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.
![[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'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.