It echoes strangely, on an odd delay, Gwenaëlle's crystal held up to where she is rapping on the window of the room Stephen occupies in their hostess's home — with any luck, delivering her urgent plea to get inside directly to him, even at so late the hour. And it is a late hour indeed, which is probably something to do with why the window she had intended to climb back in is now locked, and probably somewhere Coupe must be so smug that her gift would truly have come in useful if only Gwenaëlle had bothered to make even the slightest use of it.
Rather than regifting it twice.
Seeing as she did regift the lockpicking tools — twice — she is instead reduced to clutching her cloak around herself, tightly, and hissing, “Stephen, I know you aren't that deep a sleeper,” into her crystal, obscuring its glow with her hood and her hair.
The tapping alone would have roused him, but the crystal activating on his nightstand is like a sudden jolt kicking him immediately awake. Stephen rolls out of bed, fumbling for an oil lamp then cursing as he almost knocks it over, giving up on it, muttering, “Tony should’ve installed a Do Not Disturb setting on the crystals,” but then he’s maneuvering through the darkness toward the window. The real delay was due to the brief disorientation on waking (where is he?), then accidentally stubbing his toe on inopportunely-located ottomans, a chaise, good god, why there so much furniture in this guestroom?
He eventually yanks the curtains the rest of the way open, which lets moonlight illuminate the room, and shows Gwenaëlle perched improbably on the rooftop outside, balanced against his windowsill. For his part, Stephen’s looking rumpled, barefoot in the equivalent of pyjamas here: comfortable long braies, and a loose shirt hanging open at the neck (he’s terrible at tying the laces, and so never really bothers at night).
As she looks at him through the glass, he stares owlishly back at her, trying to make the scene compute — it doesn’t — but then he flips the latch and swings the window open, inward.
“Gwenaëlle,” he says, slow, “you do know people use doors here, right?”
Then, because Stephen Strange remains hopelessly paranoid even when he’s not being unexpectedly woken in the middle of the night: “Is something wrong? Do we need to make a rooftop escape before people come to kill us, or…”
He is asking questions, but Gwenaëlle — who has been out in the cold, perched on a rooftop — is already grasping the sill as soon as the window swings open and her most immediate concern is bracing herself in. The fact he is still so near to the window and her skirts are so full (she had not, really, packed for illicit elven gatherings; she'd compromised on a heavy cloak and her sleekest gown, the fabric heavy for the winter's chill) means she can't get much further than just perching closer without physically bearing him to the floor of the room,
which is not completely off the table, but she doesn't.
She says, “I didn't want to be seen leaving by the door, so I didn't want to be seen returning by one, either,” definitely means she had climbed out a window at some point tonight. “But mine is locked, and I didn't want to wake anyone else—”
Importantly, it's not that she couldn't have. But who would she have woken? Explained the whole of it to Wysteria at this hour? Risked finding some combination of Loki, Alexandrie, Rutyer and Bastien fucking? Risked Rowntree hearing she'd been knocking at Julius's window at some late hour and misconstruing it wildly?
No. Stephen was the obvious choice. Obviously.
“There's an artist— I was meeting with an artist. Some of his associates knew my sister, a little. I think I might have made some useful friends, all the more useful if it stays between us.”
(It’s so rude to not even consider the idea that he might’ve been busy with someone like Lady Clothilde, actually—)
But, bemused, Stephen steps aside. “Ah, so you’ve been up to spy stuff,” he says mildly, although there’s a touch of admiration in his voice. “I thought that was more the purview of Scouting.”
Not for the first nor the last time, he’s reminded of the Black Widows, of lethal and competent women with knives, climbing rooftops. He holds the window like he’s holding a door open for her — the chilly wind’s cutting into the room, nipping at his open throat — and ushers Gwenaëlle in from the cold, bizarre as the whole thing feels.
He wonders if he should be offering hot tea; a nightcap.
Hauling in all of her skirts with her — deep red velvet, matching layers of petticoats, all glimpsed by the armful between folds of her fur-lined cloak — Gwenaëlle glances at him directly, momentarily drawn to pause by (in contrast) his (incredibly predictable) state of dishabille.
Well, and what was she expecting, banging on his window at this hour.
(Not Clothilde.)
“Well, generally,” she concedes, heroically, instead of saying something incredibly stupid. “But when something falls into your lap, what sort of idiot passes it up because it isn't your division? Adenet's mistress,”
in several senses of the word,
“took to me. It merited finding out why— it's rarely that I'm so irresistibly charming. For both our sakes, better to be discreet about it— ergo—”
She shoves her hood back, loose curls tumbling around her face and shoulders and the lighter-weight fabric of her gown's construction there. “Silver has said I could be useful that way, before.”
So has Byerly Rutyer, but it's slowly become easier to believe from John Silver; he understands her better, she thinks.
It takes him a moment to place the name and remember the context. Adenet’s mistress is a reversal, when so much of society more likely remembers Adenet as Chapentier’s attendant. Stephen’s own time in town has mostly been with the academics and researchers, not the artistic set. But he does eventually remember that talent showcase from earlier: Clarice Chapentier’s delicate wood carvings with glass mosaic, works of tremendous skill.
“Gossip amongst the elven servants, then? I’ve never really had to deal with this sort of environment before, but I always figured that upstairs-downstairs distinction means the attendants know everything going on.” He’s closing the window, latching it, turning to look at her. The drizzle of moonlight through the glass, reflecting a glint in Gwenaëlle’s false eye. There’s no bleariness to the man: he’s been suddenly, instantly awake ever since he first heard her voice.
