"He's the mage who blew up the Chantry in Hightown, he was only still alive because he was made a Warden and they're..."
A vague gesture of her hand. Complicated. Slightly exempt from the usual rule of law, which is already a more malleable thing in so feudal a series of interconnected and overlapping cultures. Sometimes it's just who yells the loudest with the biggest stick, which is not unrelated to the way the mage rebellion had kicked off with a really big fucking bang.
"A spirit healer, if you can believe it."
That, and not the terrorism, had been her first encounter with him; she hadn't yet known the name of the terrifying mage who'd set the world on its ear, so it hadn't meant much to her when he'd said it, meaning to give her the opportunity to object if she preferred some other pair of healing hands. Nearly a decade ago, now; sometimes they'd been civil, and others significantly less so. She'd learned from him, a bit, and they'd snapped at each other, and she doesn't even recall what specifically she'd decided to never forgive him for.
It doesn't really matter, now. It probably didn't matter all that much then, either.
"Alistair was a Warden, too. The best of them, I think," and if she knew Ellis better then she might have an asterisk, but Alistair was her best friend before Alexandrie was, so, "he was one of the first people I ever talked to about my mother. He was Fiona's son." Elfblooded, too. "I wrote him when she was killed, I don't know if he got it. Sabine must be alive, they've said everyone from here, I don't know if she'd have been at the Keep with him or not. I have to write to her."
He’s used to the way this happens: Gwenaëlle’s meandering tangents, her half-finished thoughts, teetering from one idea to the next. The name Grey Warden Alistair does ping recognition, because Stephen’s done his historical research, and the presumably-a-king's-bastard son who fought alongside the Hero of Ferelden is a figure for the literal history books. And then there’s the parts he didn’t know: Grand Enchanter Fiona. Starkhaven. The pieces of the tapestry starting to come into view; tug on one thread and the rest moves as one.
I’ll write Sabine, Gwenaëlle had said over the crystals, and it’s easy enough to guess why she can’t simply have have Guilfoyle handle this particular correspondence.
“I’m shit at giving bad news, too,” Stephen says after a beat. “Always one of the worst parts of the job.”
Give him a knife and blood-stained hands and he knew what to do; he could roll up his sleeves and get to work, focus on the problem and its solution. Give him a grieving family in plastic hospital chairs, looking at him and waiting to hear, and he perpetually found himself at loose ends and over-analysing his own facial expressions and if he was reacting enough, or too much, or too little, and was his voice too warm, too cold, too brisk, such that in the end—
“Honestly, I wasn’t even good at the good news either. But do you want to talk through it?”
Instinctively, she thinks: no, definitely not, and is briefly diverted trying to imagine how badly one can deliver good news, but she's managed that, she's pretty sure, so actually maybe that makes perfect sense. And then she thinks, she would quite like to break another chair, or to talk about how once she banned all Grey Wardens from the de Coucy mansion and only discovered Anders even was one when he came to her in high dudgeon, presuming the decree personal and specific, and then maybe cry for a bit more, utterly unrelated. To recall: Alistair, on the ramparts, his head probably doing what hers had been days ago, if I die, you have to tell them it was a demon.
Everyone had been so much less concerned with her urgent, panicked crystal demand for a healer when they'd realised it was for Alistair and not for her, which annoys her anew remembering, and then that—
The delay is hard to read, except that maybe she is trying not to just blurt out seven unhelpful, barely-related thoughts as they bounce through her mind, distracted, distressed. She sets aside the part of the chair she's still holding with the very deliberate gesture of someone who is choosing not to throw it, and slumps sideways until she's lain her head in his lap, which is a more pleasant place to be all of these terrible things. It means she can gaze at an unimportant part of a wall, noticing the way that the floor meets it ever so slightly uneven. Where the finish is not perfect, and there is a very slight lift.
“My aunt wrote me this letter,” does not immediately seem related. So there's that. “Weeks ago. I thought I was talking to Orlov about it and it was the fucking demon. I can't stop thinking about it, now, because I'm so fucking angry with her that Casimir is dead and I'm likely never going to know why he was with the fucking Grey Wardens to die in the first place, which is why I fucking banned them from the mansion anyway, and she is— hallucinating me in the woods.”
Gwenaëlle closes her eyes. Against his thigh she has the tension of something about to move, and remains still; an active choice to do so. Difficult.
“I don't want to write to Sabine to tell her terrible news she likely already knows, I want to ask Coupe if the conversations she's having with me in her stupid cottage with my stupid uncle living in stupid political sin until she's so addled it's not safe to let her live are ever about the last fight that we had and if I've won yet and I don't. I was right. It was right. It was right to give Casimir himself back, it was wrong that he was ever treated less a person for the disconnection, it— he was a miracle,” she says, her mouth twisting, struggling to say it steady. “We made a miracle happen. Trevelyan died, I don't know why I'm surprised.”
He was a miracle to her, though, and she has never met loss but to be undone by it.
There’s the brief moment of Stephen going very quiet and motionless as she settles in his lap — even now some part of him still needing to grow accustomed to this, to such casual touch, to being this possessive with each other — before he readjusts the tilt of his knees to make it more comfortable for her.
Those seven barely-related thoughts make it out after all, leaving him perplexed as he tries furiously to keep up. (Who’s Casimir? Why is Coupe coming up— ah, that’s the aunt, somehow Gwenaëlle had never actually mentioned her name. What miracle?)
But he lets it happen and simply goes with it, the way you might meditatively float along in a current, letting it carry you wherever it will. Stephen reaches down, brushes a few unruly locks out of Gwenaëlle’s face and out of the way. He considers which metaphorical string to pull on out of all that tangled mess, lost without context. In the end, he chooses this one, the name delicate like handling spun silk, having heard how it must matter to her:
“Lyov,” she says, and that's never going to be her whole answer, but this comes slower than the rest. The tight press of her mouth eases under that gentle touch to her hair; she twists her fingers in the edge of his robe, allowing herself to be grounded. Present, in this moment, and not spinning dizzyingly out into a hundred previous.
A slow exhale, remembering his one proper conversation on this topic and dredging up the recollection with his usual pinpoint precision.
“Julius and I discussed the practice a bit. I know they undergo a procedure to cut themselves off from magic, from dreaming, from their own emotions. In the hopes of being safe from demonic possession, only for it to not be a complete assurance after all. I know it can be a voluntary alternative to a Harrowing, but isn’t always. That it can be forcibly misused.”
Stephen bites off whatever he was about to say next. Getting into his heated opinions about lobotomisation parallels probably isn’t really what this conversation is about.
