[ For the first moment he intends to finish writing the name he’s begun putting to paper. But it is a very long name, and when he needs to write neatly he only accomplishes it slowly, and she is asking for his time at the door instead of fluttering to her desk and chattering at will.
So Mr Schw will have to wait for his remaining syllables, he decides. He sets the pen aside as he looks up. ]
[ It's a grateful look— a little tentative, but mostly grateful— and then she comes in enough to shut the door behind her. For a moment she is still, flickering through choices in her mind and holding them up one after another as if trying to decide which earrings best accompany her dress, and then she comes to sit in one of the chairs at his desk rather than going to her own. ]
I had tea with Miss Poppell this afternoon.
[ Orlesian still, the sovereign language of the office. ]
I had offered to find out more about why she and Byerly had fought, and why she now entirely refuses to speak with him.
[ She doesn't know if it had come up between the two men, but if there is ever a moment to affirm their relationship that is the road she chooses, and so the news is delivered as if she believes it has. ]
[ It's news to him, his face establishes with tiny shifts toward curious and concerned, but there's no doubt or hurt tagging along. Not that there would be any evidence if they did, either. But they don't. Curiosity and concern aside, he's still smiling.
Her proximity and the topic—personal, not professional—settle him slouchier into his chair, which he was already using crookedly. He folds his hands over his middle. ]
Was it because they both have such sedate and tepid personalities?
He expressed frustration in having no idea at all what her quarrel might be—
[ She sighs, and wilts just enough to notice. ]
But for all he wishes to know, I do not think he will be pleased with her... litany.
I shall have as light a touch as I can, but... I have so often stepped wrong of a sudden and turned my ankle in conversation with him that I thought it prudent to inform you in case he is wroth later and it is due to me.
[ Midway through, for a moment, he's smiling—fondness for Byerly encompassing fondness for his frustrations, lifting one side of the mouth, and the other his ability to imagine the tone of Wysteria's voice in a litany of complaints, if not precisely the contents of it.
By the conclusion the smile has faded into mild worry with a touch of perplexity. ]
[ It's a little distant, a little fragile, a little tired, and so is the smile that accompanies it.
The morning after the dream they'd all shared had gone hard. Although she's done her best to be a light and genial companion since, she's not been able to truly shake the pallor of it, nor the thought that everything is only one sharp moment away from shattering— and with all the broken fragments old and new strewn haphazardly around them there are so many moments waiting to become sharp.
She straightens herself after a moment, not wishing him to think she'd come to be comforted. ]
But I am glad for your faith and shall attempt to share it.
[ Bastien’s little smile returns, in acknowledgment.
It’s odd, not to know what to say. He usually knows a thing to say, at least, if not the right thing. A thing that can safely deliver everyone to the conversation’s shore. But he feels a fragility, too—with Alexandrie, not with Byerly. He thinks he might hurt her if he offers outright to tidy up behind her, as if he is the expert and she’s incapable of handling it herself; he thinks she might hurt him if she asks him to, like a tool she can extend to tend to Byerly from a distance.
So he’s left silent for longer than he’d like. Still, because he hasn’t unintentionally fidgeted in twenty years.
Then, tentatively, because it feels like it could go just as wrong—and because it is digging a finger into his own bruise to talk like a supportive friend who will soon disappear for ten chapters and reappear to say congratulations at the wedding— ]
You know, he never—we do not sit around talking about you. Especially now. But before, for as long as I have known him, he has never had an unkind word for you. Nervous words and confused words, and— [ she knows, or he wouldn’t say ] —he really does not care for your husband. But never anything hard and petty. There has always been tenderness at the heart of it.
[ There's enough of the old Alexandrie left to have it come when she needs it; the little distance that lets the seabird calling he only speaks of that tenderness to you, he will not let me know his heart sail away without first winging its loneliness through her eyes.
She wonders if Bastien thinks that is what it is like, between them. Tender. If he thinks her jealous and grasping, thinks she has no reason to be made so brittle with envy to see Byerly open warmly for him.
She doesn't ask. She didn't even want this much; it is like receiving another line of credit from one she is already indebted to. She still makes herself say— ]
I am pleased to hear so.
[ —as if it had put her heart at ease instead of making her want to scream. ]
Except, naturally, that he really does not care for my husband, but I have resigned myself to their relationship being mildly antagonistic at best.
[ She hesitates a moment, and then: ]
Please do not think that in regards to Byerly you must needs be my source of clarity and reassurance. While I may be glad of it, I also cannot help but feel I am somehow making an imposition of myself even if it is offered freely.