And with that comes some restlessness, Stephen glancing at the sideboard, grasping for something to feel more like the gracious host he’d been at the Sanctum, as if this were a normal visit at a normal hour: “Do you need a drink to warm up? I have half a bottle of honeywine, although I think they cleared away the glasses—”
Emerald glitters where gold would normally gaze blankly back at him, but she'd doffed her half-mask at some point already — probably when she was hitching her skirts to start climbing. When she sheds her cloak properly— “Please, I don't mind sharing the bottle,” —those skirts are secured with the not decorative after all hikes at her hips, exposing her boots, her stockinged calves and knees,
and it's not as if he's never seen her knees before. She wears trousers fitted nearly as intimate as her stockings; he'd seen most of her scars when she was discovering designer swimwear. When she flings herself down on the edge of his rumpled guest-bed, crossing her ankles, it's not even close to the most exposed she's ever been in his company.
“Adenet's the artist,” she says, holding her hand out for the bottle. “They're lovers— Chapentier's very sympathetic, and he's awfully well positioned. My sister — she never made it as far as the Marquise, but I think I might be able to pick up further than she left off, maybe.”
It had made her think of— not Thranduil, actually, but Pietro, long since disappeared back into the wilds whence he came. Suddenly, the shape of a possible future, envisioned only years after it's been thoroughly unmade. Stupid to be protective of grown adults who know what they're doing better than she can, but still.
She wants to protect them. It doesn't enter her head not to trust Stephen with it at once.
“Huh. He really doesn’t mind her taking the credit?” This is probably the least consequential part of the whole thing to be hung up on, but Stephen’s annoying about credit; had been an irritating nag about how to name the Strange-Palmer Method that he and Christine had pioneered together. Bylines. Publications. The order of names on a dissertation.
He busies himself at the sideboard, although with all the glassware having been carted away earlier, there’s nothing else to do besides uncork that bottle again. The drink is sweet, and had been used for a spirited debate with the dean earlier; people have sometimes been surprised that the doctor enjoys a sweet wine, a port, a lemon drop martini, some mai tais at the Bar With No Doors. He takes a swig from the bottle; telling himself that it’s not for actual liquid fortitude, he’s already seen so much of her, so what makes this any different at all,
and christ, he shouldn’t be so discombobulated at a pair of knees sitting on the edge of his bed. He’s clearly been in Thedas too long.
But Stephen eventually steps closer, hands her the bottle, knuckles brushing. “What do you mean, made it as far as the Marquise?”
Gwenaëlle tilts her hand rather than outright speculate that she strongly suspects there's an element of it's a sex thing as far as goes Adenet's work and Chapentier's accolades. On paper, it's hard to imagine an elf perfectly at ease with the arrangement ... on the other hand, she had never wished for anyone to know that her poetry was her own, really, in all the years they didn't. And it isn't the same,
but they have something, the two of them. She can almost reach the edges of it. His knuckles against hers break her contemplation—
“The line between servants' gossip and Marquise Briala's elven spy network is porous,” she says, instead of anything about what love is in the Orlesian political landscape. “I think moreso now, not less.” Now that she was Marquise Briala and not just the Empress's rumoured finger-puppet. Gwenaëlle bends her knee to haul one foot up onto the end of the bed, taking a swig from the bottle and working, one handed, on removing a boot. (It's sensible. She will move more quietly in the hallways. Don't overthink it.)
Her skirts ride higher, carelessly; a blade flashes at her thigh.
“Alix was never a spy. And I'm not really,” judiciously, only she might know some spies, now, and that could be very useful. With the laces of her boot undone and loosened, “If I brace, can you give that a tug?”
(She is conscientious of what his hands can and cannot do. In fact, she specifically thinks about it a normal amount.)
Stephen’s gaze drifts inexorably downward at that shift of skirts, and snags on the sight of the knife, the garter. He’s seen them before, but in the middle of a muddy blood-stained battlefield with a Starkhaven soldier slowly dying beneath their hands, he hadn’t had much luxury to notice (or let himself notice) the way it accentuates the line of her thigh, the way it implies something deadly and viperous.
If there’s some tedious buzzkill part of his brain which wonders Gwenaëlle, why are you disrobing in my room, well, he suffocates it.
There’s enough plausible reason, anyhow. Halamshiral is further south; a little colder, and its rooftops covered in snow this time of year; she’s already swept some of it in with her and there are melting bootprints leading from the window to his bed. The part of him which embodies a tidy, finicky cat doesn’t want any more of it tracked in. So, obediently enough, Stephen closes the rest of the distance between them, remarking, “It helps to have friends in low places. Do you think they’ll come in handy? I mean, I’m assuming they’re your friends now, since you are, after all, so irresistibly charming—”
He lets Gwenaëlle brace against his shoulder as he leans down: fingers slipping between the leather of the boot and her stockings; pulling the snug boot down, dragging it off her leg.
Odd, to remember that he already knows the shape of the long ugly scarring and bite mark on her bare thigh. It had seemed like such a non-issue at the time, under crisp white impersonal showroom lights and with attendants hovering nearby to refill their drinks. He had thought it would be the same here, plus Gwenaëlle’s even more covered-up now, with layers upon layers of petticoats and thick winter dress. But this time he can feel the shape of her calf beneath his hands, the turn of an ankle and heel as he tugs the boot loose and then sets it down on the carpet. (This time, he remembers what it felt like to kiss her.)
He instinctively half-reaches for the laces of the other one, but then stops, remembering his clumsiness with eyelets and knots. He’ll wait, instead, and be a little too aware of how close he has to stand for this operation.
