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.
While Gwenaëlle crosses the room, Stephen shifts over on the floor just enough to lean his back against the side of the bed, an easier position to get comfortable in. After he accepts the paper and reads it, first quick like lightning, then slower as he backtracks to re-read and fully absorb it—
“Ah,” he says, all that realisation sunk into that one word.
His first kneejerk thought, irrationally, is: there’s more than one poet in the family. The text reads more like a poem, disparate crystalline images, little sense in them, not much of a coherent conversation to be had. His hand quivers as he holds up the paper for reading; it’s not from emotion.
“She says I am sorry. Twice,” he says, his blue-green eyes lodged on the well-worn paper.
“It's enough,” she says, and part of that is: it has to be enough because there is never going to be anything else, now. Another part of that is: we are not in the habit of apologising to each other. A beat later, “I did, too. I wrote her back, I mean, I apologised. I promised not to leave her.”
And then she'd sat in her dressing room with her head in her hands for a long time, but what the fuck else was she supposed to do. What do you say to that.
“One of the last conversations we had, before they left, she'd come to see me after I turned up alive. You know, having been presumed dead the first time.” The first time. Presumed, because in that case she hadn't been, actually. “It wasn't as if...”
She gathers the letter back to herself with the passing thought that maybe the best revenge is the fact in her right mind Coupe would be so annoyed she's showed this thing to as many people as she has, “You know, the dementia means we can admit we care about each other now, so there's that.”
His heart twinges upon hearing that, and he can’t quite sort out the words for a moment. Condolences and apologies are probably just an inadequate balm on the wound. She hasn’t lost Coupe yet but she has, in fact, already lost her.
“Dementia is one of the great, inexorable, incurable syndromes even in my world,” Stephen says after a pause. “Your own mind betraying you. No matter the clean living, no matter our ridiculous technological advancements, there’s still no drug or surgery that can repair the damage done by neurodegenerative diseases. It’s not why I became a surgeon,”
(neurosurgery was the highest-earning specialty, and one of the most difficult, and both of those things played into the choice)
“But it scares the absolute shit out of me. It’s one of the worst things I could ever imagine. Personally, for me, with my priorities. Worse than this,” he gestures, splayed fingers, that quivering hand. “So I’m— it’s inadequate, but I’m very sorry. That that’s happening to her.”
“Everything feels sort of inadequate,” she observes, rolling the letter in her hands like a worry-stone, “when it's ... you'd think we'd all get better at it. Everyone dies eventually except, apparently, incredibly irritating elves. Everyone loses someone. Usually more than one person. And we're all...”
Some people, to be fair, manage to be worse at it than others. Certainly, both of them fall under that particular heading. And even still it strikes her: in hundreds of years and apparently across hundreds of disparate worlds, no one has managed to come up with anything that doesn't feel like nothing, somehow. To say or to hear.
After a moment, “It isn't. Inadequate. That you're here.”
To set aside her grand philosophising on the intangibly, existentially empty nature of condolences—
Stephen breathes out, a slow exhale. He’s still sitting on the floor and having to look up at Gwenaëlle, jaw craned up and up, which is going to give him a crick in his neck eventually; and so he finally just gives up the ghost and climbs up to perch on the edge of the bed instead. The moment on the floor finally seems to have passed, ebbing away in the wake of all that debris, that stymied anger and grief. He simply looks at her for a little while, taking her in.
“Well then, I’m glad,” he says; the words few but the warmth there, achingly fond in a way he otherwise struggles to express.
Maybe opening yourself up to someone else isn’t, in fact, the worst thing ever.
And he’s still half-mulling over what she’d mentioned, offhand, as a joke, but: Everyone dies eventually except incredibly irritating elves.
Meditative: “Elves and elfblooded in Thedas. You don’t, like, have preternatural longevity or anything, do you? I know that it varies, across worlds— back in our universe, I’d read about the Svartálfar, they were tremendously long-lived.”
and doesn't immediately answer him. By now, the sound of her not saying the first thing that crosses her mind is not an unfamiliar one; it's very specific. There's a degree of effort that it takes. Somewhere in the back of her head it's Loxley's voice, asking her why she's being such an asshole to people for trying to have ordinary conversations with her, and the seven things she might have said that wouldn't have been cruel to him but wouldn't exactly have been easy listtening wither, unsaid.
