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 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...”
no subject
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.”
no subject
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.
no subject
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.”
no subject
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.
no subject
“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.”
no subject
“Mine is Clothilde.”
no subject
“What? No. You’re shitting me.”
no subject
she is as serious as the grave, Stephen Strange.
“It's where,” helpfully, “my nom de guerre came from, when I published originally. Ilde.”
no subject
“Maybe the woman was a horny older version of you from the future,” Stephen says, less helpfully. “A very majestic madame.”
no subject
“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.