It’s two nights that she’s away from the boat, in the end.
Her cousins oblige her — relieved, the first evening, when she arrives with company and doesn’t expect much of theirs. Guilfoyle doesn’t join her; has never cared for the Hightown residence, prefers not to be under a de Coucy roof if he can avoid it, assesses her mood when leaving and thinks himself unnecessary. The second evening she’s gone from the house falls on the Gallows’ usual pizza night, and he finds himself in the galley, having collected one out of habit, neither Florent nor Gwenaëlle in residence to appreciate it.
He leaves a slice covered on a plate in Stephen’s office, and withdraws to his own rooms with the rest. The next morning, when Gwenaëlle lets herself into the galley to make tea, it still smells faintly of Stark’s own recipe.
It’s early, when she does. Absurdly so — still more dark than not, the first fingers of morning only beginning to reach across the harbour, early enough that it’s the scent of her tea that Stephen wakes to, Gwenaëlle herself half-undone in yesterday’s clothes, sat at her desk, drinking it.
Small Yngvi has slinked off of him, gone to wind around her ankles, interested in the possibility that she might herald an early breakfast.
Only two nights without her, which is really just a drop in the bucket compared to all the long empty years before her —
And yet. Stephen sleeps even worse than the times he’s had to overnight away from the houseboat for work. He wanders the startlingly quiet house and works late into the night for a distraction, and tosses and turns whenever he does finally give up and try to get some rest. His hand always unconsciously reaches out for the other side of their bed, only to find it cold and empty. It means that by the time she returns in this pre-dawn gloom, he’s only had a small handful of hours of sleep, exhausted enough that he was pitched into dead unconsciousness; until the smell of Gwenaëlle’s tea and gentle creak of floorboards disorients him into wakefulness, bringing him suddenly sitting bolt upright.
More nightmares, until his vision adjusts to the darkness and he sees the edge of Gwenaëlle’s shoulder, the curve of her wings.
“You’re back,” he says; and he’s annoyed with himself for how surprised and desperate and vulnerable that sounded.
(Still remembering, perhaps: Gwenaëlle slipping through his fingers over and over. A dream crumbling around them. A silhouette on a mountain path, walking away from him.)
It’s not — not quite diffidence. Not indifferent to the particular quality of his voice, but there’s a lingering pensiveness to her; she’d taken the time, away with her own thoughts, to tease out and separate what mattered. What was overwhelming kneejerk, what anger and curdled disappointment was squarely for Ennaris Tavane, and—
It had been untrue, she’d settled on finally, that nothing she was angry about was Stephen’s doing or concern. In the moment, flushed with a humiliating sense of loss for a thing that hadn’t existed, it had felt true; calmer, cooler, there’s a disappointment that hasn’t entirely gone away. And they’re honest with each other,
and hypothetically, she can be honest without throwing this tea across the room. It feels like a better idea than just pretending the entire thing hadn’t happened, even if she’d seriously considered trying it.
(And she had.)
“There’s two things,” she says, finally, shifting as she crosses her knee over the other to face the bed. “First, I have a Satinalia gift that says you have to take a day off with me, no questions asked. The second thing you can wake up more first.”
It turns out that one of the downsides of being in a relationship, properly, is that he worries. It actually matters when you say the wrong thing and do the wrong thing and crack the foundations between you. There’s more to lose.
So when Gwenaëlle opens her mouth there’s a kneejerk anxiety that she’s still going to be coldly furious, but his expression smooths over a little when she mentions the Satinalia gift. Stephen straightens up further with an elbow against a raised knee and scrubs at his face, knuckles rubbing the remainders of sleep out of his eyes, fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose.
“Alright,” he says. Wishes, as ever, for the ability to just snap his fingers and conjure up some tea or coffee out of nowhere; it would save so much time.
“How you manage your patients and your infirmary is your responsibility and affair,” she says, at length, “so I’m not saying this with any expectation that you’re going to change course on how you intend to manage this one. And we don’t have to dissect it, beyond this, but I want to have said, setting aside everything else and taking as read that amputation is going to happen, period,”
working her jaw for a moment, measuring out the effort she’d made to really think about what bothered her, and what she wants to say about it, and how hard she’s trying to err on clarity and not unkindness. It’s so easy to list into and also fuck you but in French this time. She’s being purposeful.