Every step makes sense in and of itself: Stephen will probably be easy to wake and alone, so finding his window rather than trying to force her own is sensible. A drink to warm and unwind is how she'd have spent this half hour at least regardless. Traipsing around in dirty boots is loud and unsubtle—
it is suddenly very obvious to her just how comfortable she's got with him at precisely the point where she finds his shoulder under her hand and cannot ignore that this is nothing like it would have been if she'd woken Lexie. The sensible thing to do at this point — she knows — is to take a breath, unlace her boot, and excuse herself the way she had been going to do. Carry her boots on quiet stocking feet back to her guest room. Try to be seen near Lexie's, if anyone's. Put this away, like she'd convinced herself that the Crossroads hadn't changed anything.
(Herein lies the problem: maybe they hadn't. Maybe they hadn't very differently to how she'd explained it away.)
She does take a breath.
“Fair warning,” very steadily, “I think I'm about to do something stupid.”
“Oh?” Stephen asks, an eyebrow arched, nonplussed. He’s a connoisseur of doing stupid reckless shit. Tends to leap before he looks and dive into magic without reading all the instructions beforehand, and while he feels that immediate nervous leap in his chest at her statement and wondering what it means,
he’s a smart man, he can perhaps guess, but that would also be presumptuous. When, objectively and realistically speaking, there are so many other stupid things Gwenaëlle could do. She’s carrying tidings of secret elven spy meetups. Maybe it’s something about a political alliance, or planning on assassinating someone, or helping someone else assassinate someone, or otherwise simply pulling those threads of the Great Game which she hates so much, or some other extremely work-relevant mystery she’s unravelled in Halamshiral —
The angle is better than it started, last time— this time she already knows where he'll be, the shape of him, and she's already holding his shoulder, he's already so close to her. She half-rises, her knee against the outside of his where she dropped it along with discarded boot, and their teeth don't crash— it's a riptide, not a collision.
She probably should have taken both of her boots off, she thinks, but what she does is put her teeth in his lip to see what happens next.
He’s surprised but not as thunderously bowled-over as before; there isn’t that awkward, painful clack of teeth against teeth; instead, it’s just Gwenaëlle rising up to meet him, folding into him like the tide dragging her in, and when she bites at his lip, he gives a sharp hiss of indrawn breath.
She’s kissed him for the second time in their lives, and what happens next is this: Stephen leaning into it immediately, with none of the wheels-turning hesitation from the Crossroads, and he bites back, teeth grazing against lip and his hand automatically winding into the tangled curly mess of Gwenaëlle’s hair.
Before, it had been a single lengthy kiss to banish a haunting; this time it’s chasing after each other, mouth and tongue and stupid decisions, Stephen having to pause to catch his breath and then simply diving back in for more. Hungry. A hunger he hasn’t felt for— years, too many years, this side of him carefully set on a shelf and then bricked up behind a wall, only for Gwenaëlle to come crashing miraculously through it.
Her face is bitterly cold from the outdoors, but his hands are warm; they both taste of honeywine; it turns out last month wasn’t about work and this isn’t, either.
Immediately, it was stupid not to take her other boot off first—
maker, she doesn't care. His hands are warm and so is the rest of him, almost shockingly so as they rush together; layers of fabric and boned corsetry confine her but he'd been dressed to sleep, warm from the inside of this rumpled bedding, easy to reach. She twists her fingers in the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer by it still, the hard — armored, probably — corset between them jabbing into his ribs, bending her knee so she can hitch her foot at the back of his. It feels as if it should feel stranger to do this than it does; she'd recoiled for so long from the idea of reaching for anyone (except—) and now that she's here, reaching—
No, it feels inevitable. Like they were always going to end up here, her cold hands fighting to get under fabric and find his skin, mostly because she wants to touch him but at least partly because she wants to press her cold fingers to his bare skin and make him startle, make her laugh.
It doesn't matter, in the moment, if it's a good idea or a bad idea. It's just such a relief that it's happening.
He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment this drifted onto the track of inevitability, probably because it’s been a slow inexorable slide which had started a year and a half ago, with Gwenaëlle’s whiplash words flaying him to the bone (however funny it was to roll your eyes about picking up the wrong fork in whatever arsehole of the Fade you emerged from, whether you give a fuck about Thedas or take your new circumstances seriously or not—), her claws flexing and digging in and then leaving him contrite.
So few people are capable of making Stephen Strange feel contrite and abashed. He had taken notice.
Perhaps something had shifted underfoot when she’d done up his shirt buttons and not made a big deal out of it, and gifted him those thoughtful gloves, or late-night tea at the Sanctum and portalling her to a nighttime beach in the tropics simply because she liked to swim, or the two of them saving a man’s life together, or her practically clambering into his lap, him handing her a book of Orlesian poetry he’d ripped apart a timeline to bring to her, or any number of small intimacies they’d accidentally slipped into, or, or, or.
It’s been an endless step after step after step to get to this point: Gwenäelle sliding her cold fingers under his shirt and Stephen jolting, interrupting the kiss to yelp against her jaw, “Jesus fucking christ,” and the laughter bubbling in the room.
“Rude,” he adds, the smile audible in his voice. And the solid edge of the corset had been uncomfortable enough that he reaches for the sleek, flattened arch of her ribcage in an attempt to even the odds, and at least get started on carving through the first of those layers to make it more comfortable for both of them, and then, well.