Gwenaëlle's own strong opinions on the matter of Tranquility are not dissimilar, probably; also, probably not quite the same. She swallows something she might have said, on the matter of misuse, and —well. Maybe this isn't not that,
“Casimir wasn't an apprentice. He had been harrowed. I don't know if it was a...sentence or an agreement or the quantifiable difference between those things in a Circle.” Tranquility is not meant to be forced on anyone, but what is voluntary in a life without free choice? She remembers: you don't have to feel something about it to understand when people are behaving disrespectfully towards you. She remembers, I have not forgotten manners.
“Averesch, the mage one, knew him before, I think. I only knew him after. We were friends. That's—”
a breath out. The other Averesch isn't even around any more for the distinction to matter, except that it very much matters Kostos Averesch knew Casimir Lyov because they were both mages.
“You know, my adventure in the swamp— Guilfoyle was with me, and Adalia, you don't know her, she was a rifter. Hakkon's Wrath. The wyvern.” The one that left a gnarled scar at her inner thigh that he's got to know more intimately, recently. “I was there because we were seeking ingredients that the mages needed for the ritual that. He used to be Tranquil, Stephen. We demonstrated that the cure was real and repeatable and that it could be undone. He chose to undo it. It wasn't sanctioned and Coupe was furious and we thought the Chantry might have him fucking assassinated and I don't know why I thought there was anywhere he'd be safe.”
There’s a jolt of surprise at that piece of information: a lurch and muscle spasm, almost displacing Gwenaëlle from his lap entirely (and once again the feline similarities are there, the exact same thing having happened to Small Yngvi on multiple occasions). His mouth forms the word what, before he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence because there’s too much to say.
Why isn’t this in every Riftwatch pamphlet, why isn’t this shouted from every street corner, why haven’t you gone out and offered to undo it for every single Tranquil still living. One more nail driven into the coffin of Chantry control over mages.
He picks through his now-scattered thoughts, trying to find the right way to say this. “That’s,” he starts, stops. “That’s a goddamn— that is a miracle.”
It’s a miracle. What the fuck, Gwenaëlle. Like finding out his girlfriend was part of implementing a way to regrow atrophied neurons, reattach severed cerebral lobes, repair horrific brain damage.
Stephen has that crinkle in his brow he gets whenever he’s puzzling over some aspect of Thedosian life and culture that he’s struggling with. “Why was she furious? Isn’t this just— an unequivocal good, it’s a cure, it’s a fix in a world where usually not everything can be fixed—”
Sitting up is not totally because he nearly kneed her into the ceiling. (It's not completely unrelated.) It is also because it feels like the sort of conversation she suddenly needs her hands for, like he's right but it just isn't so cleanly, simply obvious and of the two of them she is the one who remembers when the clean, simple, obvious answer was the perfect polar opposite of what they now discuss. She lived that, not him, and it is inextricable from just how immense the thing that they had done is,
“Tranquility is meant to be a cure,” she says, reaching for his hands, her eye fixing on his, emphatic. Understand this. “It's not meant to horrify, though it does. Though the way it's used should. It's meant to be peace. It's meant to be better. You have to understand that when I was taught about Tranquility, I wanted it. I didn't think it was fair that you had to be a mage to do it.”
(And you don't, actually, but that's an entirely separate quest-line that Cassandra Pentaghast can't tell anyone about, now,)
“Luwenna Coupe was la limier, the mage hunter. I've heard people sing about how she could ride down an apostate, which technically she is still doing but she'd be in a lot more trouble for it now,” it is mildly surreal that her tone doesn't change for what is absolutely an unnecessary and rude aside about what goes on in that little cottage in the woods, “her qualification for commanding forces was her experience as a decorated Templar. Ten years ago, I had only seen mages enough to count on the fingers of one hand, mostly at a distance, and everyone had told me my entire life that Templars protect us and them. That Tranquility is an unequivocal good for offering a broken thing a use in the Maker's hands. That Circles are the best, safest places for mages to be. That it is heroic to haul someone screaming back into one.”
Stephen Strange is, as we all know, not the best and most tactful at navigating this sort of thing, tending to barge in with typical rifter arrogance and suppoedly-enlightened modern rifter opinions and looking down his nose at these barbaric old-fashioned practices. But he has tried to understand. He has been trying. Ever since Gwenaëlle first tore into him about it.
There’s a lot of information and context in what she’s giving him, and it does make sense, sort of, at least in terms of the public’s attitude towards mages and templars overall. It’s easy to fear a class of people if you’ve never met them and if the rest of the world’s telling you to fear them. But one detail sticks out like a rusty nail, caught in the back of his throat, even as Gwenaëlle folds her hands over his.
“Why would you ever,” Stephen says slowly, with something quietly ferocious in his voice, “want to diminish anything of what makes you so uniquely you?“
Maybe she shouldn't be surprised that that's what he snags on—
but the widening of her eyes, the way she fumbles for an answer, that's not feigned. How long has it been since she thought on that, the curiosity that had drawn her nearer Casimir in the first place — the envy? How much of her anger had been tangled up in the unfairness that she saw in the misuse of something that felt so ... so sacred to her. How it had appalled her, still appalls her, the way the Tranquil are seen and treated or not seen and brushed past, because—
how freeing it had seemed, how clean. How unfair it was to see it made something ugly and ill-treated.
“I am so fucking tired of myself sometimes,” she says, because she doesn't have a better answer than the truth. “I spill over feeling like a stumbling drunk, I—” her face twists, “break perfectly good chairs and fight about stupid things and sometimes my heart beats so hard I can't breathe and it's not like when I was dead, there's no reason, it just happens, I just make myself sick and then when it's gone and it's empty it's not useful. I don't do anything useful or see anything sensible or act logically, I just lie in my fucking bed for days until I have to do something else or else rot.”
This isn't how she meant to tell him these things.
She looks down at their hands—
“Casimir and Alistair and Cullen and Pentaghast,” she says, quiet, miserable. “I'm afraid.”
Angry, and sorrowful, and — afraid of where sorrow has led her, before. Of how much less lovely being so particularly herself can be, when this thing that they've made between them is still new, and still fragile where it isn't yet familiar.
Because Stephen is still at heart, forever and always, a doctor and a clinician, he can already feel his mind ticking over into assessing the symptoms she’d alluded to, and trying to understand them. It sounds like you need antidepressants and anxiety meds, part of him thinks, automatic and instinctive and ruminative. But that’s not exactly helpful when Thedas can’t manufacture controlled psychiatric medication, so —
“I thought it was just a temper,” he says. The parts he’s already familiar with: her whiplash tongue, her quick irritation, her Orlesian passion. But this sounds like something else, even as he’s trying to gauge the shape of it. The shattered pieces of the chair scattered around them as testament to it.
Leaving one hand still holding hers, he leans forward and lays his palm flat against her heart; as if a roundabout way of measuring her pulse, but really just an act of reassurance. (Still remembering that anchoring touch once upon a time: his hand against her spine.)
