I'd die if anyone knew them. And the worst things that I had ever imagined happening kept happening, and I kept surviving them,”
and no one can hurt her with the truth if she wears it boldly, she thinks, and sometimes it's true and sometimes it isn't. But,
slowly,
“You don't have to do as I do. I only— I want to be a place for you that's safe. Like you are. For me. I don't mind prising it out of you a little if you don't mind me doing it.”
He swallows. One of his crossed arms fumbles a little, reaching out for her hand where she’s touching his other elbow: his fingers just lightly grazing her knuckles.
“I don’t mind at all. And I’d like that very much. I need… I’ve always needed people to challenge me.” Which explains a lot about why he likes Gwenaëlle in particular.
There are other, worse angles to this story, the shame that twists Stephen’s gut. He’s too aware that the pieces he’s doled out so far make him sound very brave and noble and responsible: the self-flagellating young boy who embarked on a lifelong quest to save lives, driven by tragedy. It’s not even getting into the twisted arrogance that his career became once he’d lost the plot, forgotten what he was there for.
But if they’re really truly going to know each other—
“And so that you’re not… misled,” Stephen says, halting, “and I’m not cherrypicking the bits that sound best. I would like you to know the ugliest parts of me. While we’re on the topic. Since I don’t know when else I’d mention it.”
“...ouais,” after a moment, a slow exhale through her nose that isn't quite a sigh, “yes. In that case—”
she doesn't have to do this, and they're talking about him, and
“—there are things I would like to say, too.” Gwenaëlle is less under any illusion that Stephen views her as particularly flawless or heroic, but he has seen ... a better, maybe the best, version of who she is. She knows the difficult path to where they're standing more intimately than she suspects it entirely appears, sometimes, as ready as he often is to credit her with the best of his pivots in Riftwatch.
And, yes, sure, but.
“But I talk all the time,” she adds, “so you're going first.”
Even in the middle of this godawful conversation, that comment makes him laugh, unexpectedly— and so his back heaves beneath her with that breath, Gwenaëlle rising and falling atop him. (Still an odd sensation, although not quite so much as when he was inside her at the time.)
Once Stephen settles, he starts talking. “You mentioned your mother’s deathbed as she slowly died. You mentioned patching up your father when he was drunk, looking after him.” Gwenaëlle Baudin, the dutiful daughter. He takes another deep breath, as if he’s preparing to rip off a band-aid, and continues:
“I was on the other side of the country when they fell ill. Victor was the one left at home alone, both looking after the farm and then taking care of our parents as each of them… deteriorated. Our mother died first, then two years later our father was going the same way. Victor begged me to come home, to visit, to say goodbye, but I kept making excuse after excuse. My studies, I said. My work was too important.
“But in reality, I just didn’t want to see it happening. I was selfish, didn’t want to watch them slowly die when there was nothing I could do to fix it. I told myself there wouldn’t be any point. I never went home. He came out to New York after, furious; we fought, we argued about it. He stormed out of my apartment. That’s when he got hit by the car.”
It’s not quite as simple as declaring it’s my fault — he’s aware enough of all the different pieces of causality, it’s not like he directly shoved Victor into the street — but there is some of that guilt writhing inside him still. If only they hadn’t argued quite so viciously. Then Victor wouldn’t have been so upset, so careless, when he ran out into Manhattan traffic.
Alix and Magalie would have been in the Greatwood, if not for her,
the way she hears fault where he stops short of ascribing it only because it's what she would do, has done, couldn't help. Less a condemnation than an acute familiarity with the guilt twisting his gut, a terrible place that she knows well. How she'd avoided falling into it, that night in Halamshiral, riding the high of her success with people who had known her sister better than she did. How easy she knows it is to be felled by, if looked at directly.
(She's never known of a certainty if Annegret had wanted her there or only taken satisfaction in holding her away from her father, afraid that if she had left her side she wouldn't be sent for— dutiful but not selfless, desperate to find love in the absence of its expression.)
“When did you stop talking about them?” she asks, quiet, sliding her fingers against his and leaving their hands there, too loosely connected to jostle his joints but close enough to make the gesture plainly purposeful.
It might be time, eventually, to roll over and carry on this conversation normally and in a way where he can see her face; but for now, this is fine. This works. And Stephen thinks for a moment, to verify when he suspects it happened, but he doesn’t have to think for very long. The answer’s right in front of him and has been all along.
“Right from the start,” he says. “When I left Nebraska as soon as I could at eighteen, and moved to New York for pre-med. For school. I even—”
this part is going to sound so laughable, the fucking meticulous lengths he’d gone to, when it’s not like he was hiding a scandalous elfblooded history or anything, it wasn’t anything that would have disastrous social consequences for him, and yet, and yet,
“I even changed my accent. Practiced it until I could fit in. Erased all traces of my past. Until hardly anyone could guess I’d come from the country and with shit on my boots.”
