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.”
It’s like a jagged wound, a sliver of glass buried in his chest. Even if this was all years ago, ages past, a younger version of Gwenaëlle who no longer exists and who no longer does these things — they are sitting together, he is holding her hand — it still hurts to hear. His heart cracks in half. He can’t find the words. What are you even supposed to say.
He hates this part of caring for someone.
Other puzzle pieces are clicking into place. Even down to her perpetually making herself useful around Riftwatch, picking up every little skill. The weapons, the training, the archery, the detailed journals, re-inventorying the infirmary, practicing a tidy suture, annotating his medical texts. It’s been better, easier. As if I’d just been standing in the wrong place, before.
Like a weapon sitting on the shelf, simply waiting for the day it could be used, and could find purpose.
And if they were reaching for my throat then fine.
“You say you don’t blame anyone, but— you can’t blame yourself either, Gwenaëlle. You can’t take responsibility for others’ behaviour. Even if you tried to provoke it, to make them angry or jealous— at the end of the day, it was still their choice what they chose to do with that reaction.”
A breath, in, out. Raw and ragged: “I’m sorry that you felt like you had to do that. I hate that you felt like you had to do that.”
Immediately, she's aware that apologising is the wrong thing to do. It means she doesn't say anything at once, holding that in, because— it is not helpful, I'm sorry that it hurts you that you love me, it is not the right lesson to take away. For a moment it feels terribly as if she's tricked him into something under false pretenses — made him care for her, and then spilled all of this at his feet — and she knows, intellectually, better. Certainly, that that isn't what he's trying to say to her.
She leans, instead, until her forehead presses against his. Closes her eyes and wraps around herself, instead, the relief she'd felt when she'd asked him to sit and he had. And he's here. With her. By choice, even, the state of the Gallows notwithstanding. She lifts her hands to his face, and tries to find adequate words—
“It feels so fucking unfair to lose some of the people who've let me be more than that,” in a great exhalation, tears pricking at true eye and false, thick in her throat. “Who believed that I could be. Who — expected it from me. Maker, Alistair held that space for me before I believed it. And I just always thought I'd get to show them.”
Now, of course, it feels naive. Even still. Her thumbs press to his jaw,
“I want very much to do a better job of loving you. I want to— I like who I am, with you.”
Just as she has to fight down that first instinctive apology, he has to battle that kneejerk panicky feeling that he doesn’t deserve this sentiment either. How can she do any better, when she’s already —
“You’re good as you are,” Stephen says, forehead against hers, mouth ghosting across her cheek.
It’s a purposeful, careful selection of words. It’s not you’re perfect because nobody’s perfect and he has, after all, learned a little about placing women on pedestals to gaze at longingly from afar and build idealised distant ideas of them, and how he probably shouldn’t do that anymore. So instead it’s this: Gwenaëlle in her ugly moods, her raging temper and rotten depression, he’ll take it all.
And the condolences come stilted, he is still awkward at this, but they do come:
“The words are inadequate, but… I’m sorry about your friends. It sounds like they already knew; you didn’t have to prove anything to them.” A beat. He doesn’t know how to handle this. He’d bricked up his own familial grief and never talked about it, and even the funerals after Thanos had been held at an aloof remove; he’d been a polite colleague attending rather than a friend, a loved one.
“Would it help to— I don’t know, talk about them?”
Here, on the bedroom floor, becoming slowly more aware of the discomfort of a splinter in her hand, it's hard to imagine that it would. That anything would. And yet—
Hardie. Hardly a day has passed in all the years since Asher died that she hasn't thought of him even in passing, and hardly a week where she hasn't told some story, mentioned something, and doesn't it help? Hasn't the problem with speaking of the Baudins always been, in the end, how little she has to say? Hasn't she wished to.
(And maybe you're good as you are feels truer and easier to allow to bear some weight now than it would if he said it to her some other, better time, armoured and lovely.)