“That sickness. Those episodes. Can I ask more about that?” This wasn’t meant to be a physician’s consultation, but Stephen can’t help it; this is how he shows care. “Does it feel like a strangling panic? Pounding heart, dizziness and light-headedness, sweating, nausea, tingling in your hands? Anything like that?”
Under his hand, her heartbeat is a fluttering, furious thing, but there's something particularly telling about the muscle memory, too— he lays his palm on her chest and automatically, she takes a great breath in, exhales slowly. It is instinct to match her breathing to his, covering his hand with her own. Someone taught her this, and it helps.
(Someone. He's downstairs, checking the wet things they'd lain out to dry, airing the main floor, making a list of the few things within La Souveraineté that will need replacement.)
“Yes,” she says, slowly, meaning both you can ask and yes, it feels like that. There's a lingering wariness in the tension on her face and how she holds her shoulders — I thought we were past this rings in her ears, an echo — but she is holding onto (his hand) her own reason with both hands, to try. To resist the part of her that would feel safer if she broke something.
It never works. It always feels as if it will, but it never has.
“My neck feels hot and I can't think. Or I'm just— impossibly tired, like my lord was, he would close himself away and only I was allowed to go in, except for once,”
heritable, then. These things often are. (Years later, she has not forgotten not understanding why she was not, this time, allowed. How frightened she was when he looked at her with puzzled unrecognition.)
“And when it's been — difficult, even if I'm tired, I can't sleep.” A breath in. Out. “It happened to Stark, once, at a rift. That was when we discovered I could close them by myself.” She had had to; it had been lucky, only, that she could. “It was sort of why we were friends, you know. When someone has seen you so vulnerable and helped you, it's that or kill the witnesses.”
Stephen snorts a noise, dry amusement; that tracks. Then he considers for a moment, methodically sorting out the words before he speaks.
“I have the unenviable duty of telling you, Gwenaëlle Baudin, that it sounds like you suffer from panic attacks and the occasional chronic depression. All perfectly valid, and perfectly understandable considering the circumstances. You said there’s no reason, but the fact that you’ve been actively embroiled in a war for the past decade is more than reason enough. So many people experience this over much less.”
Thump-thump thump-thump, the frantic patter beneath his hand, the thunderous fear and grief.
It’s not, habitually, the way his own damage has manifested itself. He continually staved off any potential depression with even more obsessive action and movement, never stopping; he’d successfully kept ahead of it, even if his method had been unhealthy in other ways. Except he offers this up to her, like carving off a piece of himself and holding it up for inspection:
“After the car crash. I practically never rode in a car again. I was supposed to take a taxi home from the hospital, and I tried, but had a panic attack and almost vomited in the back seat. I took the train instead, and walked. Even when it added so much extra travel time, I just never got in one again if I could avoid it. I probably should have dealt with it, learned to be okay with it, but then I learned how to make portals and cars became even more avoidable, and— now I’m here, and carriages aren’t fast enough to trigger that same reaction. The enclosed metal space, the speed.
“My point being, this sort of reaction happens. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.”
The effort that she makes — the struggle not to only say the thing that threatens to spill out, reasonable or otherwise — is a tangible thing, nearly, the way she absorbs what he's saying. Dislikes some of it, like the phrase panic attack which is immediately very accurate to the experience and appalling to hear. Dislikes some of it for entirely different reasons, her grip on his hand tightening as he describes how it had felt to get in a car again and she remembers enough of New York's simulacrum to imagine it herself, how trapped he might feel, how his stomach might flip at the speeds.
Imagines the crash. Tries to stop imagining it, consciously easing her grip on his hands before she hurts him.
So it is deliberate, the way that she digs past the thing behind her teeth for the reason for it, instead: “It feels deceitful to say yes, that's so, I have reacted very reasonably to this terrible experience, when I brought it with me. It's—”
he isn't telling her there's something wrong with her. He won't, she thinks, for what she says next. But it feels so upside down from his calm explanation that there's a tightening in her throat of shame that she has done this, too, all arse backwards.
“Better.”
It doesn't feel great to say that out loud.
“I brought it with me to the war and the war gave me purpose and it's been— better. Easier. As if the thing that's—” she bites back wrong with me, shifts the target slightly, “as if I'd just been standing in the wrong place, before. I don't remember a time it wasn't true. A thing didn't happen, I don't— I don't know if something happened.”
A lot of things happened later. Many of them not unrelated to the control she had not learned.
“Coupe changed everything about my life,” she says, finally. “I thought I could only be steady if Thranduil held me that way. And then he didn't, and I'm better at it, and I know that that's probably not the war—”
“I might have taken the wrong tack,” Stephen admits after a beat, and the press of her fingers and his shows that he is still thinking very hard about this. (And that admission in and of itself means quite a bit; he hates to be wrong.) But his own older rancid panic was so clear-cut: here was a traumatising experience. His trauma is specifically around the things which directly remind him of that experience. Gwenaëlle’s is more nebulous.
“It doesn’t have to be that direct through-thread from a specific experience. And it doesn’t have to be because of the war. It can also just, y’know, be that way. It sounds like you had your share of stressful experiences at home, with your parents, your heritage, your secret. And even if you hadn’t, even if everything had been picture-perfect— honestly, sometimes our heads are just fucked. An imbalance in brain chemistry. The way we’re wired. We learn to cope.”
Speaking of, he takes another breath (in, out, Gwenaëlle still mirroring him), somewhere between his own tightened jaw and the struggle to delicately pick his way through these delicate concepts.
Guilfoyle's chest steady underneath her small, clumsy child's hand; Coupe, inexorable, who is holding the knife?
We learn to cope. She has learned—
“Sometimes it has been like you say,” she admits, thinking of the Fade. Lakshmi Bai. The hot panicky feeling on the back of her neck when she'd been sick on the other woman's feet, not so much because of the blow but because of where it had taken her. “I got into a fight once — I started it but it was her fault, we should never have been in the Fade — anyway, she hit harder than me. And I just—”
Every part of her body had remembered being somewhere else and it had not been easy, especially in a place so molded by emotion, to remember where she was.
“I used to— provoke,” she settles on. “It would be wrong of me to harm myself. Selfish. My life wasn't mine, I owed it to my mothers, but if someone else—”
The picture she paints, halting, is not a lovely one. She settles on: “I thought it would be better to be Tranquil. I don't want it any more — any of that, I don't. And I don't want to do to anyone what this feels like,” Casimir, Alistair, Cullen, Pentaghast, “I promise.”
“Good,” he says, getting that promise and that reassurance. There’s another more complicated ache in his own chest too, hearing those uglier details parceled out: imagining them, picturing them, already pained for her.