There’s a momentary confusion. He’s never had to fuss with the intricacies of womenswear in this time period before. His brows are furrowed in intent concentration (as if she’s a puzzle to be unravelled, which she is) as he pulls a little away, peering down in the half-gloom, hands splayed against a cage, trying to sort out how to get it off.
Her laughter had mingled with his, unreasonably pleased with herself, and it lingers in the shape of her mouth when she leans back on her elbows to allow him to fully appreciate the intricacies. It is, in fact, armored leather.
“People try to stab me not infrequently,” she says, “it's sensible.”
A solid point, but because at the best of times some of these particular intricacies are tricky enough for people whose hands are obedient and deft— it isn't unpleasant, the way that sitting up brings her closer to him, loosening a series of fastenings and laces behind her to start freeing herself of what keeps her back so straight and her kidneys unperforated. Probably, at least two lady's maids would be ideal for a dress like this, although it isn't impossible to manage on her own — more obvious as she starts to come undone that it is several disparate parts, and not a singular piece of stitched fabric.
It's hard to be completely, blindly impulsive in a dress like this. The actual effort to remove it necessitates a slowing down — an acknowledgment, even appreciation, of the fact that it is a decision to do so, that they are tumbling into bed together and can't pretend later that there hadn't been any opportunities to think better of doing it.
As impulsive as this is (that spirit on Impulse Avenue had had the truth of it, had looked right into their souls and already seen this coming), it’s also intentional. There had been so many moments, so many opportunities even tonight to swerve off the path: choose someone else’s window. Let her in and then bundle her off to the hallway. Not invite her for a nightcap. Not walk off this cliff together.
But the decision is obvious enough by the way he watches the way she works, the appreciative glint in his eye as Gwenaëlle peels herself out of the corset with the ease of long practice, unbuckling her armour. And he says, almost musingly, “You are a little terrifying, you know,”
and it’s not god, you’re beautiful but it means the same thing. Means something more, maybe. He has always been drawn to the people who could burn him.
When Gwenaëlle leans back, Stephen finally takes the opportunity to fix the ridiculous situation with that boot. Kneeling before her — there’s another frisson of sharp unavoidable desire at being in this position, looking up at her from this angle — he hauls on the second boot to drag it off, slower this time, the context immediately different from just a few minutes ago. He sets it aside to join its fellow. Intentional.
“How many knives?” he asks, firstly because he doesn’t want to collide with them later, secondly because he’s wondered, thirdly because his hands are now sliding beneath Gwenaëlle’s skirts, up the length of her legs, knees, thighs, to find and unhook those garters.
Beneath her skirts — the multitude of them — he will find the gartered holsters that don't always actually connect to stockings (or those soft boots she wears on special occasions that look like stockings) but do tonight, and in each of them sheathed a stiletto, and Gwenaëlle flexes her freed toes. She has thought a great deal about his hands, mostly practically,
mostly not allowing herself to even wonder,
there is something to it, watching him kneeling between her knees, the warm weight of his hands sliding over and above the edges of her stockings. Something that quirks her sideways smile, almost visibly considering whether or not to give him a detailed answer.
“Five,” sounds a little like relenting. “You're at the last two. Both boots, and the corset. It was six,” has the air of an arch tease, “when we were dancing.”
Is she going to tell h—
No, she looks too pleased with herself. Secret sixth knife.
Even if she hadn’t caught him asleep, this balance of undressing still would’ve been so vastly askew between them; he dressed simpler in Thedas than New York, with fewer complicated laces and buttons and wrapped robes, more comfortable styles that he could simply pull on. Even the Armani suit he wore tonight would’ve been easy enough.
Still: this is a production, but one of the most enjoyable he’s ever undertaken.
With those last two stilettoes removed and set down with the boots, Stephen scrutinises her answer. He can honestly say he’s never done this much math in the bedroom. He cocks his head, distracted, pressing an absentminded kiss to Gwenaëlle’s knee as he considers. It was six earlier, but she hadn’t been wearing much more in the way of clothes. So where in the world—
—ooooh, she wants to say no, but how transparently obvious that is would belie the lie at once, and she concedes, “Maybe,” meaning yes, of course, put out in the most lighthearted of ways and distracted, more than she feels like immediately admitting, by the brief, warm press of his lips. Probably there's an element of redressing that when she sits up straighter to properly divest herself of corset and bodice — the chemise beneath is delicate and sheer, folds pressed into it by how tightly laced she'd been, the pattern of old, cauterized scars demonstrating how close she'd come to losing a nipple to a rage demon all those years ago, on that lonely road out of this same city.
At the time, it had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Now,
well, a lot has happened since then, and she's long since left behind the doubts about her body or her beauty after all of it, assured in herself, and interested in being desired.
It doesn't seem so unreasonable a thing, she's always thought; to want to be wanted. To want to feel that she is.
He laughs, openly, only for the sound to be cut off as she straightens. The chemise is just transparent enough he can see everything, and just substantial enough that it renders her in gauzy shadows and somehow even more tantalising. This is— fun, and comfortable, in a way he hadn’t fully expected, but things with Gwenaëlle have always felt easy even when they’re difficult. And so this is simply an extension of it, of how it has felt natural to be vulnerable around her; to companionably occupy each others’ space; to trust each other. She keeps him on his toes. That sly edge to her smile makes him feel like he’s going a little insane.
So with that maybe and the bodice falling away, Stephen climbs back up and leans a knee astride hers on the edge of the bed. He leans into her again, kisses her again, one hand catching at her jaw and the other fanning across her ribcage once more, then drifting higher, palming a breast through the chemise.