“Alistair and I came out of the same sort of cunt and have been inside one in common,” —is probably not what he would have envisioned her leading with. “He was one of the first people I grew close to in Skyhold, he'd reached out to me to ask that I not print anything about Grey Wardens. He promised he'd tell me their secrets, if I agreed not to publicise their presence, and for as long as I've known him I never told him I'd have just done it if he asked. And he did tell me, it's why I wouldn't allow any of them but him in the manor. I trusted Grey Wardens much less after, but him much more, and he was there when. He was with me when my birth mother died. He was one of the people who heard what I screamed. Not the first I told of my own will, knowingly, but one of the first to know.”
Her thumbnail slides along the edge of his hand, like she'd be fidgeting if she weren't holding onto him— would rather hold on than let go to do it, can't be still, even so.
“So he was one of the first people I ever spoke to about it. He knew when it was still a thing to protect. And he was better than me for Sabine, and I don't — I'm not being unkind about myself, they're lovely together? They were. He suited her, and we learned how to be friends, and we made jokes about how...if the taint took him, if the fade took Thranduil, we'd run away to the sea and be pirates together. But I sort of always thought they'd have fat little ginger babies for me to tell outrageous stories to, after all this. I thought if he could be a father again, from the start and properly, he'd be so good at it. He was— kind and funny and the first close friend to me that I wasn't keeping secrets from. I hadn't even known I could have that. And I think he enjoyed it too much when he got to throw things at me so I could practise my fade shield.”
Her thumbnail runs along his hand, and she can feel those scarred ridges carved up and down his fingers and knuckles, that map of old injuries. “You are, admittedly, very good with that Fade shield, so clearly he must have been doing a good job with the practice,” Stephen says, matching that warm tone bleeding into her voice. Letting her think of better, kinder things than the death itself. “I’m grateful.”
It had come in handy on the field at Starkhaven, blocking blows from charging Tevene riders, and he’s certain it must have tipped the scales for Gwenaëlle’s safety at other times, other places. But even more importantly than those survival skills —
“And that he was a friend to you when you needed it most. He sounds like a good man.”
“He was. He didn't—” Despite herself, there's something very like a smile tugging at the edges of the face she pulls, “Everyone thinks we're heroes, but I just didn't want to die, he said. He was worried how I'd see him, when I knew more about the adventure that saddled him with Ferelden baggage for the rest of his life. It just never entered my head not to trust that he'd done his best for the best reason.”
This is
a dangerous thing to be as true as it is, sometimes, because it's lovely as applied to Alistair, but Alistair is not the only person she's ever loved enough to trust this way. Don't worry about it.
(That wyvern scar had been healing, still, at the time he'd said it to her. Everything happens at once, so much.)
“Cullen Rutherford, I'm sure you've heard of, too,” after a moment. “Commander. Ex-Templar. We weren't so close as that, but we were friends. When I knew him best, Hardie was a puppy and I'd never worn trousers or held a blade, and he was kind to lend his time to me. To Hardie— he trained Hardie for me, I didn't have the first fucking idea about how and Asher was already gone, so I relied on him. And I didn't see much of his journey off of lyrium, but when Orlov was making a hundred fucking excuses about why he wasn't going to do the only thing that made any sense for all the other bullshit he talks,”
criticisms that had not lacked heat then, if they do now,
“it seemed very obvious to me. He did it while commanding Skyhold. Orlov could do it answering to Flint. He set an example.”
He’s never done this before, let alone to this extent with so many names, but it’s a chance to let Gwenaëlle meander her way through that list (Casimir, Alistair, Cullen, Pentaghast) and to pay tribute, to fondly remember. Their topics continue to bounce back and forth, occasionally snagging and hooking into the conversation, and he lets them land where it will.
“A valuable one. An example the others could do with,” he says. “I’ve been trying to talk Mobius into considering quitting the lyrium, but it turns out templars are oddly stubborn about this sort of thing.”
“Well, it's a religious calling and it's an addiction and it's—”
Her face screws up.
“You aren't just asking him to stop taking something harmful. You're asking him to say that the cornerstone of his existence since, given a Templar's novitiate, his actual childhood— you're asking him to decide and then say to the whole world that it was wrong. Exploitative. You're asking him to believe that what has defined him to him and everyone who's ever met him and probably his faith and his personal sacrifices were all made for something that wasn't worthwhile. That was wrong, even. I don't think it's odd they don't. And to trust that it isn't necessary, or at least that there could be a better solution.”
