Gwenaëlle was already good at this part even when they were brand-new to each other, and so it’s little surprise that she was raring to go. Stephen reaches up and feels the fabric bundle weighing on his chest, automatically trying to suss out the shape of it. (Fabric wrapped around something else, a few rigid square edges, glass.)
He levers himself up with a drowsy groan, eventually scooting to a seated position against the headboard, Gwenaëlle still with him in his lap. (It is a very nice way to wake up.) It is in fact very early, but any urge to burrow back under the covers is offset by, despite himself, that childish sparkle of delight starting to flicker to life, of wondering what’s in the gift. He does love treats. He balances the bundle and glances over to his own nightstand beside the alcove, less well-hidden:
“I have some things for you, too. Do I open this one in front of you, with you watching? I realise this is our first time exchanging in-person—”
He’s been upgraded from Guilfoyle sack duty. Also nice.
“Yes,” she says, forthrightly and directly over the top of I realise—, “yes, yes,” with the marked lack of patience of someone who has been writhing in agony about waiting for Satinalia for, possibly, weeks at this point. Not even the traces left of the bruising shadowing her face can detract from this for her, she’s maybe specifically decided, her knees settling either side of his thighs and her feet hooking between his calves.
(Still, they fit together. Still.)
“And then,” as graciously as some majestic creature bestowing beatitudes from a throne and not his lap, “you can give me yours.”
Which she’ll likely become excited for when it happens, but for now: the gleam of her eyes is absolutely dedicated to will he like this—
Gwenaëlle’s enthusiasm and excitement is contagious, endearing, and so he can feel it sinking in: some of that old magic, early mornings and reaching beneath a plastic tree, functional hands ripping into wrapping paper and tearing open boxes, eager and impatient. The Stranges hadn’t been able to afford much, so the day had been special for what little they’d scraped together for their children.
After he’d been able to afford buying himself anything he wanted anytime, he’d sort of stopped caring.
So it’s nice, it mattering again. Stephen unwraps the bundle and shakes out the long coat first thing, its arms spilling loose, and he props it up against her chest so he can see it better: the lovely dark red colour, the Research sigil at the lapels, and she can see the delight spreading across his face at the sight of it. “Oh, I can wear a stylish uniform again,” he declares; it’s not a cloak, but it’s nice to have options which aren’t just throwing a cloak on over nondescript clothing.
He goes through the rest with meticulous care: a bottle of Orlesian cologne, which he automatically daubs on, to please her.
He lingers over-long at the poetry, pressing ruined fingertips to the pane of glass, the lipstick kiss. When he shoots a look back up to her, he’s wearing a smile that can only be described as shy. “I’ve had news articles written about me, but poetry’s still new.”
But it’s the last object which takes most of his attention: the dwarven-made pocket-watch. Stephen barks a small incredulous laugh (on so many levels) once he removes it from its case, holding it up to the dawn light filtering through their windows, turning it over carefully to examine the workings and admire the craftsmanship. A flick of the stem and the front springs open; it’s been already wound to the steady tick tick tick of counting time. Had he ever told her about his watch collection? No, and she hadn’t been invited into his bedroom at the Sanctum, so how could she have known—
He’s thunderstruck into silence for a moment.
“Is this,” he says slowly, “from Orzammar? What made you think of it?”
He can sort of guess — he’s a goddamned time wizard, after all — but he’s still stuck on it, his own gears catching.
The answer is almost in itself endearing in how straightforward a straight line it is:
“When Wysteria was settling her arrangements before she left for Orzammar,” she reminds him, “you told her that you wanted one.” And Wysteria had told him they’d cost his eye teeth, and he’d said he’d figure it out, and Gwenaëlle had thought: well, why shouldn’t she do it? “She was happy to collude with me, although she was fairly unsubtly disappointed we weren’t colluding over anything more interesting. You could not have wanted something more boring to her if you’d tried.”
Which tickles her, a bit. Both because a dwarven-made pocketwatch seems like a perfectly fine thing to want, and because it’s— nice, a bit, to be dull. Even to be thought dull. The simple fact of it is, though:
she has been paying him a great deal of mind for as long as they’ve known each other. He had said it, but not to her, and she had been listening, and that had been plenty.
“Everything else was made particularly for you,” the coat she’d handsewn, the poetry she’d pressed her lips to, the cologne mixed to specifications to complement her favourite scent in particular, “but you were so enthusiastic about pocket-watches I didn’t think you’d mind if we just had to trust Wysteria’s taste.”
Still struck by the gesture and her thoughtfulness itself, but now there’s an edge of baffling amusement bubbling beneath the surface, Stephen’s laugh deepening as he suddenly closes the distance and kisses her: more ferocious than one might expect for a drowsy morning, now urgent, pressing. He loves her so much. He cannot express how much.
When they finally break for air, he tries to explain: “I used to collect watches. I had a sprawling collection, on display like you collect glass eyes. Luxury items, limited editions.” Should he even mention the full context? Fuck it, he’s always been honest with her: “I had a favourite from Christine, which I used to wear but— this is my new favourite. And I don’t… This is absurd, you need to see.”
He’s lost his train of thought and the sentences keep chopping themselves into pieces, not even knowing where to begin, so in the end he just leans over (almost tipping the two of them) to fumble with the drawer on his side of the alcove. Inside is his own gift, two wooden cases which he presses carefully into Gwenaëlle’s hands: one which won’t open easily, another which will.
And he’s laughing: “I also colluded with Wysteria to get you something from Orzammar, I low-key think she despised my choice—”
For a variety of — no, for a few reasons, not terribly varied, it’s been weeks since she remembers kissing him quite like this, and it isn’t that in that time she forgot what it’s like to do that, just...
