Post by Liessel on Mar 2, 2024 16:06:14 GMT -5
Gerold Schoen knocked on the front door of the Knightsbridge House and stood waiting on the porch as if he were a stranger.
The door opened to the sight of the mechanical man, Cog, standing as straight backed as it ever could. Had it human emotions, or the capacity for facial expressions, it might have lifted an eyebrow as it said, "Mister Schoen," Before stepping back to let Gerold into the house with a solid, dry and robotic, "Come in."
Mister Schoen.
In the dining room, Liessel had been working on detangling herself from a needlepoint project she had started. The sound of the door had been answered before she could free her hands, those efforts were quickened, and much to terrible effect. In the process of detangling herself, her shoddy stitchwork was tossed to the table but in the process, she felt the bite of the needle she'd been working with as it sunk into the palm of her hand. She hissed at it and pulled it free with haste, making certain that it wasn't lost to the floor by placing it on top of her work where it lay on the table before turning and rushing for the foyer, rubbing the small injury with her other hand, her voice preceding her, "Gerold?"
He took off his hat when the shuffle announced her coming. No one else in this house moved the way Liessel did, even when she was in a rush. "Liessel--"
In that split-second, he looked for any sign that she might let him open his arms to her--and for any sign that she was too furious to do more than throw him back out.
He didn't need to look very hard, or for very long. The moment Liessel set eyes on him was the moment that her shoeless feet beat across the floorboards and her arms were there looking to wrap solidly around him.
His arms locked around her; his coat partially enclosed her, too, and he held her tight. He couldn't tell a thing about his heartbeat where it pressed against her. It felt strong enough to him right then.
The pinching pain in her hand was forgotten as the scent of tobacco, long gone cold, came to her and his arms closed around her. Her hair was worn simply, with half of it pulled back into a quick plait at the back of her head, which was wrapped into a small bun, the rest of it she had left to hang freely against her back and shoulders.
Liessel took in the smell of that tobacco, and the feeling of his heart where it beat against her own.
He was there. The house could have been burning down around them, and it would not have mattered nearly as much as the knowledge that he was there.
"There was something I needed to do."
As soon as he said it, it sounded contemptible to him, but he was standing there in the hallway of her house and his thoughts did not linger on patching up breathless first sentences. Nothing was solved; nothing was drastically different; but there was a fresh energy in simply being in this place with her again.
Her thin arms tightened just a little bit. She had her head laying against his shoulder, turned so that when he spoke the feeling of the short haze of hair that covered his chin brushed against her forehead as he spoke.
"Next time," She breathed out, still clinging to him as she spoke softly, "Tell me before you go. I do not need to know where you are going, or what you will be doing if you cannot say, but just tell me before you go. Please, Gerold."
"It wasn't that orderly," he told her. That, too, didn't sound the way he hoped, but again he left it.
"Then," Her answer came after a moment. She knew the kind of lifestyle he followed. She knew how unpredictable his work could be. She also knew that he faced certain things with the Frontiersmen being in the state that they were. Liessel's head shifted against his shoulder in a tiny nod. She didn't give that too much of her answer before she was lifting her head and tilting it to catch as much of his profile as she could, "Only if you are able."
She'd find him staring down at her. He wasn't so much taller than she was, really. He hadn't loosened his arms, yet. "Liessel, I had some thinking to do," he said, as if guessing some edge of how she took what he told her.
Liessel felt her brow draw in on itself as she met Gerold's gaze. That close it was not easy to catch all of his expression, but she didn't need to see all of it to read his tone.
"Is -- that why you came knocking, instead of letting yourself in?"
He laughed--a little choked, but was left grinning ruefully and throwing a look almost-but-not-quite back toward the door. "Ah--no. I wasn't certain I'd be welcomed back after going like that."
The pull of her brow eased enough to allow for a smile of her own, "I did have half a mind to give you a good thrashing for it, but" Her smile faded and became something a little more serious, "It did give me some time to think, as well. I had only worried that --" Liessel's head shook slightly, or it would have if she hadn't laid it back down against his shoulder, "Well, it was either your work, or me. By the look you had on your face while we traveled back to England, I couldn't tell which."
"There is work that I must do." Now his arms loosened, so that he could draw back some to really see her. "Now more than ever. Now, before it's too late."
Liessel had not changed much since the last he had seen her. It hadn't been that long at all, really. She was, once again, a young lady of London society and wearing the refinements to prove it. Those trappings, as with her hair, changed more than anything else about her.
Gerold loosened his arms, and Liessel pulled back just a little so that she could see him better, too. She took the time to study his expression, and to watch his eyes. His mustache hid a good deal about the way his mouth shifted as he spoke, so it was within his eyes that she got to see what was hidden by his facial hair.
"Before it's too late? Can I -- ask what that work is?" When was the last time she had asked about what he did? Liessel could only recall some questions about the corrosion of The Frontiersmen shortly after she had met Gerold. She could not think of a single instance since then when she had been bold enough to ask him more.
His answer was a nod. But he twisted and then looked back to her, and asked, "Might we walk the Square while we talk?"
"Of course," Liessel answered, looking then toward where Cog had been only to find that the mechanical man had gone back to its duty elsewhere in the house. She hadn't noticed at all until just then.
Stepping back a little, hat still in his hand--slightly crushed now but forgiving of it--Gerold pointedly looked down. He couldn't see her feet from where he was, but he'd heard them when she'd run into the foyer. Raising his eyebrows, gesturing with his hat, he chuckled a little off-key and said, "Take your time; I'll be here."
It was not easy to let him take that step back, but she managed only to look down with the gesture of his hat. She was wearing a skirt of pale mulberry, and a white blouse that had lace accents to it and looking down the length of it had her shaking her head at herself even as a dull blush rose to her cheeks. She had been about to step outside, onto a London street, without shoes on! "I'll only be a moment," She promised, looking up to meet his gaze before turning and making quick work of climbing the stairs with her skirt hiked up in her hands to make the quick climb faster.
Just a few minutes later she'd be back down with her boots on, and a parasol in hand. She wore no hat and hadn't fussed with her hair.
There was no censure in Gerold at all when he saw her. He was at the door again, coat still on, and turned when he heard her coming down.
He was the last person to care about unkempt hair.
He loved the way the halo of it caught the light.
He opened the door for her, and soon they were out in Trevor Square, leaving her front garden behind. "Thank you," he told her after their pace had settled into its agreement, "for humoring me. I suppose I shouldn't want to be seen in public with this topic, but I tell you I want the fresh air more than I want to avoid being seen. My unfinished work is Seth."
The moment they were beyond the shade of the porch Liessel had her parasol open and propped against the shoulder farthest from Gerold as they walked. Her answer almost had words to it, there was certainly a little bit of a nod in response to his thank you, but those words were abandoned easily, and replaced with, "I'm not sure I understand, Mister Schoen." It was a carefully spoken response, with Liessel making herself aware of their surroundings very quickly and not completely for the sake of the people who lived in Trevor Square.
"I think you do," Gerold said softly.
"But --" The shadow of the parasol was adjusted, if only to give Liessel something to fidget with while she pulled her words together, "How will you -- He," No, it, " --It --" No, not it, "-- Mister Seth will be obliging?"
His arm tightened where she held it, and he reached over to press his free hand over hers while she worked her way through her reaction to that. "You have nothing to fear."
Without gloves on, Liessel could feel the rough texture of his coat when her fingers tightened down against his arm, his free hand over top her own. "I wish I had your confidence in that, but the thought of it --" She shook her head and cast a glance up toward him as they walked.
Gerold really was not much taller than she was and that meant the glance was an easy one without her needing to crane her neck too much to catch sight of his eyes.
"I think I would fear, and I think I would worry, even if you told me that every last angel from the heavens above would be there with you."
"If I ordered him to throw himself into Vesuvius, he'd have no choice," Gerold said, as though he'd used that same assurance a thousand times in the past, to others.
He probably had.
Quietly, Liessel told Gerold, "I don't know what Vesuvius is."
"If I ordered him to kill himself, he would do it," Gerold translated with a frown of realization.
She didn't want to think that it would be thateasy, or that simple, because those words surely couldn't apply here. What Liessel settled on was a quieting, a kind of stillness that she felt settle onto her shoulders as she asked, "The strictures bind him that well, that he would do something like that without hesitation?"
Once those words were out, though, Liessel knew them to be true.
Gerold glanced at her; he thought she'd known this and was startled to realize that she clearly did not. Perhaps best to skip the details. He cleared his throat and found his intended discussion completely derailed. "Suffice it to say," he said, scrambling to get back to some sense of the track of meaning, "... I've made a deal with him, and I have to leave to fulfill it."
Seth was not human. That was sometimes a struggle to remember. Being face to face with him, it was not something that could ever be forgotten. But when talking about him, she had found more than once that her mind wanted to soften the edges of what he was to make him something less dangerous, something that she could more easily identify with and relate to. There in those thought was the reason for her question.
The strictures were meant to control beings like Seth, and those touched otherwise by darker means than what the human heart carried naturally. Those dangerous creatures that could snap bone like twigs and render flesh like it was paper.
She heard Gerold, and her feet slowed. Thoughts of Seth were quickly trickling away until she found herself gathering some semblance of will within herself to ask, "When are you going?" and to not sound as if she were bothered by the notion when she asked it because he felt he had to do this. Duty, whatever form it took, and whoever it served, was still duty. All the same, Liessel could not help but feel the sting of that news. He had only just gotten back... "And how long do you expect to be gone?"
"Soon," he told her, frowning through his beard. "Very soon. And I don't know, Liessel."
Gerold stopped walking and regarded her in silence--if she let him.
This was not the talk he'd thought he would have. He'd finally found the words for something he'd buried, and he'd gone to her door thinking that he would share them with her. It was unpleasant now to realize that he couldn't. She looked like a little girl to him right then. He didn't know how to lop the heads off of any of the fears he'd shared with her, right then. The answer felt far away again.
Not willing to surrender, he did realize something else, and even if it was not happy it was at least a little ironically funny: "All this work we have to do, you and I, Liessel Erphale, and none of it with courtesy enough to offer us a calendar we can mark."
