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.”
He makes a strangled noise; also kind of a laugh, also kind of horrified at suddenly contemplating that prospect, the pinprick stab of tension being released in the conversation as his shoulder shakes in a chuckle.
“No,” Stephen says, not too fast but not too slow, “I don’t. And I don’t even have your giant stack of complicated reasons about it. I just don’t think…”
I wouldn’t be good at it, I’m too selfish, I was never in the right sort of relationship for it, there’s always too much going on, and none of that has really changed—
“I don’t know, it’s never really been a priority. I value my independence. I always rather savoured the idea of being the fun cool rich uncle if any of my friends had children. I could give them presents and take them on outings but not have to do any of the hard work,” he adds, wry.
However complex Gwenaëlle's feelings about motherhood are and have been, there's a moment where she just sits with the recognition of what it is that she feels, listening to him now: relief.
It's relief. It's a relief to hear him say no, that she isn't going to disappoint him with coming to the conclusion that maybe I've thought it would be easier to die than have that conversation isn't the thought of someone who should be considering pregnancy in any context other than its prevention. It's a weight off that she hadn't realised she's been holding onto, this twist of guilt—
Maybe she'll make peace with these things. But maybe it's fine, after all, if that doesn't mean she has a baby about it.
“You'd be good at that, I think,” she decides, tipping her head to scrutinise him as if she's considering his qualifications for the role in the edge of his jaw and the sharpness of his goatee. “I have some practise. Especially with the presents and the outings part, though I don't know what I'm going to do when I can't spend my grandfather's money any more.”
This isn't true. She has the sort of books that suggest a mind that would have really taken to spreadsheets.
“Your gift-giving skills are tremendously good. That’s another one of the first things I learned about you.”
His fingers curl into hers, with a squeeze of acknowledgment. Even for him, there’s that little internal jab of relief at hearing they’re on the same page, at finding out that he’s not going to be disappointing her in this regard (if rifters even can have children at all, which— the jury’s still out). And besides, Stephen’s of an age now that that’s probably a conversation he ought to be having with partners, some women aware of their biological clocks ticking.
And so, only now, it finally somehow belatedly occurs to him, looking at Gwenaëlle, that he’d never actually asked—
There’s another faint crinkle in his brow: from mild perplexment this time, as he considers. They’ve had some surprising gaps in knowledge between them, thanks to instinctive acts of omission on his part, which she’d practically interrogated out of him. But he’s realising now that somehow there’s another gigantic gaping everyday omission which they just never filled in. He hadn’t thought to ask.
There is a small chasm opening up in his stomach with a kind of slow-dawning horror, a cold-sweat worry that this answer might skew lower than he thought.
“Gwenaëlle,” he says, “you know what I just realised— I mean, I don’t think I ever— I don’t think I even know how old you are.”
It strikes her suddenly that he's right — they'd talked about his birthday, but not the age he turned on it, and she's so expertly avoided her own for years now (Alexandrie got away with silently presenting her a gift, once, just) that her own age has just not been a conversation she's had with anyone recently. She can't remember the last time it came up. It's almost strange to do the math and say,
“I'm thirty,” a little as if it's only just occurred to her that she has in fact (at some unspecified time in the presumably recent-ish past) hit that particular milestone. Who'd have thought. “I'd have been, I think, twenty-two when I was first sent to the Inquisition.”
With substantially less trepidation: “How old are you?”
He’d girded himself for the worst, so it’s actually yet another relief, that the hammer lands and it is in fact less than he expected but not what he feared. And then his expression takes on the abstracted look of someone trying to do some very quick math. Divide by half, add seven?
Stephen’s pause goes on a little too long. Not because he’s still agonising over her age, but because now he’s frankly struggling to pin down his own. He and Cosima have bonded over how hard it was to reckon these things.
“It’s hard to tell,” he admits, “between the vanishing for five years and then crossing over here and the timelines don’t really line up. But I was forty-two when I sort-of-died, and then came back the same age, and Thedas wasn’t all that long after. So I’ve generally assumed I turned forty-three here.”