Her shrug is elegant: “Orlov was already grappling with those things. He'd already lost his faith in them. He didn't need to be persuaded of the important things, he was just frightened of following them to their conclusion. Templars already know what lyrium will do to them, they watch it happen to the people who mold them into the next lot, so they have to believe that it's important and worthwhile or that it makes them important and worthwhile. And Rutherford,”
the neat way she pulls that thread back to her point, like a little fucking lawyer,
“he believed it didn't have to be the way it's always been. He believed that enough to be wrong, in public, in the loudest possible way. I always wished I could have asked him about— the Inquisition under Chantry sway, the Exalted March. I couldn't just write to him and say. I wish we could have had a conversation.”
She would have liked, truly, to know his thinking.
They’re all things Stephen instinctively knows on some level, deep down, but having it laid out so tidily is a well-needed reminder as to why that debate has been such an uphill slog. So much of his discussions with Mobius keep colliding with the fact that the man still has all his faith in spades; still believes with all his heart that he can do the most good with those abilities, no matter the personal toll.
“Annoyingly, you’re correct on all points.” There’s a beat, then, “Until the thing with the demon, I didn’t realise that you were so close to Orlov. You followed his journey off lyrium?”
“I, um, started it,” she says, her mouth pulling to one corner with awkwardness. “Sort of accidentally? I mean, everyone was being forced to tell the truth, but that doesn't really—”
Gwenaëlle gestures at herself. That's happened to the Gallows twice and she had to be told what was happening both times. The degree to which she was pressed by that experience was significantly less than anyone else, and maybe would have gone unnoticed entirely if she'd been the only person affected. In any case,
“He had to be honest when I challenged him, so he had to be honest with himself, too, and it just struck me that— he would say these things about what being a Templar had meant to him and why he'd stopped, but he still essentially functioned as one. You know, for a while it was sort of like, every Templar is an ex-Templar because at the time they had no backing, they weren't part of the Chantry any more, they were all deciding what that meant for them. But that isn't so much the case any more, and the distinctions matter, and I just felt like he was being a fucking hypocrite for no good reason except cowardice and I only knew to press because he's so hangdog about everything when I asked him rude questions to piss him off he just answered them.”
This, perhaps, more specifically explains how confident she'd been in her assessment of the demon.
“I think we're sort of friends,” she says, finally, “but only because I was cruel to him and he kept letting it happen until I started to feel badly and I sort of thought, if he did follow-through then I owed it to him to help.”
Ah, and that’s why she could speak with so much authority on the subject: he’s a fucking demon. Stephen hadn’t fully understood the reasoning or rationale at the time, but he had simply gone with it, immediately snapped to attention and taken Gwenaëlle’s verdict as writ.
And at that description of how it happened, he makes a noise; an exhale of breath and almost a laugh, at the unfamiliar sight of that awkward, sheepish look on her face. He’s so accustomed to her unrepentant that seeing Gwenaëlle even mildly abashed is a novelty.
But she’d accomplished the exact thing he’s been trying (with no luck) to do elsewhere, so he says, fondly: “So, let me get this straight. You did essentially get a man to give up his religious calling and his addiction and the cornerstone of his existence, through very successful bullying.”
there's something reassuring, maybe, about finding herself here with a tear-streaked face and a broken chair, laughing, rueful, pressing her hands together at her mouth. “I think he was ahead of me on the religious calling part. I wouldn't have got anywhere if he hadn't done all the important groundwork. But, I mean,”
With her hands darting away to clasp at her mouth, he now rests both of his on her knees, palms flat against bone and heavy fabric. It is sometimes so awful to have his heart marching around outside his chest, but he loves her even (especially) like this: brittle around the edges, still teary, something of a mess, but still persevering.
“If I ever need to terrify anyone whatsoever into doing anything, I know exactly who to call.” Stephen reaches up and swipes at Gwenaëlle’s cheek with one thumb, gently brushing away another of those errant tears. Their spark of humour is rueful, bittersweet for the immediate context, but:
“Maybe I’ll sic you on the Head Archivist. I tried the dementia angle and it hasn’t been working.”
