Her first thought is to object; her second is on what fucking grounds, because that's not exactly... not the case, but what she settles on, with the shreds of her dignity, is:
“He's retired. I can't order him around.”
Which—
well, she doesn't, exactly. He can decline her requests and her instructions; from time to time, sometimes just to remind them both of that and sometimes for his own esoteric reasons that he sees not fit to share, he actually does. He is particular in the ways that he does, enough that when he says no, she's more like to listen than to cajole him— the way that she is often strategic with her grandfather, she sometimes thinks, except it's not a thing like that at all.
“If he wants to go and take too great an interest in a man he once tried to assassinate, it's his business.”
Stephen blinks, his hand falling away from her chatelaine and the drape of her skirts. She’s doing that thing again. Dropping in a baffling reference which hints that there’s certainly a story there, which means he has no choice but to ask for more detail, because of course he can’t not.
(But even this, too, is a relief to see: Gwenaëlle getting her feet back under her, settling her unsettled demeanour, piecing together those shreds of normalcy. Behaving more like herself.)
“Retired? But he—” A pause, trying to process that, because it doesn’t really track. “But he still does all the same sort of work. He’s not, say, out at a cottage in the countryside keeping bees or whatever. And— he tried to assassinate Thranduil?”
“He was my lord's man,” is the important part of tried to assassinate Thranduil, “and there was a time when I was still going to be a comtesse and things mattered that don't any more and when my lord said jump, he knew that Guilfoyle would figure out the correct height himself. He was taken care of, in the event of my lord's death at the battle of Ghislain— he had a personal bequest. More than enough to go and keep bees in the countryside, if he wanted, but he turned up and.”
Her shrug is a bit helpless.
“I told him that I couldn't hire him on and he didn't even dignify me with a conversation, he just found himself somewhere to be. He's been teaching me how to do everything for myself, when he's gone and I can't replace him— he's always been with us. Since before I was born. And I'm the only one left.”
Guilfoyle wears her father's signet ring; lingers, sometimes, beneath the portrait of her mama. He has been the steadying force in her life for all of her life, and she has managed without him and she could, but she isn't as certain that he, at the end of things, would manage without her.
“If he wanted to leave, I wouldn't stop him,” she says, after a beat. “I'd miss him. But I can't tell him he isn't welcome.”
It’s peeling back more layers about the curiosity that is Guilfoyle, and it’s a precious thing: a person who has remained by Gwenaëlle’s side for so long, not even for money, when she’s already lost so much else. The last of family.
“So he’s out here doing my laundry for fun?” Stephen asks, in a kind of aghast horror; Doctor Strange the neurosurgeon had been rich, yes, but as he’d mentioned so long ago, there was that difference between nouveau riche and nobility. He didn’t keep live-in servants; he’d even felt discomfited the first time he employed a cleaning lady to help tidy up that barren penthouse apartment.
He’d grown up on a farm.
Self-correcting himself already: “No, I know, it’s not for fun, it’s— it sounds like loyalty.” A beat. He’s more grateful for that old man than he realised. Mildly disconcerted by him as always, sure, but also glad that he’s been here for her —
“Is ‘Guilfoyle’ even his first name or his surname? Does he have any other name?”
In context, now, those moments of requests on Gwenaëlle's part that perhaps have seemed capricious or unnecessary: won't he read this to her while she's working, won't he teach her this thirty year old card game that she read a reference to and thinks he might know of, has he got time to take some dictation for someone in the library, could he cross-reference this for her, can he look at her figures. More often than she's asking him to accompany her to the alienage to retrieve a former comrade, she is trying to find him what she privately thinks of as sitting down tasks, anxious that he might treat retirement a little more like he's actually fucking retired, and try this salve she's mixed from a recipe in the infirmary for his joints—
He'd have died for her father, and then her father had died.
“Felix,” she says, thwarted in her objection by Stephen's own correction, “it's— Felix Guilfoyle.” It feels sort of strange in her mouth, like an impertinent intimacy that she's taking with someone who has seen her highs and lows but always from the impassive remove of servitude. (It strikes her in retrospect, how Mhavos had never entirely relaxed around her; the chasm between herself and Guilfoyle, and how much further it feels when he has been so much closer, and how little she even knows if she entirely wants to bridge it. The way that it had felt when his grief had been perceptible and to admit how far away hers had felt requires first admitting that she had any.)