[ Bastien shakes his head, quick and reflexive, at imposition. But he doesn't argue out loud.
Perhaps it's his fault that they can't just talk about it. Perhaps if he'd talked to her when he was hurt and unsure—when he thought Byerly was asking to fool around with him while he only loved her and Bastien wasn't sure he could stand it, when he didn't know what to make of their one foray beyond kissing being sandwiched between Byerly drinking himself stupid over Alexandrie and saying yes to her after all. She did ask him why he was waiting. He'd written, Maybe when you are back. But then he didn't want her to feel sorry about anything when she was so happy, so he didn't.
Or perhaps if he talked to her now, about that morning. Maybe if he put some of his feelings into her hands, they might feel more like members of the same little club, puzzling their way through something difficult together.
But he doesn't want her to feel sorry about anything when she's so unhappy, either. So he doesn't. ]
Well, if he is unreasonable with you about it, [ with all possible fondness, ] we can open the bad wine, when you feel like it, and go through the new Panopoly of Faces to see if there is anything to make fun of.
[ It should make her happy, the hand extended to her. She should take it; hop over the little stream that divides heavy hearts and light and deliver a little quip and smile the smile that says it is fine and ah, see? friends! Then they might laugh together and talk of nothing and leave knowing no more about one another than when they began. Which isn't friends— it's friendly, but not friends.
And she is not sure that friendly survives all of this. ]
A kind offer.
[ Alexandrie sighs soft through her nose. ]
You are always kind to me, and it makes me worry that you are storing up everything else you have felt in a box on a shelf somewhere.
[ A pause, and then gently: ]
It is not an easy thing we are doing. Who is it that is kind to you when you worry? [ She leaves little space for him to answer before she's appending— ] And if you smile at me and shrug as if it is a thing of no matter or say you do not worry, I will throw my slipper at you. I will throw both of them. And I will eat all of the cashews out of the nut mix.
[ For a moment Bastien looks considering and entertained—as if he might enjoy daring her to throw her slippers and vindictively pick through the nuts, to see if she really will. Because he would enjoy it, so long as it stayed friendly. He pretends at catching himself with his shoulders raised, halfway through a shrug, and badly covering it for it by rolling them as if they’re sore. ]
I am very kind to myself.
[ It’s a possibly cashew-forfeiting answer, and certainly an unfair one. A little unfair to Athessa, who Bastien expects would knuckle through the salt in her wounded heart if he asked her to listen to him whine about his relatively good luck. And very unfair to Byerly, who’s gentle with every vulnerability and anxiety he works himself around to voicing. But under the circumstances—general and specific, with her only stopped here before going up for a conversation she fears will go badly—telling Alexandrie how sweet Byerly is to him seems cruel.
For the sake of the cashews, he adds, ]
But I do worry. Of course I do.
[ About the three of them. About what he matters to Alexandrie more than about what he matters to Byerly, lately. About the two of them entwined half-dressed on the bed he hadn’t been able to sit on, the my Byerly and the kissing and murmuring about humoring Bastien over his foolish breakfast.
He’d rather step on a spike than unload any of that on her now, though. Instead, compromising, trying more than anything to not leave her feeling alone in having uncertainties: ]
In the beginning I was very sure that he was in love with you and only holding onto my hand because he was scared. I tied myself into all sorts of knots about it.
If you feel so still, then we are each of us more sure of the other's place and keeping our fingers busy with sailor's work.
[ She makes it sound lighter than she feels it, but after a few words Alexandrie finds she cannot look at him. Her eyes flick away instead to the dish of nuts— a small cover, although not one she expects to work on Bastien— so she can pick out an almond. She'll show it to him with a little smile before she eats it: vengeance escaped. ]
[ He swipes two fingers over his forehead to mime swiping away sweat in relief, with a smile not quite as little as hers. Smaller than it would be, though, if she hadn't needed to look away. ]
I don't. Not like I did before. I think nearly everyone's certainty about nearly everything wobbles, but that's only wobbles, you know, it's not...
[ He trails off; his smile widens. ]
But I am still sure of your place, too. I didn't have to trade. [ He reaches for one of his precious cashews, and his tone goes sing-song and teasing, as if they are back in the city, young again, with everything lighter. ] He has it sooo bad for you.
[ It should make her happy, the teasing. It should make her laugh and throw nuts at him with a sparkle in her eyes and a flush of colour in her cheeks.