Even if he weren’t bouncing between thoughts borderline incoherently, she might be having trouble entirely focusing on what he’s saying immediately after— and when she nearly spills off his lap, clutching the blankets and his arm like a startled Small Yngvi with a yelp, she laughs, clinging until they’re righted. Clinging after, until she has to relinquish her grip to take the cases.
“I bet,” she says, grasping onto a handhold that allows her to swing up to her favourite topic to return to with little to no warning, “that she would be significantly more impressed with us if we had a flying boat—”
What, is she wrong. A bit of fidgeting and: “Oh,” delighted, “it’s a puzzle,” before setting one box aside for the other, determining that that one can wait. “Stephen,” when the sewing case opens with significantly more ease, “these are beautiful,”
she’s not beating the boring couple allegations. (She’s still riding the high of his favourite watch.)
“I was a little worried it’d be— I don’t know,” clutching her new sewing kit to her chest, looking back at him, “not as boring a gift as Wysteria thought, but you know, oh, a thing I was just going to get myself, anyway, ho hum—” a bigger worry than the one she might’ve stumbled into but slips past, now, about competing with his absent ex. It’s not that she’s above that kind of fretting, it’s just very difficult to look at him right now and not feel very sure about the things that he’s saying to her. What hard work she’s done, to take the man she loves at face value.
These are beautiful, she says, and he feels his own little jolt of exhaled relief.
“Ah, good; I didn’t exactly know what would make the sewing supplies good or not, but I figured fine dwarven crafts meant they knew what they were on about.”
Their bed is a scattering of miscellany, his own presents sitting next to them, and as Gwenaëlle clutches the kit to her chest he instinctively reaches up and traces the edge of her cheek. Her jawbone has healed enough that he can touch her again; he hasn’t exactly needed to handle her with kid gloves, but he still does. He’s still careful around her, and until a moment ago with that small ember sparking, there hasn’t been much heat to their gestures these days. A metaphorical wound under wraps, still healing.
But as she talks about the watch, he considers how to explain this, working through the thought process aloud. It isn’t something he’s had to consider much with a girlfriend before, but:
“It’s not ho-hum,” Stephen says. “It’s, I don’t know. The fact that you listened. You paid attention.” They’ve been doing that for each other this whole time. “And I was perhaps a little bit worried that this one wasn’t very exciting for you either, that it would just look like more work,”
her fingers splayed across the sewing kit,
“but at the end of the day, it felt right. You fixed my cloak. I saw you working on that camo jacket for Clarisse. I wanted to get you something that you needed, and could make use of, and would hold up well, and that would actually make an impact on your day and reflect the way you spend your time. Your house is already filled with beautiful things; you hardly need more. You can’t do anything with, I don’t know, flowers or a necklace. And this,” the pocketwatch, “is beautiful but it also has a function.
“I don’t know where I’m going with this. Bottom line: I truly appreciate the gift, is what I’m trying to say.”
The mention of Clarisse’s jacket — likewise bundled up on the boat, ready to be hand-delivered later today (although it will not end up being necessary to go to her) — makes her laugh, the loose curls not drawn back into her sleep braids bouncing around her face as she leans into his hand, lowering hers only so she can set the sewing kit down nearby them in the rest of the gifting chaos. “I nearly— I was going to ask you about camouflage, but I didn’t want to open that conversation—”
the one she had instead started with Loxley is sooooo handsome and nearly given the man heart failure,
“—can you show me what ‘camo’ is meant to look like? And while you’re drawing it do you recall being inside me recently? And I couldn’t ask Abby, because she would obviously say, why haven’t you asked Stephen, have you not talked to him yet, and I would walk into the sea.”
At that point, obviously, her only recourse.
Her newly freed hand comes to his wrist and she slides her thumb, fondly, against the inside of it, up to his palm, “I wouldn’t have been displeased,” she says, “with flowers or a necklace. But I love that you know what I need.”
That he knows her; that he knows her this well, and loves her this much.
Stephen’s not expecting that tangent back to earlier in the year, and it catches him laughing, remembering how dreadful they’d been about avoiding each other.
Shaking his head over the prospective gifts, still amused, “Duly noted for next time. Although I would be displeased with receiving flowers or a necklace, for the record—” Gwenaëlle knows exactly how far his vanity goes and what sort of decoration he does favour, for those formal occasions when he accessorises a little more and she can nimbly set them in place for him: cufflinks, tie pins. Back in New York, a two-fingered ring if it’s magical.
And a pocketwatch, now.
That thumb running along his palm, his life-line, shouldn’t be as distracting as it is, except that it is. It’s nice to be here, warm and content in their shared bed in their shared home, with an actual holiday stretched ahead of them with no work on the day.
“Also, honestly, asking about camouflage might’ve been better than what you did lead with. I would very gladly have explained it to you. And wouldn’t have minded the reminder,” of Halamshiral, of other times, their first time,
as he drifts to replace his hand with his mouth and kiss the corner of her jaw instead, the angle of her cheek, the place where she’d been injured.
Stephen is spared, at least for the immediate moment, any protests about how well thought out and specific her unhinged tangent had been because the press of his lips is a welcome distraction— kindling heat and an unfamiliarly nervous energy in the pit of her stomach. He, probably, cannot feel with his mouth the place where she can almost feel with her fingers some nothing remnant,
she can feel the flutter of her wings beneath the flimsy fabric of her nightgown, and her stomach swoops, and she slides her fingers higher to loop through his.
“I know that it hasn’t exactly been,” what’s the word she’s looking for, “… recent, now,”
is a sort of set up that doesn’t go anywhere, exactly. She is very aware of her weight in his lap and the scrape of his morning-untidy beard against her skin and that she hasn’t stopped wanting him, actually, even as her own body has become a stranger landscape to her than it has ever been.
