fade rift. inbox.

[dissono]

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

Comments

[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.)