illithidnapped

All right, you want to talk about my feelings so fucking bad. I need to - work this out, somewhere, and I don't want to talk to someone who cares about me or might give a damn about it.

[He could contest that accusation (assessment?), but despite the delay that clutters the air with weighted silence just before he responds, he doesn't.]

Go on, then.

( best not.

she breathes out. )

I was never actually married. Oh, legally, we eventually did it; we're married in the eyes of Andraste, which personally means jackshit and is legally debatable. I'm not inviting the de Fonces collective indignance by disparaging the legality of their marriage by contesting it, but do we all think rifter marriages will hold up?

( at best: an open question. )

But not meaningfully, in any way that actually matters. In the way that he told me it mattered. In the way he, I guess, humiliated me when I didn't know any better. He put me through the anxiety and the - the indignity of spending weeks on research into whether or not being attracted to me meant there was something wrong with him and I thought that was fair, you know. The way he explained it. That was...how marriage works. You marry someone, in the way of his people, and you're bound inextricably to that person. That's meaningful. It meant something.

Fall dick-first into the first arsehole who cocks an eyebrow, on the other hand, that's fine. He can just do that. Nice to know he's able, you see. He wouldn't want to actually have been married to me, apparently, with the way he rushed to make sure it wouldn't really be any kind of inconvenience to him.

[His exhale is soft. Noisy, but soft— more the catch of his throat than breath. This is...a lot to unpack.

Also, arguably when it comes to semantics, he imagines he wasn't the first asshole to cock an eyebrow. Just the most persistent. And alluring. And— right, never mind.]

Let me see if I understand this.

[Because for once, he is trying.]

Thranduil was married before he came to Thedas, I’m assuming, if his concern over being attracted to you held some sort of inconceivable significance.

Secondly, you’re telling me he actually had you sleuthing to figure out if attraction meant something?

He did most of the legwork, which is either awfully convenient or just,

( a small, awful laugh. )

Which is worse? That he lied to me, or that he just loved me so much less it had stopped meaning anything? It always felt a bit like he were just...playing house for a while. Not our life together, just the rest of mine. Of course he didn't love me the way he said he did.

( that simply makes the most sense, with the information in front of her. )

You didn't think it would matter. Why am I surprised he didn't either?

I suppose I don’t know enough to say.

It’s possible you were the one to acclimate him to it. To make sex something more, shall we say, present in his life rather than some ceremonious gesture. That kind of thing can be rapturously freeing for some, after all.

Still, it’s...

[Another pause. Another handful of seconds spent untangling the delicacy of the moment.]

Love is a very messy thing. Sharp. Potent. It doesn’t always demand devotion, but sure as any of the Hells, it consumes.

So you’ll have to take it as you will: I only know what transpired on my end. But he was stricken with misery when we met that night, to the point that I thought the man might very well start calling me by your name.

I’m honestly shocked he didn’t, in retrospect.

My point is, when it comes to drowning, sometimes we’re all so desperate for air, we’ll eagerly swallow seawater as a substitute.

So I ruined him.

[Well. He won’t say that— but he can’t exactly disagree, either.]

Tell me something.

Why did you throw him out in the first place?

[There had to be a reason for it, after all.]

Because I wanted him out of my hair.

( because she was having an episode and his intense attention was aggravating it and she doesn't have the tools or the vocabulary to unpack that, )

Which seems like a blessing in disguise now.

Well.

You certainly got what you wanted.

[Not spoken judgmentally, only with certainty— because there’s no denying that final, definitive truth.]

But I do want you to know something.

That's not what this was for at all, but sure, I get off on being kicked when I'm down. This should be good.

I didn’t reach for you because it meant nothing.

I realize I seem a heartless bastard, and in most cases— nearly all of them, in fact— it’s true. But...

[He stops there, almost verbally wincing for the trouble of trying to gnaw his way through this by force. It sits about as well as indigestion, and stinging in his gut just as much.]

I have standards. Steep ones.

So don’t imagine I was simply toying with you for a laugh. Him, maybe. [That addition mild enough to be an obvious joke.]

But not you.

( quietly, sincerely, )

If even an ounce of me believed that might be within spitting distance of not bullshit, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Not today. Not about this.

Fair enough.

[Easier for him to bypass this discussion as well, in all honesty. And it’s not as though he expects— or even wants— absolution.

Things are what they are.]

So if I understand everything correctly, just to tally the score: you thought he loved you the way his people loved. And that in drawing away, he’d still be latched to you, so to speak.

What you’re left with instead is the question of whether or not he’d lied to you, or whether his feelings have changed despite the obviousness of his apparent misery.

( maybe, eventually, she will think on his saying so at a time it would hurt less to hear,

but today, she sets it aside. liars lie. it isn't anything to dwell deeply on. )

Was our marriage built on a total, knowing lie? Or just worth less to him.