It is a very suggestive place that they find themselves in now. And yet it’s still a slow-building thing, handled carefully. He’s no stranger to dry spells; the car crash, his body morphed and changed and unfamiliar, the chronic pain dulling everything else. Gwenaëlle’s always had a stronger libido than him, and this entire year had largely been her coaxing him out of it and reminding that he did, in fact, have urges and desires.
And the shoe’s on the other foot, this time. First it had been her injuries themselves — a doctor’s stubborn prescribed bedrest — but then, as time went on, he had noticed where their sex life lapsed, conspicuous for its absence. The wings. Those robes, wrapped around her shoulders at night. It’s not a thing he misses overly much, in contrast to having her presence alone, her conversation, her wit.
“I don’t mind,” Stephen says quietly. They haven’t actually talked about it yet. He needs to say this. “You know I don’t mind, right?”
The way she rolls her lip in her teeth isn’t exactly no, I didn’t, but maybe that knowing is different to feeling it. Maybe,
“I mind,” she admits, resisting the usual impulse to prevaricate and dissemble about it. I mind— a bit. I mind— but it’s fine. I mind— it’s often Gwenaëlle reaching for him, it’s not as if he hasn’t been there, isn’t it fucking stupid to miss something she could have just done? Does she even get to say, I’ve missed that? and anyway, it’s been like, a month, she’s gone without sex for longer than that. They both have.
(So she resisted it out loud, but it’s harder, in her own head.)
She tips her forehead against his; their breath mingled, their hands clasped.
At length, “I know you’re not mad,” the shape of a worry she might have had, in some other bed, in some other era of her life. “I haven’t not wanted, exactly.” And she wants, now,
it’s never felt vulnerable to want, quite the way it does now.
“I know this might not be an exact cognate, so feel free to tell me to fuck off and that it’s actually something else, but I know— I remember—” Stephen’s tripping over his words again; not through that giddy stupid delight in finding out they did the same thing with their presents, but instead now the delicacy of it, trying to find the right words to express what he wants to.
He’s not a poet or a writer or a diplomat. Still, he tries.
“Needing to take a bit of time to get comfortable in your own skin again. To feel like you’re yourself again. They put metal pins in all my fingers to reconstruct them; at night it seemed like I could feel them there, inside me. My hands were crooked. Everything was the wrong shape. Obviously it’s not fucking faerie wings,” there’s a touch of dry humour in his voice, their similar coping mechanisms, “but I don’t know. I remember what that sort of thing felt like, is what I mean.”
The lack of haste to tell him that he’s wrong is probably enough of a confirmation that this is in fact exactly the right track— she rubs her thumb in restless circles against his skin, half for his sake and half for her own. Half because he’s reminded her of he has hands, and that she’s touching them, and that they are not entirely navigating unfamiliar territory. It’s a little reassuring, remembering her own words to him. Remembering how little it has mattered to her that the version of him in her bed isn’t the physically whole one he remembers, because it’s him, still,
“I don’t want to be celibate for ten years about it,” she says, and almost immediately feels petulant and foolish for it, pulling a face and then burying it in his shoulder. “I know you don’t mind, but—”
How to find the words. That she wants to feel like her skin is her own again, yes; that she wants to feel wanted in it, too, that she’s vain and stupid and what if he finds her stranger and less beautiful. What a small, stupid thing to need so badly.
She says, into his skin where his sleep shirt has slid sideways with their entangling, “You know, first it was the rage demon. And then it was the wyvern, and then it was fucking ancient Arlathan spirits and at what point does well, I still think I’m beautiful become just, delusional—”
Her voice gets smaller and more embarrassed the longer she speaks, until she stops.
In another world perhaps he might have reacted with more incredulous surprise, is that what this is about,
except that he is sometimes just as vain as her, in complementary ways. Worrying about his unlovely hands, his overnight grey streaks. As she hides her face in his shoulder, voice small against his skin, Stephen’s own voice is a little muffled and mostly spoken into her hair, but audible enough.
“If you need someone to say it out loud, Gwenaëlle,” he says, no archness or humour buried in it anymore, just solid patience, “you are still an absolute smokeshow. The scars tell a story. The gold eye makes you intimidating in a frighteningly sexy way; I’ve always thought so. If you could roll with the idea of tentacles, I’m more than fine with the wings. Plus they’re, I don’t know, colourful? Pretty? It’s not like they’re demonic bat wings or anything; although for the record, I would love you even with demonic bat wings, too.”
What was it she had said?
Warmly: “To steal some words from someone far more eloquent: I like everything about your body. It’s a roadmap that brought you to me.”
It does help, even as absurd as it makes her feel to admit it, to hear him say so in so many words. So directly, and so sincerely, and frighteningly sexy is a nice thing to hear he’s always thought, and — and it’s a good point, about the tentacles, because,
“I thought your hands wouldn’t get tired that way,”
which is nearly as sweet as it is indicative of a willingness to get down with some significantly freakier elements than, as he says, pretty faerie wings. She’s looked at them less than she might’ve, avoided the mirrors scattered through their home, kept them tucked behind her and beneath fabric as much as she could, done her best to conceal them even from herself. To feel ordinary, instead of to look at what’s been made new of her.
(She remembers how they had prismed the light when she showed them to Isaac, and can think, now in retrospect: there had been some surreal beauty about that, the way the sun had shattered a rainbow through her.)
Lifting her head, finally, she searches his face for the same sincerity in his voice, and, “Thank you. For being patient with me.” For not needing her to rush into anything she wasn’t ready for; for being willing to say the thing she needs to hear.
When she kisses him, it is not with great patience.