He stopped, and she stopped with him. When he turned to regard her, Liessel did not look up to meet his gaze. She lowered her chin and worked on shoving her disappointment back into the box it belonged in.
The hand she had hooked around his arm lowered, drifting until she felt the skin of his fingers. There she'd hold if he let her, her fingers lacing between his. Liessel's skin was no where near the ungodly softness that belonged to Aurelia Dumitru, but it was still silk-like and smooth in a more human way.
"Someone," She said, trying for a little smile, even if it was an unhappy one, as she lifted her chin and looked to meet Gerold's gaze, "ought to do something about that, I think."
He saw the attempt; without trying, without really meaning to, his mouth did the same thing. It turned a little sour on the downturn, and he stood observing her, feeling antsy. Pent up. Itchy, like he had a burr down the back of his shirt. "Tell me what you're really thinking, Liessel."
Around them was the relatively quiet neighborhood of Trevor Square. Some children were playing in a wide yard somewhere close by, and there were a few people out and about enjoying the sun before the rain could return. A couple of carriages made their way down the lane beside where Gerold and Liessel stood. The wind came as a breeze carrying with it the faint smells of late-summer blossoms.
What was she thinking?
"I know that 'soon' does not mean this very moment," She answered, doing her best to keep her voice steady. One day, she would learn how to control her tears. One day, they would not come so quickly. That day seemed like it was far in the future, though, "That it could be tonight, or tomorrow, or days from now. But, right now, 'Soon' feels like it's too soon. I want you to know that I support you in what you feel you must do, but you've only just returned, and I have missed you."
"Why do you feel that saying something like that to me is not something to do?" Frowning, he shook his head and sighed out a depth of breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in. "Liessel--I don't want you fearing that I haven't missed you back. But I don't know how to talk about these things with you, either! I meant to talk--to share--to try to express how wretched this anger in me feels. How afraid I am that I'm stomping around lost in my own haze, inflicting it on everyone else. And especially on you. I'm shouting all the time. I feel empty all the time. Or full of ash. And yet when we did come out here together, instead I could only explain Seth's Strictures and the shallowest edge of all of this."
"I didn't want you thinking that I didn't understand; that I was disregarding what you are going to do. I didn't want you to think that I don't support you." Liessel was there, searching for his gaze while her own was growing misty, "And if that is what you meant to talk to me about, then let's talk about it. This position you've found yourself in, you aren't inflicting it on anyone else. You've not been unkind to me, or anyone else because of it. Not that I have seen. You seem tired, though, and yes, it is easy to see that you are angry about it, but you haven't been shouting. You've been distant, and not yourself, but that is not the same thing as taking anything out on anyone else."
"But I don't want to talk about it now," he said, almost breathless with scrabbling for the heart of this other thing that was now on the sidewalk with them. "I want to talk about how...." He frowned, word-dry for a moment, throat nearly closed up with his own feelings, and with the sight of her tears, too. "I want to talk about how, by anticipating what I might think and trying to control it, you wouldn't have said any of that to me without my asking. I want to talk about... how... if we're to stand a chance, you have to trust me to think whatever I might think, and then trust me to mature past it if it's abominably stupid!"
He breathed in deep and clutched at her hands. "Because, damn it, I want to hear what you think and feel, Liessel. I don't need some polished version of it. I want to hear it. How can I ever know you better otherwise?"
The sidewalk could have disappeared for how aware of it she was. Trevor Square and all the neat and tidy stately homes of Knightsbridge could have disappeared with it, along with all the trees and birds, and the grass, and the playing children -- the world could have ceased to be and she still would have felt the weight of what she was about to say.
He held her hands in his, her parasol forgotten and dropped to the sidewalk by her side.
"I am absolutely terrified," She told him, her voice for the space between them and nowhere else, "for you, Gerold, and so utterly afraid that one day you will go and not return -- that you will be alone somewhere far away when it happens, and that I will not be able to get to you." Her trembling fingers curled around his as she continued quietly, "You asked me to not speak of it because you do not want to, and so I haven't. But I have been worrying, I have been watching, and I have been trying to smile because you do not want to be fretted over. How can I not fret, though? How can I not want to ask you how you are feeling, how can I not fear this thing that is affecting you so badly?"
"Oh God." His fingers tightened on hers. "I didn't say that to shut you up," he breathed, realizing of course now that that had really been the only likely outcome with Liessel Erphale.
"I did not want to make it any worse for you, anymore wretched than it already is. As I said before, even if I do not know directly how it feels, I can see how it wears on you. And I know how it makes me feel to see you so angry at it, and -- so at its mercy. I want, so desperately, to help but I do not know what to do." Liessel breathed out slowly and closed her eyes for a moment to shake free the tears that had gathered and were yet to fall.
Gerold was frozen there, stuck between two powerful, opposing needs. He did not want to be babied. He did not want to be "looked after." And he also did not want Liessel biting her tongue on this, too, along with everything else. He felt another roar of frustration building in his chest--such as he'd unleashed at Tollander, such as he'd unleashed at Seth--and held it back with all his might. He had no trouble at all expressing himself; he could chain this up without it meaning he'd chain up everything forever.
He just managed to get himself breathing again. He managed to grow one single thought out of the mess.
"I just don't want to always have to ask," he said, deflating. "I don't have time to wait to hear your true thoughts only when I'm clever enough to ask. And I want you to feel that you can say true things to me. Even if I'm an idiot about them at first."
Liessel gave herself a moment, struggling against an inhale that wanted to become a gasp. Her corset hadn't tightened any on her, there were no invisible hands squeezing her lungs, but that gasp wanted to come all the same.
"I will do better," She told him, opening her eyes to look up at his. It was a promise to herself as much as it was an agreement to him that she would get better at not making him work for a truth with her. "I'm sorry Gerold, I do not mean to make it difficult."
"It is difficult," he breathed, feeling a little tension ease at this turn in the conversation. But maybe that was what this would have been with anyone: discovering tensions--words for them--that you didn't fully understand were there. "It also saddens me. I don't-- When I said I love you, I don't mean the mask you wear. I mean...."
All kinds of cliches herded themselves right up to his tongue and he had to fight them off to try to see clearly. "I mean that I am interested in the person you try to be, and the person you would show me... and the person I might guess at... and the person you might be in the future. Whoever that is. And you don't have to shave down parts of yourself for me. I'd like to meet all of them."
Liessel brought his hands up between them, if he'd let her, with the intention of laying a light kiss there against his knuckles. It was warmer than formality, more personal than kindly meant manners. "--That person. If -- this is true, and I do not doubt that it is -- then there is something that I -- must tell you about. I have wanted to since it happened, but I have not. I have been too afraid that it might change the way you look at me and I do not want that to happen."
Gerold stared at her. He had not fought her motion of his hands. Nor had he cast even half a thought toward her dropped parasol. "I find it very hard to believe that there's anything you could tell me that would cause a reaction you need to fear."
"I fear it none-the-less," She breathed out, letting her arms relax slowly, their hands lowering between them. She did not let go but held on gently as was her way. Liessel was then clearing her throat softly.
She could do this. She wanted to do this. She needed to tell him despite the part of her that wanted to shy away from it. The man in front of her was Gerold Schoen, and he needed to know but not because he might ask about it someday but because she wanted to tell him.
"It -- has to do with Cyrus Singh. I know you heard a great deal of what happened that day, and I know you saw a great deal of it, too. But I do not know how much you heard about the smaller details of the day, the ones that were not nearly as pressing as this world and the danger it faced."
His frown had started as he'd watched her steeling herself. By degrees, she readied herself, and by degrees he felt a dread crawling in after all. "What is it?"
The beginning was out. The door was open, staring at her like the maw of an abyss. She breathed out again, closed her eyes, and tightened her hands around his a little.
"There was a moment," She told him, "In the cottage. I found myself alone with him -- There is something magnetic about him, Gerold, and it drew me in so completely. I allowed him to be closer to me than I've ever allowed anyone because I had believed, mistakenly, that there was something there."
She paused there to open her eyes so that she could see Gerold, and shifted just a little bit closer as she gave herself a moment, and a gentle tug at his arms. She refused to let his hands go, so the motion was just an extension of insistence, "Nothing happened. There was nothing there for me, but I did not find out until after the fact. Gerold, I want you to understand, I had never encountered touch like that before. I have touched so many, but it was not the same. It was not intimate, and it was never returned the same way. What Cyrus did -- what I allowed him to do, it was small touches -- a brush against my hands, the feeling of his breath against my cheek -- the way he looked at me. But, he -- did not want me. He had --has Adeline. And I just -- I wanted to tell you that. I wanted you to know, and I did not want you hearing it from anyone else."
"I found myself alone with him--"
In an instant, a primordial fear and steeling built armor up through Gerold's spine, around his ribs and belly, readying him to protect, to fight--
But where that primordial protectiveness lived was not where Liessel went right then. Gerold found himself trying to both hear her and to discern any sign that she was softening a horrible truth for reasons of habit or protection of him or herself--
And that was the reality of Gerold when Liessel went through the rest and finally came to a halt.
He gave her an extra several seconds in case she would say more, and still found himself in the same frozen state, ready to move--
"Nothing happened?" It wasn't really a question, the way it came out of him. It was echo, and it was hope for confirmation.
"Nothing," Liessel confirmed softly, "I had thought that something might have, in the moment, but later I spoke with Adeline and she told me that Cyrus and her were -- together. And then, in The Fens, when I had the chance to speak with him again, he confirmed it. The moment I had with him," She found the need to swallow there, and followed it. Her mouth was going dry, "was only a means of his to find out who I was, and I let it happen because I didn't understand."
Gerold caught on quick to the truth that he and Liessel were talking about two different things. He didn't hurt you? --That was where he was coming from. He saw where her own mind was. And he felt certain that someone else would have said something to him if there had been something as overt as his boldest concern-- ... if they'd known about it... "There was no...." His mouth twitched and he tried his best to keep himself under control. It wasn't that they were on the sidewalk in her neighborhood; he didn't give a pile of horseshit about that. It was for her. "... intrusion?"
Weak word. Terrible word. Coward word. But sometimes gentleness could resemble cowardice, and not for too much shame.