“I worry about him doing too much,” she admits, “but he doesn't listen to me if I approach it like that.”
“Workaholics don’t tend to like scaling back. I’m familiar with the type.” The Stranges, for all their differences, had exhibited some similar streaks; his own father had probably worked his overtaxed heart into a coronary too soon. Heavy physical labour, early mornings in the field and stables, long days. God knows Stephen himself wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he was forced into a second retirement after sorcery.
“Well, I suppose you might have some more harmless busywork for him now that you’re Captain; perhaps there’s some paperwork you can foist off.”
There’s a thoughtful crinkle in his brow, a habitual paranoia still ticking over. Warily: “Since there’s no earldom to protect anymore,” sorry, he’s blunt sometimes, “that means he wouldn’t have any reason to kill me these days, does he?”
The concept of a shovel talk, belated as it would be, is much more unsettling if it’s coming from a not-so-retired assassin who knows exactly where he sleeps and how to get at him.
(Felix Guilfoyle has never fired a warning shot in his life.)
“Well, don't hurt my feelings,” she starts, a bit arch, and almost immediately can't hold it— “no, Maker, it was. You know, besides everything else, that was a direct order from his lord, and we never...”
Gwenaëlle tries to word it less terribly. Fails: “You don't argue with the knife. Thranduil had it out in Orlais with the Comte.” And he had come back sad and strange and she doesn't like to think about understanding why, so she doesn't, especially not now. He isn't her husband any longer, and her father has been ash for years. The past is the past. “And he didn't try again when my feelings were hurt, so I think you're well in the clear.”
“Still,” he sounds distracted, “I’ll have to get him something for Satinalia. Appreciation for his services and what-have-you. Do any Kirkwall businesses do gift cards?”
It’s not tipping the building superintendent at Christmas, but it’s also not not that.
Stephen’s still standing with his back to the door, surveying her in this private space. Looking for more of those hairline fractures or signs of distress, the quiet fidgeting. They’re past that particular crucible, he thinks, but it’s still worth saying it aloud, so he reaches out and his fingertips graze Gwenaëlle’s bare wrist, her pulse-point.
“Are you all right?” he asks. “About him being back.”
He’s no longer talking about Guilfoyle. (Once upon a time, Cosima’s quarters upstairs been Tony’s which once had been Thranduil-and-Gwenaëlle’s. Bizarre, to think about now.)
Some businesses in Hightown, she knows, will allow someone to extend credit for another — she, too, thinks of Tony for entirely different reasons, remembering how she'd made him an appointment with a tailor for a number of items adding up to his not dressing like a depressed ragman any more. Maybe she's about to say something about it (wouldn't it be nice if Tony came back, actually, Cosima would probably be relieved, too—) but the slide of his fingertips and the question,
one soothes more than the other. Gwenaëlle slips her wrist beneath his hand enough that she can press their palms together. Probably he can see the moment where she nearly says of course I'm fine, not because she's thought it through but because she hasn't. He warrants the extra effort, the moment of pause. An answer she's actually given some weight to.
“I was when he was still here,” she says, feeling her way to the edges of how off-balanced she's found herself. “It'd be easier if it were just my ex-husband, you know, and not... I keep reaching for these fragile things,” with a wet laugh, struck by it, tilting her head up half not to let tears surprise her and half not to look at him and find she can't avoid them. “I was so much smaller a part of his life than he was of mine. I was the wife that could be forgotten. The thing I was so fucking afraid of, here it is. And that keeps happening, I have to stop finding new things to be afraid of, I think I just become fearless or something. I think that's—”
She presses her eyes shut, and then her forehead against his shoulder. “And I don't wish I was living a different life. It just, I want this to be real to you.”
Stephen sees the moment and recognises it for what it is, because so much of him does the very same flippant thing (I am happy), but he waits her out as she pulls together the longer answer. Folds her into his side as she presses her head into his shoulder, his palm splayed against the small of her back, the casual unthinking touch which he only ever indulges with Gwenaëlle.
It’s difficult and complicated and so few people have ever been in her exact shoes, with this specific problem.