The first remark shakes another laugh out of him, surprised and amused, it is so batshit insane but also considerate and isn’t that just the perfect summary of Gwenaëlle Clothilde Decima Vauquelin Baudin,
and Stephen’s still smiling through “I survived a yearslong dry spell, what’s a few more weeks,” but then Gwenaëlle captures his mouth and swallows whatever he’d been about to say. He kisses her back, and there’s an edge to it that’s been tamped-down and absent since the beginning of Harvestmere; this isn’t a chaste peck to her cheek or forehead, nor the clinical touch of a doctor checking on her wounds, her fresh dressing. He pauses only long enough to move some of the gifting chaos out of the way, not wanting to accidentally crush that custom puzzle-box or that precious framed glass poem under a knee, a thigh. With the bed alcove, it’s easy enough to relocate their Satinalia presents to the not-too-distant floor.
They haven’t had to do that in a while.
And as his mouth opens against hers with the slide of tongue, he realises: he has actually missed this. Not enough to nudge or pry or ask, but now that the fire’s here with that slow ember sparking anew, he admits it to himself: he has missed her. This.
The nightgowns had been a comfort — a barrier when she felt that she needed one — but now, it’s fabric tangling tight and uncomfortable around her thigh when she tries to move closer to him, and she makes a small sound of frustration against his mouth before gripping it with her fist and hauling it loose in a way that is less provocative than it is determined. Determined to get nearer to him, mostly,
(she makes sure the coat has slid all the way to the floor, too, she didn’t spend weeks handstitching it for Stephen to come on it because she was thoughtlessly caught up,)
determined to feel like herself again. To feel herself, again, and while she’s at it: him.
Their hands released from one another for the sake of various rearrangements, she sinks them into his hair — thumbs those streaks she likes so much, twists morning-loose hair around her fingers, follows his tongue back into his mouth. Between kisses, she murmurs, “It’s very romantic of you to be prepared to engage in courtly love,” a warm, heated tease, “but I have a lot of very romantic feelings for you that are specifically in my cunt.”
Stephen laughs again when he has a moment to breathe, “What was I just saying about eloquence?”
Not that he’s complaining. He’s already stirring to life with the way she’s straddling his lap, hands twining into his hair, knees pressed either side of his comfortable rumpled trousers.
They have had each other in so many ways, learning and re-learning each other. Late at night, tipsy and clumsy and eager. In that fabled enchanted bathtub. The occasional misuse of their private offices.
Every version of Gwenaëlle is his favourite version of her, and here is another: bed-mussed and sleepy and warm, both of them waking up, cast in sunlight rather than dim shadows and moonlight. It means the room is bright, and he can see her in all detail; as he slides a hand to hike up her nightgown and help sweep the rest out of the way so he can reach bare skin. His other hand catches at Gwenaëlle’s uninjured cheek, the line of her throat, palming a breast as the strap of her nightgown starts to slip off one shoulder.
Only a few inches away: those wings, caught between skin and fabric.
The (slight) rise of her breast under his hand pebbles; beneath her nightgown there is only skin, where if she’d planned the morning to go this way there might not have been. (Her undergarments divide into two categories: finely and comfortably practical, for her work clothes, or outrageously frivolous and meant to be seen and admired and not long worn. ) It’s familiar and it’s not— it’s the same, and it’s not. She can feel the flutter of her pulse and the way her wings shift behind her,
and it’s not unpleasant, if she allows it not to be. In this moment, where they are warm and close and there’s so little fabric left between them that she can feel him stiffening against the inside of her thigh and she doesn’t push away the way that want pools in her belly, the way she has been. The soft gown is headed to her waist from two directions and she could just— leave it there, it’s not as if he can’t get to her.
She is tempted to, for a moment. There’s a hesitation felt mostly in the coil of tension before she moves, leaning back enough that she can grasp her nightgown with both hands and pull it free over her head, wings rising behind her almost the moment they’re not confined by fabric.
(It feels more of a relief than she likes to admit.)
She rarely hesitates like this, and so he feels it in that heartbeat of a pause, where ordinarily Gwenaëlle is a creature of such immediate want and gratification.
But she finally hauls that nightgown off, and those insectile wings are immediately arching, visible behind her, opening and unfurling like long-coiled muscles unfolding. Arms stretching after a long time spent motionless. This first time of theirs isn’t happening at night, where she could wreathe herself in shadows and almost pretend that she hasn’t been changed; here, Stephen has the time and space and lighting to finally stop and look at them properly.
He’d seen them newly-made and disconcertingly fresh, but despite literally living together, she’s successfully kept them under wraps more often than not, only occasionally loosening them even around him.
He could ignore the wings, attention going straight to her bare tits, but he doesn’t. This is new territory, when he used to know every inch of Gwenaëlle: each scar, each chapter in the book of her. And so, derailed and experimental, Stephen reaches out and runs a fingertip along the edge of iridescent wing, testing to see how it feels; how sensitive it might be, if it hurts, if he’ll have to avoid any incidental contact at all during a roll in the hay. Re-learning her.
That they are sensitive isn’t news to her, not when she’s been methodically binding them to her back daily with a newly constant awareness of the pressure of her clothes, her own body heat— but she hasn’t, really, allowed the kind of exploration that he’s engaged in now, even for herself. Finding the most comfortable way to keep them concealed is miles from the way she realises, her mouth opening with surprise, that she can feel the approach of his hand before he’s touched her only in the way it disturbs the air, a pre-emptive caress.
“…yes,” she says, not immediately. “I— ouais.” It’s an entirely different kind of sensitivity; not bad, not even odd, exactly, so much as momentarily disorienting. And a bizarrely thrilling reassurance: on these rare occasions she can be this vulnerable, she’s going to be really fucking difficult to sneak up on.
