krempuff | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Krem did not often, nor did he enjoy, feeling hypocritical. He knew this was a human condition, and he was far from perfect in any way. But there was something about hypocrisy in general that smacked around in his chest, over-hot and miserable. He had no right to it, especially not in matters of heart and bed; being a hypocrite about those things just sang of a possessiveness of other people that he had no right to. Yet, here he was: embittered and hurt over something as simple as two people enjoying a moment together.

He was trying to get it out of his system. If he could, then things would be set to straights again. He had not asked Gannicus to give his key back, nor had he handed over his; this was not a break, just a pause. A moment for Krem to get his bearings in what this all meant and why it hurt so badly when it did not hurt to know that any one of his lovers might take someone else to bed.

His feet found a liquor store. His hands found bottles. And then he found himself standing outside Hild's complex. He paused, frowning at himself. He knew why he was here, but this felt hypocritical as well, and cruel in too many ways. He should not saddle Hild with the burdens of his stupid heart ache.

Someone came out, and so Krem went in. He went up to Hild's floor and, in front of her door, tried to think about what he might say.

There were no words. Not really. Except the truth of what had happened, and knowing he was acting like a spoilt brat about the whole thing. So, Krem cradled the bag with the liquor bottles he'd purchased in one arm, and wrapped on Hild's door. All he could do was hope she was in.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hild's training, the ability to keep a composed expression while dealing with difficult or terrifying news, was deeply ingrained into her. Years and years of the same message -- quiet mouth, bright mind -- could not be fully undone by a year and a half in a place such as Darrow, which seemed to prize and encourage emotional displays and openness of feeling. But with her friends, Hild had always been less than circumspect.

Her face remained calm, only a twitch of her brows, a tightening around the eyes showing that she had heard Krem's words at all. But her mouth was far from quiet. A string of Anglisc curses fell from her lips. She had always thought of Anglisc as sounding like round apples thumbing against a barrel. These apples smashed hard against word, ready to break.

She shut the door harder than she needed, but less than a slam, and moved to shepherd Krem toward the couch. "What was he thinking?" she asked, managing to pull herself back to modern English. "Did he know?"

The calm rage billowing over into the verbalization of that outrage was, above all things, relieving. It justified Krem's hurt, even if he still felt like a hypocrite for feeling hurt in the first place.

Krem did not understand the words she spoke in her mother tongue, but he understand the feelings behind them. He gave a slightly hysterical little chuckle, and took a swig off the bottle he'd opened.

"Not until I told him," Krem said. He let himself be moved toward the couch.

It reassured her that Krem took a sip of his drink. In the back of her mind, she thought he might simply hold onto the bottle, too upset to think to dull the pain with what was readily at hand. Alcohol was an easy, quick way to distract oneself from the worst of things, which let you deal with the situation later. She had rarely had the luxury at home, but it worked for others.

She sat down opposite Krem, perched on the coffee table and facing him, elbows on her knees. Her cursing switched, slipping into Old Irish so she could utilize a particular, blasphemous turn of phrase of Fursey's.

"You've talked to him," she surmised. The anger was quickly pushed back, restrained, but her native accent came out stronger. "He knows now. What did he say?"

The switch in language brought Krem closer to the words that Gannicus sometimes murmured to him, though the language was still largely unintelligible to Krem. It was relaxing, in a way. He set himself so that his legs boxed in on either side of Hild's.

"Just before I came here," Krem reported. He sighed and took another drink straight from the bottle. "Not very much. We got to that point in the discussion, of him telling me who he'd been with, and it all sort of...devolved."

He turned the bottle around and around in his hands. "I don't know why I'm so upset about it. I don't care if he fucks other people..."

Hild's heart sank at Krem's words, though she did not let the feeling show on her face. She wished Krem and Gannicus had spoken longer, had had more chance to say things that needed to be said. As it was, Gannicus might not know what he had to say to make this right. Hild would have to guide him, perhaps at the point of her seax.

"This isn't any other person," she said firmly. Surely Krem knew that. Surely he could see, or did his hurt blind him that much.

"This is not Thomas or Noah. This is not even the Iron Bull." Reaching forward, Hild covered Krem's hands, gripping the bottle, with her own. Lead them to the answer, a voice reminded her.