Stephen's mouth smothers a yelped laugh of pleased surprise, and something lower, and it feels both unreal to be vaulting themselves across this line and impossible that they never have before. She catches him to her with a hand splayed on his back, sliding up from his arm, her free hand pulling at the laces that hold the bulk of her skirts tight to her waist, a lot of undignified wriggling happening underneath him as she uses her heels to catch in layers of underskirts and haul them down her thighs, the bed—
they're not, actually, in a hurry. It just seems so patently ridiculous that there should be this much of anything in between them when she wants to — when she wants him, the release of admitting it making her dizzyingly weightless.
Her skirts are tangled around her feet; her knee finds the inside of his thigh, and higher, an insistent and exploratory pressure; she is, as he has noted in the past, direct.
Gwenaëlle might not need the reassurance anymore that she is desirable, desired, wanted, but it’s there nonetheless as her knee forays higher: the hard edge of his cock more than apparent in the fairly thin equivalent of pyjama pants, Stephen already hopelessly turned on, giving a predictable small strangled noise as she nudges up against him.
Crossing this line feels oddly simpler here in Halamshiral, in an anonymous room — the safety of a guest room in an expansive wing on a stranger’s sprawling estate, not neighbours cooped atop of each other in the Gallows and risking gossip at any stray sound. Here the rooms are larger, further apart; there’s more privacy to indulge. Perhaps in a way this is Riftwatch’s equivalent of a trip to an out-of-state work conference, getting more audacious after a few drinks at the hotel bar, following each other back to their rooms.
It’s a collaborative effort to work through the rest of her skirts (although that wriggling is a problem): he purposefully steps on that puddle of petticoats, and it helps Gwenaëlle kick off the last of them, leaving her in trousers and stockings.
He’s getting bolder, now that it’s unceasingly clear that kiss in the Crossroads wasn’t a one-off anomaly, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: now, there’s the luxury to explore. To slowly start to find out what she likes, what noise she might make when he mouths at her neck, teeth grazing her pulse point; when he reaches beneath her chemise just for the sake of reaching warm bare skin, the map of her scars beneath his own scarred fingertips.
The sound he makes prompts a teeth-baring, self-satisfied grin— and his teeth draw an equally satisfying hitched breath from her, rewarding every firmer press of his hands or the weight of his body with encouragement, vocal and otherwise. It's not out of her mind to fret a little about the pains of his hands, but it's hard to focus on over the way heat streaks through her everywhere their skin connects and the new sensation of his neat beard scraping against her skin. The way his mouth moves and the way she tilts her head back to jerk the tumble of her curls out of his way, he brushes light enough that it tickles for a moment and she finds herself giggling stupidly and helplessly, caught off-guard.
At every turn, it's been easy with him— why not this, too? Of course this, too.
The breath she takes to steady herself doesn't, really, but she doesn't find herself minding. Draws the knee not between his up alongside his hip, seeking pressure, friction, hot and impatient; her chemise riding up between them snags on her thigh, his wrist, entangling, and she reaches between them to free it—
no, she doesn't. She reaches between them to his cock, in search of another strangled sound or his teeth or just to get to know him better, in this moment. The building ache between her thighs follows the drumbeat of her pulse, and it doesn't make any sense any more to hesitate. “I want you,” is a good start, warmly delivered close to his ear, her lips brushing the skin there, “to tell me what you want.”
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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halamshiral.
It echoes strangely, on an odd delay, Gwenaëlle's crystal held up to where she is rapping on the window of the room Stephen occupies in their hostess's home — with any luck, delivering her urgent plea to get inside directly to him, even at so late the hour. And it is a late hour indeed, which is probably something to do with why the window she had intended to climb back in is now locked, and probably somewhere Coupe must be so smug that her gift would truly have come in useful if only Gwenaëlle had bothered to make even the slightest use of it.
Rather than regifting it twice.
Seeing as she did regift the lockpicking tools — twice — she is instead reduced to clutching her cloak around herself, tightly, and hissing, “Stephen, I know you aren't that deep a sleeper,” into her crystal, obscuring its glow with her hood and her hair.
no subject
The tapping alone would have roused him, but the crystal activating on his nightstand is like a sudden jolt kicking him immediately awake. Stephen rolls out of bed, fumbling for an oil lamp then cursing as he almost knocks it over, giving up on it, muttering, “Tony should’ve installed a Do Not Disturb setting on the crystals,” but then he’s maneuvering through the darkness toward the window. The real delay was due to the brief disorientation on waking (where is he?), then accidentally stubbing his toe on inopportunely-located ottomans, a chaise, good god, why there so much furniture in this guestroom?
He eventually yanks the curtains the rest of the way open, which lets moonlight illuminate the room, and shows Gwenaëlle perched improbably on the rooftop outside, balanced against his windowsill. For his part, Stephen’s looking rumpled, barefoot in the equivalent of pyjamas here: comfortable long braies, and a loose shirt hanging open at the neck (he’s terrible at tying the laces, and so never really bothers at night).
As she looks at him through the glass, he stares owlishly back at her, trying to make the scene compute — it doesn’t — but then he flips the latch and swings the window open, inward.
“Gwenaëlle,” he says, slow, “you do know people use doors here, right?”
Then, because Stephen Strange remains hopelessly paranoid even when he’s not being unexpectedly woken in the middle of the night: “Is something wrong? Do we need to make a rooftop escape before people come to kill us, or…”
no subject
which is not completely off the table, but she doesn't.