Maybe if he'd taken her off-guard with it, she'd have had a different reaction — if there'd been no one here to compare him to, if she'd known less about all of them — maybe then she'd have found it more immediately shocking than she does, instead listening to him confirm aloud something she'd suspected, contemplatively, earlier than now. Maybe she'd have said something thoughtlessly insensitive,
although maybe not, as attuned as she is to him in this moment. What she does say is,
“It's still a part of you,” quietly, “but the ... delineation. You mark it so particularly,” sorcerer, surgeon, farmboy. “Like you were different people. But I can see...”
Her fingers trace a line from his hand along his forearm: “The connective tissue between them. How one led to the next. There are parts of you that I couldn't, mmmm, that I didn't understand how they fit. I misread you, sometimes, because of that. ” She says it with such matter of fact certainty; that she had been revising her understanding of him with unfurling context, that she can see the spaces where she guessed wrong with too little to work off of. “I'd bet,”
thoughtfully,
“at that point it was just easier to do the thing you'd been doing anyway. And close that door.”
That ache deepens, twists, gnarls in his chest again, his skin burning with that gentle touch trailing along his forearm. He’s never really had anyone see and acknowledge and understand all the connective tissue before; he’d never let them be privy to all the pieces.
“Exactly,” Stephen says. “And then you go through yet another door, and close that one behind you too, and you get further and further from that starting point. Intellectually, of course I’m aware that every step and every brick built led me to who I am today — and here, to you, to which I’m indescribably grateful — but it’s also…”
He’s never had to think about this part before, let alone articulate it aloud.
“I’ve been to your Hightown estate. You could theoretically show me the lake in the Greatwood where you swam. I can’t do that. It’s yet another door removed. I’ve told you about Wong because there’s a fleeting chance a version of him might show up here. But the farm in Nebraska, it’s long-gone people you’d never meet and yet another door removed, an impossibility — although I guess you did get to see Earth, sort of, in the Fade.”
And thankfully that, too, counts as the things that matter. The Sanctum, his closest thing to a home which he’d chosen and taken and made his own, his love for it seeped into every creaking floorboard.
People have come to Thedas who had died, she thinks. But she thinks, a moment later: one of them was Tony Stark. He knows that. The words that he's saying, that Wong is possible but Victor Strange isn't — Donna, never older than ten — those are not the words of a man regarding the whims of the Fade through analytical observation. It's Clarisse, on the verge of tears, certain that the vision of her father cannot be real because he would never come for her.
“You loved them,” she says, maybe just so one of them has said it out loud, this very true thing that is threaded through every twisting wince of pain in this conversation, “so it's a door that I would like to be behind, a little. I can't meet them, but they're important to you, I— I don't know.”
She does know, actually.
“I care about the things that are important to you. I don't need them to be things you can give me.”
It’s a hopelessly self-evident fact, but not for a man who has struggled so much with these mere basics of letting himself be loved. Stephen’s next breath is shaky.
Ugh, feelings are the worst, why must we have them.
It’s finally too much, having hit some critical mass where his neck and shoulders are getting stiff in this position and he could claim that’s the pragmatic reason; but mostly it’s just that he’d like to see Gwenaëlle again. He shifts beneath her, a tell-tale roiling landslide of movement as he tilts and tilts until she’s dislodged and slides off him to the mattress, but he soon follows it up by still rolling until he’s reversed their positions, his body hovering over hers, leaning in to kiss her.
Sometimes he, too, finds it a little easier to communicate without words.
All things considered, it takes her less off-guard than it might and the huff of laughter she lets out is just a breath before his mouth is on hers and her hands have slid to the nape of his neck, barely hearing the double thud of Small Yngvi landing off the side of the bed, finally giving up on these idiots. Kissing him has yet to stop feeling wondrously novel, a gift, a thing stolen and to be held onto tightly and jealously—
she is in no rush to make him use his words again, in other words, when she'd really been very looking forward to exactly this. The weight and taste of him. The assurance that they are both whole and here and that neither of them have thought better of embarking on the arguable insanity of romantic entanglement. Maybe, too: that pressing him hasn't pushed him away, peeling him open to look at his innards when she has herself reacted harshly, even violently, to the same.
(Not from him, though. And isn't that it, exactly?)
“You're so important to me,” she says, and it sounds like a scold, except she's still kissing him, the words sliding languid between their mouths. “I don't know how to not want to be in your ribcage about it.”
That brings on another chuckle, laughing into her mouth — that sentence doesn’t even make sense — but his ribcage is warm for hearing it, that frigid carved-out hollow slowly filling with something more. Something bubbly and fizzy and sparky. It’s stupid.
“Hopefully not literally,” Stephen says, jokingly. His knee fits between hers, his hand against the bracket of her cheek, instinctively finding their way back to lying comfortable and entangled in her bed.
And it would be so very easy to be swept away and to lose themselves in this, in lingering kisses and touches and giddy smiles and a pleasant morning in,
except that they both have minds and memories like steel traps, and he never leaves a task unfinished. And so as his thumb traces Gwenaëlle’s jaw, Stephen adds quietly, “Your turn.”
she was sort of hoping maybe they could do her turn another time. In her head it had sounded very generous of her, even: this conversation has been raw and difficult and a lot, and maybe he would like to just recover a bit from having it before she suddenly makes it all about herself, that seems reasonable, doesn't it? That seems like being thoughtful, and not just— cowardly, when she had volunteered it. When she does want to meet him there, but that doesn't make doing it any easier.