The way she relaxes is still more deliberate than it was, the last time they were this close, like this. Too many things are happening in her head and only most of them are about Stephen,
but that is still a priority, folding herself in nearer partly for the pleasure of it and partly to allow him easier reach, if he wants it. A better look, over her shoulder. The slide of her hand down his abdomen probably isn’t going to make focusing any easier, though.
forgot to slap the nsfw warning on the thread. anyway there it is.
Gwenaëlle sidles closer, and this way he can look down over her shoulderblades, see them in better detail. It’s probably not too dissimilar from his sensitivity in the tentacles that had coiled loose from his arm, but hers is lasting; has lasted; any hopes they had of it simply sloughing off over time has faded, as time went on and on and the wings remained just as solid and impermeable as ever.
Stephen’s in data-gathering mode now, carving this into his photographic memory: he presses his thumb, ever so lightly, against the curve where one of the wings moulds into her back. The connection to the skin seamless and imperceptible, as if it grew organically out of her. He starts to follow the pearlescent mosaic of them, trailing the delicate tracery of veins, the opal topography. The wings are beautiful, now that she’s finally letting him look at them, touch them, take in the way the sunlight shatters and reflects off them.
He winds up so absorbed and distracted that he is, accordingly, entirely unprepared by the time her hand reaches his cock.
Her wings connect to her back in four separate places, two paired; that broken-glass shimmer spidering across the skin nearest where they do, fading to nothing, to the ordinary and familiar texture of her body. Under his hand they twitch and flutter, firm with the scale required to fit a human body, but flexible, light, translucent. Shades of the stained glass she favoured all through this boat,
her hand wraps around the base of his cock and she murmurs, “Well, you don’t feel off-put,” very archly.
The light, exploratory touch is … distracting. Slowly learning this is different to the cacophony of sensations, early, that had mostly been pain, or the way hauling a heavy robe over her shoulders had a largely dulling effect, trapping her wings where mostly what she could feel has been herself. It’s different, allowing herself to expand into this space, and under his hands— the very purposeful way she touches him is almost an exercise in grounding. A point to focus on outside of herself as she is newly mapped.
It’s an effective redirect, immediately wrenching loose a hitch of breath, a strangled noise into her neck. “I’m definitely not not interested, if you must ask,” Stephen says, but there’s that thread of humour in it, just as warm, just as teasing. He runs his hand down that strip of bare skin between the wings (her wings, her, yes, they’re a part of her), following the dip of her spine and lower back and down, gauging a sense for the space they take up.
And if she wanted to regain some control over him and thus her environment, this is indubitably a good way to do it: Stephen’s head tips against Gwenaëlle’s, teeth grazing the skin of her neck, instantly lost in that familiar feeling of her hand around him. While he curls one arm low around her back — he knows she likes that feeling of being held, encircled — his free hand moves to mirror her, with the slide of his fingers between her legs.
“I’ve missed you,” he admits into her skin. “I know I never lost you. But, still—”
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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no subject
He levers himself up with a drowsy groan, eventually scooting to a seated position against the headboard, Gwenaëlle still with him in his lap. (It is a very nice way to wake up.) It is in fact very early, but any urge to burrow back under the covers is offset by, despite himself, that childish sparkle of delight starting to flicker to life, of wondering what’s in the gift. He does love treats. He balances the bundle and glances over to his own nightstand beside the alcove, less well-hidden:
“I have some things for you, too. Do I open this one in front of you, with you watching? I realise this is our first time exchanging in-person—”
He’s been upgraded from Guilfoyle sack duty. Also nice.
no subject
(Still, they fit together. Still.)
“And then,” as graciously as some majestic creature bestowing beatitudes from a throne and not his lap, “you can give me yours.”
Which she’ll likely become excited for when it happens, but for now: the gleam of her eyes is absolutely dedicated to will he like this—
no subject
After he’d been able to afford buying himself anything he wanted anytime, he’d sort of stopped caring.
So it’s nice, it mattering again. Stephen unwraps the bundle and shakes out the long coat first thing, its arms spilling loose, and he props it up against her chest so he can see it better: the lovely dark red colour, the Research sigil at the lapels, and she can see the delight spreading across his face at the sight of it. “Oh, I can wear a stylish uniform again,” he declares; it’s not a cloak, but it’s nice to have options which aren’t just throwing a cloak on over nondescript clothing.
He goes through the rest with meticulous care: a bottle of Orlesian cologne, which he automatically daubs on, to please her.
He lingers over-long at the poetry, pressing ruined fingertips to the pane of glass, the lipstick kiss. When he shoots a look back up to her, he’s wearing a smile that can only be described as shy. “I’ve had news articles written about me, but poetry’s still new.”
But it’s the last object which takes most of his attention: the dwarven-made pocket-watch. Stephen barks a small incredulous laugh (on so many levels) once he removes it from its case, holding it up to the dawn light filtering through their windows, turning it over carefully to examine the workings and admire the craftsmanship. A flick of the stem and the front springs open; it’s been already wound to the steady tick tick tick of counting time. Had he ever told her about his watch collection? No, and she hadn’t been invited into his bedroom at the Sanctum, so how could she have known—
He’s thunderstruck into silence for a moment.
“Is this,” he says slowly, “from Orzammar? What made you think of it?”
He can sort of guess — he’s a goddamned time wizard, after all — but he’s still stuck on it, his own gears catching.
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“When Wysteria was settling her arrangements before she left for Orzammar,” she reminds him, “you told her that you wanted one.” And Wysteria had told him they’d cost his eye teeth, and he’d said he’d figure it out, and Gwenaëlle had thought: well, why shouldn’t she do it? “She was happy to collude with me, although she was fairly unsubtly disappointed we weren’t colluding over anything more interesting. You could not have wanted something more boring to her if you’d tried.”