He can’t even promise it will never happen again. It could so easily happen: the Fade could take him at any moment and he’s met other Stephen Stranges, knows they’re out there walking the multiverse. And he’s been so cagey with telling people about Christine, but Gwenaëlle’s one of the few people who knows, and it does wind up oddly relevant here, another unexpected echo:
“I don’t think I ever mentioned— I once met a Christine in another universe who had never been with me. It’s jarring; they’re both the person you remember and they’re not. I probably did her a disservice by thinking of her as the woman I knew. You have to meet them where they’re at, I think. And in the meantime— whether or not he remembers it, it doesn’t change the fact that it did happen here. It was real. You’re real. You’re what I measure everything else by.”
How the fuck is she supposed to be normal about hearing a thing like that—
but it is exactly, exactly the thing that she needs to hear.
“Then I'm all right,” she decides, letting herself be steadied with next breath and the incredible odds against the fact that they've found one another, maybe the only people who can specifically relate to this narrow experience. The improbability of this very real thing— “About it. I'll be all right.”
His smile is a small, faint thing, but it’s there nonetheless. He gives a squeeze of her hand, tightening pressure, weight.
“Good. And you don’t have to be, immediately. You can take your time adjusting to it and finding your equilibrium again. It’s a hell of a thing to get accustomed to.”
“If it's not one fucking thing around here,” she sighs, and then tilts back enough that she can look up at him— “I'll finish up here later, I'm at sixes and sevens. Let's go get dinner.”
Maybe she'll prod him into regaling her with his jaunts through alternate worlds, or maybe they'll just be companionable; it means so much to her, how instantly he just came when she needed him to. That's something to lean on, now.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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no subject
Her first thought is to object; her second is on what fucking grounds, because that's not exactly... not the case, but what she settles on, with the shreds of her dignity, is:
“He's retired. I can't order him around.”
Which—
well, she doesn't, exactly. He can decline her requests and her instructions; from time to time, sometimes just to remind them both of that and sometimes for his own esoteric reasons that he sees not fit to share, he actually does. He is particular in the ways that he does, enough that when he says no, she's more like to listen than to cajole him— the way that she is often strategic with her grandfather, she sometimes thinks, except it's not a thing like that at all.
“If he wants to go and take too great an interest in a man he once tried to assassinate, it's his business.”
no subject
(But even this, too, is a relief to see: Gwenaëlle getting her feet back under her, settling her unsettled demeanour, piecing together those shreds of normalcy. Behaving more like herself.)
“Retired? But he—” A pause, trying to process that, because it doesn’t really track. “But he still does all the same sort of work. He’s not, say, out at a cottage in the countryside keeping bees or whatever. And— he tried to assassinate Thranduil?”
no subject
Her shrug is a bit helpless.
“I told him that I couldn't hire him on and he didn't even dignify me with a conversation, he just found himself somewhere to be. He's been teaching me how to do everything for myself, when he's gone and I can't replace him— he's always been with us. Since before I was born. And I'm the only one left.”
Guilfoyle wears her father's signet ring; lingers, sometimes, beneath the portrait of her mama. He has been the steadying force in her life for all of her life, and she has managed without him and she could, but she isn't as certain that he, at the end of things, would manage without her.
“If he wanted to leave, I wouldn't stop him,” she says, after a beat. “I'd miss him. But I can't tell him he isn't welcome.”
no subject
“So he’s out here doing my laundry for fun?” Stephen asks, in a kind of aghast horror; Doctor Strange the neurosurgeon had been rich, yes, but as he’d mentioned so long ago, there was that difference between nouveau riche and nobility. He didn’t keep live-in servants; he’d even felt discomfited the first time he employed a cleaning lady to help tidy up that barren penthouse apartment.
He’d grown up on a farm.
Self-correcting himself already: “No, I know, it’s not for fun, it’s— it sounds like loyalty.” A beat. He’s more grateful for that old man than he realised. Mildly disconcerted by him as always, sure, but also glad that he’s been here for her —
“Is ‘Guilfoyle’ even his first name or his surname? Does he have any other name?”
no subject
He'd have died for her father, and then her father had died.
“Felix,” she says, thwarted in her objection by Stephen's own correction, “it's— Felix Guilfoyle.” It feels sort of strange in her mouth, like an impertinent intimacy that she's taking with someone who has seen her highs and lows but always from the impassive remove of servitude. (It strikes her in retrospect, how Mhavos had never entirely relaxed around her; the chasm between herself and Guilfoyle, and how much further it feels when he has been so much closer, and how little she even knows if she entirely wants to bridge it. The way that it had felt when his grief had been perceptible and to admit how far away hers had felt requires first admitting that she had any.)