Under his hand, her mouth tightens, her lower lip disappearing, and she closes her eyes. He feels warm and good and she wants to only feel those things.
Saying any of that out loud, now, does not feel generous or kind or reasonable. She says, at length,
“I don't remember how much I've said about how they died. The Baudins, my sisters, my birth mother. Not everything, I think.” If anything.
A breath out.
“I was a lady, you know. I was an heiress. I was a courtier. And I had this secret and I was afraid of it every hour of every day— that I was this ugly thing that had been done to my mother and she had sacrificed so much, both of my mothers, and it was all so fucking fragile. It all depended on me, and I'm not...”
Good at those things. Suited to that world. No, Gwenaëlle who was sent to Hightown when Mother Pleasance was here, who had disavowed the ability to offer much useful advice to him in Val Royeaux, a place she had spent much of her young life. The weight and her knowledge of being so utterly ill-made for the task had been
excruciating.
“I was so fucking angry,” she says, quietly. “And I was cruel. I was so afraid of what would happen if someone knew. All of the time. The way that I treated elves, so no one could ever think for an instant that I might have any reason to sympathise with them, was— ugly. And when my lord made Alix my lady's maid, I was such a fucking nightmare to her— I was so fucking unbearable she couldn't bear me. I didn't strike her, and that's ... what a pitiful bar to have cleared,” quietly, “that at least when I degraded her and complained about everything she did and made her redo perfectly acceptable work because I was afraid that someone would think I favoured her, would see the likeness in our faces, at least I only ever threatened to hit her with a hairbrush. And never did it.”
Much quieter,
“I found it in my father's papers, afterwards. That her mother. That our mother had interceded, at her request, to have her released from the post. That Magalie had wished to go with her, when she left to work, so they lived in the city. When I was in the carriage that the demon destroyed, I could smell the burning,”
and she knew intimately, very soon after, what burning flesh smelled like,
“they were slaughtered. Thranduil investigated it for Mistress Baudin, once. Alix was shot in the back by an archer while she was trying to break down the door to free Magalie from their burning house. Chevaliers. Celene's chevaliers. The only words my sisters ever heard from me were cruel, and I drove them to their deaths. They could have been with me. They could have been in the High Quarter, they could have...if we'd had more of a party to take, the carriage could have delayed...”
When they’re already in the thick of it, might as well get a large swathe of it done at once. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, that’s the deal, the reciprocity; and now it’s Stephen’s turn for that little hitch and the unexpected suckerpunch, the sudden abject understanding, the acute familiarity. He recognises this. The circles and loops and calculations and what-ifs they’ve been weighing for years.
There are other pieces of his own clicking into place, too, filling in his picture of Gwenaëlle. A frightened, defensive younger creature, snapping her teeth to keep herself safe. And the sudden pall in the conversation when he’d asked about chevaliers, her barbed and furious reply (you might consider asking them if they remember the face of their first elven victim), and then his genteel, discreet withdrawal from the topic entirely.
Now the topic’s back, and he’s gazing at it in full transparency.
“If I’d gone home. If I hadn’t been so awful to Victor. If I hadn’t let him leave that day. If the driver had had quicker reflexes,” he says, echoing back a litany of his own, to show that understanding. The last words his brother ever heard from him were cruel, too.
“If you hadn’t been so awful to Alix. If your mother hadn’t interceded. If the chevaliers hadn’t done what they did.”
Stephen thinks himself godawful with words, often a little too callous with them, or just hitting on the wrong angle to take, but it’s his turn to try. And at the end of the day, after all of it, he is still a time sorcerer, so: “The way I console myself, the way I rationalise it. There are endless timelines and endless tangled threads within them. Every tiny piece affects another, and everyone has contributed. If she’d come with you, perhaps she’d have died to the rage demon instead. Maybe the extra weight in the carriage would have sent it off a cliff road on a too-sharp turn. Or the delayed carriage departure might have led to even further deaths. There’s— Those questions are endless, and unanswerable. You can’t keep going down that road. You lose your mind.”
Spoken from experience.
And then, softer, a little late because he always jumps to solutioning, but he gets there in the end: “I’m sorry, too.”
When her mother died, Guenievre Baudin, it had been shoving Gwenaëlle down as an archer loosed the arrow that would lodge in her throat, and to this day it is the clearest memory she has of the woman: her eyes huge, her grip tight, gurgling blood as after all that had been taken from her she was robbed even of last words.
It had been so hard, for such a long time, not to feel that every subsequent hour of her life has been an insult to three women she has only been able to claim as her family in their deaths.
“There was an elven mage,” she says, soft, “when I was barely more than a girl. Him and his sister, they were apostates. For a time they worked our estate, and Pietro and I...it was the most innocent thing I've ever had. He loved me and it— frightened me half to death. In Halamshiral, I thought of that, that artist and his mistress, making a life for themselves that they're happy with, or happy enough, and I had...”
Her brows pinch together as she makes a face, exhales.