Which tickles her, a bit. Both because a dwarven-made pocketwatch seems like a perfectly fine thing to want, and because it’s— nice, a bit, to be dull. Even to be thought dull. The simple fact of it is, though:
she has been paying him a great deal of mind for as long as they’ve known each other. He had said it, but not to her, and she had been listening, and that had been plenty.
“Everything else was made particularly for you,” the coat she’d handsewn, the poetry she’d pressed her lips to, the cologne mixed to specifications to complement her favourite scent in particular, “but you were so enthusiastic about pocket-watches I didn’t think you’d mind if we just had to trust Wysteria’s taste.”
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Still struck by the gesture and her thoughtfulness itself, but now there’s an edge of baffling amusement bubbling beneath the surface, Stephen’s laugh deepening as he suddenly closes the distance and kisses her: more ferocious than one might expect for a drowsy morning, now urgent, pressing. He loves her so much. He cannot express how much.
When they finally break for air, he tries to explain: “I used to collect watches. I had a sprawling collection, on display like you collect glass eyes. Luxury items, limited editions.” Should he even mention the full context? Fuck it, he’s always been honest with her: “I had a favourite from Christine, which I used to wear but— this is my new favourite. And I don’t… This is absurd, you need to see.”
He’s lost his train of thought and the sentences keep chopping themselves into pieces, not even knowing where to begin, so in the end he just leans over (almost tipping the two of them) to fumble with the drawer on his side of the alcove. Inside is his own gift, two wooden cases which he presses carefully into Gwenaëlle’s hands: one which won’t open easily, another which will.
And he’s laughing: “I also colluded with Wysteria to get you something from Orzammar, I low-key think she despised my choice—”
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Even if he weren’t bouncing between thoughts borderline incoherently, she might be having trouble entirely focusing on what he’s saying immediately after— and when she nearly spills off his lap, clutching the blankets and his arm like a startled Small Yngvi with a yelp, she laughs, clinging until they’re righted. Clinging after, until she has to relinquish her grip to take the cases.
“I bet,” she says, grasping onto a handhold that allows her to swing up to her favourite topic to return to with little to no warning, “that she would be significantly more impressed with us if we had a flying boat—”
What, is she wrong. A bit of fidgeting and: “Oh,” delighted, “it’s a puzzle,” before setting one box aside for the other, determining that that one can wait. “Stephen,” when the sewing case opens with significantly more ease, “these are beautiful,”
she’s not beating the boring couple allegations. (She’s still riding the high of his favourite watch.)
“I was a little worried it’d be— I don’t know,” clutching her new sewing kit to her chest, looking back at him, “not as boring a gift as Wysteria thought, but you know, oh, a thing I was just going to get myself, anyway, ho hum—” a bigger worry than the one she might’ve stumbled into but slips past, now, about competing with his absent ex. It’s not that she’s above that kind of fretting, it’s just very difficult to look at him right now and not feel very sure about the things that he’s saying to her. What hard work she’s done, to take the man she loves at face value.
(It’s only funny because it’s true.)
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“Ah, good; I didn’t exactly know what would make the sewing supplies good or not, but I figured fine dwarven crafts meant they knew what they were on about.”
Their bed is a scattering of miscellany, his own presents sitting next to them, and as Gwenaëlle clutches the kit to her chest he instinctively reaches up and traces the edge of her cheek. Her jawbone has healed enough that he can touch her again; he hasn’t exactly needed to handle her with kid gloves, but he still does. He’s still careful around her, and until a moment ago with that small ember sparking, there hasn’t been much heat to their gestures these days. A metaphorical wound under wraps, still healing.
But as she talks about the watch, he considers how to explain this, working through the thought process aloud. It isn’t something he’s had to consider much with a girlfriend before, but:
“It’s not ho-hum,” Stephen says. “It’s, I don’t know. The fact that you listened. You paid attention.” They’ve been doing that for each other this whole time. “And I was perhaps a little bit worried that this one wasn’t very exciting for you either, that it would just look like more work,”
her fingers splayed across the sewing kit,
“but at the end of the day, it felt right. You fixed my cloak. I saw you working on that camo jacket for Clarisse. I wanted to get you something that you needed, and could make use of, and would hold up well, and that would actually make an impact on your day and reflect the way you spend your time. Your house is already filled with beautiful things; you hardly need more. You can’t do anything with, I don’t know, flowers or a necklace. And this,” the pocketwatch, “is beautiful but it also has a function.
“I don’t know where I’m going with this. Bottom line: I truly appreciate the gift, is what I’m trying to say.”
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the one she had instead started with Loxley is sooooo handsome and nearly given the man heart failure,
“—can you show me what ‘camo’ is meant to look like? And while you’re drawing it do you recall being inside me recently? And I couldn’t ask Abby, because she would obviously say, why haven’t you asked Stephen, have you not talked to him yet, and I would walk into the sea.”
At that point, obviously, her only recourse.
Her newly freed hand comes to his wrist and she slides her thumb, fondly, against the inside of it, up to his palm, “I wouldn’t have been displeased,” she says, “with flowers or a necklace. But I love that you know what I need.”
That he knows her; that he knows her this well, and loves her this much.
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Shaking his head over the prospective gifts, still amused, “Duly noted for next time. Although I would be displeased with receiving flowers or a necklace, for the record—” Gwenaëlle knows exactly how far his vanity goes and what sort of decoration he does favour, for those formal occasions when he accessorises a little more and she can nimbly set them in place for him: cufflinks, tie pins. Back in New York, a two-fingered ring if it’s magical.
And a pocketwatch, now.
That thumb running along his palm, his life-line, shouldn’t be as distracting as it is, except that it is. It’s nice to be here, warm and content in their shared bed in their shared home, with an actual holiday stretched ahead of them with no work on the day.