She says, “I didn't want to be seen leaving by the door, so I didn't want to be seen returning by one, either,” definitely means she had climbed out a window at some point tonight. “But mine is locked, and I didn't want to wake anyone else—”
Importantly, it's not that she couldn't have. But who would she have woken? Explained the whole of it to Wysteria at this hour? Risked finding some combination of Loki, Alexandrie, Rutyer and Bastien fucking? Risked Rowntree hearing she'd been knocking at Julius's window at some late hour and misconstruing it wildly?
No. Stephen was the obvious choice. Obviously.
“There's an artist— I was meeting with an artist. Some of his associates knew my sister, a little. I think I might have made some useful friends, all the more useful if it stays between us.”
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But, bemused, Stephen steps aside. “Ah, so you’ve been up to spy stuff,” he says mildly, although there’s a touch of admiration in his voice. “I thought that was more the purview of Scouting.”
Not for the first nor the last time, he’s reminded of the Black Widows, of lethal and competent women with knives, climbing rooftops. He holds the window like he’s holding a door open for her — the chilly wind’s cutting into the room, nipping at his open throat — and ushers Gwenaëlle in from the cold, bizarre as the whole thing feels.
He wonders if he should be offering hot tea; a nightcap.
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Well, and what was she expecting, banging on his window at this hour.
(Not Clothilde.)
“Well, generally,” she concedes, heroically, instead of saying something incredibly stupid. “But when something falls into your lap, what sort of idiot passes it up because it isn't your division? Adenet's mistress,”
in several senses of the word,
“took to me. It merited finding out why— it's rarely that I'm so irresistibly charming. For both our sakes, better to be discreet about it— ergo—”
She shoves her hood back, loose curls tumbling around her face and shoulders and the lighter-weight fabric of her gown's construction there. “Silver has said I could be useful that way, before.”
So has Byerly Rutyer, but it's slowly become easier to believe from John Silver; he understands her better, she thinks.
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“Gossip amongst the elven servants, then? I’ve never really had to deal with this sort of environment before, but I always figured that upstairs-downstairs distinction means the attendants know everything going on.” He’s closing the window, latching it, turning to look at her. The drizzle of moonlight through the glass, reflecting a glint in Gwenaëlle’s false eye. There’s no bleariness to the man: he’s been suddenly, instantly awake ever since he first heard her voice.
And with that comes some restlessness, Stephen glancing at the sideboard, grasping for something to feel more like the gracious host he’d been at the Sanctum, as if this were a normal visit at a normal hour: “Do you need a drink to warm up? I have half a bottle of honeywine, although I think they cleared away the glasses—”
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and it's not as if he's never seen her knees before. She wears trousers fitted nearly as intimate as her stockings; he'd seen most of her scars when she was discovering designer swimwear. When she flings herself down on the edge of his rumpled guest-bed, crossing her ankles, it's not even close to the most exposed she's ever been in his company.
“Adenet's the artist,” she says, holding her hand out for the bottle. “They're lovers— Chapentier's very sympathetic, and he's awfully well positioned. My sister — she never made it as far as the Marquise, but I think I might be able to pick up further than she left off, maybe.”
It had made her think of— not Thranduil, actually, but Pietro, long since disappeared back into the wilds whence he came. Suddenly, the shape of a possible future, envisioned only years after it's been thoroughly unmade. Stupid to be protective of grown adults who know what they're doing better than she can, but still.
She wants to protect them. It doesn't enter her head not to trust Stephen with it at once.
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He busies himself at the sideboard, although with all the glassware having been carted away earlier, there’s nothing else to do besides uncork that bottle again. The drink is sweet, and had been used for a spirited debate with the dean earlier; people have sometimes been surprised that the doctor enjoys a sweet wine, a port, a lemon drop martini, some mai tais at the Bar With No Doors. He takes a swig from the bottle; telling himself that it’s not for actual liquid fortitude, he’s already seen so much of her, so what makes this any different at all,
and christ, he shouldn’t be so discombobulated at a pair of knees sitting on the edge of his bed. He’s clearly been in Thedas too long.
But Stephen eventually steps closer, hands her the bottle, knuckles brushing. “What do you mean, made it as far as the Marquise?”
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but they have something, the two of them. She can almost reach the edges of it. His knuckles against hers break her contemplation—
“The line between servants' gossip and Marquise Briala's elven spy network is porous,” she says, instead of anything about what love is in the Orlesian political landscape. “I think moreso now, not less.” Now that she was Marquise Briala and not just the Empress's rumoured finger-puppet. Gwenaëlle bends her knee to haul one foot up onto the end of the bed, taking a swig from the bottle and working, one handed, on removing a boot. (It's sensible. She will move more quietly in the hallways. Don't overthink it.)
Her skirts ride higher, carelessly; a blade flashes at her thigh.
“Alix was never a spy. And I'm not really,” judiciously, only she might know some spies, now, and that could be very useful. With the laces of her boot undone and loosened, “If I brace, can you give that a tug?”
(She is conscientious of what his hands can and cannot do. In fact, she specifically thinks about it a normal amount.)
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If there’s some tedious buzzkill part of his brain which wonders Gwenaëlle, why are you disrobing in my room, well, he suffocates it.
There’s enough plausible reason, anyhow. Halamshiral is further south; a little colder, and its rooftops covered in snow this time of year; she’s already swept some of it in with her and there are melting bootprints leading from the window to his bed. The part of him which embodies a tidy, finicky cat doesn’t want any more of it tracked in. So, obediently enough, Stephen closes the rest of the distance between them, remarking, “It helps to have friends in low places. Do you think they’ll come in handy? I mean, I’m assuming they’re your friends now, since you are, after all, so irresistibly charming—”
He lets Gwenaëlle brace against his shoulder as he leans down: fingers slipping between the leather of the boot and her stockings; pulling the snug boot down, dragging it off her leg.