“I humiliated him, Stephen. I was so afraid of doing to him what had been done to my mother that I hurt him so badly, I wanted to tear myself out of the part of his heart that loved me and salt it, and it was just this...there are so many bricks like that. In that wall. In what I built of myself. And Pietro, he knew them better than I'll ever have a chance to, now. I wasted all of that time terrorising everyone around me and for what? I'm not la Comtesse de Vauquelin. I never married a Duc. I will not dance attendance, a courtier. Two women gave up their lives for me to be inheritrix Vauquelin and I fumbled it so fucking badly at every turn,”
and that shadow still lingers at the edges of what she's built for herself instead. For what?
For her to thrive, but not as they had dreamed, and how dare she not be what they had dreamed.
It’s a good thing he doesn’t particularly wonder about the name Pietro or ask what was the apostate sister called, because that’d be opening a larger distracting can of worms and we simply don’t have time to unpack all of that,
instead, Stephen shifts up and presses a chaste lingering kiss to that pinched furrow in her brow, as if he can smooth it out.
“You were young and terribly afraid,” he says, close to her ear, practically into her hair. (It’s not quite the same as Gwenaëlle sprawled over his spine and their not being able to see each other at all, but it does provide some small relief, a brief cover to not be looking directly at each other for this part.)
“Frightened dogs bite. It doesn’t excuse it. You behaved shittily. Sometimes people behave shittily. They make mistakes. They get older, and they survive, and they learn, and they do better next time. Sometimes people forgive them for it. Other times they don’t, and you still have to survive and learn and do better. Your end result is still worthwhile, even if you’re not the Comtesse.”
So much of his life has been built on loops, and earning wisdom by harsh degrees. Dying to Dormammu over and over. Dying to Thanos over and over. You try again until it works.
He hesitates, then adds, “Not to make this about me, but so that you see that you and I are both… In Arlathan, you only saw the end. At the wedding. But I had treated Christine abominably before. She tried to be kind and I lashed out after the accident, I said awful things, I chose the words that I thought would hurt her most, in order to drive her away and make her stop loving me. Sometimes we just— we’re cruel, and we fuck up. It happens. We learn.”
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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then, eventually, just wanting to see her,
until it was merely enough to be in the same room, while she braided her hair and they talked through the remains of the day. His voice from the bed had quieted and quieted throughout the conversation, his answers drifting and turning from full sentences into unintelligible Mmhms before eventually into: nothing, just silence and perhaps an ignoble snore, sheer exhaustion dragging him under.
And he finally wakes the next morning, face still buried in the pillows as if he hasn’t moved all night, black-and-grey hair tousled and standing up at odd angles, wavier than usual. There was no particular sound to wake him except for the unmistakable crawling sensation of being watched. Stephen tilts his chin, cracks an eye open; he makes a muffled noise of surprise, and it’s uncertain whether it’s at Small Yngvi practically sitting on his head or at Gwenaëlle’s watchful fey stare looming unexpectedly close to his face (both, it’s both). He stirs slightly, but winds up pinned in place, her ankle digging in to keep him immobile.
“Hi,” he says, drowsy and fond, and, “Good morning.”
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It's given her time to think, though. Turning over the remains of the chaos; considering their own conversations. How much about her is known, broadly and to him, and how much of himself she has been patient and watchful for and still doesn't know—
She starts to move. It is not, in fact, to let him roll over or get up; she follows her ankle with her knee and sprawls lazily on his back, chin against his shoulder, one of her slowly unraveling braids falling to his upper arm as she insinuates herself into a position that is not unpleasant (her shift is thin silk, warmed by her body, slippery between her breasts and hips and his back) if sort of heavy and not immediately easy to extricate from, “It occurred to me this morning that if I'd asked you the sort of personal questions we were all using to test each other that I wouldn't have known nearly as many of the answers as you do, reversed.”
It's not not a test, that she leaves that hanging instead of continuing down the obvious path of so cough it up, Stephen.
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This is a lot to be bombarded with, when she’s clear-eyed and alert and has the advantage of him and he’s still sleep-addled, but:
“What?” Stephen asks, slowly coming awake. “That’s… absurd. You know everything that matters about me.”
— does she, though? He’s starting to wrack his mind to recall details before there’s a thoughtful pause, then an amendment, “You know more about me than anyone else here. But I can… What would you like? My middle name’s Vincent.”
(Small pieces of trivia, innocent factoids, I wanted to be a guitarist. He’s always been incredibly open with her about his life as a sorcerer, the pivot from surgery to sorcery, but there are long gaps and swathes on that canvas which remain blank. The earliest years, in particular.)
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there was a time in her life that the realisation she'd come to would have frightened her into silence, instead. When she'd have lain beside him agonising over the imaginary reasons he might, secretly, not wish her to know all of those things. She isn't seeking comfort for that part of her when she briskly brushes it aside to just ask, but it is reassuring, his bewilderment, his immediate willingness. Of course she must know these things. Absurd that she doesn't. Where would she like to start.
Gwenaëlle presses a kiss to the back of his neck, undone by fondness, and has to take a moment to decide what she would like. Even though it's obvious, really, because always you start at the beginning if you're going to start anywhere, probably,
“You know about my mothers,” she says, “I've mentioned my sisters.” One of them. “Tell me about your farm, before you were insufferable nouveau riche. Who was there?”