“Also, honestly, asking about camouflage might’ve been better than what you did lead with. I would very gladly have explained it to you. And wouldn’t have minded the reminder,” of Halamshiral, of other times, their first time,
as he drifts to replace his hand with his mouth and kiss the corner of her jaw instead, the angle of her cheek, the place where she’d been injured.
There isn’t even a scar remaining.
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she can feel the flutter of her wings beneath the flimsy fabric of her nightgown, and her stomach swoops, and she slides her fingers higher to loop through his.
“I know that it hasn’t exactly been,” what’s the word she’s looking for, “… recent, now,”
is a sort of set up that doesn’t go anywhere, exactly. She is very aware of her weight in his lap and the scrape of his morning-untidy beard against her skin and that she hasn’t stopped wanting him, actually, even as her own body has become a stranger landscape to her than it has ever been.
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And the shoe’s on the other foot, this time. First it had been her injuries themselves — a doctor’s stubborn prescribed bedrest — but then, as time went on, he had noticed where their sex life lapsed, conspicuous for its absence. The wings. Those robes, wrapped around her shoulders at night. It’s not a thing he misses overly much, in contrast to having her presence alone, her conversation, her wit.
“I don’t mind,” Stephen says quietly. They haven’t actually talked about it yet. He needs to say this. “You know I don’t mind, right?”
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“I mind,” she admits, resisting the usual impulse to prevaricate and dissemble about it. I mind— a bit. I mind— but it’s fine. I mind— it’s often Gwenaëlle reaching for him, it’s not as if he hasn’t been there, isn’t it fucking stupid to miss something she could have just done? Does she even get to say, I’ve missed that? and anyway, it’s been like, a month, she’s gone without sex for longer than that. They both have.
(So she resisted it out loud, but it’s harder, in her own head.)
She tips her forehead against his; their breath mingled, their hands clasped.
At length, “I know you’re not mad,” the shape of a worry she might have had, in some other bed, in some other era of her life. “I haven’t not wanted, exactly.” And she wants, now,
it’s never felt vulnerable to want, quite the way it does now.
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He’s not a poet or a writer or a diplomat. Still, he tries.
“Needing to take a bit of time to get comfortable in your own skin again. To feel like you’re yourself again. They put metal pins in all my fingers to reconstruct them; at night it seemed like I could feel them there, inside me. My hands were crooked. Everything was the wrong shape. Obviously it’s not fucking faerie wings,” there’s a touch of dry humour in his voice, their similar coping mechanisms, “but I don’t know. I remember what that sort of thing felt like, is what I mean.”
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“I don’t want to be celibate for ten years about it,” she says, and almost immediately feels petulant and foolish for it, pulling a face and then burying it in his shoulder. “I know you don’t mind, but—”
How to find the words. That she wants to feel like her skin is her own again, yes; that she wants to feel wanted in it, too, that she’s vain and stupid and what if he finds her stranger and less beautiful. What a small, stupid thing to need so badly.
She says, into his skin where his sleep shirt has slid sideways with their entangling, “You know, first it was the rage demon. And then it was the wyvern, and then it was fucking ancient Arlathan spirits and at what point does well, I still think I’m beautiful become just, delusional—”
Her voice gets smaller and more embarrassed the longer she speaks, until she stops.
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except that he is sometimes just as vain as her, in complementary ways. Worrying about his unlovely hands, his overnight grey streaks. As she hides her face in his shoulder, voice small against his skin, Stephen’s own voice is a little muffled and mostly spoken into her hair, but audible enough.
“If you need someone to say it out loud, Gwenaëlle,” he says, no archness or humour buried in it anymore, just solid patience, “you are still an absolute smokeshow. The scars tell a story. The gold eye makes you intimidating in a frighteningly sexy way; I’ve always thought so. If you could roll with the idea of tentacles, I’m more than fine with the wings. Plus they’re, I don’t know, colourful? Pretty? It’s not like they’re demonic bat wings or anything; although for the record, I would love you even with demonic bat wings, too.”
What was it she had said?
Warmly: “To steal some words from someone far more eloquent: I like everything about your body. It’s a roadmap that brought you to me.”
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“I thought your hands wouldn’t get tired that way,”
which is nearly as sweet as it is indicative of a willingness to get down with some significantly freakier elements than, as he says, pretty faerie wings. She’s looked at them less than she might’ve, avoided the mirrors scattered through their home, kept them tucked behind her and beneath fabric as much as she could, done her best to conceal them even from herself. To feel ordinary, instead of to look at what’s been made new of her.
(She remembers how they had prismed the light when she showed them to Isaac, and can think, now in retrospect: there had been some surreal beauty about that, the way the sun had shattered a rainbow through her.)
Lifting her head, finally, she searches his face for the same sincerity in his voice, and, “Thank you. For being patient with me.” For not needing her to rush into anything she wasn’t ready for; for being willing to say the thing she needs to hear.
When she kisses him, it is not with great patience.
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and Stephen’s still smiling through “I survived a yearslong dry spell, what’s a few more weeks,” but then Gwenaëlle captures his mouth and swallows whatever he’d been about to say. He kisses her back, and there’s an edge to it that’s been tamped-down and absent since the beginning of Harvestmere; this isn’t a chaste peck to her cheek or forehead, nor the clinical touch of a doctor checking on her wounds, her fresh dressing. He pauses only long enough to move some of the gifting chaos out of the way, not wanting to accidentally crush that custom puzzle-box or that precious framed glass poem under a knee, a thigh. With the bed alcove, it’s easy enough to relocate their Satinalia presents to the not-too-distant floor.
They haven’t had to do that in a while.
And as his mouth opens against hers with the slide of tongue, he realises: he has actually missed this. Not enough to nudge or pry or ask, but now that the fire’s here with that slow ember sparking anew, he admits it to himself: he has missed her. This.