Liessel let go of his left hand, bringing her right up to gently lay it against his jaw. The hard edges of his concerns made his eyes sharpen in color, and pulled his mouth tight beneath his mustache, "No," She answered, that word just as gentle as her touch, "I do not think he would have had such intentions even if I had not stepped back away from him. He let me go when I moved away and did not pursue."
Gerold had no idea what his own face looked like right then. He could accept that response; that was true. Ratcheting down to something less animal was harder than merely taking in a truth, though. It took some experience and some clarity about what was important. Not always a simple matter, on either front.
Buying time to unwind himself, Gerold huffed. "When I first met him, there was a moment when I thought he was a jackass. He'd looked like he might start a fistfight right there in the middle of Bournemouth, with everything that was going on...."
As Liessel answered, her hand drifted from Gerold's cheek downward to rest over his heart. It was as gentle a motion as the one that had come before. Beneath her palm, she simply wanted to feel his heart beating, "He certainly had that way about him. His patience was running just as short as his time was by the time we found ourselves in motion. He was fighting a losing battle within himself, so it does not surprise me at all that he looked like he was ready to have one with the world."
"With the government man--Slake," Gerold told her, breathing easier now. The pressure of her hand against his chest was welcome. He found himself leaning into it slightly before it registered that the pressure was not all hers. He drew in a deep breath. Yes; talking helped; he could feel the edges eroding away, leaving him the man he was a little more used to being. "I'm not sure what I think of him--Singh--but I learned a little more about them after. And I saw him on that ship, rushing back and forth in the hold, snapping all those bespelled people out of their daze...."
"With Slake, there is some history. It bridges between him, Cyrus, and Miss Webber, but I do not know what it is. And I cannot ask Adeline right now for the story. I do not think she would be willing for that conversation, though I know that conversation is coming," She said with a sigh, her hand there against his chest remained steady, "But Captain Singh -- He loves this world, and the people in it, though he is tethered to another, and though there are hostilities that could prevent him from ever finding a life here that he would enjoy. What I've seen of him, I think he is a good person. Or is trying to be a good person."
Aurelia had joined in, too, on that ship, and for a time it had been the two of them pointing out and calling loudly, What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? Some of Singh's folk had joined in. With seemingly no spell of their own wielded to combat Veleith's, they'd cracked the unfortunate folk of Bournemouth out of their dreamy prisons. And after that, Gerold had to confess he hadn't seen much of Singh.
Hearing Liessel now, he tried to process not those slim recollections of the man, but Liessel right now, and her fear. "What lay at the heart of your fear of telling me?"
"It was not something I felt I could comfortably speak of with anyone. I felt so ashamed of myself and could not bear the thought of letting you or anyone else see that in me. I could not bear seeing it in myself. The thought of you seeing it, of knowing how I acted, it felt like it would have been really hard to face that. Really hard to admit to it in front of you. It seemed that you might think my love to be fickle."
"Ashamed of yourself? For what?" The confusion was taking over in the wake of the protective reflex, now, and Gerold was left trying to feel his way through what she'd actually told him, what had actually stuck in his head. Gently his fingers were around her wrist where her hand pressed to his chest. Just a point of contact. A way to reassure through the simplest of touches. And that instinct brought to mind how she'd said what she'd needed to say about other touches. "I don't understand the shame," he admitted frankly, brow drawn. He shook his head; emphasis.
It seemed that you might think my love to be fickle.
Did you? Love him?
Natural as it was to wonder, Gerold Schoen knew an unfair and irrelevant question when he thought it.
The truly important words were not so lightning-strike quick to assert themselves, but they were reliable, steady, and there for him nevertheless:
"You and I have now known each other for some time, and under some trying circumstances. I have not seen anything about you that I ever read as fickle or frivolous. I would never assume it of you."
There was a tail-end of the thoughts that he couldn't quite shape enough to understand them. He remembered telling her how he feared that because she did not reach for him-- Yes. The amorphous thought, not yet born, had to do with that.
Relief. It washed tension away from her shoulders and loosened muscles in her neck. She could feel them relaxing while her hand against his chest curled in on itself and then flattened again. The warmth of his hand holding onto her wrist kept her hand right where it was. That small touch was where her focus was as she answered him, "Such -- intimacies -- were not allowed for me in my life before which is why they had never happened. I was -- I believed that any man who was to capture my heart would have been sent by Eidole. When I found myself alone with Captain Singh, I had believed that it was he that she had sent to me. I wanted to believe that. It was the only way I could explain to myself how I had let him get so close to me, how I had allowed his touch and how I had allowed my own. The shame," she swallowed, "Comes from knowing that I had made a mistake in my judgement."
This Gerold had to think about.
He was no Londoner, in truth. His upbringing had been a bit different than what was normal among the upper class here and in this century, and then his life had broken down many walls that might have hemmed in his thinking otherwise. He'd seen the wilds. He'd seen many people, from many places. So he understood, but did not care, what it must look like to London eyes, him and Liessel outside standing like this with her parasol on the ground. His thoughts were less on appearances and more on life.
"You... think what happened reflects badly on you?"
Straight backed, tight-laced, and feeling as if the world could not just see them standing there but that the world could also see through her, Liessel gave Gerold a nod of her head.
"Why?" The frown was a searching one; his eyes made tiny movements as he looked from one of hers to the other, back and forth, seeking insight into this shame.
"Because of the life I lived -- my training -- being a Sister. I could not ever have been that free with myself in Harroway." She tried to hold that connection with him, waging a battle against every inclination within her that wanted to force her to lower her gaze. "It is the same reason that I have not yet reached for you the way I would want to, and believe me, Gerold Schoen, I do want to."
"You feel it?" He hadn't meant to whisper. That notion of shame was still unanswered as far as he was concerned, but fluttering quickly away, borne off by this new idea.
Liessel's head shifted just enough to be a nod, but not enough to break her gaze away from his. His whisper brought the faint trace of a smile, but it was only faint because she was answering him, "I do. Very much."
That smile was like the sun, right then. He hadn't expected it. "Tell me, please," he heard himself say, "that it doesn't shame you."
"A lot of things have become easier since I have decided to live beyond my teachings," She pressed her hand a little more firmly against his chest, but only so that when she curled her fingers next she could pick up some of the fabric of his shirt with the movement, "And I am happy to say that there is no shame, just a desire to know that you would want that from me."
Nothing solved.
Nothing solved.
But maybe one thing after all.
Or at least, something brought into the real world and out of conjecture and fear and unformed thought.
Gerold lived in that real world, and at least having it said here and now, and not in that far off place, felt better.
Hesitant, the will to do it coming jerkily, halted in sparks by outside doubts, Gerold released her wrist to reach for her shoulder. To pull her toward him. He reached for her, as he'd feared to do, to kiss her right here and now, his other hand reflexively releasing her, in turn, so that he could take off his hat--
Would the neighborhood talk? Who cared if they did. Were people watching? Who cared if they were.
Liessel folded so easily against him. His reach brought her closer, but his were not the only arms moving. She released his shirt, her hands slipping beneath his arms, and his coat, as he pulled her in and removed his hat.
He reached for her, and she reached back. And somewhere in the middle of that meeting, she felt as if she'd sprouted wings to fly with.
He kissed her right there. The only remnant splinter of awareness of what it meant to be seen was embodied by the way he held his hat at first, so that Liessel's face was not so easily glimpsed from the street-side. It didn't even come from Gerold's heart, or his head, that tiny little vestigial gesture, but from someplace disconnected. He was in the middle of a sensation that overcame him as soon as it was too late not to kiss her. There was nothing like it, but perhaps the light in water, how that moved and shone brighter here and there, always shifting, a gleam, a flash, a spark--
The moment was her willingness, the softness of her lips, the feel of her arms around him, the scent of Liessel the human woman, of Liessel who must have been baking earlier, and most delightfully, most outlandishly, most giddyingly, of Liessel who must have developed a habit with that pipe of hers, and her favorite blend, because that was there almost like a joke they shared between them, that was just theirs.
The water was always cool, but not cold. It could never be cold.
There with Gerold's arms wrapped around her, the water was anything but cool, and it couldn't have been any farther from cold.
She was unaware of the shielding his hat was providing. Liessel was unaware of everything around them just then. She had what mattered the most, she had what was most important wrapped between her arms. Against her chest, she felt the beat of his heart, against her body she felt the strong presence that was him.
He wasn't going to fade, he wasn't going to disappear. She wasn't clinging to air. This was Gerold Schoen: real and solid.
The feeling of his lips against hers wasn't that of a dream.
Her right hand drifted upward beneath his coat as far as it could go, finding the collar where her fingers stretched to find the edge of his hairline.
It was so perfect, so beautifully warm. In that embrace, she felt her shoulders start to tremble, but there were no tears to follow. Thankfully they would stay away.
The air was thick with fears, but they fluttered around like butterflies: real but harmless and hard to catch. They would land later. Gerold's hand was in the hair that Liessel hadn't had time to perfect, and he felt her own sliding up under his coat. When he drew back a little, it was only to break the kiss; the embrace held, and he stood there in that warmth feeling more himself than he had in weeks.
For one spectacularly brief moment London hadn't existed. There was no ground beneath her feet, or sky over head. There were no carriages, or buildings. The only people who existed in the world, in that moment, had been an old man in a dust-stained coat, and a young woman in a pale mulberry colored skirt.
As Gerold pulled back, Liessel lowered her head and caught the fabric at the back of his shirt, clinging to him while her head cleared and her feet found the ground of London beneath her. There was a waver to her, one that didn't have a chance to take hold. He was holding her up as much as she was holding onto him.
As the world came back into focus, broadening into the sounds of everyday life in Trevor Square, she found that it was exactly the way it had been the moment before. Nothing had changed about the world around them, even in that brief moment when she had stepped beyond it with Gerold.
She was still dizzy, though it was not that borne of illness. It was that she felt lighter than she could have ever remembered over the past few months. Liessel dared herself through it to lift her head and to look up at him. The words came so easily and felt so natural. "I love you, Gerold."
The bright energy running through him zinged.
It wasn't that he hadn't believed her at all before. It was that touch made mere notions real.
One thought lit on the idea of taking her home, but he didn't move. It wasn't because of fear or the pleasant danger of being on the other side of a closed door, but because, though he'd been the one to end the kiss, he didn't want to move, to leave this spot, to take a step six inches to the left and find himself in a colder reality than this.