He does the math. They’re in the clear.
Then, before he can think any better of this irrational absurd kneejerk question, “Is that alright? I mean, I’m fine with it if you are—”
To be fair to the momentarily blank look she gives him as she parses that question, there are a couple of elves really fucking with her average here. To be fair to the many things that are and have been independently wrong with her before any particularly long-lived, pointy-eared individuals came into the picture, she still might have done, anyway. The idea of it being an issue is not totally intuitive to her, though she catches on — visibly — after that moment of incomprehension.
“Well,” she says, bracingly, “it has been a while since there was anyone under the age of a hundred, but I don't think you're that young—”
Okay.
So she holds that for about a millionth of a second before she laughs, sliding her hand familiarly and fondly over his knee, “Stephen, you're a very handsome man and I like the streaks of white very much but I hadn't taken them for belonging to a man under forty.”
The joke lands where it should, drawing another surprised relieved laugh out of him; he hadn’t actually known the extent of it, it’s not like he ever met any of those long-lived rifter elves. And then,
half-joking, half-mock-affronted, but with perhaps a little bit of genuine pedantry, because Stephen really can be a little vain when he lets himself be: “Grey. They’re more streaks of grey than white, I’ll have you know—”
“Only because the rest of your hair is black,” she says, a laugh still threaded through the words, lifting her hand to sweep her fingers through it, illustratively and because she can and she'd like to.
(Sometimes, in the evening, she stops what she's doing to watch him because the novelty that he's right there hasn't worn off yet.)
Mollified, Stephen leans into her touch and savours that simple, enjoyable sensation; Gwenaëlle’s fingers at his temples, at the nape of his neck, combing through his scalp. Perhaps if the physical change had come on more slowly, through mere natural aging, he’d have been less self-aware about it. But it had come on like a shock: waking up after the accident to find that those few greys had multiplied, his whole look gone frayed and wan overnight, exacerbated by injury and his fucked-up face. (He still remembered the technicalities behind it: norepinephrine, a burst of acute stress, hormones affecting hair follicle pigmentation. A thing he never thought he’d experience firsthand.)
But Gwenaëlle thinks he looks very distinguished and very handsome now, and so at the end of the day he can’t really mind all that much.
He’s surveying the rest of the room and its wreckage. The mostly-empty paper on Gwenaëlle’s desk, the spill of ink, the broken chair. “I’ll help you clean this up,” Stephen says, head turning, pressing a kiss into her shoulder. “We can move up one of the spare chairs from below.”
But he doesn’t make any gesture to move just yet. They sit there for a while, shoulder-to-shoulder, in the mess. Her grief’s still there, he can sense it like some deep waters lurking just out of view, but at least the weight is— less, hopefully, for having been shared.
There’s the physician’s urge to press his fingers into everything, to fix everything. This is a wound that he can’t stitch back together or sew up with his bare hands, but at least there’s company and that’s not nothing. It isn’t inadequate that you’re here.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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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,” Stephen says, not too fast but not too slow, “I don’t. And I don’t even have your giant stack of complicated reasons about it. I just don’t think…”
I wouldn’t be good at it, I’m too selfish, I was never in the right sort of relationship for it, there’s always too much going on, and none of that has really changed—
“I don’t know, it’s never really been a priority. I value my independence. I always rather savoured the idea of being the fun cool rich uncle if any of my friends had children. I could give them presents and take them on outings but not have to do any of the hard work,” he adds, wry.
no subject
It's relief. It's a relief to hear him say no, that she isn't going to disappoint him with coming to the conclusion that maybe I've thought it would be easier to die than have that conversation isn't the thought of someone who should be considering pregnancy in any context other than its prevention. It's a weight off that she hadn't realised she's been holding onto, this twist of guilt—
Maybe she'll make peace with these things. But maybe it's fine, after all, if that doesn't mean she has a baby about it.
“You'd be good at that, I think,” she decides, tipping her head to scrutinise him as if she's considering his qualifications for the role in the edge of his jaw and the sharpness of his goatee. “I have some practise. Especially with the presents and the outings part, though I don't know what I'm going to do when I can't spend my grandfather's money any more.”