And it takes her a minute to come up with something else. Finally:
“Ancient elves were like that, more like the elves that have come here from Faerun or Arda or — Iorveth's continent. Thedosian elves are—”
it's tricky, navigating around for once trying to have any tact, and what she knows and believes to be true, and she frowns.
“Remnants, a Dalish elf and one of elvhenan is like comparing a stray dog and a mabari,” she settles on, so we're going with points for effort and a shaky dismount. “Being elfblooded is nothing. We're indistinguishable from humans in every way— if I'd never been told, there's nothing about me that would have made it possible for me to learn. If I had children, I'm still a dead end, my mother's line ended with me.”
Then why the fuck do people still make such a big deal about it says that crinkle of consternation in his brow, but Stephen also, for once, doesn’t just blurt out the first blunt thing which comes to mind. Points for effort all around.
This is not the sort of thing they tell you in the rifter orientation. The history books don’t devote much space to it. The few medical textbooks he’s found don’t delve into it; non-human physiology is quite glaringly omitted, for likely obvious reasons. And there’s no guide to what to say here in terms of response, knowing there are complicated feelings here about her mother, complicated feelings about her mother’s line, that branch of the family tree already bloodily and awfully hacked off—
So what he settles for, in the end, is simply a pragmatic: “Got it.”
Which is the scholar replying, before there’s a pause and then the man tries to muster a thought together, an attempt made: “And it’s not nothing, I think. You’re still of her line, even if it’s not in… every respect. I see that portrait in the foyer every day; you look very much like her.”
Factually, this is true. Gwenaëlle has always favoured her — her high cheekbones and big eyes, the curls that she'd never seen until Guenievre was sharing her quarters in Skyhold, even their high hairlines. Slight and slender, where her father had been tall and broad and rather more muscular than your average dandy. The nose is him, the jaw, enough that she and Marcellin have also always favoured one another, but with the Baudins, it's striking. If she'd been an elf, it'd have been inarguable.
She sits, slipping a hand into his while she weighs the things she wants to say. If anything. Maybe she could just leave it at that—
then again, when was the last time she left well enough alone.
“Before we separated,” she says, slowly, “Thranduil had talked about, he thought if we had children they'd be like from Arda. Half elves are a thing there— apparently fucking everywhere but here, but— I always sort of kicked that down the road, you know, because it's not as if I'm going to stop using birth control in a war zone. In Forces. Psychotic. And we might die. But I could never figure out if it would be worse if he were right, and then I have a baby that I'm jealous of, which is fucked, or if he's wrong, and then is he disappointed? And what do I feel about every elf I share blood with being dead and now I've got this human baby that I'm sure I'd feel very normal about,”
reader, she was not sure of that at all,
“and I'd just think, Maker, I sort of hope I just die before I have to deal with that. I think it's more complicated than I used to believe,” a concession that he cannot know the magnitude of, coming late to this particular journey, “but—”
she breathes out something very like a laugh and leans against his shoulder. “I think I only want to figure it out for myself. So this would be a terrible time to tell me you want children.”
![[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
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
“Ah,” he says, all that realisation sunk into that one word.
His first kneejerk thought, irrationally, is: there’s more than one poet in the family. The text reads more like a poem, disparate crystalline images, little sense in them, not much of a coherent conversation to be had. His hand quivers as he holds up the paper for reading; it’s not from emotion.
“She says I am sorry. Twice,” he says, his blue-green eyes lodged on the well-worn paper.
no subject
And then she'd sat in her dressing room with her head in her hands for a long time, but what the fuck else was she supposed to do. What do you say to that.
“One of the last conversations we had, before they left, she'd come to see me after I turned up alive. You know, having been presumed dead the first time.” The first time. Presumed, because in that case she hadn't been, actually. “It wasn't as if...”