Odd, to remember that he already knows the shape of the long ugly scarring and bite mark on her bare thigh. It had seemed like such a non-issue at the time, under crisp white impersonal showroom lights and with attendants hovering nearby to refill their drinks. He had thought it would be the same here, plus Gwenaëlle’s even more covered-up now, with layers upon layers of petticoats and thick winter dress. But this time he can feel the shape of her calf beneath his hands, the turn of an ankle and heel as he tugs the boot loose and then sets it down on the carpet. (This time, he remembers what it felt like to kiss her.)
He instinctively half-reaches for the laces of the other one, but then stops, remembering his clumsiness with eyelets and knots. He’ll wait, instead, and be a little too aware of how close he has to stand for this operation.
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it is suddenly very obvious to her just how comfortable she's got with him at precisely the point where she finds his shoulder under her hand and cannot ignore that this is nothing like it would have been if she'd woken Lexie. The sensible thing to do at this point — she knows — is to take a breath, unlace her boot, and excuse herself the way she had been going to do. Carry her boots on quiet stocking feet back to her guest room. Try to be seen near Lexie's, if anyone's. Put this away, like she'd convinced herself that the Crossroads hadn't changed anything.
(Herein lies the problem: maybe they hadn't. Maybe they hadn't very differently to how she'd explained it away.)
She does take a breath.
“Fair warning,” very steadily, “I think I'm about to do something stupid.”
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he’s a smart man, he can perhaps guess, but that would also be presumptuous. When, objectively and realistically speaking, there are so many other stupid things Gwenaëlle could do. She’s carrying tidings of secret elven spy meetups. Maybe it’s something about a political alliance, or planning on assassinating someone, or helping someone else assassinate someone, or otherwise simply pulling those threads of the Great Game which she hates so much, or some other extremely work-relevant mystery she’s unravelled in Halamshiral —
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It wasn't work.
The angle is better than it started, last time— this time she already knows where he'll be, the shape of him, and she's already holding his shoulder, he's already so close to her. She half-rises, her knee against the outside of his where she dropped it along with discarded boot, and their teeth don't crash— it's a riptide, not a collision.
She probably should have taken both of her boots off, she thinks, but what she does is put her teeth in his lip to see what happens next.
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He’s surprised but not as thunderously bowled-over as before; there isn’t that awkward, painful clack of teeth against teeth; instead, it’s just Gwenaëlle rising up to meet him, folding into him like the tide dragging her in, and when she bites at his lip, he gives a sharp hiss of indrawn breath.
She’s kissed him for the second time in their lives, and what happens next is this: Stephen leaning into it immediately, with none of the wheels-turning hesitation from the Crossroads, and he bites back, teeth grazing against lip and his hand automatically winding into the tangled curly mess of Gwenaëlle’s hair.
Before, it had been a single lengthy kiss to banish a haunting; this time it’s chasing after each other, mouth and tongue and stupid decisions, Stephen having to pause to catch his breath and then simply diving back in for more. Hungry. A hunger he hasn’t felt for— years, too many years, this side of him carefully set on a shelf and then bricked up behind a wall, only for Gwenaëlle to come crashing miraculously through it.
Her face is bitterly cold from the outdoors, but his hands are warm; they both taste of honeywine; it turns out last month wasn’t about work and this isn’t, either.
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maker, she doesn't care. His hands are warm and so is the rest of him, almost shockingly so as they rush together; layers of fabric and boned corsetry confine her but he'd been dressed to sleep, warm from the inside of this rumpled bedding, easy to reach. She twists her fingers in the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer by it still, the hard — armored, probably — corset between them jabbing into his ribs, bending her knee so she can hitch her foot at the back of his. It feels as if it should feel stranger to do this than it does; she'd recoiled for so long from the idea of reaching for anyone (except—) and now that she's here, reaching—
No, it feels inevitable. Like they were always going to end up here, her cold hands fighting to get under fabric and find his skin, mostly because she wants to touch him but at least partly because she wants to press her cold fingers to his bare skin and make him startle, make her laugh.
It doesn't matter, in the moment, if it's a good idea or a bad idea. It's just such a relief that it's happening.
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So few people are capable of making Stephen Strange feel contrite and abashed. He had taken notice.
Perhaps something had shifted underfoot when she’d done up his shirt buttons and not made a big deal out of it, and gifted him those thoughtful gloves,
or late-night tea at the Sanctum and portalling her to a nighttime beach in the tropics simply because she liked to swim,
or the two of them saving a man’s life together,
or her practically clambering into his lap, him handing her a book of Orlesian poetry he’d ripped apart a timeline to bring to her,
or any number of small intimacies they’d accidentally slipped into,
or, or, or.
It’s been an endless step after step after step to get to this point: Gwenäelle sliding her cold fingers under his shirt and Stephen jolting, interrupting the kiss to yelp against her jaw, “Jesus fucking christ,” and the laughter bubbling in the room.
“Rude,” he adds, the smile audible in his voice. And the solid edge of the corset had been uncomfortable enough that he reaches for the sleek, flattened arch of her ribcage in an attempt to even the odds, and at least get started on carving through the first of those layers to make it more comfortable for both of them, and then, well.