The very slightest sigh accompanies the small tilt of her face to his hand— there's not no twinge of discomfort at feeling as exposed as she does, right now, but he's more a comfort than he isn't. He isn't going anywhere; she doesn't need to untangle that feeling all at once.
“He's old,” she points out, “it's not outside the realm of possibility his reasoning has already started degrading and we just don't have anything to compare it to, in which case reasoning with him is—”
Challenging. She wobbles a hand.
“I think the flaw in the dementia argument is just that they've generally already either made their peace with it or decided not to think about it. It's hard to argue with something someone's already decided is worth it or that they think they can avoid by dying in battle, I mean, they already know they don't retire.” Templars die or deteriorate: it's how Templars work. “And they're children at the beginning. Not that I can imagine Coupe as a child. She was probably already a cunt.”
“Yeah, I’ve been running into exactly that.” There’s a brief beat, the words are almost out there, about to trip blithely off Stephen’s tongue: Yeah, I’ve been butting up against the whole ‘I’m probably going to die in battle for Riftwatch long before this becomes an issue’ thing.
But at the last second, he manages to rein himself in and cut that thought off at the pass. He can’t joke about it now; not when they recently received that long list of the dead. The occupational hazard’s a real one.
So, instead: “How old’s your aunt now? You’ve mentioned her offhand before, that she got you trained, but I don’t know much about her— I didn’t even know it was Coupe until today.”
The question means she has to stop and think, squinting into the nothing over his shoulder as she tries to recall, or guess, or wonder if she ever knew at all,
“I think,” she decides, finally, “somewhere in her fifties. I don't think she's much off my uncle's age, and he's— Maker, nearly sixty now, I think? I don't know if I know her age precisely, although I don't know if she knows it precisely, either.” With how much precision such things are measured can vary, strata to strata, in Thedas; she doesn't know enough, she realises, about other Coupes and the woman's background before the Chantry to be sure if they would or wouldn't have strictly recorded that sort of information.
This does seem like a safer derail than we all might die, really.
“Before anything else I knew her as a miserable interfering bitch who'd inexplicably taken it into her head to elbow her way into my life and tell me what to do with it, first. When we were still an Inquisition outpost, she'd come here for some Chantry mothers, or something, and whenever I turned around there she was, having an opinion about everything.” Wow doesn't sound like anyone she knows, don't worry about it. “I didn't know she'd known my uncle. I didn't know there was anything to know about, and then— he was presumed dead for years. He was a mage of the White Spire, and when it was annulled, there wasn't any reason to think he hadn't been killed with the rest. He never turned up, not for years, but when I got word of him being alive, and when I mentioned as much to her, it wasn't new information. She knew already. Some other way. I think it was the time travel.”
“What a thing,” Stephen muses aloud, marveling, “that both of us can drop phrases like I think it was the time travel into casual conversation and that’s just fine.”
Very likely it’s one of the reasons they like each other so much: this offhand, shared straightforward matter-of-factness.
He shifts a little, readjusting his position; a little stiff on the wooden floor, but not as much as he once might have been. These days he stretches, he does yoga, he’s more limber as a sorcerer and mage than he ever was as a surgeon. He readjusts so one leg’s stretched out on the floor, thigh alongside hers. His foot nudges a piece of exposed chairback out of the way.
He rearranges, adjusts; Gwenaëlle relaxes beside him, holding herself less as if she might at any moment launch herself across the room and off the balcony. Musters a sparse smile, not without humour,
“In a cottage,” she elaborates, “in the woods. The first thing my uncle did when he turned up at the Gallows was come to tell me that he'd had an heirloom ring off my lord and that he intended to propose to her with it. Sort of, the Circles have all fallen, did I imagine a vibe, did you want to get married about it?” It had been kind of him not to allow her to be totally blindsided, and she'd repaid that by doing her level best to make it slightly less obvious how much she hated everything he was struggling through saying to her.