It is true that Stephen’s been skittish of relationships because it is frightening to be cared for, to open yourself up, to let them see the vulnerable whole of you.
But it is also just as true that he’s been afraid of caring about someone else: to make them so inextricably precious to you, so that their pain is your pain, so that the loss of them would gouge you open. (To hand them that knife, capable of hurting you.)
Stephen’s hand moves from Gwenaëlle’s heart, up to brace against her cheek. I thought it would be better to be Tranquil, she says, rather than being this.
His mouth has set into a thin line, wheels spinning, still agonising over how much to describe. Whether it would be dangling yet another solution just out of reach, unactionable, therefore irrelevant. But in the end — Stephen values knowledge and he always wants to know, to understand why a brain ticks the way it does, to parse reality and make it make sense, it was the whole reason he became a neurosurgeon — so in the end, he decides to try. If it were him, he would want to know. So, trying to find the right vocabulary:
“I’m saying this not to suggest it as the fix, but to set context— sorry, just, bear with me. Back home, there’s— advanced medicine. To fix that brain chemistry I mentioned, to produce the right hormones, to get one’s system back into alignment; maybe someone’s brain makes them constantly too scared or angry, or not attentive enough, or it isn’t capable of generating enough of the emotions to make them happy.
“It’s a careful balancing act for doctors, ones different from me, who specialise in finding the right type of medication and the right dosage and the right effects. I don’t… I still think the Rite of Tranquility is monstrous, a crime, but it’s occurring to me that my world did have treatments to stabilise emotions. To give you a more even keel. It’s just not that permanent sledgehammer to your psyche; it’s more like small, incremental changes, and reversible. So maybe it’s not so alien. To have wanted some form of that. Another tool in the kit, just like medicine for anything else physical: a heart condition, an infection.”
Some of that— goes over her head. There is a neat pile of books beside the bed they now share, full of anatomical diagrams and increasingly full of marginalia that she has solicited him for his thoughts on, making notes and occasionally corrections, winding down in the evenings with just more study to be even more of use. (It is hard, still, not to understand her place in the world directly in relation to her use to it. They really don't have time to also unpack that.) It is practical and actionable and through the lens of medicine as understood by Thedas, not Earth, so concepts like hormones and brain chemistry are not natural to her—
but she understands, enough, what he's saying. He can see it on her face, the way that understanding blooms and disorients,
I thought we were past this. It is, perhaps, not her fault that they aren't. That there is no medicine for the terrible emptiness in the middle of her is not because she should have just been better. Even his world, which seems to the point of frank irritation to take the attitude that so many things are and should be easy to solve, is challenged by this thing that she hasn't been able to brute force into rightness.
Maybe as far as she's got isn't so little as it feels, when it would be unrecognisable to her if she were to see it from ten years ago.
“Oh,” feels so stupidly small, for so monumental a thing. (What if there had been something like that, before Tranquillity, when Casimir had been frightening the Circles he was in—) Her eyes close and she presses her mouth against his palm, holding herself there. The hard wood flooring underneath her. The boning of her corset, dug into her waist with the way she's sat. The warmth of his hand on her face and the other, in hers. Here she is. Here she is. “I—”
It is better to know. She, too, always wants to know — wants to understand — but she can't quite move through that understanding as quickly as she wants to, forcibly sat with it now. Maybe it isn't her fault if she isn't just past it, and maybe that is an entirely new thought she's never had before, and maybe having that thought deserves to be sat with.
And there are ways that this ... makes sense, things that it connects to, her head tilting, “I've used elfroot for the panic, before,” she says, “I didn't think of it in so many words,” had been dismissive when Margaery, watching her breath out wreathes of smoke and the uncontrollable agitation that had sent her careening out into the garden, had queried her on when that started, well, why did you start drinking wine, as if she hasn't also used wine to drown grief and sorrow and rage and the inability to just be fucking still when she desperately wished to be still and quiet.
Easy to grow accustomed to the ordinary thing that had always been ordinary around her; to soak in liquor and sedate the terrible, clutching limitlessness of those feelings.
“You wouldn’t want to self-medicate too-too much, but, yeah. From what I can tell, elfroot is harmless enough and that mellowing effect would help.” You’d have liked Xanax and Klonopin, Gwenaëlle. Also cannabis, but elfroot’s close enough regardless —
They’ve drifted into each other in their positions on the hardwood floor, his knees against hers, easy to face each other. Stephen doesn’t rush her; gives her those long seconds of drawn-out silence and consideration as the pieces start to slowly settle into place. He suspects it’s a lot to take in, without centuries of development in psychiatric theory to pave the way. So he gives her time.
The next idea comes slowly, eventually rising up out of that deep pool of stillness. “Do you remember what I tried to do, in your Hightown parlour after Granitefell? The questions I asked you?”
A nod, recalling — easy to recall when she had been so inclined to fold that idea into the collection of strategies she already has. Things she can see. Things she can feel. Exist in this moment, where nothing is actually trying to hurt her. (Tricky trying to reassure wildly overpowered anxiety living a life where things are frequently trying to hurt her, but not impossible, actually.)
“It reminded me of what Guilfoyle would do,” she says, “counting breaths or — making me explain something to him.”
Distraction, as a method: she is calm before she's realised she's being calmed down.
This had been a part of why she'd cooperated so readily at the time; not the same, maybe more effective, but close enough to something she was used to reaching for that the moment where she might have balked and resisted didn't happen. The other part, probably, had been Stephen himself— she can admit that now, in retrospect, when she hadn't particularly wanted to examine that at the time.
“Guilfoyle’s a wise man. It’s very similar: a grounding exercise to interrupt those spiraling thoughts, to refocus on the tangible.” Stephen has to think for a moment to remember the precise order, but it eventually comes back to him. Teaching her this, handing her more tools for the toolkit, another knife to wield on her own:
“If you find yourself needing to use it again: It’s naming five things you see around you, four things you can touch, three things you hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste.”
His hand drifts down again, away from Gwenaëlle’s cheek to settle on her knee instead, a tangible weight of its own. He tilts his head, inquisitive.
She repeats it back to herself, quieter, five she can see, four she can touch— and the countdown of it makes a soothing sort of sense to her, too. Like something she could run through a few times if she needed to. Counts: the weight of his hand, now. Thinks, at least this time they aren't wet and smelling of wine.
“He's tricked me out of my stupors,” she admits, after that, and it's hard to hold against him but there's still a perceptible hint of irritation at the recollection, because he is good at it, actually: “He knows the levers to make me argue, or to think I need to do something myself, and then I've got up and the bed is being made behind me and I might as well also come over here and eat something and he won't close the curtains again, which I can do myself but it's—”
It is hard not to feel stupid and petulant, standing in the middle of the room, arguing the point. The worst times are when her pride can't be used against her.