She gathers the letter back to herself with the passing thought that maybe the best revenge is the fact in her right mind Coupe would be so annoyed she's showed this thing to as many people as she has, “You know, the dementia means we can admit we care about each other now, so there's that.”
no subject
“Dementia is one of the great, inexorable, incurable syndromes even in my world,” Stephen says after a pause. “Your own mind betraying you. No matter the clean living, no matter our ridiculous technological advancements, there’s still no drug or surgery that can repair the damage done by neurodegenerative diseases. It’s not why I became a surgeon,”
(neurosurgery was the highest-earning specialty, and one of the most difficult, and both of those things played into the choice)
“But it scares the absolute shit out of me. It’s one of the worst things I could ever imagine. Personally, for me, with my priorities. Worse than this,” he gestures, splayed fingers, that quivering hand. “So I’m— it’s inadequate, but I’m very sorry. That that’s happening to her.”
no subject
Some people, to be fair, manage to be worse at it than others. Certainly, both of them fall under that particular heading. And even still it strikes her: in hundreds of years and apparently across hundreds of disparate worlds, no one has managed to come up with anything that doesn't feel like nothing, somehow. To say or to hear.
After a moment, “It isn't. Inadequate. That you're here.”
To set aside her grand philosophising on the intangibly, existentially empty nature of condolences—
actually, it's good, a bit.
no subject
“Well then, I’m glad,” he says; the words few but the warmth there, achingly fond in a way he otherwise struggles to express.
Maybe opening yourself up to someone else isn’t, in fact, the worst thing ever.
And he’s still half-mulling over what she’d mentioned, offhand, as a joke, but: Everyone dies eventually except incredibly irritating elves.
Meditative: “Elves and elfblooded in Thedas. You don’t, like, have preternatural longevity or anything, do you? I know that it varies, across worlds— back in our universe, I’d read about the Svartálfar, they were tremendously long-lived.”
no subject
and doesn't immediately answer him. By now, the sound of her not saying the first thing that crosses her mind is not an unfamiliar one; it's very specific. There's a degree of effort that it takes. Somewhere in the back of her head it's Loxley's voice, asking her why she's being such an asshole to people for trying to have ordinary conversations with her, and the seven things she might have said that wouldn't have been cruel to him but wouldn't exactly have been easy listtening wither, unsaid.
And it takes her a minute to come up with something else. Finally:
“Ancient elves were like that, more like the elves that have come here from Faerun or Arda or — Iorveth's continent. Thedosian elves are—”
it's tricky, navigating around for once trying to have any tact, and what she knows and believes to be true, and she frowns.
“Remnants, a Dalish elf and one of elvhenan is like comparing a stray dog and a mabari,” she settles on, so we're going with points for effort and a shaky dismount. “Being elfblooded is nothing. We're indistinguishable from humans in every way— if I'd never been told, there's nothing about me that would have made it possible for me to learn. If I had children, I'm still a dead end, my mother's line ended with me.”
no subject
This is not the sort of thing they tell you in the rifter orientation. The history books don’t devote much space to it. The few medical textbooks he’s found don’t delve into it; non-human physiology is quite glaringly omitted, for likely obvious reasons. And there’s no guide to what to say here in terms of response, knowing there are complicated feelings here about her mother, complicated feelings about her mother’s line, that branch of the family tree already bloodily and awfully hacked off—
So what he settles for, in the end, is simply a pragmatic: “Got it.”
Which is the scholar replying, before there’s a pause and then the man tries to muster a thought together, an attempt made: “And it’s not nothing, I think. You’re still of her line, even if it’s not in… every respect. I see that portrait in the foyer every day; you look very much like her.”
no subject
She sits, slipping a hand into his while she weighs the things she wants to say. If anything. Maybe she could just leave it at that—
then again, when was the last time she left well enough alone.
“Before we separated,” she says, slowly, “Thranduil had talked about, he thought if we had children they'd be like from Arda. Half elves are a thing there— apparently fucking everywhere but here, but— I always sort of kicked that down the road, you know, because it's not as if I'm going to stop using birth control in a war zone. In Forces. Psychotic. And we might die. But I could never figure out if it would be worse if he were right, and then I have a baby that I'm jealous of, which is fucked, or if he's wrong, and then is he disappointed? And what do I feel about every elf I share blood with being dead and now I've got this human baby that I'm sure I'd feel very normal about,”
reader, she was not sure of that at all,
“and I'd just think, Maker, I sort of hope I just die before I have to deal with that. I think it's more complicated than I used to believe,” a concession that he cannot know the magnitude of, coming late to this particular journey, “but—”
she breathes out something very like a laugh and leans against his shoulder. “I think I only want to figure it out for myself. So this would be a terrible time to tell me you want children.”
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
potential 🎀