"What do we do?"
"I don't know," Liessel answered, her smile dazzlingly bright. The light within it was just as clear as that within her eyes. With her smile came a small shake of her head, and a little warm laugh. "But we must do whatever it is, soon, before we offend the neighbors."
She didn't want to, heavens above she didn't want to, but she broke her gaze away to look past his arm up the way they had been going before they stopped. Did she really want to be out there sharing this with the world just then? Did she really want to be sharing him with the world just then?
He had so much to do, they both did, and time was painfully short. That thought was the one that made up Liessel's mind for her. "Let's go home," She said quickly, looking back up to meet his gaze, "We can draw the curtains, and just let it be us for a while."
Everything about Liessel radiated that she'd taken his question for this moment only.
What do we do?
It was in that smile that waylaid him, and in her eyes, and certainly in her words--soon--draw the curtains--
Gerold found himself nodding, but he was thrown into confusion between all that lively need and desire and the sudden glaring return of everything he had listed to her out there in the "grasslands" of Harroway. He took the first step back the way she'd indicated in that state, and the immediacy of the kiss became a different sort of light-headedness, and his thoughts felt fogged in.
She had let him go to scoop and pick up her parasol, her smile going with her. Once she was righted with her parasol over her shoulder, and her hair a little less than the relaxed perfection it had been before, Liessel caught sight of him and her smile wavered, and then faded. "What is it?" Her left hand was there, reaching lightly for his arm as she came up beside him.
Liessel was there right beside him, catching the way his expression shifted while his thoughts rolled over themselves.
He took another step and said, "You're right... Let's go home. I want all of this. I want you. And I have not one single solution to even a crumb of this."
He knew what this had become--what he'd just made it. The wavering of her smile; he'd done that. The energy might bleed away entirely; if so, he'd done that, too. Could a kiss bring back that force--and should it? He was thinking too much. It was the killer of that energy, thinking too much.
The most startling thing was a thought that struck him out of the mess of it. That thought would take some chewing.
But taking his time about it would just make him a hypocrite, after what he himself had told her not five minutes ago, right out here. "I'm confused," he told her, trying to get somewhere near the heart of it before he regretted too heavily how he was killing something beautiful that had nearly happened, but maybe shouldn't have.
From heights so high, the tone in his voice pulled her heart low. Of course: The Fears. She had not forgotten any of them. There hadn't been time long enough for them to be forgotten. His, and hers both.
Liessel's head tipped forward in a silent nod, her parasol angled against her shoulder to hide her face from the street. She was trembling again; the hum of happiness having fled into the shadow of -- she didn't know what.
"Tell me," Liessel requested quietly, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
He wanted to duck it. Felt that cowardice, but yes: he'd neatly cut off retreat as an option after he'd voiced his own frustration with her doing something with the exact same outcome. "I want to behave as if this is as easy as being swept up in the moment, but I know it's not. If I were--"
If I were as young as you, I'd have every excuse in the world for not knowing.
It felt cruel to say a single word about how much he wanted to leave knowing better behind, so he didn't right now. The result was that, as before when Liessel had first greeted him, and as in the grasslands and nearly every moment after, he was not showing her the person he wished he could be with her. The devil-may-care youth who, with her, could find a way into the overgrown jungle of love and life. He knew that he was instead coming off as more distant, and more decrepit, and more hesitant and befuddled than ever. Just when he felt more desire and will than he'd felt in a long time.
He did not give up, though all his options felt unhappy. They were all stabs in the dark. He had no idea if there even was, out there in the distance, a destination they could share. "I invited you out here to tell you that I've business to finish. I don't know how to not see it--that business. I want so many things that have nothing to do with it, but... as you can see...." His laugh was weak, sour, knowing. "I don't want them enough, it seems, to push it aside for very long."
The thing to do was to put an end to this right now.
The thought sheared into him very suddenly.
The hand around her parasol tightened as she listened, trying not to let her attention be pulled away from the lane ahead of them. It felt as if she did, as if should she let herself look at him, that her resolve would break there on the sidewalk out there in broad daylight. She just had to hold it in until that front door was closed, and the world was locked out.
Liessel took a breath and felt it shudder within her chest. "I know your work is very important to you," Her voice retained its quiet quality, restrained to keep it from shaking still, "And I would never think to try and make you choose."
Gerold glanced at her and said nothing more until they'd reached her house, gone up her walk, crossed her porch and shut her front door behind them. "I feel that I have wronged you, Liessel. That was the last thing that I wanted to do."
Her parasol was collapsed as soon as they hit the shade of the front porch. The door was open, and Liessel left her parasol just inside the door, leaning against the frame. Her steps carried her into the middle of the foyer where she stopped, her left hand on her hip while her right rose to cover her eyes. Her back was toward him, her shoulders shaking.
I feel that I have wronged you, Liessel.
"I do not want to hear that," She managed to pull from her chest, "Not from you."
But this was proof. Wasn't it?
"I told you my fears, but I must have softened them when I spoke."
"I heard them," She said from where she was standing, trying to will her tears not to fall. But fall they would, "The only thing that was soft about them, was that it was you who spoke them." After half of a second, giving herself time to wipe her eyes, she shook her head and let her hand fall away from her face, "I do not mean that you are soft -- I mean that..." Why was she even trying to untie that one? Liessel took a breath, and let the exhale carry her shoulders before she turned his way.
"Everyone has fears, Gerold. It will always be there, in some form or another, and some of them -- like these -- aren't easy. But I've spent my life surrendering to fear, and I will not let it continue. Not with something -- someone that I love! We can figure it out, and we can do it together unless you tell me right here, and right now that everything that happened out there," She gave a wave of her hand toward the door behind him, meaning the street they had just walked down, "Everything that was said -- was --" She couldn't let herself finish. Her mouth twitched at its corners, but the word nothing did not come. Instead, she shook her head and cut through the air with her hand before she turned, quick steps carrying her toward the front parlor.
He was left there, shaken, in her wake, and no less confused than before.
From within the parlor the sound of a cabinet being opened was heard, and then came the sound of bottles being knocked about, and then before long the sound of boot heels against wood announced her return to the foyer. With her, grasped by her left hand, Liessel carried a glass that was half-full of a golden-amber liquid.
She came to a stop in front of him, glass offered out into the air between them. She had calmed down some in just those few moments, but not nearly enough to contain what remnants of frustration were still there within her when she spoke, "Here, you look like you could use it."
She'd find him where he had been, turned a little, and as soon as she'd come back in he'd turned his head and was eyeing her askance. Then he looked at the glass, but didn't smile this time. He did lift a hand to take it, and he did say a very quiet, "Thank you."
Glass given over, Liessel gave him a small nod and was then turning to retreat to the stairs where she sat, skirt drawn in around her legs and hugged there. With her leaning forward against them a little she sighed heavily, watching him from where she sat, "It's not you, Gerold." She closed her eyes, sat up a little bit and shook her head as she made her own correction before opening her eyes and looking at him again, "I -- it is, but it also isn't. Its more everything else, everything. All of those fears. I do not know how to get past any of them besides facing them, of fighting them. And I am willing to do that. I am willing to fight, because what I said out there was no lie."
Gerold gathered himself. She was not herself drinking, he noticed, but she was right about him, and he did toss back what she'd brought him. More so that he could then ignore it than for any sense that it might lead to clarity. She went to the stairs, and he didn't know if it was to ascend them, so when she simply sat down he moved toward her a little. Closing some distance. She'd been warm in his arms an instant ago it seemed, and now he was feeling the absence.
He listened.
"I didn't lie, either," he said quietly. "Not with the kiss and not with the confusion."
He thought about her wording a little more and sighed. "It does not please me to think that the 'everything else' might grow as one acquires years. For I've acquired a healthy share. And you have yet to. --I wonder if I would have been able to even conceive of this feeling in my head, when I was younger. Even if I'd tried, I think I'd have failed. Maybe that's the real difference."
She was feeling it too. Her world, in the blink of an eye, had gone from warm and full to cold and -- empty. It wasn't just the joy of the kiss that had fled her, it was the feeling of his arms as they wrapped around her. It was the subdued scent of tobacco that seemed to have baked itself into him. It was the feeling of him so whole and totally close to her.
Her head lowered as Gerold spoke, Liessel fighting off the memory of that embrace so she could hear him without feeling her heart aching.
It ached anyway.
"I think," she managed, "that 'everything else's are inevitable. I think they come with life, and there is no stopping them." Her arms had become wrapped around her as he closed the distance some, a pale replacement for what had been moments ago, "We just learn which ones are the more important ones, and which ones can be let go."
Her head shook, her eyes closed and she forced herself to breath, "This confusion, is it because of that? Because I am so much younger? -- Inexperienced?"
... and which ones can be let go.
"I can't let this one go any longer." He knew they weren't necessarily on the same topic again, but couldn't stop himself. Fortunately, she went on with a question. Or maybe not so fortunately.
"Some of it," he admitted. He moved closer, set the glass down, and rested his hand on the banister. "There's such a clash."
Her arms tightened around her body as if with the very strength of them she might be able to fend off the tears that were already forming.
So, tell me how to fix it!
What do I need to do?!
I can't make myself any older!
Those words welled up within her, a scream to the world that went unheard.
Gerold got closer, and in his shadow she was shaking.
What came from her were none of those declarations. What Liessel practically whispered was, "Differences can be overcome."
If it went unheard, it was only because it went unspoken first.
"No one knows that better than I do," Gerold said, coming around and easing down to crouch--carefully--before her. "If we're speaking in generalities. Only we aren't."
Unsure why he felt the need to say that, Gerold to work to get another clear thought. "I'm tied up and turned around, Liessel. It's what I told you that night. Now, at least, I believe that if I can go and get this done, I can let go of it. Come back as something I can respect. Offer you more than... this."
Confusion. Mixed signals. Half-doused self.
He moved, and his shadow shifted with him and with that motion the quality of light changed. His voice came from lower, closer to the level she was at there on the stairs.
She wanted to let herself fold in, to disappear there where she sat. Liessel didn't want to open her eyes and see him crouched there before her because she was certain that she knew what haunted his expression just then.