The bath has been made a particular way. Well, she doesn't wish it. Well, if it is made to her exacting specifications, then she will have no reason not to get into it. And so on, and so on—
“I am trying to be better,” she says, on a defense that he hasn't given her cause to need. Arguing with shadows that aren't here, and may never have said the things she credits them. “I don't mean him to spend his entire retirement managing me. I sleep. I work. I care about things.”
(About Casimir, and Alistair, and Cullen, and Pentaghast, and this cause that she took up because she fucking lives in the world. It is hers, now, and she is bloody-minded, determined.)
“Mm. Yeah. That sort of thing works too. I just hate to be wrangled, personally; I prefer when it’s something you choose to do yourself. But of course, that means being in a state where you’re able to make that choice— so for all the other times, it’s useful to have a Guilfoyle.
“And I believe you,” Stephen adds. “If there’s one thing I know about you, you care so much, Gwenaëlle. It was one of the first things I ever noticed about you. So I think this sort of thing is a slow process, simply trying and continuing until you wake up one morning and realise you don’t need those crutches anymore. Like a broken leg, healing.”
The press of his fingers against her knee, her hand. This is backtracking a little, but there’s still some connective tissue there: his last big fight with Christine had at least partially been about her managing him, his inability to let someone simply help and pull him out of his drowning spiral. He had picked that fight. Had lashed out and tried to hurt her for it.
And so he asks, reeling back to a few minutes ago, that ugly picture: “Who would you provoke?”
Because he finds himself pained but still wanting to paint in the rest of it, understanding the vulnerable whole of her. If it was her father, or a lover, or friends, or strangers in a bar— these details matter.
Gwenaëlle exhales. In his hand, hers flexes— fingers pulling in toward her palm, then still, relax, her thumb curving over his knuckle. It is not the conversation she imagined having today,
she had, maybe, entertained the idea she wouldn't have to be this detailed. That if she were well, only, it would never have to come up again unless he got really interested in her poetry and then the distance and framing of art would do what it's always done, allow her to art direct her own bruising. Hold it out for a more dispassionate examination. Nothing about this moment is dispassionate—
“I sort of ran through a lot of people in Orlais when I was...younger, before Skyhold,” she says. “I was discreet. It was— I had a lot of freedoms that my lord would have curtailed if he knew what I was doing with them. To myself. And Guilfoyle could have put a stop to some of it if he'd spoken up, I know he knew more, I don't...know what he thought, I've never asked. Anyway, it wasn't his job.”
(Not his job does not seem to mean much to this man, who is officially retired.)
She is, she knows, prevaricating. Talking around the thing. Dissembling, like if she leads him to another tangent she won't have to say these things,
“I couldn't ask someone to sit next to me,” she says, finally. “I couldn't say, I wish you would hold me. And I wanted to be— I don't know, held. Important. I wanted to prove someone would reach for me and if they were reaching for my throat then fine. You know, I can make people angry. I would make them jealous, or... you know, if someone's jealous, then you matter, right. And if you don't matter, then at least you can be valuable in some way, or. Useful. And I am beautiful and I fuck like a desire demon so while I had limited options,” speaking faster, like she can rush through it, past it, “for being useful, I did a really— I just wanted to be reached for. And what happened next didn't matter. And I don't blame anyone.”
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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A vague gesture of her hand. Complicated. Slightly exempt from the usual rule of law, which is already a more malleable thing in so feudal a series of interconnected and overlapping cultures. Sometimes it's just who yells the loudest with the biggest stick, which is not unrelated to the way the mage rebellion had kicked off with a really big fucking bang.
"A spirit healer, if you can believe it."
That, and not the terrorism, had been her first encounter with him; she hadn't yet known the name of the terrifying mage who'd set the world on its ear, so it hadn't meant much to her when he'd said it, meaning to give her the opportunity to object if she preferred some other pair of healing hands. Nearly a decade ago, now; sometimes they'd been civil, and others significantly less so. She'd learned from him, a bit, and they'd snapped at each other, and she doesn't even recall what specifically she'd decided to never forgive him for.
It doesn't really matter, now. It probably didn't matter all that much then, either.
"Alistair was a Warden, too. The best of them, I think," and if she knew Ellis better then she might have an asterisk, but Alistair was her best friend before Alexandrie was, so, "he was one of the first people I ever talked to about my mother. He was Fiona's son." Elfblooded, too. "I wrote him when she was killed, I don't know if he got it. Sabine must be alive, they've said everyone from here, I don't know if she'd have been at the Keep with him or not. I have to write to her."
To say what? Come back.
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I’ll write Sabine, Gwenaëlle had said over the crystals, and it’s easy enough to guess why she can’t simply have have Guilfoyle handle this particular correspondence.
“I’m shit at giving bad news, too,” Stephen says after a beat. “Always one of the worst parts of the job.”
Give him a knife and blood-stained hands and he knew what to do; he could roll up his sleeves and get to work, focus on the problem and its solution. Give him a grieving family in plastic hospital chairs, looking at him and waiting to hear, and he perpetually found himself at loose ends and over-analysing his own facial expressions and if he was reacting enough, or too much, or too little, and was his voice too warm, too cold, too brisk, such that in the end—
“Honestly, I wasn’t even good at the good news either. But do you want to talk through it?”
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Everyone had been so much less concerned with her urgent, panicked crystal demand for a healer when they'd realised it was for Alistair and not for her, which annoys her anew remembering, and then that—
The delay is hard to read, except that maybe she is trying not to just blurt out seven unhelpful, barely-related thoughts as they bounce through her mind, distracted, distressed. She sets aside the part of the chair she's still holding with the very deliberate gesture of someone who is choosing not to throw it, and slumps sideways until she's lain her head in his lap, which is a more pleasant place to be all of these terrible things. It means she can gaze at an unimportant part of a wall, noticing the way that the floor meets it ever so slightly uneven. Where the finish is not perfect, and there is a very slight lift.
“My aunt wrote me this letter,” does not immediately seem related. So there's that. “Weeks ago. I thought I was talking to Orlov about it and it was the fucking demon. I can't stop thinking about it, now, because I'm so fucking angry with her that Casimir is dead and I'm likely never going to know why he was with the fucking Grey Wardens to die in the first place, which is why I fucking banned them from the mansion anyway, and she is— hallucinating me in the woods.”
Gwenaëlle closes her eyes. Against his thigh she has the tension of something about to move, and remains still; an active choice to do so. Difficult.
“I don't want to write to Sabine to tell her terrible news she likely already knows, I want to ask Coupe if the conversations she's having with me in her stupid cottage with my stupid uncle living in stupid political sin until she's so addled it's not safe to let her live are ever about the last fight that we had and if I've won yet and I don't. I was right. It was right. It was right to give Casimir himself back, it was wrong that he was ever treated less a person for the disconnection, it— he was a miracle,” she says, her mouth twisting, struggling to say it steady. “We made a miracle happen. Trevelyan died, I don't know why I'm surprised.”