Instead it rips her heart out because it falls so easily off Bastien's lips and she has to drag it from Byerly with her fingernails and it feels like a scrapbook of every time she broke herself open and he turned away.
She doesn't cry, at least. Or blanch, or freeze, or run. She speaks, softly: ]
He does not trust me enough to say so, and were he to... I am not sure I trust him enough to truly believe.
[ Then she is back at the bowl, hunting for almonds with a wan smile. ]
I think perhaps you think us easier with one another than we are.
[ He was there for some of the miscommunication and despair. He was also there for the paeans and herb kingdoms. Perhaps he's overestimating the prevalence of the latter. And that wan smile isn't what he wanted, short-term, with his teasing. But that she's talking to him is what he wanted, longer-term, so he won't beat himself up too badly for the miscalculation.
He holds out a hand, palm flat, in silent request for a cashew. Or whatever else she'd like to give him. He isn't so picky. ]
Have you talked to him about—about Val Royeaux? About where he went afterwards? How it was?
[ She finds him some. One, two; the little curled crescents deftly picked from the mix and deposited into the waiting hand. ]
Some. Not as we should speak. I think perhaps the both of us are avoiding it, or allowing the other to.
I do not even know what he did that night.
[ And she doesn't want to ask. Not only because it will hurt to hear, but because she doesn't want him to ask her what she had done. It is the first stone of the soulless road she paved, and thinking too closely of it now— thinking too closely about near everything in those silent years— is like looking directly at the sun.
[ It is the only polite thing to say while he’s chewing. After he’s swallowed, though— ]
I hate to give advice, because then if it goes badly it is my fault. [ A joke. Sort of. ] And I don’t know how things are for the two of you when I am not there, you know, making them much worse.
[ Also a joke; also only sort of. ]
I think it is hard to talk to someone about how they have hurt you unless you don’t mind hurting them back. But I think if I were hurt—if I were capable of being hurt— [ One last joke for the road, with a wry little smile, because he doesn’t expect her to believe that old spy’s lie. ] —then knowing that the person who hurt me understood what it meant for me, feeling like they could carry that with me—it would be a step. [ Again: ] I think.
[ He thinks of Byerly, younger and even skinnier and selling his violin to scrape by, and his default pleasant expression dips for a moment. But then it’s back. ]
I also think I do not really know what I am doing, most of the time, so...
[ For a little while she is quiet, considering. Thinking of how often it is that they are strangers to each other— she and Byerly. The violent dichotomy of their intimacy; how quickly a moment of incredible softness turns to the heat of her fear fueled rage and the chill of his withdrawal. How the closer they hold one another, the easier it is to tear one another to shreds when they stray from knowing into nothing.
If there were more knowing, perhaps...
Finally: ]
You do not make things worse, Bastien. Telling a man who is unaware he has taken a wound that he bleeds is not the cause of the bleeding.
[ She'd been palming cashews as she picked them out, one tucked away for every one she'd revealed. She puts them on the desk now, a little offering. ]
[ Bastien nods, smiles wider for the additional cashew bounty, and picks one up. ]
Thank you. [ For the cashews, for the kind correction. He splits the nut in half with his nail rather than eat it straight away. ] Tell me how it goes—your conversation about Miss Poppell. Or if I do not see or hear from you until tomorrow I will just assume it went very well.
[ A joke, like his: sort of. But when she gets up and brushes her hands lightly down her skirt to set it hanging properly she is looking at him again. And if her smile is not a broad bright thing, it is at least not sad. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
[ For the first moment he intends to finish writing the name he’s begun putting to paper. But it is a very long name, and when he needs to write neatly he only accomplishes it slowly, and she is asking for his time at the door instead of fluttering to her desk and chattering at will.
So Mr Schw will have to wait for his remaining syllables, he decides. He sets the pen aside as he looks up. ]
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I had tea with Miss Poppell this afternoon.
[ Orlesian still, the sovereign language of the office. ]
I had offered to find out more about why she and Byerly had fought, and why she now entirely refuses to speak with him.
[ She doesn't know if it had come up between the two men, but if there is ever a moment to affirm their relationship that is the road she chooses, and so the news is delivered as if she believes it has. ]
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Her proximity and the topic—personal, not professional—settle him slouchier into his chair, which he was already using crookedly. He folds his hands over his middle. ]
Was it because they both have such sedate and tepid personalities?
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He expressed frustration in having no idea at all what her quarrel might be—
[ She sighs, and wilts just enough to notice. ]
But for all he wishes to know, I do not think he will be pleased with her... litany.