She'd been very polite. It had been incredibly obvious, but she thought he'd appreciated her making the effort.
“They left together, a bit after she stepped down from Commander. They write me, sometimes. It's...we didn't fight again,” slowly, “after the fight that started about Casimir.” She can't say with a straight face that they'd argued about tranquillity, but yeah, it had started there. “We never really reconciled, either. And she isn't dead, but—”
A shrug. Helplessly: “Now we never will. It's just the past. I'll grieve her when she dies.”
She has begun, already; when that end comes, it will feel like relief.
Fifty-something, probably old age for a world like Thedas. Once a decorated templar, now hallucinating in a cottage in her retirement. This is what retirement looks like for templars.
How would Gwenaëlle even find out if she died. If her uncle’s even older, what if he goes first —
Stephen’s chewing over it, the thought like tough gristle. He remembers too well what it felt like to fight with family, and for them to die before you could fix it. “’Never’ is a strong word,” he says. “You don’t want to… I mean, if letters are able to get back and forth, you haven’t wanted to try to reconcile while you still can? If she’s still writing you, some part of her clearly still wants to communicate; you’re not, y’know, salted earth.”
(He hasn’t seen the letter. He doesn’t know quite how bad it already is.)
She presses his shoulder lightly like a reassurance when she levers herself up off the floor; crosses the short distance to her desk and does not need to search for long to find what she's looking for, opening a slim wooden box that sits at the back of it (almost decoratively,) and removing the top-most folded missive. When she brings it back to him, it has already — in the time since it arrived — been folded and unfolded often enough to have grown soft at its edges.
Pressing the letter into his hands, she says, “I don't think she would understand what I want to fight with her about.”
And she does still, sort of, want to fight with her; news of Casimir's death had broken over her like a wave, hauling away the tide and leaving anger in its place. So much waste. So much loss. For what? Fuck her precious fucking Chantry—
Please don't go, she'd written. Among those losses: the time to have it out.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
“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?”
no subject
“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.)
no subject
“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.
no subject
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.”
no subject
He hates this part of caring for someone.
Other puzzle pieces are clicking into place. Even down to her perpetually making herself useful around Riftwatch, picking up every little skill. The weapons, the training, the archery, the detailed journals, re-inventorying the infirmary, practicing a tidy suture, annotating his medical texts. It’s been better, easier. As if I’d just been standing in the wrong place, before.
Like a weapon sitting on the shelf, simply waiting for the day it could be used, and could find purpose.
And if they were reaching for my throat then fine.
“You say you don’t blame anyone, but— you can’t blame yourself either, Gwenaëlle. You can’t take responsibility for others’ behaviour. Even if you tried to provoke it, to make them angry or jealous— at the end of the day, it was still their choice what they chose to do with that reaction.”
A breath, in, out. Raw and ragged: “I’m sorry that you felt like you had to do that. I hate that you felt like you had to do that.”
no subject
She leans, instead, until her forehead presses against his. Closes her eyes and wraps around herself, instead, the relief she'd felt when she'd asked him to sit and he had. And he's here. With her. By choice, even, the state of the Gallows notwithstanding. She lifts her hands to his face, and tries to find adequate words—
“It feels so fucking unfair to lose some of the people who've let me be more than that,” in a great exhalation, tears pricking at true eye and false, thick in her throat. “Who believed that I could be. Who — expected it from me. Maker, Alistair held that space for me before I believed it. And I just always thought I'd get to show them.”
Now, of course, it feels naive. Even still. Her thumbs press to his jaw,
“I want very much to do a better job of loving you. I want to— I like who I am, with you.”
no subject
“You’re good as you are,” Stephen says, forehead against hers, mouth ghosting across her cheek.
It’s a purposeful, careful selection of words. It’s not you’re perfect because nobody’s perfect and he has, after all, learned a little about placing women on pedestals to gaze at longingly from afar and build idealised distant ideas of them, and how he probably shouldn’t do that anymore. So instead it’s this: Gwenaëlle in her ugly moods, her raging temper and rotten depression, he’ll take it all.