She did it anyway, opening her eyes to the sight of her knees and then lifting her tear-filled gaze until she found herself studying the way he was looking at her just then. Then, just as slowly, Liessel unwound her arms from around her body in order to reach for him where he crouched. She had to lean a little bit, and used her other hand as an anchor point against the stair she was perched on to do it, "I'm not asking you not to, Gerold. I'm not. Go. Go if you must, see to it. Do what you need to do. I do not need you to change your plans for me. I don't need you to change anything for me."
What she saw when she looked at his face was absolute grief. Her tears and his own were there, plain to see. His hands met hers, and he asked, "What do you need, then, if not those things?"
His hands were so warm, and were so much larger than her own. They were also harder, not nearly as soft as her own hands, but she didn't mind. She didn't care. It was only a testament to the life he had lived before she knew him. It was a testament to the life he continued to live.
What did she need?
Liessel didn't need a second to know her answer to that question. It came with her sliding forward against the stair until she was sitting just at the edge of it. What she needed was, "Just you, Gerold. Your long nights, your dangerous work, the raucous company you keep, the weeks or months you must be away for your job -- I will take it all, as long as I can have you, because that is what I need. Head to toe, ailments and all. Just you. Just Gerold Schoen in any form he would give to me."
It was a very Liessel answer. An absolute Liessel answer. As sometimes happened, Gerold felt it come in around him like a fog, softening and then hiding outlines. It was not cynicism that he had to chop back this time, but perhaps more tiredness. He attuned his ears to hear this for what it was. It was not the first time he'd had to do so. "I want to give you that in a better form than this."
Resolve finally began to trickle back in, under the fog. "I want to be the man who...." His eyes burned suddenly, as much as they had a moment ago. "Even if he abandoned his friend, made it right in the end. And after he made it as right as he could, could see a future for himself again, and say 'come what may.'"
The tails of his coat flared out against the floor behind Gerold where he was crouched, the length of it hiding much of his lower half due to his position. And around them the house was still any sound of Cog was muffled by him being rooms away from where they were in the foyer.
Liessel slipped forward off of the step she was on and came to kneel before him. He held one of her hands in his, and she brought her other up to meet his hands there between them.
The pain she saw there, she wished she could have taken it from him. The guilt he felt, she wanted to help lighten it so it was not sitting so heavily on his shoulders. "You mean, Mister Matthias?" she asked quietly, searching his eyes with her own.
He watched her slide to her knees, and frowned, but he wasn't fully there. He followed her eyes, and did hear her question. His nods were tiny and tight, and only after a few did he agree, "Matthias."
Grief, she knew, could last a lifetime. For some it got easier to carry, and for others it never changed at all. It could stay as fresh and blazing as the day it first hit.
"Gerold," With the sound of his name came a softening of her features. She could very well imagine what this was doing to him, what it had been doing all those years to be partnered to a shell of his dead friend. She had thought about it often enough while alone in her room, at night when the house was still and just as quiet as it was with them in the foyer as they were.
His name came, and her words stopped there for a moment as she tried to drum up something hopeful, something that might help him through. Everything sounded trite, and nothing quite fit the way she wanted it to. There was a level of respect that needed to be given to this that she just couldn't achieve with things that sounded like mundane placations to her ear just then.
What she settled on, what she told him, was said with a nod of her head, "Give him the rest you know he deserves."
His hands tightened on hers. Only after that did his brow lock up, and his eyes close. They were shut for only seconds, but in that time he said, "As I should have ages ago. I will."
Liessel gave him a few moments, letting what he said become a vow in the stillness of the foyer. She let it have the gravity that it needed, that it called for, before bending over his hands and bringing them to her lips.
As she righted herself, she told him, "And I will pray for him, wherever he may be right now. I will pray for you both."
The door opened to the sight of the mechanical man, Cog, standing as straight backed as it ever could. Had it human emotions, or the capacity for facial expressions, it might have lifted an eyebrow as it said, "Mister Schoen," Before stepping back to let Gerold into the house with a solid, dry and robotic, "Come in."
Mister Schoen.
In the dining room, Liessel had been working on detangling herself from a needlepoint project she had started. The sound of the door had been answered before she could free her hands, those efforts were quickened, and much to terrible effect. In the process of detangling herself, her shoddy stitchwork was tossed to the table but in the process, she felt the bite of the needle she'd been working with as it sunk into the palm of her hand. She hissed at it and pulled it free with haste, making certain that it wasn't lost to the floor by placing it on top of her work where it lay on the table before turning and rushing for the foyer, rubbing the small injury with her other hand, her voice preceding her, "Gerold?"
He took off his hat when the shuffle announced her coming. No one else in this house moved the way Liessel did, even when she was in a rush. "Liessel--"
In that split-second, he looked for any sign that she might let him open his arms to her--and for any sign that she was too furious to do more than throw him back out.
He didn't need to look very hard, or for very long. The moment Liessel set eyes on him was the moment that her shoeless feet beat across the floorboards and her arms were there looking to wrap solidly around him.
His arms locked around her; his coat partially enclosed her, too, and he held her tight. He couldn't tell a thing about his heartbeat where it pressed against her. It felt strong enough to him right then.
The pinching pain in her hand was forgotten as the scent of tobacco, long gone cold, came to her and his arms closed around her. Her hair was worn simply, with half of it pulled back into a quick plait at the back of her head, which was wrapped into a small bun, the rest of it she had left to hang freely against her back and shoulders.
Liessel took in the smell of that tobacco, and the feeling of his heart where it beat against her own.
He was there. The house could have been burning down around them, and it would not have mattered nearly as much as the knowledge that he was there.
"There was something I needed to do."
As soon as he said it, it sounded contemptible to him, but he was standing there in the hallway of her house and his thoughts did not linger on patching up breathless first sentences. Nothing was solved; nothing was drastically different; but there was a fresh energy in simply being in this place with her again.
Her thin arms tightened just a little bit. She had her head laying against his shoulder, turned so that when he spoke the feeling of the short haze of hair that covered his chin brushed against her forehead as he spoke.
"Next time," She breathed out, still clinging to him as she spoke softly, "Tell me before you go. I do not need to know where you are going, or what you will be doing if you cannot say, but just tell me before you go. Please, Gerold."
"It wasn't that orderly," he told her. That, too, didn't sound the way he hoped, but again he left it.
"Then," Her answer came after a moment. She knew the kind of lifestyle he followed. She knew how unpredictable his work could be. She also knew that he faced certain things with the Frontiersmen being in the state that they were. Liessel's head shifted against his shoulder in a tiny nod. She didn't give that too much of her answer before she was lifting her head and tilting it to catch as much of his profile as she could, "Only if you are able."
She'd find him staring down at her. He wasn't so much taller than she was, really. He hadn't loosened his arms, yet. "Liessel, I had some thinking to do," he said, as if guessing some edge of how she took what he told her.
Liessel felt her brow draw in on itself as she met Gerold's gaze. That close it was not easy to catch all of his expression, but she didn't need to see all of it to read his tone.
"Is -- that why you came knocking, instead of letting yourself in?"
He laughed--a little choked, but was left grinning ruefully and throwing a look almost-but-not-quite back toward the door. "Ah--no. I wasn't certain I'd be welcomed back after going like that."
The pull of her brow eased enough to allow for a smile of her own, "I did have half a mind to give you a good thrashing for it, but" Her smile faded and became something a little more serious, "It did give me some time to think, as well. I had only worried that --" Liessel's head shook slightly, or it would have if she hadn't laid it back down against his shoulder, "Well, it was either your work, or me. By the look you had on your face while we traveled back to England, I couldn't tell which."
"There is work that I must do." Now his arms loosened, so that he could draw back some to really see her. "Now more than ever. Now, before it's too late."
Liessel had not changed much since the last he had seen her. It hadn't been that long at all, really. She was, once again, a young lady of London society and wearing the refinements to prove it. Those trappings, as with her hair, changed more than anything else about her.
Gerold loosened his arms, and Liessel pulled back just a little so that she could see him better, too. She took the time to study his expression, and to watch his eyes. His mustache hid a good deal about the way his mouth shifted as he spoke, so it was within his eyes that she got to see what was hidden by his facial hair.
"Before it's too late? Can I -- ask what that work is?" When was the last time she had asked about what he did? Liessel could only recall some questions about the corrosion of The Frontiersmen shortly after she had met Gerold. She could not think of a single instance since then when she had been bold enough to ask him more.
His answer was a nod. But he twisted and then looked back to her, and asked, "Might we walk the Square while we talk?"
"Of course," Liessel answered, looking then toward where Cog had been only to find that the mechanical man had gone back to its duty elsewhere in the house. She hadn't noticed at all until just then.
Stepping back a little, hat still in his hand--slightly crushed now but forgiving of it--Gerold pointedly looked down. He couldn't see her feet from where he was, but he'd heard them when she'd run into the foyer. Raising his eyebrows, gesturing with his hat, he chuckled a little off-key and said, "Take your time; I'll be here."
It was not easy to let him take that step back, but she managed only to look down with the gesture of his hat. She was wearing a skirt of pale mulberry, and a white blouse that had lace accents to it and looking down the length of it had her shaking her head at herself even as a dull blush rose to her cheeks. She had been about to step outside, onto a London street, without shoes on! "I'll only be a moment," She promised, looking up to meet his gaze before turning and making quick work of climbing the stairs with her skirt hiked up in her hands to make the quick climb faster.
Just a few minutes later she'd be back down with her boots on, and a parasol in hand. She wore no hat and hadn't fussed with her hair.
There was no censure in Gerold at all when he saw her. He was at the door again, coat still on, and turned when he heard her coming down.
He was the last person to care about unkempt hair.
He loved the way the halo of it caught the light.
He opened the door for her, and soon they were out in Trevor Square, leaving her front garden behind. "Thank you," he told her after their pace had settled into its agreement, "for humoring me. I suppose I shouldn't want to be seen in public with this topic, but I tell you I want the fresh air more than I want to avoid being seen. My unfinished work is Seth."