I shall have as light a touch as I can, but... I have so often stepped wrong of a sudden and turned my ankle in conversation with him that I thought it prudent to inform you in case he is wroth later and it is due to me.
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By the conclusion the smile has faded into mild worry with a touch of perplexity. ]
I am sure it will be fine.
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[ It's a little distant, a little fragile, a little tired, and so is the smile that accompanies it.
The morning after the dream they'd all shared had gone hard. Although she's done her best to be a light and genial companion since, she's not been able to truly shake the pallor of it, nor the thought that everything is only one sharp moment away from shattering— and with all the broken fragments old and new strewn haphazardly around them there are so many moments waiting to become sharp.
She straightens herself after a moment, not wishing him to think she'd come to be comforted. ]
But I am glad for your faith and shall attempt to share it.
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It’s odd, not to know what to say. He usually knows a thing to say, at least, if not the right thing. A thing that can safely deliver everyone to the conversation’s shore. But he feels a fragility, too—with Alexandrie, not with Byerly. He thinks he might hurt her if he offers outright to tidy up behind her, as if he is the expert and she’s incapable of handling it herself; he thinks she might hurt him if she asks him to, like a tool she can extend to tend to Byerly from a distance.
So he’s left silent for longer than he’d like. Still, because he hasn’t unintentionally fidgeted in twenty years.
Then, tentatively, because it feels like it could go just as wrong—and because it is digging a finger into his own bruise to talk like a supportive friend who will soon disappear for ten chapters and reappear to say congratulations at the wedding— ]
You know, he never—we do not sit around talking about you. Especially now. But before, for as long as I have known him, he has never had an unkind word for you. Nervous words and confused words, and— [ she knows, or he wouldn’t say ] —he really does not care for your husband. But never anything hard and petty. There has always been tenderness at the heart of it.
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She wonders if Bastien thinks that is what it is like, between them. Tender. If he thinks her jealous and grasping, thinks she has no reason to be made so brittle with envy to see Byerly open warmly for him.
She doesn't ask. She didn't even want this much; it is like receiving another line of credit from one she is already indebted to. She still makes herself say— ]
I am pleased to hear so.
[ —as if it had put her heart at ease instead of making her want to scream. ]
Except, naturally, that he really does not care for my husband, but I have resigned myself to their relationship being mildly antagonistic at best.
[ She hesitates a moment, and then: ]
Please do not think that in regards to Byerly you must needs be my source of clarity and reassurance. While I may be glad of it, I also cannot help but feel I am somehow making an imposition of myself even if it is offered freely.
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Perhaps it's his fault that they can't just talk about it. Perhaps if he'd talked to her when he was hurt and unsure—when he thought Byerly was asking to fool around with him while he only loved her and Bastien wasn't sure he could stand it, when he didn't know what to make of their one foray beyond kissing being sandwiched between Byerly drinking himself stupid over Alexandrie and saying yes to her after all. She did ask him why he was waiting. He'd written, Maybe when you are back. But then he didn't want her to feel sorry about anything when she was so happy, so he didn't.
Or perhaps if he talked to her now, about that morning. Maybe if he put some of his feelings into her hands, they might feel more like members of the same little club, puzzling their way through something difficult together.
But he doesn't want her to feel sorry about anything when she's so unhappy, either. So he doesn't. ]
Well, if he is unreasonable with you about it, [ with all possible fondness, ] we can open the bad wine, when you feel like it, and go through the new Panopoly of Faces to see if there is anything to make fun of.
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And she is not sure that friendly survives all of this. ]
A kind offer.
[ Alexandrie sighs soft through her nose. ]
You are always kind to me, and it makes me worry that you are storing up everything else you have felt in a box on a shelf somewhere.
[ A pause, and then gently: ]
It is not an easy thing we are doing. Who is it that is kind to you when you worry? [ She leaves little space for him to answer before she's appending— ] And if you smile at me and shrug as if it is a thing of no matter or say you do not worry, I will throw my slipper at you. I will throw both of them. And I will eat all of the cashews out of the nut mix.
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I am very kind to myself.
[ It’s a possibly cashew-forfeiting answer, and certainly an unfair one. A little unfair to Athessa, who Bastien expects would knuckle through the salt in her wounded heart if he asked her to listen to him whine about his relatively good luck. And very unfair to Byerly, who’s gentle with every vulnerability and anxiety he works himself around to voicing. But under the circumstances—general and specific, with her only stopped here before going up for a conversation she fears will go badly—telling Alexandrie how sweet Byerly is to him seems cruel.