And the condolences come stilted, he is still awkward at this, but they do come:
“The words are inadequate, but… I’m sorry about your friends. It sounds like they already knew; you didn’t have to prove anything to them.” A beat. He doesn’t know how to handle this. He’d bricked up his own familial grief and never talked about it, and even the funerals after Thanos had been held at an aloof remove; he’d been a polite colleague attending rather than a friend, a loved one.
“Would it help to— I don’t know, talk about them?”
no subject
Hardie. Hardly a day has passed in all the years since Asher died that she hasn't thought of him even in passing, and hardly a week where she hasn't told some story, mentioned something, and doesn't it help? Hasn't the problem with speaking of the Baudins always been, in the end, how little she has to say? Hasn't she wished to.
(And maybe you're good as you are feels truer and easier to allow to bear some weight now than it would if he said it to her some other, better time, armoured and lovely.)
“Alistair and I came out of the same sort of cunt and have been inside one in common,” —is probably not what he would have envisioned her leading with. “He was one of the first people I grew close to in Skyhold, he'd reached out to me to ask that I not print anything about Grey Wardens. He promised he'd tell me their secrets, if I agreed not to publicise their presence, and for as long as I've known him I never told him I'd have just done it if he asked. And he did tell me, it's why I wouldn't allow any of them but him in the manor. I trusted Grey Wardens much less after, but him much more, and he was there when. He was with me when my birth mother died. He was one of the people who heard what I screamed. Not the first I told of my own will, knowingly, but one of the first to know.”
Her thumbnail slides along the edge of his hand, like she'd be fidgeting if she weren't holding onto him— would rather hold on than let go to do it, can't be still, even so.
“So he was one of the first people I ever spoke to about it. He knew when it was still a thing to protect. And he was better than me for Sabine, and I don't — I'm not being unkind about myself, they're lovely together? They were. He suited her, and we learned how to be friends, and we made jokes about how...if the taint took him, if the fade took Thranduil, we'd run away to the sea and be pirates together. But I sort of always thought they'd have fat little ginger babies for me to tell outrageous stories to, after all this. I thought if he could be a father again, from the start and properly, he'd be so good at it. He was— kind and funny and the first close friend to me that I wasn't keeping secrets from. I hadn't even known I could have that. And I think he enjoyed it too much when he got to throw things at me so I could practise my fade shield.”
no subject
It had come in handy on the field at Starkhaven, blocking blows from charging Tevene riders, and he’s certain it must have tipped the scales for Gwenaëlle’s safety at other times, other places. But even more importantly than those survival skills —
“And that he was a friend to you when you needed it most. He sounds like a good man.”
no subject
This is
a dangerous thing to be as true as it is, sometimes, because it's lovely as applied to Alistair, but Alistair is not the only person she's ever loved enough to trust this way. Don't worry about it.
(That wyvern scar had been healing, still, at the time he'd said it to her. Everything happens at once, so much.)
“Cullen Rutherford, I'm sure you've heard of, too,” after a moment. “Commander. Ex-Templar. We weren't so close as that, but we were friends. When I knew him best, Hardie was a puppy and I'd never worn trousers or held a blade, and he was kind to lend his time to me. To Hardie— he trained Hardie for me, I didn't have the first fucking idea about how and Asher was already gone, so I relied on him. And I didn't see much of his journey off of lyrium, but when Orlov was making a hundred fucking excuses about why he wasn't going to do the only thing that made any sense for all the other bullshit he talks,”
criticisms that had not lacked heat then, if they do now,
“it seemed very obvious to me. He did it while commanding Skyhold. Orlov could do it answering to Flint. He set an example.”
no subject
“A valuable one. An example the others could do with,” he says. “I’ve been trying to talk Mobius into considering quitting the lyrium, but it turns out templars are oddly stubborn about this sort of thing.”
no subject
Her face screws up.
“You aren't just asking him to stop taking something harmful. You're asking him to say that the cornerstone of his existence since, given a Templar's novitiate, his actual childhood— you're asking him to decide and then say to the whole world that it was wrong. Exploitative. You're asking him to believe that what has defined him to him and everyone who's ever met him and probably his faith and his personal sacrifices were all made for something that wasn't worthwhile. That was wrong, even. I don't think it's odd they don't. And to trust that it isn't necessary, or at least that there could be a better solution.”