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But try as he might, combing back through his considerably accurate memory, Stephen can’t remember breathing his family’s names even once, in the year-and-a-half that he’s been here. It’s an unsettling realisation to have about himself when it’s not something that he did on purpose, just— it was a black hole in his history that he had automatically and unconsciously walked around, skirted, avoided.
He buries his face in the mattress more fully, temporarily holding his breath and not breathing. Just anchoring himself in this: the physical sensation, the warmth of Gwenaëlle’s lips against the nape of his neck, the heat and weight of her sprawled over all of his limbs.
Perhaps it’s a little easier this way, to speak without looking her in the eye, without having to gauge and watch her expressions at the same time as he peels back the layers, picks at the scabs. He readjusts slightly as he comes up for air again, drawing both arms up to fold his forearms beneath his chin, shoulderblades stretching and rippling beneath her. (There’s an offended mrowl from Small Yngvi, before the cat settles again.)
“Besides all the barnyard animals,” said dryly, obfuscating, he’s never actually realised until this moment how very much he obfuscates this exact topic and so she probably has a point,
“A father, a mother, a younger sister and brother. Eugene, Beverly,” there is the briefest pause before the next set of names, “Donna and Victor. Despite the surname, we Stranges were all tremendously, horrendously normal. No millionaire inheritance, no secret ancestral magic, no being bitten by radioactive spiders and granted superpowers. Just a lot of cow dung and hard work and early mornings and fire-and-brimstone church sermons on Sundays. Closed-minded. Pastoral.”
Some people might say pastoral with a touch of dreamy nostalgia, a longing for a simple rural existence; Gwenaëlle can hear the faint bitter derision in it instead. Closed-minded.
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Nothing he had missed about living that life. It catches her ear, the disdain — she thinks about how much he sounds like Stark, often, who had certainly not come from a life like that, about his fastidiousness and his appreciation of fine things. Crass new money, he had said, unabashed about it. How extremely willing he'd been to let her dress him up like a handsome doll when they'd barely known each other, shrugging into the finest version of himself available to him here,
yes. It isn't familiar, exactly, but she thinks wryly that he's not far wrong, you know everything that matters. He isn't telling her things that change him. He is a man she understands.
It also isn't the only part of what he says that catches her, tracing circles on his arm with her thumb. We were, when he was a part of them. Fair. But it's a telling past tense, she thinks, when nothing about his framing suggests that they had shed that life the way he has, and after a moment,
“What happened to them?”
Maybe she's wrong. Maybe he'll say, my sister married some hick and my brother became one, or I could have introduced you in New York but they wouldn't have been real or—
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This, too, is a thing they have in common: the steady loss across their family tree. And she’s clever; she’d already deduced the shape of it. He’s always very clinical and purposeful with his choice of words.
There’s another exhaled sigh. His next lead-in is a vague aim at flippancy and faint gallow’s humour, but it’s a thin attempt. “Also nothing extraordinary. No tragic murders, no supervillains seeking vengeance; it happened while I was in training for neurosurgery, years before I became a sorcerer. Our parents were elderly, so it was just inevitable, those run-of-the-mill incurable diseases like cancers and kidney failures. Victor was hit by a car.”
Banal, everyday, horrible.
The worst one comes last, and there’s another palpable hesitation here; he’s so very unaccustomed to speaking about this, to baring this part of himself, like prying open the cover to a pocketwatch and seeing all his cogs and moving gears open and vulnerable to view. The last person he said this to was in fact himself—
“Donna was just a kid,” he says, and that’s the real sorrow in it. “Ten years old. I was twelve. We were playing at a lake nearby, which we often did. She was a good swimmer but she got a cramp and drowned. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know CPR at the time. Water in the lungs, such a goddamned fixable— It’s what made me decide to be a doctor.”
Which hadn’t, however, helped at all with the other three either. But it does continue to flesh out the shape of him: the control issues, the urge to play god, the hand that wants to hold the knife.
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This time, when she presses a kiss to the nearest patch of skin she stays there for a moment, quiet and warm, offering the sort of tactile comfort that is most familiar to her and easiest to reach for— when saying something is hard, and crafting something that probably will still feel wildly insufficient takes time, she can just be near. She can do that.
“I'm sorry,” she says, finally, because it's true. For the loss; for the echo of responsibility he hasn't shaken off. Donna Strange's life could have been longer and it wasn't. And, the same stubbornness shaded into her care that had prompted her to tell Clarisse in so many words, you're worth coming back for, “These are things that matter, too, Stephen.”
The shape of him, she has; shading in the empty space where something has always been, though.
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But all things considered, it’s the world’s most benign interrogation. Any innocent question to Gwenaëlle had always led to her giving him more than he’d expected, all her most gruesome details in a row; whereas she has to dig in a little harder, rattle it loose from him, until his history comes spilling loose in neat recitation. It’s like dislodging a stubborn boulder, slowly rolling it away.