Krem was still under the touch. He knew what Hild meant, but the fact that it was Gannicus who had very little to do with this. He knew, without a doubt, that he would feel this wounded if it had been Thomas, or Hild, or even Balthier or Bull or (Maker forbid) Poison, who were incredibly dear to him but were not quite in the same category as the other three loves in his life.

"It's not that," he breathed, feeling the need to excuse or explain. "I love him dearly, but it's not that he slept with someone. He doesn't often, but that's his to do. It's that it was--it was her."

He stared at Hild's fingers on top of his. "It makes me feel less a man, somehow. Which is stupid, he didn't know who she was. But just--just a moment more, he could have asked, he could have...? I see myself so clearly in her face."

That had not, in fact, been what Hild meant, but given the purposeful vagueness of her phrasing, she quickly understood how Krem had come to that conclusion. Of course Krem did not care that Gannicus slept with someone, anyone, would not hurt so deeply were it Thomas or Noah or the Bull who had shared Gannicus' bed. But that it was her, that made it different.

What mattered was that Krem had come to the proper conclusion and understood why he was so upset by this. He had admitted it, even if he had thought Hild pointed the wrong way.

"I see it too," Hild agreed in a soothing voice. "But that was your face, once. And you can see echoes of her in yours now. I am trained to look for such things. It can be both that you are deeply hurt and that he could not have known."

Krem extracted his hands from Hild's, only to set the bottle down near her on the table she sat on. Then, he took up her hands again and leaned over to touch them to his forehead. Perhaps the touch itself would cure him of how wretched he felt. It wouldn't, but he could hope, could dream.

She was right, of course. His hurt and Gannicus's ignorance were not mutually exclusive, and Krem did not, in the first place, believe that Gannicus would have knowingly and willfully fucked Leocadia if he had known.

At least, he hoped.

Softly, breathing through a sudden wave of revulsion and upset, Krem murmured tearily, "I can't help but feel like he fucked her because he would rather have a woman."

With the touch initiated, Hild let her hands lay there for a moment, long enough to hear Krem speak. It took everything in her not to breathe in sharply, not to curse or to tense her hands. She hated, hated, seeing those she loved in pain. She would do what was needed to protect them and at that moment? Oh, how she longed to gut Gannicus, and well.

She never would, of course. This pain was not directly his fault, though it felt a bright and blatant string that connected one to the other. Obviously he did not mean to hurt Krem. But did he know how deeply he had?

Hild moved her hands then, cupping Krem's face. She did not force him to lift his face, but instead placed kisses at his brows and temples. "You know that's not true," she said in the same soothing tones. "If he wanted a woman, he could have any. Even if he did, how many love you?"

Krem sniffled vaguely. He did not feel teary, but the overwhelming pain of the moment was welling in him again. He knew that Gannicus could have anyone he wanted, any man or woman; and Krem had tripped himself, somehow, into a wealth of love. But he never, really, got over the fear that anyone he was with would someday realize he wasn't worth the efforts.

"On good days, yes," he murmured. He looked up at her, and his face said that no matter how this day had begun, it as no longer a good day.

In the next breath, he huffed a sigh and looked back down. How awful of him, to subject Hild to his pains and make her carry them with him. Gently, he reached out to her, so that he could try and pull her from table to couch with him. It would be better to hold her close, even if he knew he was terrible company at the moment.

Though she did not let it show, not in expression or posture, in her gaze or in her breath, Hild's heart sank. Had Gannicus not shown Krem enough love and affection to make him sure of his feelings? Was this a thing he feared of Hild as well? Had his words at Fight Club carried such a weight of true concern? It pained her to think that Krem doubted Gannicus, not for Gannicus' sake, but for Krem's. Such questioning would blind anyone to the love around them.

She read his gesture plainly, moving without hesitation to seat herself beside him, body pressed to body, on the couch. She tucked her legs up under her and wrapped Krem up in the circle of her arms, encouraging him to lean against her, share her strength and warmth.

Krem wrapped Hild in his arms, and let her wrap him in hers, until they were a tangle, a knot, of some remark. Her feeling and the scent of her skin were familiar and reassuring. Her affection and closeness were tings that had borne him out of some of his darkest moments.

He sniffled again, head on her shoulder, fingers working gently at the small of her back.

"I shouldn't...foist this on you," he murmured. But who else could he talk to about this? He was staid about his relationships with Dorian and purposefully withholding with Bull; he might drink with Balthier, but they were not a pair that talked about their lives much outside of what they did with each other; and Thomas was too reserved and easily flustered to bring up these things.