There’s a momentary confusion. He’s never had to fuss with the intricacies of womenswear in this time period before. His brows are furrowed in intent concentration (as if she’s a puzzle to be unravelled, which she is) as he pulls a little away, peering down in the half-gloom, hands splayed against a cage, trying to sort out how to get it off.
“—Is this armoured leather?”
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“People try to stab me not infrequently,” she says, “it's sensible.”
A solid point, but because at the best of times some of these particular intricacies are tricky enough for people whose hands are obedient and deft— it isn't unpleasant, the way that sitting up brings her closer to him, loosening a series of fastenings and laces behind her to start freeing herself of what keeps her back so straight and her kidneys unperforated. Probably, at least two lady's maids would be ideal for a dress like this, although it isn't impossible to manage on her own — more obvious as she starts to come undone that it is several disparate parts, and not a singular piece of stitched fabric.
It's hard to be completely, blindly impulsive in a dress like this. The actual effort to remove it necessitates a slowing down — an acknowledgment, even appreciation, of the fact that it is a decision to do so, that they are tumbling into bed together and can't pretend later that there hadn't been any opportunities to think better of doing it.
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But the decision is obvious enough by the way he watches the way she works, the appreciative glint in his eye as Gwenaëlle peels herself out of the corset with the ease of long practice, unbuckling her armour. And he says, almost musingly, “You are a little terrifying, you know,”
and it’s not god, you’re beautiful but it means the same thing. Means something more, maybe. He has always been drawn to the people who could burn him.
When Gwenaëlle leans back, Stephen finally takes the opportunity to fix the ridiculous situation with that boot. Kneeling before her — there’s another frisson of sharp unavoidable desire at being in this position, looking up at her from this angle — he hauls on the second boot to drag it off, slower this time, the context immediately different from just a few minutes ago. He sets it aside to join its fellow. Intentional.
“How many knives?” he asks, firstly because he doesn’t want to collide with them later, secondly because he’s wondered, thirdly because his hands are now sliding beneath Gwenaëlle’s skirts, up the length of her legs, knees, thighs, to find and unhook those garters.
Maybe he’s thought about it before.
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mostly not allowing herself to even wonder,
there is something to it, watching him kneeling between her knees, the warm weight of his hands sliding over and above the edges of her stockings. Something that quirks her sideways smile, almost visibly considering whether or not to give him a detailed answer.
“Five,” sounds a little like relenting. “You're at the last two. Both boots, and the corset. It was six,” has the air of an arch tease, “when we were dancing.”
Is she going to tell h—
No, she looks too pleased with herself. Secret sixth knife.
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Still: this is a production, but one of the most enjoyable he’s ever undertaken.
With those last two stilettoes removed and set down with the boots, Stephen scrutinises her answer. He can honestly say he’s never done this much math in the bedroom. He cocks his head, distracted, pressing an absentminded kiss to Gwenaëlle’s knee as he considers. It was six earlier, but she hadn’t been wearing much more in the way of clothes. So where in the world—
Then a guess, amused: “Was it in your hair?”
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At the time, it had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Now,
well, a lot has happened since then, and she's long since left behind the doubts about her body or her beauty after all of it, assured in herself, and interested in being desired.
It doesn't seem so unreasonable a thing, she's always thought; to want to be wanted. To want to feel that she is.
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So with that maybe and the bodice falling away, Stephen climbs back up and leans a knee astride hers on the edge of the bed. He leans into her again, kisses her again, one hand catching at her jaw and the other fanning across her ribcage once more, then drifting higher, palming a breast through the chemise.
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they're not, actually, in a hurry. It just seems so patently ridiculous that there should be this much of anything in between them when she wants to — when she wants him, the release of admitting it making her dizzyingly weightless.
Her skirts are tangled around her feet; her knee finds the inside of his thigh, and higher, an insistent and exploratory pressure; she is, as he has noted in the past, direct.
slaps on a nsfw warning here on out
Crossing this line feels oddly simpler here in Halamshiral, in an anonymous room — the safety of a guest room in an expansive wing on a stranger’s sprawling estate, not neighbours cooped atop of each other in the Gallows and risking gossip at any stray sound. Here the rooms are larger, further apart; there’s more privacy to indulge. Perhaps in a way this is Riftwatch’s equivalent of a trip to an out-of-state work conference, getting more audacious after a few drinks at the hotel bar, following each other back to their rooms.
It’s a collaborative effort to work through the rest of her skirts (although that wriggling is a problem): he purposefully steps on that puddle of petticoats, and it helps Gwenaëlle kick off the last of them, leaving her in trousers and stockings.
He’s getting bolder, now that it’s unceasingly clear that kiss in the Crossroads wasn’t a one-off anomaly, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: now, there’s the luxury to explore. To slowly start to find out what she likes, what noise she might make when he mouths at her neck, teeth grazing her pulse point; when he reaches beneath her chemise just for the sake of reaching warm bare skin, the map of her scars beneath his own scarred fingertips.
nsfw ∞ party up in here
At every turn, it's been easy with him— why not this, too? Of course this, too.
The breath she takes to steady herself doesn't, really, but she doesn't find herself minding. Draws the knee not between his up alongside his hip, seeking pressure, friction, hot and impatient; her chemise riding up between them snags on her thigh, his wrist, entangling, and she reaches between them to free it—
no, she doesn't. She reaches between them to his cock, in search of another strangled sound or his teeth or just to get to know him better, in this moment. The building ache between her thighs follows the drumbeat of her pulse, and it doesn't make any sense any more to hesitate. “I want you,” is a good start, warmly delivered close to his ear, her lips brushing the skin there, “to tell me what you want.”
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