Her shrug is elegant: “Orlov was already grappling with those things. He'd already lost his faith in them. He didn't need to be persuaded of the important things, he was just frightened of following them to their conclusion. Templars already know what lyrium will do to them, they watch it happen to the people who mold them into the next lot, so they have to believe that it's important and worthwhile or that it makes them important and worthwhile. And Rutherford,”
the neat way she pulls that thread back to her point, like a little fucking lawyer,
“he believed it didn't have to be the way it's always been. He believed that enough to be wrong, in public, in the loudest possible way. I always wished I could have asked him about— the Inquisition under Chantry sway, the Exalted March. I couldn't just write to him and say. I wish we could have had a conversation.”
She would have liked, truly, to know his thinking.
no subject
“Annoyingly, you’re correct on all points.” There’s a beat, then, “Until the thing with the demon, I didn’t realise that you were so close to Orlov. You followed his journey off lyrium?”
no subject
Gwenaëlle gestures at herself. That's happened to the Gallows twice and she had to be told what was happening both times. The degree to which she was pressed by that experience was significantly less than anyone else, and maybe would have gone unnoticed entirely if she'd been the only person affected. In any case,
“He had to be honest when I challenged him, so he had to be honest with himself, too, and it just struck me that— he would say these things about what being a Templar had meant to him and why he'd stopped, but he still essentially functioned as one. You know, for a while it was sort of like, every Templar is an ex-Templar because at the time they had no backing, they weren't part of the Chantry any more, they were all deciding what that meant for them. But that isn't so much the case any more, and the distinctions matter, and I just felt like he was being a fucking hypocrite for no good reason except cowardice and I only knew to press because he's so hangdog about everything when I asked him rude questions to piss him off he just answered them.”
This, perhaps, more specifically explains how confident she'd been in her assessment of the demon.
“I think we're sort of friends,” she says, finally, “but only because I was cruel to him and he kept letting it happen until I started to feel badly and I sort of thought, if he did follow-through then I owed it to him to help.”
no subject
And at that description of how it happened, he makes a noise; an exhale of breath and almost a laugh, at the unfamiliar sight of that awkward, sheepish look on her face. He’s so accustomed to her unrepentant that seeing Gwenaëlle even mildly abashed is a novelty.
But she’d accomplished the exact thing he’s been trying (with no luck) to do elsewhere, so he says, fondly: “So, let me get this straight. You did essentially get a man to give up his religious calling and his addiction and the cornerstone of his existence, through very successful bullying.”
no subject
there's something reassuring, maybe, about finding herself here with a tear-streaked face and a broken chair, laughing, rueful, pressing her hands together at her mouth. “I think he was ahead of me on the religious calling part. I wouldn't have got anywhere if he hadn't done all the important groundwork. But, I mean,”
it really does sound mad. “Essentially?”
no subject
“If I ever need to terrify anyone whatsoever into doing anything, I know exactly who to call.” Stephen reaches up and swipes at Gwenaëlle’s cheek with one thumb, gently brushing away another of those errant tears. Their spark of humour is rueful, bittersweet for the immediate context, but:
“Maybe I’ll sic you on the Head Archivist. I tried the dementia angle and it hasn’t been working.”
no subject
“He's old,” she points out, “it's not outside the realm of possibility his reasoning has already started degrading and we just don't have anything to compare it to, in which case reasoning with him is—”
Challenging. She wobbles a hand.
“I think the flaw in the dementia argument is just that they've generally already either made their peace with it or decided not to think about it. It's hard to argue with something someone's already decided is worth it or that they think they can avoid by dying in battle, I mean, they already know they don't retire.” Templars die or deteriorate: it's how Templars work. “And they're children at the beginning. Not that I can imagine Coupe as a child. She was probably already a cunt.”
no subject
But at the last second, he manages to rein himself in and cut that thought off at the pass. He can’t joke about it now; not when they recently received that long list of the dead. The occupational hazard’s a real one.