He was a miracle to her, though, and she has never met loss but to be undone by it.
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Those seven barely-related thoughts make it out after all, leaving him perplexed as he tries furiously to keep up. (Who’s Casimir? Why is Coupe coming up— ah, that’s the aunt, somehow Gwenaëlle had never actually mentioned her name. What miracle?)
But he lets it happen and simply goes with it, the way you might meditatively float along in a current, letting it carry you wherever it will. Stephen reaches down, brushes a few unruly locks out of Gwenaëlle’s face and out of the way. He considers which metaphorical string to pull on out of all that tangled mess, lost without context. In the end, he chooses this one, the name delicate like handling spun silk, having heard how it must matter to her:
“Who’s Casimir?”
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More haltingly—
“I don't— what do you know about the Tranquil?”
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“Julius and I discussed the practice a bit. I know they undergo a procedure to cut themselves off from magic, from dreaming, from their own emotions. In the hopes of being safe from demonic possession, only for it to not be a complete assurance after all. I know it can be a voluntary alternative to a Harrowing, but isn’t always. That it can be forcibly misused.”
Stephen bites off whatever he was about to say next. Getting into his heated opinions about lobotomisation parallels probably isn’t really what this conversation is about.
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“Casimir wasn't an apprentice. He had been harrowed. I don't know if it was a...sentence or an agreement or the quantifiable difference between those things in a Circle.” Tranquility is not meant to be forced on anyone, but what is voluntary in a life without free choice? She remembers: you don't have to feel something about it to understand when people are behaving disrespectfully towards you. She remembers, I have not forgotten manners.
“Averesch, the mage one, knew him before, I think. I only knew him after. We were friends. That's—”
a breath out. The other Averesch isn't even around any more for the distinction to matter, except that it very much matters Kostos Averesch knew Casimir Lyov because they were both mages.
“You know, my adventure in the swamp— Guilfoyle was with me, and Adalia, you don't know her, she was a rifter. Hakkon's Wrath. The wyvern.” The one that left a gnarled scar at her inner thigh that he's got to know more intimately, recently. “I was there because we were seeking ingredients that the mages needed for the ritual that. He used to be Tranquil, Stephen. We demonstrated that the cure was real and repeatable and that it could be undone. He chose to undo it. It wasn't sanctioned and Coupe was furious and we thought the Chantry might have him fucking assassinated and I don't know why I thought there was anywhere he'd be safe.”
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Why isn’t this in every Riftwatch pamphlet, why isn’t this shouted from every street corner, why haven’t you gone out and offered to undo it for every single Tranquil still living. One more nail driven into the coffin of Chantry control over mages.
He picks through his now-scattered thoughts, trying to find the right way to say this. “That’s,” he starts, stops. “That’s a goddamn— that is a miracle.”
It’s a miracle. What the fuck, Gwenaëlle. Like finding out his girlfriend was part of implementing a way to regrow atrophied neurons, reattach severed cerebral lobes, repair horrific brain damage.
Stephen has that crinkle in his brow he gets whenever he’s puzzling over some aspect of Thedosian life and culture that he’s struggling with. “Why was she furious? Isn’t this just— an unequivocal good, it’s a cure, it’s a fix in a world where usually not everything can be fixed—”
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“Tranquility is meant to be a cure,” she says, reaching for his hands, her eye fixing on his, emphatic. Understand this. “It's not meant to horrify, though it does. Though the way it's used should. It's meant to be peace. It's meant to be better. You have to understand that when I was taught about Tranquility, I wanted it. I didn't think it was fair that you had to be a mage to do it.”
(And you don't, actually, but that's an entirely separate quest-line that Cassandra Pentaghast can't tell anyone about, now,)
“Luwenna Coupe was la limier, the mage hunter. I've heard people sing about how she could ride down an apostate, which technically she is still doing but she'd be in a lot more trouble for it now,” it is mildly surreal that her tone doesn't change for what is absolutely an unnecessary and rude aside about what goes on in that little cottage in the woods, “her qualification for commanding forces was her experience as a decorated Templar. Ten years ago, I had only seen mages enough to count on the fingers of one hand, mostly at a distance, and everyone had told me my entire life that Templars protect us and them. That Tranquility is an unequivocal good for offering a broken thing a use in the Maker's hands. That Circles are the best, safest places for mages to be. That it is heroic to haul someone screaming back into one.”
A breath—
“You're right. But it's an act of war to say it.”
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There’s a lot of information and context in what she’s giving him, and it does make sense, sort of, at least in terms of the public’s attitude towards mages and templars overall. It’s easy to fear a class of people if you’ve never met them and if the rest of the world’s telling you to fear them. But one detail sticks out like a rusty nail, caught in the back of his throat, even as Gwenaëlle folds her hands over his.
“Why would you ever,” Stephen says slowly, with something quietly ferocious in his voice, “want to diminish anything of what makes you so uniquely you?“
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but the widening of her eyes, the way she fumbles for an answer, that's not feigned. How long has it been since she thought on that, the curiosity that had drawn her nearer Casimir in the first place — the envy? How much of her anger had been tangled up in the unfairness that she saw in the misuse of something that felt so ... so sacred to her. How it had appalled her, still appalls her, the way the Tranquil are seen and treated or not seen and brushed past, because—
how freeing it had seemed, how clean. How unfair it was to see it made something ugly and ill-treated.
“I am so fucking tired of myself sometimes,” she says, because she doesn't have a better answer than the truth. “I spill over feeling like a stumbling drunk, I—” her face twists, “break perfectly good chairs and fight about stupid things and sometimes my heart beats so hard I can't breathe and it's not like when I was dead, there's no reason, it just happens, I just make myself sick and then when it's gone and it's empty it's not useful. I don't do anything useful or see anything sensible or act logically, I just lie in my fucking bed for days until I have to do something else or else rot.”
This isn't how she meant to tell him these things.
She looks down at their hands—
“Casimir and Alistair and Cullen and Pentaghast,” she says, quiet, miserable. “I'm afraid.”
Angry, and sorrowful, and — afraid of where sorrow has led her, before. Of how much less lovely being so particularly herself can be, when this thing that they've made between them is still new, and still fragile where it isn't yet familiar.
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“I thought it was just a temper,” he says. The parts he’s already familiar with: her whiplash tongue, her quick irritation, her Orlesian passion. But this sounds like something else, even as he’s trying to gauge the shape of it. The shattered pieces of the chair scattered around them as testament to it.