"Thank you," he said next, just as soft. "For letting me in."

"Foist?" she echoed. It was a strange term and even stranger in this context. There was nothing being thrown on her, no task she was being forced to. Krem was no burden and she was no oxen yoked to bear him. She had a choice in this and she chose to be with Krem.

"You make yourself sound like a bag of wheat and I must catch you or be hit." Hild turned her head to brush a kiss to his brow. She linked her fingers together, securing him in her arms, and let her hands rest at his side.

"You are always welcome here. Because I say so. You can always confide in me. Because I say so. These things are mine to give." Just as you are mine, she thought, but did not say. "I give them to you because I love you, not because I have to."

He was prepared to explain the word, until he realized--both through he expression and her concerned word--that she just disliked the word he'd used. He felt a bit like a bag of wheat. But, also, to be held like this felt an awful lot like being caught, and he was alright with that.

And then those words, her love, sat in his chest, it settled everything else out. It hurt, in the way that love always did, filling him up too full. But when had she given cause to doubt? Never. Once, months ago--over a year now, honestly--they had spoken of his growing affection for Noah and his worry that it would end a second chance with her. She had always been there, a constant with him, through everything he and suffered.

He pressed his face against her shoulder, nose pressed to her collarbone, and in Tevene--close enough to the Latin she spoke, close enough that they were mutually intelligible to each other--he murmured, "I love you."

She echoed him, in the Latin, and nuzzled her cheek into his hair and let it stay there.

She had never said those words, she thought, ever. She had said words of a like, words that carried greater meaning than their forms would imply. She had felt such things, so deeply, written on her very bones, but she had never put them to tongue, to lips, to sound and form and words.

She remembered how the queen, how Onnen had warned her. She didn't speak enough. She stared too much, too silent, too knowing, too otherwordly. They all knew she was thinking but none of them knew what. Speak more often, they had warned her, or people will speak for you, make guesses at your thoughts.

"I love you," Hild said again, and tightened the circle of her arms around him gently. She would not have him ever doubt and have those doubts speak for her.

Krem found Hild's hand and laced their fingers together. The weight of the ring he'd given her pressed into his skin, warm and soothing as her fingers between his, as her body pressed against his own, as her breath.

Today could be a better day. As with so many things, Hild was there for him, a constant, unrelenting support that he likely had not earned but that he appreciated nonetheless. The past year had been a hectic whirlwind of emotional and romantic ups and downs, but Hild had been there, whenever he needed her.

He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles.

"He seemed contrite, at least," he said, turning her hand over to nuzzle her palm. "When I told him who she was. I think I just need to be angry about it for a moment. It still feels stupid."

She squeezed his hand, then rubbed her thumb against his skin, slow and soothing in its repetitiveness. Gannicus would have to be contrite. He would never purposefully hurt Krem, of that Hild was sure. But worried over the exact words that needed to be said, the expression of feeling to smooth this over and fix it. Her words were not enough, at times, to carry a prophecy. It needed the tone, the setting, the dressing up to make it mean something.

"You can be angry," Hild said in an agreeable tone. Her lips moved into a slight smirk, her cheek twitching against the top of his head. "We can wrestle," she volunteered. "As in fight club."

Krem laughed softly. It brightened him, the gentleness of her words, the tenderness, the knowing that he was allowed to be angry about so petty a thing. It didn't feel petty right now. Just stung.

Honestly, and he wasn't sure if it was right to say so right now, he would rather wrestle like they had after Magnus's party. That hadn't been wrestling, but it had been close and intimate and reassuring of his worth.

"How about," he said, and stretched from the circle of her arms just enough to grab the bottle once more. "We drink, and then we can see about the wrestling part?"

He shifted and Hild took the opportunity to shift herself into something slightly more comfortable. By the time he had settled back against the couch, and her, bottle in hand, she had pulled her legs out from under her. One remained crooked on the sofa, but the other she wove between his, barefoot under his thigh, knee bent only so high that he could use it as a place to rest the bottle. Her skirt shifted in the movement, but this was more comfortable, too. The slide of fabric from knee to thigh was a subtle invitation, should he wish, should they get that far, should there be another sort of wrestling in mind.

"We drink," she agreed, smiling a soft, warm smile, of fondness and gentle care. "Deeply. And then we spend the evening however you like, even being angry." Though she hoped that that would not be the fullness of their time tonight.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only