So, instead: “How old’s your aunt now? You’ve mentioned her offhand before, that she got you trained, but I don’t know much about her— I didn’t even know it was Coupe until today.”
no subject
“I think,” she decides, finally, “somewhere in her fifties. I don't think she's much off my uncle's age, and he's— Maker, nearly sixty now, I think? I don't know if I know her age precisely, although I don't know if she knows it precisely, either.” With how much precision such things are measured can vary, strata to strata, in Thedas; she doesn't know enough, she realises, about other Coupes and the woman's background before the Chantry to be sure if they would or wouldn't have strictly recorded that sort of information.
This does seem like a safer derail than we all might die, really.
“Before anything else I knew her as a miserable interfering bitch who'd inexplicably taken it into her head to elbow her way into my life and tell me what to do with it, first. When we were still an Inquisition outpost, she'd come here for some Chantry mothers, or something, and whenever I turned around there she was, having an opinion about everything.” Wow doesn't sound like anyone she knows, don't worry about it. “I didn't know she'd known my uncle. I didn't know there was anything to know about, and then— he was presumed dead for years. He was a mage of the White Spire, and when it was annulled, there wasn't any reason to think he hadn't been killed with the rest. He never turned up, not for years, but when I got word of him being alive, and when I mentioned as much to her, it wasn't new information. She knew already. Some other way. I think it was the time travel.”
no subject
Very likely it’s one of the reasons they like each other so much: this offhand, shared straightforward matter-of-factness.
He shifts a little, readjusting his position; a little stiff on the wooden floor, but not as much as he once might have been. These days he stretches, he does yoga, he’s more limber as a sorcerer and mage than he ever was as a surgeon. He readjusts so one leg’s stretched out on the floor, thigh alongside hers. His foot nudges a piece of exposed chairback out of the way.
“And she’s… in the woods now?”
no subject
“In a cottage,” she elaborates, “in the woods. The first thing my uncle did when he turned up at the Gallows was come to tell me that he'd had an heirloom ring off my lord and that he intended to propose to her with it. Sort of, the Circles have all fallen, did I imagine a vibe, did you want to get married about it?” It had been kind of him not to allow her to be totally blindsided, and she'd repaid that by doing her level best to make it slightly less obvious how much she hated everything he was struggling through saying to her.
She'd been very polite. It had been incredibly obvious, but she thought he'd appreciated her making the effort.
“They left together, a bit after she stepped down from Commander. They write me, sometimes. It's...we didn't fight again,” slowly, “after the fight that started about Casimir.” She can't say with a straight face that they'd argued about tranquillity, but yeah, it had started there. “We never really reconciled, either. And she isn't dead, but—”
A shrug. Helplessly: “Now we never will. It's just the past. I'll grieve her when she dies.”
She has begun, already; when that end comes, it will feel like relief.
no subject
How would Gwenaëlle even find out if she died. If her uncle’s even older, what if he goes first —
Stephen’s chewing over it, the thought like tough gristle. He remembers too well what it felt like to fight with family, and for them to die before you could fix it. “’Never’ is a strong word,” he says. “You don’t want to… I mean, if letters are able to get back and forth, you haven’t wanted to try to reconcile while you still can? If she’s still writing you, some part of her clearly still wants to communicate; you’re not, y’know, salted earth.”
(He hasn’t seen the letter. He doesn’t know quite how bad it already is.)
no subject
She presses his shoulder lightly like a reassurance when she levers herself up off the floor; crosses the short distance to her desk and does not need to search for long to find what she's looking for, opening a slim wooden box that sits at the back of it (almost decoratively,) and removing the top-most folded missive. When she brings it back to him, it has already — in the time since it arrived — been folded and unfolded often enough to have grown soft at its edges.
Pressing the letter into his hands, she says, “I don't think she would understand what I want to fight with her about.”
And she does still, sort of, want to fight with her; news of Casimir's death had broken over her like a wave, hauling away the tide and leaving anger in its place. So much waste. So much loss. For what? Fuck her precious fucking Chantry—
Please don't go, she'd written. Among those losses: the time to have it out.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
potential 🎀