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[dissono]

for private scenes and correspondence.
non-urgent crystal messages will be responded to by letter at his earliest convenience.

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[dissono]

Gervais does not put his trousers on.

He doesn't even reach for them, although the way he exhales as he opens his eyes certainly suggests that the thought may have crossed his mind, and therefore that not doing so is a decision rather than just an innocent lack of impulse. Where is this, on the list of conversations that they don't have? The ache isn't at the not-new thought that he might well be kidding himself to think their future will always follow the same path, it's at the other impulse, the one that twists bitter in his gut:

ah, because we think we get a future, now.

He doesn't have the luxury, any more, of not allowing himself to think of the day she doesn't stand up again.

“L-l-l—”

His expression twists in the dim light.

“Lea—leaving me. So soon.”

[limier]

"This," White stone walls, salt in the bay; an acre of ill-content. She twists fingers into the sleeve of the pillow, to ignore the weight of a blade beneath. Across the bed, grooves furrow into skin that ought to smooth still (so foreign the curl her brow affects of late). "Not you."

It isn't that simple. She abandons the cloth, presses skin to an arm.

"You told me that you would stay," Near a year past, and how quick and dark these months have drawn. "We need decide what that means."

[dissono]

Maker, it'd be so much simpler if they'd just die before they had to address any of this.

(Not better, but simpler.)

His hand finds her elbow, slides down until he can touch her fingers, far more lightly than he touched her earlier; like something that will not leave an impression. As if he doesn't leave an impression. He did say that, he remembers, and he meant it—Gwenaëlle had brought him to Kirkwall, but she did not bid him stay. His niece is safe (in a tower, and all—), and if Wren leaves, he will follow.

What that will look like, though. What it will mean. He occasionally dislikes it very much when she's right.

“Chantry w-w--will. Will, will not dispense. Approval. Twice.”

He's no handsome rifter elf.

[limier]

"No," The ghost of something like a smile — that fucking wedding — gone again for the heat in Gwenaelle’s mouth. "Not even my people."

They haven’t been hers in two years. What contacts she owned (owed) have been pawned to this cause, and hardly unimpeachable now. The two of them are an object lesson: At its kindest, disqualifying. Her age, his harmlessness; tolerated until there's an alternative. Not a path that sees anything done. At its ugliest,

"Secrets do not keep," Gwenaelle, his brother; twenty years of stilted imbalance. "But I have never promised to return to the Order."

To what it will become, what new shape it's beaten to.

[dissono]

The weight of his politics and hers have lain between them for nearly a year, now, in this room and in this bed; a fight that he had picked with her upon arriving, and that has since then simmered in silence, mostly. Not even only their own, and he'd be surprised by that if either of them were about twenty years younger.

Inching ever closer to irrelevance. It's one way to find peace.

“S—s—s-say your meaning,” quieter, drawing her hand to his mouth and pressing his lips to the back of it. She didn't corner him at this most opportune of moments with nothing in mind. What's his, he thinks. Meaning.

Purpose.

He is learning rebellion; would not set it aside, to follow her. And yet, could not, in following her. To persist in what he persists in claiming for a marriage is, in itself, a rejection of the hundred reasons not to. It doesn't change the world, but it matters. (It changes his world, which matters.)