These are things that matter, too, is such a simple statement and yet the simplicity of it almost undoes him. There’s a hollow ache in his chest, for a wound so old and worn and rarely-travelled. For how methodically Stephen Strange has excised this part of himself, carving it out like a tumour.
“They’re long-dead, and it happened in another universe, multiple lifetimes ago,” he says, which isn’t technically true but she gets the spirit.
Slowly, as he works through it aloud: “I know I can be habitually secretive; annoyingly so. I don’t mean to be, at least not with you. But it just… it’s like I buried that part of my life. It became irrelevant. Does that make any sense? The sorcerer is barely recognisable as the surgeon I was, and in turn he’s unrecognisable from the farmboy. I left it behind and then I consciously, purposefully, worked very hard to not be that person anymore. I haven’t spoken of them in years.”
It’s not that it’s Gwenaëlle he resisted speaking to, in short.
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She understands well enough to wish he didn't. It's hard not to only say that, and she's so close to him that he can almost feel against his skin the way her lips purse, holding something in,
“I know a little of reinvention,” she says, finally. Slower, and less deliberate, but: “All the things I told you— when I was first taken to the Inquisition, I thought I'd die if anyone knew them. And the worst things that I had ever imagined happening kept happening, and I kept surviving them,”
and no one can hurt her with the truth if she wears it boldly, she thinks, and sometimes it's true and sometimes it isn't. But,
slowly,
“You don't have to do as I do. I only— I want to be a place for you that's safe. Like you are. For me. I don't mind prising it out of you a little if you don't mind me doing it.”
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“I don’t mind at all. And I’d like that very much. I need… I’ve always needed people to challenge me.” Which explains a lot about why he likes Gwenaëlle in particular.
There are other, worse angles to this story, the shame that twists Stephen’s gut. He’s too aware that the pieces he’s doled out so far make him sound very brave and noble and responsible: the self-flagellating young boy who embarked on a lifelong quest to save lives, driven by tragedy. It’s not even getting into the twisted arrogance that his career became once he’d lost the plot, forgotten what he was there for.
But if they’re really truly going to know each other—
“And so that you’re not… misled,” Stephen says, halting, “and I’m not cherrypicking the bits that sound best. I would like you to know the ugliest parts of me. While we’re on the topic. Since I don’t know when else I’d mention it.”
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she doesn't have to do this, and they're talking about him, and
“—there are things I would like to say, too.” Gwenaëlle is less under any illusion that Stephen views her as particularly flawless or heroic, but he has seen ... a better, maybe the best, version of who she is. She knows the difficult path to where they're standing more intimately than she suspects it entirely appears, sometimes, as ready as he often is to credit her with the best of his pivots in Riftwatch.
And, yes, sure, but.
“But I talk all the time,” she adds, “so you're going first.”
So there.
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Once Stephen settles, he starts talking. “You mentioned your mother’s deathbed as she slowly died. You mentioned patching up your father when he was drunk, looking after him.” Gwenaëlle Baudin, the dutiful daughter. He takes another deep breath, as if he’s preparing to rip off a band-aid, and continues:
“I was on the other side of the country when they fell ill. Victor was the one left at home alone, both looking after the farm and then taking care of our parents as each of them… deteriorated. Our mother died first, then two years later our father was going the same way. Victor begged me to come home, to visit, to say goodbye, but I kept making excuse after excuse. My studies, I said. My work was too important.
“But in reality, I just didn’t want to see it happening. I was selfish, didn’t want to watch them slowly die when there was nothing I could do to fix it. I told myself there wouldn’t be any point. I never went home. He came out to New York after, furious; we fought, we argued about it. He stormed out of my apartment. That’s when he got hit by the car.”
It’s not quite as simple as declaring it’s my fault — he’s aware enough of all the different pieces of causality, it’s not like he directly shoved Victor into the street — but there is some of that guilt writhing inside him still. If only they hadn’t argued quite so viciously. Then Victor wouldn’t have been so upset, so careless, when he ran out into Manhattan traffic.
And that atop all the other unsaid goodbyes.
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Alix and Magalie would have been in the Greatwood, if not for her,
the way she hears fault where he stops short of ascribing it only because it's what she would do, has done, couldn't help. Less a condemnation than an acute familiarity with the guilt twisting his gut, a terrible place that she knows well. How she'd avoided falling into it, that night in Halamshiral, riding the high of her success with people who had known her sister better than she did. How easy she knows it is to be felled by, if looked at directly.
(She's never known of a certainty if Annegret had wanted her there or only taken satisfaction in holding her away from her father, afraid that if she had left her side she wouldn't be sent for— dutiful but not selfless, desperate to find love in the absence of its expression.)
“When did you stop talking about them?” she asks, quiet, sliding her fingers against his and leaving their hands there, too loosely connected to jostle his joints but close enough to make the gesture plainly purposeful.
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“Right from the start,” he says. “When I left Nebraska as soon as I could at eighteen, and moved to New York for pre-med. For school. I even—”
this part is going to sound so laughable, the fucking meticulous lengths he’d gone to, when it’s not like he was hiding a scandalous elfblooded history or anything, it wasn’t anything that would have disastrous social consequences for him, and yet, and yet,
“I even changed my accent. Practiced it until I could fit in. Erased all traces of my past. Until hardly anyone could guess I’d come from the country and with shit on my boots.”