The moment they were beyond the shade of the porch Liessel had her parasol open and propped against the shoulder farthest from Gerold as they walked. Her answer almost had words to it, there was certainly a little bit of a nod in response to his thank you, but those words were abandoned easily, and replaced with, "I'm not sure I understand, Mister Schoen." It was a carefully spoken response, with Liessel making herself aware of their surroundings very quickly and not completely for the sake of the people who lived in Trevor Square.
"I think you do," Gerold said softly.
"But --" The shadow of the parasol was adjusted, if only to give Liessel something to fidget with while she pulled her words together, "How will you -- He," No, it, " --It --" No, not it, "-- Mister Seth will be obliging?"
His arm tightened where she held it, and he reached over to press his free hand over hers while she worked her way through her reaction to that. "You have nothing to fear."
Without gloves on, Liessel could feel the rough texture of his coat when her fingers tightened down against his arm, his free hand over top her own. "I wish I had your confidence in that, but the thought of it --" She shook her head and cast a glance up toward him as they walked.
Gerold really was not much taller than she was and that meant the glance was an easy one without her needing to crane her neck too much to catch sight of his eyes.
"I think I would fear, and I think I would worry, even if you told me that every last angel from the heavens above would be there with you."
"If I ordered him to throw himself into Vesuvius, he'd have no choice," Gerold said, as though he'd used that same assurance a thousand times in the past, to others.
He probably had.
Quietly, Liessel told Gerold, "I don't know what Vesuvius is."
"If I ordered him to kill himself, he would do it," Gerold translated with a frown of realization.
She didn't want to think that it would be thateasy, or that simple, because those words surely couldn't apply here. What Liessel settled on was a quieting, a kind of stillness that she felt settle onto her shoulders as she asked, "The strictures bind him that well, that he would do something like that without hesitation?"
Once those words were out, though, Liessel knew them to be true.
Gerold glanced at her; he thought she'd known this and was startled to realize that she clearly did not. Perhaps best to skip the details. He cleared his throat and found his intended discussion completely derailed. "Suffice it to say," he said, scrambling to get back to some sense of the track of meaning, "... I've made a deal with him, and I have to leave to fulfill it."
Seth was not human. That was sometimes a struggle to remember. Being face to face with him, it was not something that could ever be forgotten. But when talking about him, she had found more than once that her mind wanted to soften the edges of what he was to make him something less dangerous, something that she could more easily identify with and relate to. There in those thought was the reason for her question.
The strictures were meant to control beings like Seth, and those touched otherwise by darker means than what the human heart carried naturally. Those dangerous creatures that could snap bone like twigs and render flesh like it was paper.
She heard Gerold, and her feet slowed. Thoughts of Seth were quickly trickling away until she found herself gathering some semblance of will within herself to ask, "When are you going?" and to not sound as if she were bothered by the notion when she asked it because he felt he had to do this. Duty, whatever form it took, and whoever it served, was still duty. All the same, Liessel could not help but feel the sting of that news. He had only just gotten back... "And how long do you expect to be gone?"
"Soon," he told her, frowning through his beard. "Very soon. And I don't know, Liessel."
Gerold stopped walking and regarded her in silence--if she let him.
This was not the talk he'd thought he would have. He'd finally found the words for something he'd buried, and he'd gone to her door thinking that he would share them with her. It was unpleasant now to realize that he couldn't. She looked like a little girl to him right then. He didn't know how to lop the heads off of any of the fears he'd shared with her, right then. The answer felt far away again.
Not willing to surrender, he did realize something else, and even if it was not happy it was at least a little ironically funny: "All this work we have to do, you and I, Liessel Erphale, and none of it with courtesy enough to offer us a calendar we can mark."
He stopped, and she stopped with him. When he turned to regard her, Liessel did not look up to meet his gaze. She lowered her chin and worked on shoving her disappointment back into the box it belonged in.
The hand she had hooked around his arm lowered, drifting until she felt the skin of his fingers. There she'd hold if he let her, her fingers lacing between his. Liessel's skin was no where near the ungodly softness that belonged to Aurelia Dumitru, but it was still silk-like and smooth in a more human way.
"Someone," She said, trying for a little smile, even if it was an unhappy one, as she lifted her chin and looked to meet Gerold's gaze, "ought to do something about that, I think."
He saw the attempt; without trying, without really meaning to, his mouth did the same thing. It turned a little sour on the downturn, and he stood observing her, feeling antsy. Pent up. Itchy, like he had a burr down the back of his shirt. "Tell me what you're really thinking, Liessel."
Around them was the relatively quiet neighborhood of Trevor Square. Some children were playing in a wide yard somewhere close by, and there were a few people out and about enjoying the sun before the rain could return. A couple of carriages made their way down the lane beside where Gerold and Liessel stood. The wind came as a breeze carrying with it the faint smells of late-summer blossoms.
What was she thinking?
"I know that 'soon' does not mean this very moment," She answered, doing her best to keep her voice steady. One day, she would learn how to control her tears. One day, they would not come so quickly. That day seemed like it was far in the future, though, "That it could be tonight, or tomorrow, or days from now. But, right now, 'Soon' feels like it's too soon. I want you to know that I support you in what you feel you must do, but you've only just returned, and I have missed you."
"Why do you feel that saying something like that to me is not something to do?" Frowning, he shook his head and sighed out a depth of breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in. "Liessel--I don't want you fearing that I haven't missed you back. But I don't know how to talk about these things with you, either! I meant to talk--to share--to try to express how wretched this anger in me feels. How afraid I am that I'm stomping around lost in my own haze, inflicting it on everyone else. And especially on you. I'm shouting all the time. I feel empty all the time. Or full of ash. And yet when we did come out here together, instead I could only explain Seth's Strictures and the shallowest edge of all of this."
"I didn't want you thinking that I didn't understand; that I was disregarding what you are going to do. I didn't want you to think that I don't support you." Liessel was there, searching for his gaze while her own was growing misty, "And if that is what you meant to talk to me about, then let's talk about it. This position you've found yourself in, you aren't inflicting it on anyone else. You've not been unkind to me, or anyone else because of it. Not that I have seen. You seem tired, though, and yes, it is easy to see that you are angry about it, but you haven't been shouting. You've been distant, and not yourself, but that is not the same thing as taking anything out on anyone else."
"But I don't want to talk about it now," he said, almost breathless with scrabbling for the heart of this other thing that was now on the sidewalk with them. "I want to talk about how...." He frowned, word-dry for a moment, throat nearly closed up with his own feelings, and with the sight of her tears, too. "I want to talk about how, by anticipating what I might think and trying to control it, you wouldn't have said any of that to me without my asking. I want to talk about... how... if we're to stand a chance, you have to trust me to think whatever I might think, and then trust me to mature past it if it's abominably stupid!"
He breathed in deep and clutched at her hands. "Because, damn it, I want to hear what you think and feel, Liessel. I don't need some polished version of it. I want to hear it. How can I ever know you better otherwise?"
The sidewalk could have disappeared for how aware of it she was. Trevor Square and all the neat and tidy stately homes of Knightsbridge could have disappeared with it, along with all the trees and birds, and the grass, and the playing children -- the world could have ceased to be and she still would have felt the weight of what she was about to say.
He held her hands in his, her parasol forgotten and dropped to the sidewalk by her side.
"I am absolutely terrified," She told him, her voice for the space between them and nowhere else, "for you, Gerold, and so utterly afraid that one day you will go and not return -- that you will be alone somewhere far away when it happens, and that I will not be able to get to you." Her trembling fingers curled around his as she continued quietly, "You asked me to not speak of it because you do not want to, and so I haven't. But I have been worrying, I have been watching, and I have been trying to smile because you do not want to be fretted over. How can I not fret, though? How can I not want to ask you how you are feeling, how can I not fear this thing that is affecting you so badly?"
"Oh God." His fingers tightened on hers. "I didn't say that to shut you up," he breathed, realizing of course now that that had really been the only likely outcome with Liessel Erphale.
"I did not want to make it any worse for you, anymore wretched than it already is. As I said before, even if I do not know directly how it feels, I can see how it wears on you. And I know how it makes me feel to see you so angry at it, and -- so at its mercy. I want, so desperately, to help but I do not know what to do." Liessel breathed out slowly and closed her eyes for a moment to shake free the tears that had gathered and were yet to fall.
Gerold was frozen there, stuck between two powerful, opposing needs. He did not want to be babied. He did not want to be "looked after." And he also did not want Liessel biting her tongue on this, too, along with everything else. He felt another roar of frustration building in his chest--such as he'd unleashed at Tollander, such as he'd unleashed at Seth--and held it back with all his might. He had no trouble at all expressing himself; he could chain this up without it meaning he'd chain up everything forever.
He just managed to get himself breathing again. He managed to grow one single thought out of the mess.
"I just don't want to always have to ask," he said, deflating. "I don't have time to wait to hear your true thoughts only when I'm clever enough to ask. And I want you to feel that you can say true things to me. Even if I'm an idiot about them at first."
Liessel gave herself a moment, struggling against an inhale that wanted to become a gasp. Her corset hadn't tightened any on her, there were no invisible hands squeezing her lungs, but that gasp wanted to come all the same.
"I will do better," She told him, opening her eyes to look up at his. It was a promise to herself as much as it was an agreement to him that she would get better at not making him work for a truth with her. "I'm sorry Gerold, I do not mean to make it difficult."
"It is difficult," he breathed, feeling a little tension ease at this turn in the conversation. But maybe that was what this would have been with anyone: discovering tensions--words for them--that you didn't fully understand were there. "It also saddens me. I don't-- When I said I love you, I don't mean the mask you wear. I mean...."
All kinds of cliches herded themselves right up to his tongue and he had to fight them off to try to see clearly. "I mean that I am interested in the person you try to be, and the person you would show me... and the person I might guess at... and the person you might be in the future. Whoever that is. And you don't have to shave down parts of yourself for me. I'd like to meet all of them."
Liessel brought his hands up between them, if he'd let her, with the intention of laying a light kiss there against his knuckles. It was warmer than formality, more personal than kindly meant manners. "--That person. If -- this is true, and I do not doubt that it is -- then there is something that I -- must tell you about. I have wanted to since it happened, but I have not. I have been too afraid that it might change the way you look at me and I do not want that to happen."
Gerold stared at her. He had not fought her motion of his hands. Nor had he cast even half a thought toward her dropped parasol. "I find it very hard to believe that there's anything you could tell me that would cause a reaction you need to fear."
