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.”
The idea of worthwhile, of worthiness, of — how can she ever presume to even aspire to make them proud — it's something that she has grappled with for years, now, to unsatisfying results. It is exhausting to carry and it is exhausting to think of setting it down, too, when sometimes it feels like the bleed is all she has left. They shared so little,
if she is not guilty, what is she?
“Had that one in the barrel,” she murmurs, an echo of him. Long time, she'd said, and: yes, that's easy to imagine, now, in the weight of this awful understanding between them. What a thing to twist their hands around, to recognise in each other—
she is grateful in a way she doesn't love, that he keeps his face near her hair. Because she doesn't have to look him in the eye— because she needs to hold onto him, to breathe in the smell of him, to remember that all of these terrible things are not in this room, and she is in no physical danger, and if she said I don't want to talk about this any more he would probably kiss her forehead again, which would be nice, and he might do that anyway.
“I'm so tired of learning lessons,” she says to his shoulder.
Stephen snorts; not all the way to a laugh, just a short huffed breath, but the half-smile’s there in his face buried in her neck.
“I try to be a lifelong student, but no, I agree.”
It’s so odd. This isn’t how he intended or wanted to start the day, and this conversation would have been unutterably harder with anyone else. With Christine, even, who’s likely too good of a person for it. It’s that recognition which makes it easier: here are my ugly edges, here are where we align. Here is where I, too, have been spiteful and awful and selfish and monstrous. I understand.
His arm’s slung over her ribcage, a reassuring weight. His voice is a little muffled, but with an attempt at a clean scalpel-cut lancing the emotional tension and grief sitting heavy in the air and thick in their throats and hearts: “You can put it down today, at least. All you need to remember is that my middle name’s Vincent.”
Oh, at that she is really laughing, “Clothilde Decima, but I think that one isn't really mine, Lady Decima was my lord's mistress, I don't count it so much—”
she is as serious as the grave, Stephen Strange.
“It's where,” helpfully, “my nom de guerre came from, when I published originally. Ilde.”
Gwenaëlle spends about thirty seconds trying to decide how mad she is about this suggestion before instantly turning it on him, insouciant, rolling him onto his back with a push so she can knee over his lap, terribly haughty from this new vantage point above him:
“Well, that's what you have to look forward to, then, so you'd best enjoy this while it lasts.”
Another laugh; lower in his throat, now, as his hands drift down and settle on her hips. Then they slide beneath the insubstantial edge of her chemise, warm palms against the bare skin of her ass.
“Hmm. I think I could do that, yeah.”
Haughty and rightfully so, as she plays him like a fiddle, effortlessly shifting the tone in the room. The tension’s been effectively punctured, all that awful flayed vulnerability now bleeding away as they pivot back towards the safety of cheeky humour, that perpetually-simmering heat, and Gwenaëlle giving an experimental taunting rock of her hips to stir him to life, Stephen arching a knowing eyebrow up at her.
This, this was more what they’d thought the itinerary for the night and morning was going to be.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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no subject
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.”
no subject
“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.”
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
“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.”
no subject
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.”
no subject
“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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if she is not guilty, what is she?
“Had that one in the barrel,” she murmurs, an echo of him. Long time, she'd said, and: yes, that's easy to imagine, now, in the weight of this awful understanding between them. What a thing to twist their hands around, to recognise in each other—
she is grateful in a way she doesn't love, that he keeps his face near her hair. Because she doesn't have to look him in the eye— because she needs to hold onto him, to breathe in the smell of him, to remember that all of these terrible things are not in this room, and she is in no physical danger, and if she said I don't want to talk about this any more he would probably kiss her forehead again, which would be nice, and he might do that anyway.
“I'm so tired of learning lessons,” she says to his shoulder.
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“I try to be a lifelong student, but no, I agree.”
It’s so odd. This isn’t how he intended or wanted to start the day, and this conversation would have been unutterably harder with anyone else. With Christine, even, who’s likely too good of a person for it. It’s that recognition which makes it easier: here are my ugly edges, here are where we align. Here is where I, too, have been spiteful and awful and selfish and monstrous. I understand.
His arm’s slung over her ribcage, a reassuring weight. His voice is a little muffled, but with an attempt at a clean scalpel-cut lancing the emotional tension and grief sitting heavy in the air and thick in their throats and hearts: “You can put it down today, at least. All you need to remember is that my middle name’s Vincent.”
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“Mine is Clothilde.”
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“What? No. You’re shitting me.”
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she is as serious as the grave, Stephen Strange.
“It's where,” helpfully, “my nom de guerre came from, when I published originally. Ilde.”
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“Maybe the woman was a horny older version of you from the future,” Stephen says, less helpfully. “A very majestic madame.”
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“Well, that's what you have to look forward to, then, so you'd best enjoy this while it lasts.”
🎀
“Hmm. I think I could do that, yeah.”
Haughty and rightfully so, as she plays him like a fiddle, effortlessly shifting the tone in the room. The tension’s been effectively punctured, all that awful flayed vulnerability now bleeding away as they pivot back towards the safety of cheeky humour, that perpetually-simmering heat, and Gwenaëlle giving an experimental taunting rock of her hips to stir him to life, Stephen arching a knowing eyebrow up at her.
This, this was more what they’d thought the itinerary for the night and morning was going to be.