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although maybe not, as attuned as she is to him in this moment. What she does say is,
“It's still a part of you,” quietly, “but the ... delineation. You mark it so particularly,” sorcerer, surgeon, farmboy. “Like you were different people. But I can see...”
Her fingers trace a line from his hand along his forearm: “The connective tissue between them. How one led to the next. There are parts of you that I couldn't, mmmm, that I didn't understand how they fit. I misread you, sometimes, because of that. ” She says it with such matter of fact certainty; that she had been revising her understanding of him with unfurling context, that she can see the spaces where she guessed wrong with too little to work off of. “I'd bet,”
thoughtfully,
“at that point it was just easier to do the thing you'd been doing anyway. And close that door.”
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“Exactly,” Stephen says. “And then you go through yet another door, and close that one behind you too, and you get further and further from that starting point. Intellectually, of course I’m aware that every step and every brick built led me to who I am today — and here, to you, to which I’m indescribably grateful — but it’s also…”
He’s never had to think about this part before, let alone articulate it aloud.
“I’ve been to your Hightown estate. You could theoretically show me the lake in the Greatwood where you swam. I can’t do that. It’s yet another door removed. I’ve told you about Wong because there’s a fleeting chance a version of him might show up here. But the farm in Nebraska, it’s long-gone people you’d never meet and yet another door removed, an impossibility — although I guess you did get to see Earth, sort of, in the Fade.”
And thankfully that, too, counts as the things that matter. The Sanctum, his closest thing to a home which he’d chosen and taken and made his own, his love for it seeped into every creaking floorboard.
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“You loved them,” she says, maybe just so one of them has said it out loud, this very true thing that is threaded through every twisting wince of pain in this conversation, “so it's a door that I would like to be behind, a little. I can't meet them, but they're important to you, I— I don't know.”
She does know, actually.
“I care about the things that are important to you. I don't need them to be things you can give me.”
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Ugh, feelings are the worst, why must we have them.
It’s finally too much, having hit some critical mass where his neck and shoulders are getting stiff in this position and he could claim that’s the pragmatic reason; but mostly it’s just that he’d like to see Gwenaëlle again. He shifts beneath her, a tell-tale roiling landslide of movement as he tilts and tilts until she’s dislodged and slides off him to the mattress, but he soon follows it up by still rolling until he’s reversed their positions, his body hovering over hers, leaning in to kiss her.
Sometimes he, too, finds it a little easier to communicate without words.
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she is in no rush to make him use his words again, in other words, when she'd really been very looking forward to exactly this. The weight and taste of him. The assurance that they are both whole and here and that neither of them have thought better of embarking on the arguable insanity of romantic entanglement. Maybe, too: that pressing him hasn't pushed him away, peeling him open to look at his innards when she has herself reacted harshly, even violently, to the same.
(Not from him, though. And isn't that it, exactly?)
“You're so important to me,” she says, and it sounds like a scold, except she's still kissing him, the words sliding languid between their mouths. “I don't know how to not want to be in your ribcage about it.”
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“Hopefully not literally,” Stephen says, jokingly. His knee fits between hers, his hand against the bracket of her cheek, instinctively finding their way back to lying comfortable and entangled in her bed.
And it would be so very easy to be swept away and to lose themselves in this, in lingering kisses and touches and giddy smiles and a pleasant morning in,
except that they both have minds and memories like steel traps, and he never leaves a task unfinished. And so as his thumb traces Gwenaëlle’s jaw, Stephen adds quietly, “Your turn.”
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she was sort of hoping maybe they could do her turn another time. In her head it had sounded very generous of her, even: this conversation has been raw and difficult and a lot, and maybe he would like to just recover a bit from having it before she suddenly makes it all about herself, that seems reasonable, doesn't it? That seems like being thoughtful, and not just— cowardly, when she had volunteered it. When she does want to meet him there, but that doesn't make doing it any easier.
Under his hand, her mouth tightens, her lower lip disappearing, and she closes her eyes. He feels warm and good and she wants to only feel those things.
Saying any of that out loud, now, does not feel generous or kind or reasonable. She says, at length,
“I don't remember how much I've said about how they died. The Baudins, my sisters, my birth mother. Not everything, I think.” If anything.
A breath out.
“I was a lady, you know. I was an heiress. I was a courtier. And I had this secret and I was afraid of it every hour of every day— that I was this ugly thing that had been done to my mother and she had sacrificed so much, both of my mothers, and it was all so fucking fragile. It all depended on me, and I'm not...”
Good at those things. Suited to that world. No, Gwenaëlle who was sent to Hightown when Mother Pleasance was here, who had disavowed the ability to offer much useful advice to him in Val Royeaux, a place she had spent much of her young life. The weight and her knowledge of being so utterly ill-made for the task had been
excruciating.