“I think you should be honest with yourself and Tavane that the only people being protected by lying to the rest of our company is the two of you. de Fonce presented an actual researched argument for it nailed to a—” fucking, she doesn’t say, the deliberateness a different quality to her crisp coldness, a conscious effort not to sound more hostile when she doesn’t usually care to worry about how she’s interpreted, “—door and couldn’t persuade anyone else to follow through. It’s a breathtaking lack of respect toward and lack of faith in every person here who has already had to wrestle, or choose not to wrestle, with that decision for themselves. And it’s irresponsible as all hell to do that unnecessarily. If, after inevitably it comes out that you lied, every other rifter here rips their arm off, then fine, they deserve the insult and you’re right and I’ll apologise for it. Otherwise,”
she rises, gathering her shawl around her shoulders folding her wings down beneath it,
“I’m sorry for the way I behaved the other morning,” the delivery, not the opinions, “and I’m going to make you some tea. If you want to have a fight about it when I get back, fine. If you don’t, I’ve said what I wanted to say and you’re going to do what you feel is right and necessary and we have the rest of the day.”
(She definitely rehearsed at least half of that in the carriage on the way back; there was definitely a longer version with much ruder editorial remarks and assumptions.)
Edited (sometimes you edit stuff so much you take words out in your rewrites and have to put them back in awkwardly) 2025-05-15 01:28 (UTC)
“Okay,” Stephen says, and watches after Gwenaëlle as she leaves the bedroom.
He doesn’t like to sit motionless and helpless, however, so he gets moving shortly after her footsteps recede down those winding stairs. He slides out of bed and goes to splash some cold water in his face from the washbasin sitting out; he runs his fingers along the edge of his jaw, where his beard’s starting to grow in a little too thick. He pulls on some clothes over the braies he sleeps in, hobbling into clean comfortable trousers and a clean comfortable shirt.
He stews over it while she’s downstairs: tries to weigh the arguments for and against and measure it from the other angles. He values Gwenaëlle’s opinion enough that it brings hesitation, the innate knowledge that they agree so often, and that she is very likely right about parts of this. That the easier path would be to cave and give way and agree. That perhaps there’s something reckless and proud buried here in his instinct to be secretive, to hold his cards obsessively close to his chest until the theory’s confirmed. Until they know for sure what an amputation does, and if it actually accomplishes what it needs to.
But.
Where ordinarily he might have migrated to his study for the morning tea, Stephen stays put instead; the study means work, and work’s off the table for today. By the time Gwenaëlle returns she’ll find him sitting on the edge of the bed again, where he looks up and says, weary, “I don’t want to have a fight about it.”
She says, “Okay,” back to him, pressing a cup of tea into his hands. Stays there, standing close enough that her toes bump into his feet, touching her thumb under his chin to tilt him a little bit and add, “I should trim your beard.”
It’s not Asher that she thinks of, though he was the only other exception besides Stephen to her remarkably cleanshaven romantic history (and Thranduil, exempt from the process altogether); that’s not a particular intimacy they ever shared. It’s her mother’s steady hands with a blade at his bedside, the kindness of them, and that it was as much a comfort to her when she asked to be taught how, afterwards, as burying her tears in Morrigan’s shoulder had been.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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post-fighttown.
Her cousins oblige her — relieved, the first evening, when she arrives with company and doesn’t expect much of theirs. Guilfoyle doesn’t join her; has never cared for the Hightown residence, prefers not to be under a de Coucy roof if he can avoid it, assesses her mood when leaving and thinks himself unnecessary. The second evening she’s gone from the house falls on the Gallows’ usual pizza night, and he finds himself in the galley, having collected one out of habit, neither Florent nor Gwenaëlle in residence to appreciate it.
He leaves a slice covered on a plate in Stephen’s office, and withdraws to his own rooms with the rest. The next morning, when Gwenaëlle lets herself into the galley to make tea, it still smells faintly of Stark’s own recipe.
It’s early, when she does. Absurdly so — still more dark than not, the first fingers of morning only beginning to reach across the harbour, early enough that it’s the scent of her tea that Stephen wakes to, Gwenaëlle herself half-undone in yesterday’s clothes, sat at her desk, drinking it.
Small Yngvi has slinked off of him, gone to wind around her ankles, interested in the possibility that she might herald an early breakfast.
no subject
And yet. Stephen sleeps even worse than the times he’s had to overnight away from the houseboat for work. He wanders the startlingly quiet house and works late into the night for a distraction, and tosses and turns whenever he does finally give up and try to get some rest. His hand always unconsciously reaches out for the other side of their bed, only to find it cold and empty. It means that by the time she returns in this pre-dawn gloom, he’s only had a small handful of hours of sleep, exhausted enough that he was pitched into dead unconsciousness; until the smell of Gwenaëlle’s tea and gentle creak of floorboards disorients him into wakefulness, bringing him suddenly sitting bolt upright.
More nightmares, until his vision adjusts to the darkness and he sees the edge of Gwenaëlle’s shoulder, the curve of her wings.
“You’re back,” he says; and he’s annoyed with himself for how surprised and desperate and vulnerable that sounded.