( neither of those things feel great, nor do they incline her to sympathy with whatever hurt he's feeling.

it's about the size of it: she'd thought she had a safety net, and in losing it she'd lost all her faith in what had come before. what she'd built on that faith. )

Maybe it doesn't matter, it's over and done with regardless. He doesn't trust me because I threw him out, he's hardly going to exert himself to court me anew. And whatever our marriage actually was or wasn't, it's over now.

( it would have to be made new, and she can't right now imagine how. )

Would you want him to exert himself like that? Trying to win you back, I mean.

[It’s an honest question, and not just fumbling around in the figurative dark in search of any particular response that might somehow solve all their problems.

It doesn’t work that way, after all. Not when it comes to these two.]

I thought laying it all out might tell me the answer.

( —but it hasn't, really. )

Things like this rarely sort out willingly even if you have all the pieces in place.

[No one knows trouble like Astarion knows trouble, after all.]

So. Let’s talk hypotheticals.

Say someone else came waltzing into your life: handsome, clever, wealthy, charismatic— not me— kind, even. Whatever traits ideally suit your fancy. Sheer perfection.

Would you let them?

Edited 2021-10-28 11:47 (UTC)

That person sounds fucking insufferable, which would certainly simplify matters, but if we pretend for the sake of argument you haven't described an easy no,

I have no idea. What about someone who doesn't keep secrets from me, and actually shares his plans and goals and life with me, and doesn't mock me for an idiot if I consider the idea someone else might have thought more of me than that. I might give that person a try.

...you’re saying he mocks you?

[Spoken with all the surprise of a pair of raised eyebrows; Thranduil is— at times— a nuisance in his own right, and perhaps more than a little unreadable, but opting to deride someone he cares for?

How unexpected.]

I'm saying our last conversation didn't go very well. Probably he was on the defensive as it was, considering you.

But it's nice to know the only possible reason anyone might think me competent enough to be an equal in my own life is because they'd have to lie to fuck me. Per my husband. To be honest, I didn't expect the answer to "it feels as if you think less of me than Alexander did", which is dreadful considering how that ended, to be simply that he was either wrong or lying.

Edited 2021-10-29 19:17 (UTC)

[There’s a soft sigh on the other end of the line, a noise of attempted comprehension— though between Thranduil’s vague, noble rambling and Gwenaëlle’s own storied past— he always feels like he’s missing more than a handful of context clues at any given moment.]

Who in the Hells is Alexander?

It doesn't actually matter. Someone who might have married me and didn't.

It just,

How fucking hard would it have been to say, I didn't mean for you to feel that way? If he didn't. I'm meant to crawl back and apologise to someone who misled me and thinks anyone else who ever cared about me must have been lying?

( a laugh, incredulous, edged. )

Between him and you, Maker, maybe he's right. I do keep falling for bullshit.

Oh, stop it. Much as I know the world does conspire at present, you’re not a damned idiot and you’re not gullible.

I hate this sort of thing, you know. It’s much too...open. Thoughtful, whatever. But I’ve also lived long enough that I can at least offer a lens for perhaps a little clarified viewing of the situation. Something to help you find your own footing.

[This, he does for her. One open-handed gesture of good faith, and one he won't circle back to later.]

Because you feel undervalued and undesired. And in the midst of that, you’ve been forced to wrestle with the agonizing idea that everything you’d been put through was either unnecessary trite— or simply untrue.

But my darling, you’re in possession of a wealth of appeal: the world could very easily lend itself to your very lovely grasp if you chose to sink your claws into it. Of course I know that’s not actually what you crave in any capacity, which leads me to my hypothetical, and why you’ve been no doubt struggling to lap your wounds on your own to no avail.

You still want your husband. And you not only want him to want you— which he has done, and which isn’t nearly enough— but to understand your pain, and to help you make peace with it as a start. Maybe you don’t want him back. Maybe you don’t even want what you had anymore, just...

Well.

Sometimes the heart takes to beating of its own accord.

[Wretched thing that it is.]

Anyway I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got to offer, darling. My forcibly assigned lot was always to rip relationships apart at the seams, not to mend them; I can’t tell you where to go from here, but with luck, you might be able to divine something worthwhile from all this mess.

( she makes a sound when he says you're not gullible that sounds a lot like my track record disagrees, but she swallows the impulse to put it into words, out loud. listens, and doesn't expect what she hears—

if she were feeling a bit less sore about being a bit more credulous than she cares for, it might sound awfully like someone who does care to do her this kindness; who might have agreed to listen for reasons beyond the very real risk, in the mood she had begun, that she'd have barreled over him anyway if he hadn't. )

I only wanted to put it all out of my head.

( to say it all, directly and unself-consciously, and see what it looked like once she had; writing had not got her anywhere and there's real appeal in unloading to someone who she's already fled friendship. the idea that if she couldn't look at him afterwards, that'd be fine, actually.

jury's out on how that's gone. )

I'm so tired of feeling stupid. ( and small, and to blame. )

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illithidnapped - 2021-10-30 06:57 (UTC) - Expand

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