"I fear it none-the-less," She breathed out, letting her arms relax slowly, their hands lowering between them. She did not let go but held on gently as was her way. Liessel was then clearing her throat softly.
She could do this. She wanted to do this. She needed to tell him despite the part of her that wanted to shy away from it. The man in front of her was Gerold Schoen, and he needed to know but not because he might ask about it someday but because she wanted to tell him.
"It -- has to do with Cyrus Singh. I know you heard a great deal of what happened that day, and I know you saw a great deal of it, too. But I do not know how much you heard about the smaller details of the day, the ones that were not nearly as pressing as this world and the danger it faced."
His frown had started as he'd watched her steeling herself. By degrees, she readied herself, and by degrees he felt a dread crawling in after all. "What is it?"
The beginning was out. The door was open, staring at her like the maw of an abyss. She breathed out again, closed her eyes, and tightened her hands around his a little.
"There was a moment," She told him, "In the cottage. I found myself alone with him -- There is something magnetic about him, Gerold, and it drew me in so completely. I allowed him to be closer to me than I've ever allowed anyone because I had believed, mistakenly, that there was something there."
She paused there to open her eyes so that she could see Gerold, and shifted just a little bit closer as she gave herself a moment, and a gentle tug at his arms. She refused to let his hands go, so the motion was just an extension of insistence, "Nothing happened. There was nothing there for me, but I did not find out until after the fact. Gerold, I want you to understand, I had never encountered touch like that before. I have touched so many, but it was not the same. It was not intimate, and it was never returned the same way. What Cyrus did -- what I allowed him to do, it was small touches -- a brush against my hands, the feeling of his breath against my cheek -- the way he looked at me. But, he -- did not want me. He had --has Adeline. And I just -- I wanted to tell you that. I wanted you to know, and I did not want you hearing it from anyone else."
"I found myself alone with him--"
In an instant, a primordial fear and steeling built armor up through Gerold's spine, around his ribs and belly, readying him to protect, to fight--
But where that primordial protectiveness lived was not where Liessel went right then. Gerold found himself trying to both hear her and to discern any sign that she was softening a horrible truth for reasons of habit or protection of him or herself--
And that was the reality of Gerold when Liessel went through the rest and finally came to a halt.
He gave her an extra several seconds in case she would say more, and still found himself in the same frozen state, ready to move--
"Nothing happened?" It wasn't really a question, the way it came out of him. It was echo, and it was hope for confirmation.
"Nothing," Liessel confirmed softly, "I had thought that something might have, in the moment, but later I spoke with Adeline and she told me that Cyrus and her were -- together. And then, in The Fens, when I had the chance to speak with him again, he confirmed it. The moment I had with him," She found the need to swallow there, and followed it. Her mouth was going dry, "was only a means of his to find out who I was, and I let it happen because I didn't understand."
Gerold caught on quick to the truth that he and Liessel were talking about two different things. He didn't hurt you? --That was where he was coming from. He saw where her own mind was. And he felt certain that someone else would have said something to him if there had been something as overt as his boldest concern-- ... if they'd known about it... "There was no...." His mouth twitched and he tried his best to keep himself under control. It wasn't that they were on the sidewalk in her neighborhood; he didn't give a pile of horseshit about that. It was for her. "... intrusion?"
Weak word. Terrible word. Coward word. But sometimes gentleness could resemble cowardice, and not for too much shame.
Liessel let go of his left hand, bringing her right up to gently lay it against his jaw. The hard edges of his concerns made his eyes sharpen in color, and pulled his mouth tight beneath his mustache, "No," She answered, that word just as gentle as her touch, "I do not think he would have had such intentions even if I had not stepped back away from him. He let me go when I moved away and did not pursue."
Gerold had no idea what his own face looked like right then. He could accept that response; that was true. Ratcheting down to something less animal was harder than merely taking in a truth, though. It took some experience and some clarity about what was important. Not always a simple matter, on either front.
Buying time to unwind himself, Gerold huffed. "When I first met him, there was a moment when I thought he was a jackass. He'd looked like he might start a fistfight right there in the middle of Bournemouth, with everything that was going on...."
As Liessel answered, her hand drifted from Gerold's cheek downward to rest over his heart. It was as gentle a motion as the one that had come before. Beneath her palm, she simply wanted to feel his heart beating, "He certainly had that way about him. His patience was running just as short as his time was by the time we found ourselves in motion. He was fighting a losing battle within himself, so it does not surprise me at all that he looked like he was ready to have one with the world."
"With the government man--Slake," Gerold told her, breathing easier now. The pressure of her hand against his chest was welcome. He found himself leaning into it slightly before it registered that the pressure was not all hers. He drew in a deep breath. Yes; talking helped; he could feel the edges eroding away, leaving him the man he was a little more used to being. "I'm not sure what I think of him--Singh--but I learned a little more about them after. And I saw him on that ship, rushing back and forth in the hold, snapping all those bespelled people out of their daze...."
"With Slake, there is some history. It bridges between him, Cyrus, and Miss Webber, but I do not know what it is. And I cannot ask Adeline right now for the story. I do not think she would be willing for that conversation, though I know that conversation is coming," She said with a sigh, her hand there against his chest remained steady, "But Captain Singh -- He loves this world, and the people in it, though he is tethered to another, and though there are hostilities that could prevent him from ever finding a life here that he would enjoy. What I've seen of him, I think he is a good person. Or is trying to be a good person."
Aurelia had joined in, too, on that ship, and for a time it had been the two of them pointing out and calling loudly, What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? Some of Singh's folk had joined in. With seemingly no spell of their own wielded to combat Veleith's, they'd cracked the unfortunate folk of Bournemouth out of their dreamy prisons. And after that, Gerold had to confess he hadn't seen much of Singh.
Hearing Liessel now, he tried to process not those slim recollections of the man, but Liessel right now, and her fear. "What lay at the heart of your fear of telling me?"
"It was not something I felt I could comfortably speak of with anyone. I felt so ashamed of myself and could not bear the thought of letting you or anyone else see that in me. I could not bear seeing it in myself. The thought of you seeing it, of knowing how I acted, it felt like it would have been really hard to face that. Really hard to admit to it in front of you. It seemed that you might think my love to be fickle."
"Ashamed of yourself? For what?" The confusion was taking over in the wake of the protective reflex, now, and Gerold was left trying to feel his way through what she'd actually told him, what had actually stuck in his head. Gently his fingers were around her wrist where her hand pressed to his chest. Just a point of contact. A way to reassure through the simplest of touches. And that instinct brought to mind how she'd said what she'd needed to say about other touches. "I don't understand the shame," he admitted frankly, brow drawn. He shook his head; emphasis.
It seemed that you might think my love to be fickle.
Did you? Love him?
Natural as it was to wonder, Gerold Schoen knew an unfair and irrelevant question when he thought it.
The truly important words were not so lightning-strike quick to assert themselves, but they were reliable, steady, and there for him nevertheless:
"You and I have now known each other for some time, and under some trying circumstances. I have not seen anything about you that I ever read as fickle or frivolous. I would never assume it of you."
There was a tail-end of the thoughts that he couldn't quite shape enough to understand them. He remembered telling her how he feared that because she did not reach for him-- Yes. The amorphous thought, not yet born, had to do with that.
Relief. It washed tension away from her shoulders and loosened muscles in her neck. She could feel them relaxing while her hand against his chest curled in on itself and then flattened again. The warmth of his hand holding onto her wrist kept her hand right where it was. That small touch was where her focus was as she answered him, "Such -- intimacies -- were not allowed for me in my life before which is why they had never happened. I was -- I believed that any man who was to capture my heart would have been sent by Eidole. When I found myself alone with Captain Singh, I had believed that it was he that she had sent to me. I wanted to believe that. It was the only way I could explain to myself how I had let him get so close to me, how I had allowed his touch and how I had allowed my own. The shame," she swallowed, "Comes from knowing that I had made a mistake in my judgement."
This Gerold had to think about.
He was no Londoner, in truth. His upbringing had been a bit different than what was normal among the upper class here and in this century, and then his life had broken down many walls that might have hemmed in his thinking otherwise. He'd seen the wilds. He'd seen many people, from many places. So he understood, but did not care, what it must look like to London eyes, him and Liessel outside standing like this with her parasol on the ground. His thoughts were less on appearances and more on life.
"You... think what happened reflects badly on you?"
Straight backed, tight-laced, and feeling as if the world could not just see them standing there but that the world could also see through her, Liessel gave Gerold a nod of her head.
"Why?" The frown was a searching one; his eyes made tiny movements as he looked from one of hers to the other, back and forth, seeking insight into this shame.
"Because of the life I lived -- my training -- being a Sister. I could not ever have been that free with myself in Harroway." She tried to hold that connection with him, waging a battle against every inclination within her that wanted to force her to lower her gaze. "It is the same reason that I have not yet reached for you the way I would want to, and believe me, Gerold Schoen, I do want to."
"You feel it?" He hadn't meant to whisper. That notion of shame was still unanswered as far as he was concerned, but fluttering quickly away, borne off by this new idea.
Liessel's head shifted just enough to be a nod, but not enough to break her gaze away from his. His whisper brought the faint trace of a smile, but it was only faint because she was answering him, "I do. Very much."
That smile was like the sun, right then. He hadn't expected it. "Tell me, please," he heard himself say, "that it doesn't shame you."
"A lot of things have become easier since I have decided to live beyond my teachings," She pressed her hand a little more firmly against his chest, but only so that when she curled her fingers next she could pick up some of the fabric of his shirt with the movement, "And I am happy to say that there is no shame, just a desire to know that you would want that from me."
Nothing solved.
Nothing solved.
But maybe one thing after all.
Or at least, something brought into the real world and out of conjecture and fear and unformed thought.
Gerold lived in that real world, and at least having it said here and now, and not in that far off place, felt better.
Hesitant, the will to do it coming jerkily, halted in sparks by outside doubts, Gerold released her wrist to reach for her shoulder. To pull her toward him. He reached for her, as he'd feared to do, to kiss her right here and now, his other hand reflexively releasing her, in turn, so that he could take off his hat--
Would the neighborhood talk? Who cared if they did. Were people watching? Who cared if they were.