“I worry about him doing too much,” she admits, “but he doesn't listen to me if I approach it like that.”
no subject
“Well, I suppose you might have some more harmless busywork for him now that you’re Captain; perhaps there’s some paperwork you can foist off.”
There’s a thoughtful crinkle in his brow, a habitual paranoia still ticking over. Warily: “Since there’s no earldom to protect anymore,” sorry, he’s blunt sometimes, “that means he wouldn’t have any reason to kill me these days, does he?”
The concept of a shovel talk, belated as it would be, is much more unsettling if it’s coming from a not-so-retired assassin who knows exactly where he sleeps and how to get at him.
no subject
“Well, don't hurt my feelings,” she starts, a bit arch, and almost immediately can't hold it— “no, Maker, it was. You know, besides everything else, that was a direct order from his lord, and we never...”
Gwenaëlle tries to word it less terribly. Fails: “You don't argue with the knife. Thranduil had it out in Orlais with the Comte.” And he had come back sad and strange and she doesn't like to think about understanding why, so she doesn't, especially not now. He isn't her husband any longer, and her father has been ash for years. The past is the past. “And he didn't try again when my feelings were hurt, so I think you're well in the clear.”
(Shovel talks are for people you see coming.)
no subject
It’s not tipping the building superintendent at Christmas, but it’s also not not that.
Stephen’s still standing with his back to the door, surveying her in this private space. Looking for more of those hairline fractures or signs of distress, the quiet fidgeting. They’re past that particular crucible, he thinks, but it’s still worth saying it aloud, so he reaches out and his fingertips graze Gwenaëlle’s bare wrist, her pulse-point.
“Are you all right?” he asks. “About him being back.”
He’s no longer talking about Guilfoyle. (Once upon a time, Cosima’s quarters upstairs been Tony’s which once had been Thranduil-and-Gwenaëlle’s. Bizarre, to think about now.)
no subject
one soothes more than the other. Gwenaëlle slips her wrist beneath his hand enough that she can press their palms together. Probably he can see the moment where she nearly says of course I'm fine, not because she's thought it through but because she hasn't. He warrants the extra effort, the moment of pause. An answer she's actually given some weight to.
“I was when he was still here,” she says, feeling her way to the edges of how off-balanced she's found herself. “It'd be easier if it were just my ex-husband, you know, and not... I keep reaching for these fragile things,” with a wet laugh, struck by it, tilting her head up half not to let tears surprise her and half not to look at him and find she can't avoid them. “I was so much smaller a part of his life than he was of mine. I was the wife that could be forgotten. The thing I was so fucking afraid of, here it is. And that keeps happening, I have to stop finding new things to be afraid of, I think I just become fearless or something. I think that's—”
She presses her eyes shut, and then her forehead against his shoulder. “And I don't wish I was living a different life. It just, I want this to be real to you.”
Thedas, her. It is so fragile.
no subject
It’s difficult and complicated and so few people have ever been in her exact shoes, with this specific problem.
He can’t even promise it will never happen again. It could so easily happen: the Fade could take him at any moment and he’s met other Stephen Stranges, knows they’re out there walking the multiverse. And he’s been so cagey with telling people about Christine, but Gwenaëlle’s one of the few people who knows, and it does wind up oddly relevant here, another unexpected echo:
“I don’t think I ever mentioned— I once met a Christine in another universe who had never been with me. It’s jarring; they’re both the person you remember and they’re not. I probably did her a disservice by thinking of her as the woman I knew. You have to meet them where they’re at, I think. And in the meantime— whether or not he remembers it, it doesn’t change the fact that it did happen here. It was real. You’re real. You’re what I measure everything else by.”
no subject
but it is exactly, exactly the thing that she needs to hear.
“Then I'm all right,” she decides, letting herself be steadied with next breath and the incredible odds against the fact that they've found one another, maybe the only people who can specifically relate to this narrow experience. The improbability of this very real thing— “About it. I'll be all right.”
no subject
“Good. And you don’t have to be, immediately. You can take your time adjusting to it and finding your equilibrium again. It’s a hell of a thing to get accustomed to.”
🎀
Maybe she'll prod him into regaling her with his jaunts through alternate worlds, or maybe they'll just be companionable; it means so much to her, how instantly he just came when she needed him to. That's something to lean on, now.