“I was so fucking angry,” she says, quietly. “And I was cruel. I was so afraid of what would happen if someone knew. All of the time. The way that I treated elves, so no one could ever think for an instant that I might have any reason to sympathise with them, was— ugly. And when my lord made Alix my lady's maid, I was such a fucking nightmare to her— I was so fucking unbearable she couldn't bear me. I didn't strike her, and that's ... what a pitiful bar to have cleared,” quietly, “that at least when I degraded her and complained about everything she did and made her redo perfectly acceptable work because I was afraid that someone would think I favoured her, would see the likeness in our faces, at least I only ever threatened to hit her with a hairbrush. And never did it.”
Much quieter,
“I found it in my father's papers, afterwards. That her mother. That our mother had interceded, at her request, to have her released from the post. That Magalie had wished to go with her, when she left to work, so they lived in the city. When I was in the carriage that the demon destroyed, I could smell the burning,”
and she knew intimately, very soon after, what burning flesh smelled like,
“they were slaughtered. Thranduil investigated it for Mistress Baudin, once. Alix was shot in the back by an archer while she was trying to break down the door to free Magalie from their burning house. Chevaliers. Celene's chevaliers. The only words my sisters ever heard from me were cruel, and I drove them to their deaths. They could have been with me. They could have been in the High Quarter, they could have...if we'd had more of a party to take, the carriage could have delayed...”
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There are other pieces of his own clicking into place, too, filling in his picture of Gwenaëlle. A frightened, defensive younger creature, snapping her teeth to keep herself safe. And the sudden pall in the conversation when he’d asked about chevaliers, her barbed and furious reply (you might consider asking them if they remember the face of their first elven victim), and then his genteel, discreet withdrawal from the topic entirely.
Now the topic’s back, and he’s gazing at it in full transparency.
“If I’d gone home. If I hadn’t been so awful to Victor. If I hadn’t let him leave that day. If the driver had had quicker reflexes,” he says, echoing back a litany of his own, to show that understanding. The last words his brother ever heard from him were cruel, too.
“If you hadn’t been so awful to Alix. If your mother hadn’t interceded. If the chevaliers hadn’t done what they did.”
Stephen thinks himself godawful with words, often a little too callous with them, or just hitting on the wrong angle to take, but it’s his turn to try. And at the end of the day, after all of it, he is still a time sorcerer, so: “The way I console myself, the way I rationalise it. There are endless timelines and endless tangled threads within them. Every tiny piece affects another, and everyone has contributed. If she’d come with you, perhaps she’d have died to the rage demon instead. Maybe the extra weight in the carriage would have sent it off a cliff road on a too-sharp turn. Or the delayed carriage departure might have led to even further deaths. There’s— Those questions are endless, and unanswerable. You can’t keep going down that road. You lose your mind.”
Spoken from experience.
And then, softer, a little late because he always jumps to solutioning, but he gets there in the end: “I’m sorry, too.”
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It had been so hard, for such a long time, not to feel that every subsequent hour of her life has been an insult to three women she has only been able to claim as her family in their deaths.
“There was an elven mage,” she says, soft, “when I was barely more than a girl. Him and his sister, they were apostates. For a time they worked our estate, and Pietro and I...it was the most innocent thing I've ever had. He loved me and it— frightened me half to death. In Halamshiral, I thought of that, that artist and his mistress, making a life for themselves that they're happy with, or happy enough, and I had...”
Her brows pinch together as she makes a face, exhales.
“I humiliated him, Stephen. I was so afraid of doing to him what had been done to my mother that I hurt him so badly, I wanted to tear myself out of the part of his heart that loved me and salt it, and it was just this...there are so many bricks like that. In that wall. In what I built of myself. And Pietro, he knew them better than I'll ever have a chance to, now. I wasted all of that time terrorising everyone around me and for what? I'm not la Comtesse de Vauquelin. I never married a Duc. I will not dance attendance, a courtier. Two women gave up their lives for me to be inheritrix Vauquelin and I fumbled it so fucking badly at every turn,”
and that shadow still lingers at the edges of what she's built for herself instead. For what?
For her to thrive, but not as they had dreamed, and how dare she not be what they had dreamed.
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instead, Stephen shifts up and presses a chaste lingering kiss to that pinched furrow in her brow, as if he can smooth it out.
“You were young and terribly afraid,” he says, close to her ear, practically into her hair. (It’s not quite the same as Gwenaëlle sprawled over his spine and their not being able to see each other at all, but it does provide some small relief, a brief cover to not be looking directly at each other for this part.)
“Frightened dogs bite. It doesn’t excuse it. You behaved shittily. Sometimes people behave shittily. They make mistakes. They get older, and they survive, and they learn, and they do better next time. Sometimes people forgive them for it. Other times they don’t, and you still have to survive and learn and do better. Your end result is still worthwhile, even if you’re not the Comtesse.”
So much of his life has been built on loops, and earning wisdom by harsh degrees. Dying to Dormammu over and over. Dying to Thanos over and over. You try again until it works.
He hesitates, then adds, “Not to make this about me, but so that you see that you and I are both… In Arlathan, you only saw the end. At the wedding. But I had treated Christine abominably before. She tried to be kind and I lashed out after the accident, I said awful things, I chose the words that I thought would hurt her most, in order to drive her away and make her stop loving me. Sometimes we just— we’re cruel, and we fuck up. It happens. We learn.”
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