Leaving one hand still holding hers, he leans forward and lays his palm flat against her heart; as if a roundabout way of measuring her pulse, but really just an act of reassurance. (Still remembering that anchoring touch once upon a time: his hand against her spine.)
“That sickness. Those episodes. Can I ask more about that?” This wasn’t meant to be a physician’s consultation, but Stephen can’t help it; this is how he shows care. “Does it feel like a strangling panic? Pounding heart, dizziness and light-headedness, sweating, nausea, tingling in your hands? Anything like that?”
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(Someone. He's downstairs, checking the wet things they'd lain out to dry, airing the main floor, making a list of the few things within La Souveraineté that will need replacement.)
“Yes,” she says, slowly, meaning both you can ask and yes, it feels like that. There's a lingering wariness in the tension on her face and how she holds her shoulders — I thought we were past this rings in her ears, an echo — but she is holding onto (his hand) her own reason with both hands, to try. To resist the part of her that would feel safer if she broke something.
It never works. It always feels as if it will, but it never has.
“My neck feels hot and I can't think. Or I'm just— impossibly tired, like my lord was, he would close himself away and only I was allowed to go in, except for once,”
heritable, then. These things often are. (Years later, she has not forgotten not understanding why she was not, this time, allowed. How frightened she was when he looked at her with puzzled unrecognition.)
“And when it's been — difficult, even if I'm tired, I can't sleep.” A breath in. Out. “It happened to Stark, once, at a rift. That was when we discovered I could close them by myself.” She had had to; it had been lucky, only, that she could. “It was sort of why we were friends, you know. When someone has seen you so vulnerable and helped you, it's that or kill the witnesses.”
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“I have the unenviable duty of telling you, Gwenaëlle Baudin, that it sounds like you suffer from panic attacks and the occasional chronic depression. All perfectly valid, and perfectly understandable considering the circumstances. You said there’s no reason, but the fact that you’ve been actively embroiled in a war for the past decade is more than reason enough. So many people experience this over much less.”
Thump-thump thump-thump, the frantic patter beneath his hand, the thunderous fear and grief.
It’s not, habitually, the way his own damage has manifested itself. He continually staved off any potential depression with even more obsessive action and movement, never stopping; he’d successfully kept ahead of it, even if his method had been unhealthy in other ways. Except he offers this up to her, like carving off a piece of himself and holding it up for inspection:
“After the car crash. I practically never rode in a car again. I was supposed to take a taxi home from the hospital, and I tried, but had a panic attack and almost vomited in the back seat. I took the train instead, and walked. Even when it added so much extra travel time, I just never got in one again if I could avoid it. I probably should have dealt with it, learned to be okay with it, but then I learned how to make portals and cars became even more avoidable, and— now I’m here, and carriages aren’t fast enough to trigger that same reaction. The enclosed metal space, the speed.
“My point being, this sort of reaction happens. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.”
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Imagines the crash. Tries to stop imagining it, consciously easing her grip on his hands before she hurts him.
So it is deliberate, the way that she digs past the thing behind her teeth for the reason for it, instead: “It feels deceitful to say yes, that's so, I have reacted very reasonably to this terrible experience, when I brought it with me. It's—”
he isn't telling her there's something wrong with her. He won't, she thinks, for what she says next. But it feels so upside down from his calm explanation that there's a tightening in her throat of shame that she has done this, too, all arse backwards.
“Better.”
It doesn't feel great to say that out loud.
“I brought it with me to the war and the war gave me purpose and it's been— better. Easier. As if the thing that's—” she bites back wrong with me, shifts the target slightly, “as if I'd just been standing in the wrong place, before. I don't remember a time it wasn't true. A thing didn't happen, I don't— I don't know if something happened.”
A lot of things happened later. Many of them not unrelated to the control she had not learned.
“Coupe changed everything about my life,” she says, finally. “I thought I could only be steady if Thranduil held me that way. And then he didn't, and I'm better at it, and I know that that's probably not the war—”
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“It doesn’t have to be that direct through-thread from a specific experience. And it doesn’t have to be because of the war. It can also just, y’know, be that way. It sounds like you had your share of stressful experiences at home, with your parents, your heritage, your secret. And even if you hadn’t, even if everything had been picture-perfect— honestly, sometimes our heads are just fucked. An imbalance in brain chemistry. The way we’re wired. We learn to cope.”
Speaking of, he takes another breath (in, out, Gwenaëlle still mirroring him), somewhere between his own tightened jaw and the struggle to delicately pick his way through these delicate concepts.
no subject
We learn to cope. She has learned—
“Sometimes it has been like you say,” she admits, thinking of the Fade. Lakshmi Bai. The hot panicky feeling on the back of her neck when she'd been sick on the other woman's feet, not so much because of the blow but because of where it had taken her. “I got into a fight once — I started it but it was her fault, we should never have been in the Fade — anyway, she hit harder than me. And I just—”
Every part of her body had remembered being somewhere else and it had not been easy, especially in a place so molded by emotion, to remember where she was.
“I used to— provoke,” she settles on. “It would be wrong of me to harm myself. Selfish. My life wasn't mine, I owed it to my mothers, but if someone else—”
The picture she paints, halting, is not a lovely one. She settles on: “I thought it would be better to be Tranquil. I don't want it any more — any of that, I don't. And I don't want to do to anyone what this feels like,” Casimir, Alistair, Cullen, Pentaghast, “I promise.”
no subject
It is true that Stephen’s been skittish of relationships because it is frightening to be cared for, to open yourself up, to let them see the vulnerable whole of you.
But it is also just as true that he’s been afraid of caring about someone else: to make them so inextricably precious to you, so that their pain is your pain, so that the loss of them would gouge you open. (To hand them that knife, capable of hurting you.)
Stephen’s hand moves from Gwenaëlle’s heart, up to brace against her cheek. I thought it would be better to be Tranquil, she says, rather than being this.
His mouth has set into a thin line, wheels spinning, still agonising over how much to describe. Whether it would be dangling yet another solution just out of reach, unactionable, therefore irrelevant. But in the end — Stephen values knowledge and he always wants to know, to understand why a brain ticks the way it does, to parse reality and make it make sense, it was the whole reason he became a neurosurgeon — so in the end, he decides to try. If it were him, he would want to know. So, trying to find the right vocabulary:
“I’m saying this not to suggest it as the fix, but to set context— sorry, just, bear with me. Back home, there’s— advanced medicine. To fix that brain chemistry I mentioned, to produce the right hormones, to get one’s system back into alignment; maybe someone’s brain makes them constantly too scared or angry, or not attentive enough, or it isn’t capable of generating enough of the emotions to make them happy.