(Still remembering, perhaps: Gwenaëlle slipping through his fingers over and over. A dream crumbling around them. A silhouette on a mountain path, walking away from him.)
no subject
It’s not — not quite diffidence. Not indifferent to the particular quality of his voice, but there’s a lingering pensiveness to her; she’d taken the time, away with her own thoughts, to tease out and separate what mattered. What was overwhelming kneejerk, what anger and curdled disappointment was squarely for Ennaris Tavane, and—
It had been untrue, she’d settled on finally, that nothing she was angry about was Stephen’s doing or concern. In the moment, flushed with a humiliating sense of loss for a thing that hadn’t existed, it had felt true; calmer, cooler, there’s a disappointment that hasn’t entirely gone away. And they’re honest with each other,
and hypothetically, she can be honest without throwing this tea across the room. It feels like a better idea than just pretending the entire thing hadn’t happened, even if she’d seriously considered trying it.
(And she had.)
“There’s two things,” she says, finally, shifting as she crosses her knee over the other to face the bed. “First, I have a Satinalia gift that says you have to take a day off with me, no questions asked. The second thing you can wake up more first.”
no subject
So when Gwenaëlle opens her mouth there’s a kneejerk anxiety that she’s still going to be coldly furious, but his expression smooths over a little when she mentions the Satinalia gift. Stephen straightens up further with an elbow against a raised knee and scrubs at his face, knuckles rubbing the remainders of sleep out of his eyes, fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose.
“Alright,” he says. Wishes, as ever, for the ability to just snap his fingers and conjure up some tea or coffee out of nowhere; it would save so much time.
“That— sounds nice. I’m all yours.”
no subject
“How you manage your patients and your infirmary is your responsibility and affair,” she says, at length, “so I’m not saying this with any expectation that you’re going to change course on how you intend to manage this one. And we don’t have to dissect it, beyond this, but I want to have said, setting aside everything else and taking as read that amputation is going to happen, period,”
working her jaw for a moment, measuring out the effort she’d made to really think about what bothered her, and what she wants to say about it, and how hard she’s trying to err on clarity and not unkindness. It’s so easy to list into and also fuck you but in French this time. She’s being purposeful.
“I think you should be honest with yourself and Tavane that the only people being protected by lying to the rest of our company is the two of you. de Fonce presented an actual researched argument for it nailed to a—” fucking, she doesn’t say, the deliberateness a different quality to her crisp coldness, a conscious effort not to sound more hostile when she doesn’t usually care to worry about how she’s interpreted, “—door and couldn’t persuade anyone else to follow through. It’s a breathtaking lack of respect toward and lack of faith in every person here who has already had to wrestle, or choose not to wrestle, with that decision for themselves. And it’s irresponsible as all hell to do that unnecessarily. If, after inevitably it comes out that you lied, every other rifter here rips their arm off, then fine, they deserve the insult and you’re right and I’ll apologise for it. Otherwise,”
she rises, gathering her shawl around her shoulders folding her wings down beneath it,
“I’m sorry for the way I behaved the other morning,” the delivery, not the opinions, “and I’m going to make you some tea. If you want to have a fight about it when I get back, fine. If you don’t, I’ve said what I wanted to say and you’re going to do what you feel is right and necessary and we have the rest of the day.”
(She definitely rehearsed at least half of that in the carriage on the way back; there was definitely a longer version with much ruder editorial remarks and assumptions.)
no subject
He doesn’t like to sit motionless and helpless, however, so he gets moving shortly after her footsteps recede down those winding stairs. He slides out of bed and goes to splash some cold water in his face from the washbasin sitting out; he runs his fingers along the edge of his jaw, where his beard’s starting to grow in a little too thick. He pulls on some clothes over the braies he sleeps in, hobbling into clean comfortable trousers and a clean comfortable shirt.
He stews over it while she’s downstairs: tries to weigh the arguments for and against and measure it from the other angles. He values Gwenaëlle’s opinion enough that it brings hesitation, the innate knowledge that they agree so often, and that she is very likely right about parts of this. That the easier path would be to cave and give way and agree. That perhaps there’s something reckless and proud buried here in his instinct to be secretive, to hold his cards obsessively close to his chest until the theory’s confirmed. Until they know for sure what an amputation does, and if it actually accomplishes what it needs to.
But.
Where ordinarily he might have migrated to his study for the morning tea, Stephen stays put instead; the study means work, and work’s off the table for today. By the time Gwenaëlle returns she’ll find him sitting on the edge of the bed again, where he looks up and says, weary, “I don’t want to have a fight about it.”
no subject
It’s not Asher that she thinks of, though he was the only other exception besides Stephen to her remarkably cleanshaven romantic history (and Thranduil, exempt from the process altogether); that’s not a particular intimacy they ever shared. It’s her mother’s steady hands with a blade at his bedside, the kindness of them, and that it was as much a comfort to her when she asked to be taught how, afterwards, as burying her tears in Morrigan’s shoulder had been.
She doesn’t want to have (another) fight.