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(she makes sure the coat has slid all the way to the floor, too, she didn’t spend weeks handstitching it for Stephen to come on it because she was thoughtlessly caught up,)
determined to feel like herself again. To feel herself, again, and while she’s at it: him.
Their hands released from one another for the sake of various rearrangements, she sinks them into his hair — thumbs those streaks she likes so much, twists morning-loose hair around her fingers, follows his tongue back into his mouth. Between kisses, she murmurs, “It’s very romantic of you to be prepared to engage in courtly love,” a warm, heated tease, “but I have a lot of very romantic feelings for you that are specifically in my cunt.”
(That’s not what she wrote in the poem.)
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Not that he’s complaining. He’s already stirring to life with the way she’s straddling his lap, hands twining into his hair, knees pressed either side of his comfortable rumpled trousers.
They have had each other in so many ways, learning and re-learning each other. Late at night, tipsy and clumsy and eager. In that fabled enchanted bathtub. The occasional misuse of their private offices.
Every version of Gwenaëlle is his favourite version of her, and here is another: bed-mussed and sleepy and warm, both of them waking up, cast in sunlight rather than dim shadows and moonlight. It means the room is bright, and he can see her in all detail; as he slides a hand to hike up her nightgown and help sweep the rest out of the way so he can reach bare skin. His other hand catches at Gwenaëlle’s uninjured cheek, the line of her throat, palming a breast as the strap of her nightgown starts to slip off one shoulder.
Only a few inches away: those wings, caught between skin and fabric.
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and it’s not unpleasant, if she allows it not to be. In this moment, where they are warm and close and there’s so little fabric left between them that she can feel him stiffening against the inside of her thigh and she doesn’t push away the way that want pools in her belly, the way she has been. The soft gown is headed to her waist from two directions and she could just— leave it there, it’s not as if he can’t get to her.
She is tempted to, for a moment. There’s a hesitation felt mostly in the coil of tension before she moves, leaning back enough that she can grasp her nightgown with both hands and pull it free over her head, wings rising behind her almost the moment they’re not confined by fabric.
(It feels more of a relief than she likes to admit.)
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But she finally hauls that nightgown off, and those insectile wings are immediately arching, visible behind her, opening and unfurling like long-coiled muscles unfolding. Arms stretching after a long time spent motionless. This first time of theirs isn’t happening at night, where she could wreathe herself in shadows and almost pretend that she hasn’t been changed; here, Stephen has the time and space and lighting to finally stop and look at them properly.
He’d seen them newly-made and disconcertingly fresh, but despite literally living together, she’s successfully kept them under wraps more often than not, only occasionally loosening them even around him.
He could ignore the wings, attention going straight to her bare tits, but he doesn’t. This is new territory, when he used to know every inch of Gwenaëlle: each scar, each chapter in the book of her. And so, derailed and experimental, Stephen reaches out and runs a fingertip along the edge of iridescent wing, testing to see how it feels; how sensitive it might be, if it hurts, if he’ll have to avoid any incidental contact at all during a roll in the hay. Re-learning her.
“Is that alright?” he asks, voice still quiet.
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“…yes,” she says, not immediately. “I— ouais.” It’s an entirely different kind of sensitivity; not bad, not even odd, exactly, so much as momentarily disorienting. And a bizarrely thrilling reassurance: on these rare occasions she can be this vulnerable, she’s going to be really fucking difficult to sneak up on.
The way she relaxes is still more deliberate than it was, the last time they were this close, like this. Too many things are happening in her head and only most of them are about Stephen,
but that is still a priority, folding herself in nearer partly for the pleasure of it and partly to allow him easier reach, if he wants it. A better look, over her shoulder. The slide of her hand down his abdomen probably isn’t going to make focusing any easier, though.
forgot to slap the nsfw warning on the thread. anyway there it is.
Gwenaëlle sidles closer, and this way he can look down over her shoulderblades, see them in better detail. It’s probably not too dissimilar from his sensitivity in the tentacles that had coiled loose from his arm, but hers is lasting; has lasted; any hopes they had of it simply sloughing off over time has faded, as time went on and on and the wings remained just as solid and impermeable as ever.
Stephen’s in data-gathering mode now, carving this into his photographic memory: he presses his thumb, ever so lightly, against the curve where one of the wings moulds into her back. The connection to the skin seamless and imperceptible, as if it grew organically out of her. He starts to follow the pearlescent mosaic of them, trailing the delicate tracery of veins, the opal topography. The wings are beautiful, now that she’s finally letting him look at them, touch them, take in the way the sunlight shatters and reflects off them.
He winds up so absorbed and distracted that he is, accordingly, entirely unprepared by the time her hand reaches his cock.
when it’s been nsfw for a minute,
her hand wraps around the base of his cock and she murmurs, “Well, you don’t feel off-put,” very archly.
The light, exploratory touch is … distracting. Slowly learning this is different to the cacophony of sensations, early, that had mostly been pain, or the way hauling a heavy robe over her shoulders had a largely dulling effect, trapping her wings where mostly what she could feel has been herself. It’s different, allowing herself to expand into this space, and under his hands— the very purposeful way she touches him is almost an exercise in grounding. A point to focus on outside of herself as she is newly mapped.
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And if she wanted to regain some control over him and thus her environment, this is indubitably a good way to do it: Stephen’s head tips against Gwenaëlle’s, teeth grazing the skin of her neck, instantly lost in that familiar feeling of her hand around him. While he curls one arm low around her back — he knows she likes that feeling of being held, encircled — his free hand moves to mirror her, with the slide of his fingers between her legs.
“I’ve missed you,” he admits into her skin. “I know I never lost you. But, still—”
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🎀