“It’s a careful balancing act for doctors, ones different from me, who specialise in finding the right type of medication and the right dosage and the right effects. I don’t… I still think the Rite of Tranquility is monstrous, a crime, but it’s occurring to me that my world did have treatments to stabilise emotions. To give you a more even keel. It’s just not that permanent sledgehammer to your psyche; it’s more like small, incremental changes, and reversible. So maybe it’s not so alien. To have wanted some form of that. Another tool in the kit, just like medicine for anything else physical: a heart condition, an infection.”
no subject
but she understands, enough, what he's saying. He can see it on her face, the way that understanding blooms and disorients,
I thought we were past this. It is, perhaps, not her fault that they aren't. That there is no medicine for the terrible emptiness in the middle of her is not because she should have just been better. Even his world, which seems to the point of frank irritation to take the attitude that so many things are and should be easy to solve, is challenged by this thing that she hasn't been able to brute force into rightness.
Maybe as far as she's got isn't so little as it feels, when it would be unrecognisable to her if she were to see it from ten years ago.
“Oh,” feels so stupidly small, for so monumental a thing. (What if there had been something like that, before Tranquillity, when Casimir had been frightening the Circles he was in—) Her eyes close and she presses her mouth against his palm, holding herself there. The hard wood flooring underneath her. The boning of her corset, dug into her waist with the way she's sat. The warmth of his hand on her face and the other, in hers. Here she is. Here she is. “I—”
It is better to know. She, too, always wants to know — wants to understand — but she can't quite move through that understanding as quickly as she wants to, forcibly sat with it now. Maybe it isn't her fault if she isn't just past it, and maybe that is an entirely new thought she's never had before, and maybe having that thought deserves to be sat with.
And there are ways that this ... makes sense, things that it connects to, her head tilting, “I've used elfroot for the panic, before,” she says, “I didn't think of it in so many words,” had been dismissive when Margaery, watching her breath out wreathes of smoke and the uncontrollable agitation that had sent her careening out into the garden, had queried her on when that started, well, why did you start drinking wine, as if she hasn't also used wine to drown grief and sorrow and rage and the inability to just be fucking still when she desperately wished to be still and quiet.
Easy to grow accustomed to the ordinary thing that had always been ordinary around her; to soak in liquor and sedate the terrible, clutching limitlessness of those feelings.
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They’ve drifted into each other in their positions on the hardwood floor, his knees against hers, easy to face each other. Stephen doesn’t rush her; gives her those long seconds of drawn-out silence and consideration as the pieces start to slowly settle into place. He suspects it’s a lot to take in, without centuries of development in psychiatric theory to pave the way. So he gives her time.
The next idea comes slowly, eventually rising up out of that deep pool of stillness. “Do you remember what I tried to do, in your Hightown parlour after Granitefell? The questions I asked you?”
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“It reminded me of what Guilfoyle would do,” she says, “counting breaths or — making me explain something to him.”
Distraction, as a method: she is calm before she's realised she's being calmed down.
This had been a part of why she'd cooperated so readily at the time; not the same, maybe more effective, but close enough to something she was used to reaching for that the moment where she might have balked and resisted didn't happen. The other part, probably, had been Stephen himself— she can admit that now, in retrospect, when she hadn't particularly wanted to examine that at the time.
Upon consideration: “It felt less like a trick.”
no subject
“If you find yourself needing to use it again: It’s naming five things you see around you, four things you can touch, three things you hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste.”
His hand drifts down again, away from Gwenaëlle’s cheek to settle on her knee instead, a tangible weight of its own. He tilts his head, inquisitive.
“What would have felt like a trick?”
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“He's tricked me out of my stupors,” she admits, after that, and it's hard to hold against him but there's still a perceptible hint of irritation at the recollection, because he is good at it, actually: “He knows the levers to make me argue, or to think I need to do something myself, and then I've got up and the bed is being made behind me and I might as well also come over here and eat something and he won't close the curtains again, which I can do myself but it's—”
It is hard not to feel stupid and petulant, standing in the middle of the room, arguing the point. The worst times are when her pride can't be used against her.
The bath has been made a particular way. Well, she doesn't wish it. Well, if it is made to her exacting specifications, then she will have no reason not to get into it. And so on, and so on—
“I am trying to be better,” she says, on a defense that he hasn't given her cause to need. Arguing with shadows that aren't here, and may never have said the things she credits them. “I don't mean him to spend his entire retirement managing me. I sleep. I work. I care about things.”
(About Casimir, and Alistair, and Cullen, and Pentaghast, and this cause that she took up because she fucking lives in the world. It is hers, now, and she is bloody-minded, determined.)
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“And I believe you,” Stephen adds. “If there’s one thing I know about you, you care so much, Gwenaëlle. It was one of the first things I ever noticed about you. So I think this sort of thing is a slow process, simply trying and continuing until you wake up one morning and realise you don’t need those crutches anymore. Like a broken leg, healing.”
The press of his fingers against her knee, her hand. This is backtracking a little, but there’s still some connective tissue there: his last big fight with Christine had at least partially been about her managing him, his inability to let someone simply help and pull him out of his drowning spiral. He had picked that fight. Had lashed out and tried to hurt her for it.
And so he asks, reeling back to a few minutes ago, that ugly picture: “Who would you provoke?”
Because he finds himself pained but still wanting to paint in the rest of it, understanding the vulnerable whole of her. If it was her father, or a lover, or friends, or strangers in a bar— these details matter.
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she had, maybe, entertained the idea she wouldn't have to be this detailed. That if she were well, only, it would never have to come up again unless he got really interested in her poetry and then the distance and framing of art would do what it's always done, allow her to art direct her own bruising. Hold it out for a more dispassionate examination. Nothing about this moment is dispassionate—
“I sort of ran through a lot of people in Orlais when I was...younger, before Skyhold,” she says. “I was discreet. It was— I had a lot of freedoms that my lord would have curtailed if he knew what I was doing with them. To myself. And Guilfoyle could have put a stop to some of it if he'd spoken up, I know he knew more, I don't...know what he thought, I've never asked. Anyway, it wasn't his job.”
(Not his job does not seem to mean much to this man, who is officially retired.)
She is, she knows, prevaricating. Talking around the thing. Dissembling, like if she leads him to another tangent she won't have to say these things,
“I couldn't ask someone to sit next to me,” she says, finally. “I couldn't say, I wish you would hold me. And I wanted to be— I don't know, held. Important. I wanted to prove someone would reach for me and if they were reaching for my throat then fine. You know, I can make people angry. I would make them jealous, or... you know, if someone's jealous, then you matter, right. And if you don't matter, then at least you can be valuable in some way, or. Useful. And I am beautiful and I fuck like a desire demon so while I had limited options,” speaking faster, like she can rush through it, past it, “for being useful, I did a really— I just wanted to be reached for. And what happened next didn't matter. And I don't blame anyone.”
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potential 🎀