This isn't true. She has the sort of books that suggest a mind that would have really taken to spreadsheets.
no subject
His fingers curl into hers, with a squeeze of acknowledgment. Even for him, there’s that little internal jab of relief at hearing they’re on the same page, at finding out that he’s not going to be disappointing her in this regard (if rifters even can have children at all, which— the jury’s still out). And besides, Stephen’s of an age now that that’s probably a conversation he ought to be having with partners, some women aware of their biological clocks ticking.
And so, only now, it finally somehow belatedly occurs to him, looking at Gwenaëlle, that he’d never actually asked—
There’s another faint crinkle in his brow: from mild perplexment this time, as he considers. They’ve had some surprising gaps in knowledge between them, thanks to instinctive acts of omission on his part, which she’d practically interrogated out of him. But he’s realising now that somehow there’s another gigantic gaping everyday omission which they just never filled in. He hadn’t thought to ask.
There is a small chasm opening up in his stomach with a kind of slow-dawning horror, a cold-sweat worry that this answer might skew lower than he thought.
“Gwenaëlle,” he says, “you know what I just realised— I mean, I don’t think I ever— I don’t think I even know how old you are.”
no subject
It strikes her suddenly that he's right — they'd talked about his birthday, but not the age he turned on it, and she's so expertly avoided her own for years now (Alexandrie got away with silently presenting her a gift, once, just) that her own age has just not been a conversation she's had with anyone recently. She can't remember the last time it came up. It's almost strange to do the math and say,
“I'm thirty,” a little as if it's only just occurred to her that she has in fact (at some unspecified time in the presumably recent-ish past) hit that particular milestone. Who'd have thought. “I'd have been, I think, twenty-two when I was first sent to the Inquisition.”
With substantially less trepidation: “How old are you?”
no subject
Stephen’s pause goes on a little too long. Not because he’s still agonising over her age, but because now he’s frankly struggling to pin down his own. He and Cosima have bonded over how hard it was to reckon these things.
“It’s hard to tell,” he admits, “between the vanishing for five years and then crossing over here and the timelines don’t really line up. But I was forty-two when I sort-of-died, and then came back the same age, and Thedas wasn’t all that long after. So I’ve generally assumed I turned forty-three here.”
He does the math. They’re in the clear.
Then, before he can think any better of this irrational absurd kneejerk question, “Is that alright? I mean, I’m fine with it if you are—”
no subject
“Well,” she says, bracingly, “it has been a while since there was anyone under the age of a hundred, but I don't think you're that young—”
Okay.
So she holds that for about a millionth of a second before she laughs, sliding her hand familiarly and fondly over his knee, “Stephen, you're a very handsome man and I like the streaks of white very much but I hadn't taken them for belonging to a man under forty.”
no subject
half-joking, half-mock-affronted, but with perhaps a little bit of genuine pedantry, because Stephen really can be a little vain when he lets himself be: “Grey. They’re more streaks of grey than white, I’ll have you know—”
no subject
(Sometimes, in the evening, she stops what she's doing to watch him because the novelty that he's right there hasn't worn off yet.)
potential 🎀
But Gwenaëlle thinks he looks very distinguished and very handsome now, and so at the end of the day he can’t really mind all that much.
He’s surveying the rest of the room and its wreckage. The mostly-empty paper on Gwenaëlle’s desk, the spill of ink, the broken chair. “I’ll help you clean this up,” Stephen says, head turning, pressing a kiss into her shoulder. “We can move up one of the spare chairs from below.”
But he doesn’t make any gesture to move just yet. They sit there for a while, shoulder-to-shoulder, in the mess. Her grief’s still there, he can sense it like some deep waters lurking just out of view, but at least the weight is— less, hopefully, for having been shared.
There’s the physician’s urge to press his fingers into everything, to fix everything. This is a wound that he can’t stitch back together or sew up with his bare hands, but at least there’s company and that’s not nothing. It isn’t inadequate that you’re here.