For the sake of the cashews, he adds, ]
But I do worry. Of course I do.
[ About the three of them. About what he matters to Alexandrie more than about what he matters to Byerly, lately. About the two of them entwined half-dressed on the bed he hadn’t been able to sit on, the my Byerly and the kissing and murmuring about humoring Bastien over his foolish breakfast.
He’d rather step on a spike than unload any of that on her now, though. Instead, compromising, trying more than anything to not leave her feeling alone in having uncertainties: ]
In the beginning I was very sure that he was in love with you and only holding onto my hand because he was scared. I tied myself into all sorts of knots about it.
no subject
[ She makes it sound lighter than she feels it, but after a few words Alexandrie finds she cannot look at him. Her eyes flick away instead to the dish of nuts— a small cover, although not one she expects to work on Bastien— so she can pick out an almond. She'll show it to him with a little smile before she eats it: vengeance escaped. ]
no subject
I don't. Not like I did before. I think nearly everyone's certainty about nearly everything wobbles, but that's only wobbles, you know, it's not...
[ He trails off; his smile widens. ]
But I am still sure of your place, too. I didn't have to trade. [ He reaches for one of his precious cashews, and his tone goes sing-song and teasing, as if they are back in the city, young again, with everything lighter. ] He has it sooo bad for you.
no subject
Instead it rips her heart out because it falls so easily off Bastien's lips and she has to drag it from Byerly with her fingernails and it feels like a scrapbook of every time she broke herself open and he turned away.
She doesn't cry, at least. Or blanch, or freeze, or run. She speaks, softly: ]
He does not trust me enough to say so, and were he to... I am not sure I trust him enough to truly believe.
[ Then she is back at the bowl, hunting for almonds with a wan smile. ]
I think perhaps you think us easier with one another than we are.
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[ He was there for some of the miscommunication and despair. He was also there for the paeans and herb kingdoms. Perhaps he's overestimating the prevalence of the latter. And that wan smile isn't what he wanted, short-term, with his teasing. But that she's talking to him is what he wanted, longer-term, so he won't beat himself up too badly for the miscalculation.
He holds out a hand, palm flat, in silent request for a cashew. Or whatever else she'd like to give him. He isn't so picky. ]
Have you talked to him about—about Val Royeaux? About where he went afterwards? How it was?
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[ She finds him some. One, two; the little curled crescents deftly picked from the mix and deposited into the waiting hand. ]
Some. Not as we should speak. I think perhaps the both of us are avoiding it, or allowing the other to.
I do not even know what he did that night.
[ And she doesn't want to ask. Not only because it will hurt to hear, but because she doesn't want him to ask her what she had done. It is the first stone of the soulless road she paved, and thinking too closely of it now— thinking too closely about near everything in those silent years— is like looking directly at the sun.
So she doesn't. ]
no subject
[ It is the only polite thing to say while he’s chewing. After he’s swallowed, though— ]
I hate to give advice, because then if it goes badly it is my fault. [ A joke. Sort of. ] And I don’t know how things are for the two of you when I am not there, you know, making them much worse.
[ Also a joke; also only sort of. ]
I think it is hard to talk to someone about how they have hurt you unless you don’t mind hurting them back. But I think if I were hurt—if I were capable of being hurt— [ One last joke for the road, with a wry little smile, because he doesn’t expect her to believe that old spy’s lie. ] —then knowing that the person who hurt me understood what it meant for me, feeling like they could carry that with me—it would be a step. [ Again: ] I think.
[ He thinks of Byerly, younger and even skinnier and selling his violin to scrape by, and his default pleasant expression dips for a moment. But then it’s back. ]
I also think I do not really know what I am doing, most of the time, so...
no subject
If there were more knowing, perhaps...
Finally: ]
You do not make things worse, Bastien. Telling a man who is unaware he has taken a wound that he bleeds is not the cause of the bleeding.
[ She'd been palming cashews as she picked them out, one tucked away for every one she'd revealed. She puts them on the desk now, a little offering. ]
You make things better. It is better to know.
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Thank you. [ For the cashews, for the kind correction. He splits the nut in half with his nail rather than eat it straight away. ] Tell me how it goes—your conversation about Miss Poppell. Or if I do not see or hear from you until tomorrow I will just assume it went very well.
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[ A joke, like his: sort of. But when she gets up and brushes her hands lightly down her skirt to set it hanging properly she is looking at him again. And if her smile is not a broad bright thing, it is at least not sad. ]
I will. [ A pause, and— ] Thank you.