Liessel folded so easily against him. His reach brought her closer, but his were not the only arms moving. She released his shirt, her hands slipping beneath his arms, and his coat, as he pulled her in and removed his hat.
He reached for her, and she reached back. And somewhere in the middle of that meeting, she felt as if she'd sprouted wings to fly with.
He kissed her right there. The only remnant splinter of awareness of what it meant to be seen was embodied by the way he held his hat at first, so that Liessel's face was not so easily glimpsed from the street-side. It didn't even come from Gerold's heart, or his head, that tiny little vestigial gesture, but from someplace disconnected. He was in the middle of a sensation that overcame him as soon as it was too late not to kiss her. There was nothing like it, but perhaps the light in water, how that moved and shone brighter here and there, always shifting, a gleam, a flash, a spark--
The moment was her willingness, the softness of her lips, the feel of her arms around him, the scent of Liessel the human woman, of Liessel who must have been baking earlier, and most delightfully, most outlandishly, most giddyingly, of Liessel who must have developed a habit with that pipe of hers, and her favorite blend, because that was there almost like a joke they shared between them, that was just theirs.
The water was always cool, but not cold. It could never be cold.
There with Gerold's arms wrapped around her, the water was anything but cool, and it couldn't have been any farther from cold.
She was unaware of the shielding his hat was providing. Liessel was unaware of everything around them just then. She had what mattered the most, she had what was most important wrapped between her arms. Against her chest, she felt the beat of his heart, against her body she felt the strong presence that was him.
He wasn't going to fade, he wasn't going to disappear. She wasn't clinging to air. This was Gerold Schoen: real and solid.
The feeling of his lips against hers wasn't that of a dream.
Her right hand drifted upward beneath his coat as far as it could go, finding the collar where her fingers stretched to find the edge of his hairline.
It was so perfect, so beautifully warm. In that embrace, she felt her shoulders start to tremble, but there were no tears to follow. Thankfully they would stay away.
The air was thick with fears, but they fluttered around like butterflies: real but harmless and hard to catch. They would land later. Gerold's hand was in the hair that Liessel hadn't had time to perfect, and he felt her own sliding up under his coat. When he drew back a little, it was only to break the kiss; the embrace held, and he stood there in that warmth feeling more himself than he had in weeks.
For one spectacularly brief moment London hadn't existed. There was no ground beneath her feet, or sky over head. There were no carriages, or buildings. The only people who existed in the world, in that moment, had been an old man in a dust-stained coat, and a young woman in a pale mulberry colored skirt.
As Gerold pulled back, Liessel lowered her head and caught the fabric at the back of his shirt, clinging to him while her head cleared and her feet found the ground of London beneath her. There was a waver to her, one that didn't have a chance to take hold. He was holding her up as much as she was holding onto him.
As the world came back into focus, broadening into the sounds of everyday life in Trevor Square, she found that it was exactly the way it had been the moment before. Nothing had changed about the world around them, even in that brief moment when she had stepped beyond it with Gerold.
She was still dizzy, though it was not that borne of illness. It was that she felt lighter than she could have ever remembered over the past few months. Liessel dared herself through it to lift her head and to look up at him. The words came so easily and felt so natural. "I love you, Gerold."
The bright energy running through him zinged.
It wasn't that he hadn't believed her at all before. It was that touch made mere notions real.
One thought lit on the idea of taking her home, but he didn't move. It wasn't because of fear or the pleasant danger of being on the other side of a closed door, but because, though he'd been the one to end the kiss, he didn't want to move, to leave this spot, to take a step six inches to the left and find himself in a colder reality than this.
"What do we do?"
"I don't know," Liessel answered, her smile dazzlingly bright. The light within it was just as clear as that within her eyes. With her smile came a small shake of her head, and a little warm laugh. "But we must do whatever it is, soon, before we offend the neighbors."
She didn't want to, heavens above she didn't want to, but she broke her gaze away to look past his arm up the way they had been going before they stopped. Did she really want to be out there sharing this with the world just then? Did she really want to be sharing him with the world just then?
He had so much to do, they both did, and time was painfully short. That thought was the one that made up Liessel's mind for her. "Let's go home," She said quickly, looking back up to meet his gaze, "We can draw the curtains, and just let it be us for a while."
Everything about Liessel radiated that she'd taken his question for this moment only.
What do we do?
It was in that smile that waylaid him, and in her eyes, and certainly in her words--soon--draw the curtains--
Gerold found himself nodding, but he was thrown into confusion between all that lively need and desire and the sudden glaring return of everything he had listed to her out there in the "grasslands" of Harroway. He took the first step back the way she'd indicated in that state, and the immediacy of the kiss became a different sort of light-headedness, and his thoughts felt fogged in.
She had let him go to scoop and pick up her parasol, her smile going with her. Once she was righted with her parasol over her shoulder, and her hair a little less than the relaxed perfection it had been before, Liessel caught sight of him and her smile wavered, and then faded. "What is it?" Her left hand was there, reaching lightly for his arm as she came up beside him.
Liessel was there right beside him, catching the way his expression shifted while his thoughts rolled over themselves.
He took another step and said, "You're right... Let's go home. I want all of this. I want you. And I have not one single solution to even a crumb of this."
He knew what this had become--what he'd just made it. The wavering of her smile; he'd done that. The energy might bleed away entirely; if so, he'd done that, too. Could a kiss bring back that force--and should it? He was thinking too much. It was the killer of that energy, thinking too much.
The most startling thing was a thought that struck him out of the mess of it. That thought would take some chewing.
But taking his time about it would just make him a hypocrite, after what he himself had told her not five minutes ago, right out here. "I'm confused," he told her, trying to get somewhere near the heart of it before he regretted too heavily how he was killing something beautiful that had nearly happened, but maybe shouldn't have.
From heights so high, the tone in his voice pulled her heart low. Of course: The Fears. She had not forgotten any of them. There hadn't been time long enough for them to be forgotten. His, and hers both.
Liessel's head tipped forward in a silent nod, her parasol angled against her shoulder to hide her face from the street. She was trembling again; the hum of happiness having fled into the shadow of -- she didn't know what.
"Tell me," Liessel requested quietly, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
He wanted to duck it. Felt that cowardice, but yes: he'd neatly cut off retreat as an option after he'd voiced his own frustration with her doing something with the exact same outcome. "I want to behave as if this is as easy as being swept up in the moment, but I know it's not. If I were--"
If I were as young as you, I'd have every excuse in the world for not knowing.
It felt cruel to say a single word about how much he wanted to leave knowing better behind, so he didn't right now. The result was that, as before when Liessel had first greeted him, and as in the grasslands and nearly every moment after, he was not showing her the person he wished he could be with her. The devil-may-care youth who, with her, could find a way into the overgrown jungle of love and life. He knew that he was instead coming off as more distant, and more decrepit, and more hesitant and befuddled than ever. Just when he felt more desire and will than he'd felt in a long time.
He did not give up, though all his options felt unhappy. They were all stabs in the dark. He had no idea if there even was, out there in the distance, a destination they could share. "I invited you out here to tell you that I've business to finish. I don't know how to not see it--that business. I want so many things that have nothing to do with it, but... as you can see...." His laugh was weak, sour, knowing. "I don't want them enough, it seems, to push it aside for very long."
The thing to do was to put an end to this right now.
The thought sheared into him very suddenly.
The hand around her parasol tightened as she listened, trying not to let her attention be pulled away from the lane ahead of them. It felt as if she did, as if should she let herself look at him, that her resolve would break there on the sidewalk out there in broad daylight. She just had to hold it in until that front door was closed, and the world was locked out.
Liessel took a breath and felt it shudder within her chest. "I know your work is very important to you," Her voice retained its quiet quality, restrained to keep it from shaking still, "And I would never think to try and make you choose."
Gerold glanced at her and said nothing more until they'd reached her house, gone up her walk, crossed her porch and shut her front door behind them. "I feel that I have wronged you, Liessel. That was the last thing that I wanted to do."
Her parasol was collapsed as soon as they hit the shade of the front porch. The door was open, and Liessel left her parasol just inside the door, leaning against the frame. Her steps carried her into the middle of the foyer where she stopped, her left hand on her hip while her right rose to cover her eyes. Her back was toward him, her shoulders shaking.
I feel that I have wronged you, Liessel.
"I do not want to hear that," She managed to pull from her chest, "Not from you."
But this was proof. Wasn't it?
"I told you my fears, but I must have softened them when I spoke."
"I heard them," She said from where she was standing, trying to will her tears not to fall. But fall they would, "The only thing that was soft about them, was that it was you who spoke them." After half of a second, giving herself time to wipe her eyes, she shook her head and let her hand fall away from her face, "I do not mean that you are soft -- I mean that..." Why was she even trying to untie that one? Liessel took a breath, and let the exhale carry her shoulders before she turned his way.
"Everyone has fears, Gerold. It will always be there, in some form or another, and some of them -- like these -- aren't easy. But I've spent my life surrendering to fear, and I will not let it continue. Not with something -- someone that I love! We can figure it out, and we can do it together unless you tell me right here, and right now that everything that happened out there," She gave a wave of her hand toward the door behind him, meaning the street they had just walked down, "Everything that was said -- was --" She couldn't let herself finish. Her mouth twitched at its corners, but the word nothing did not come. Instead, she shook her head and cut through the air with her hand before she turned, quick steps carrying her toward the front parlor.
He was left there, shaken, in her wake, and no less confused than before.
From within the parlor the sound of a cabinet being opened was heard, and then came the sound of bottles being knocked about, and then before long the sound of boot heels against wood announced her return to the foyer. With her, grasped by her left hand, Liessel carried a glass that was half-full of a golden-amber liquid.
She came to a stop in front of him, glass offered out into the air between them. She had calmed down some in just those few moments, but not nearly enough to contain what remnants of frustration were still there within her when she spoke, "Here, you look like you could use it."
She'd find him where he had been, turned a little, and as soon as she'd come back in he'd turned his head and was eyeing her askance. Then he looked at the glass, but didn't smile this time. He did lift a hand to take it, and he did say a very quiet, "Thank you."
Glass given over, Liessel gave him a small nod and was then turning to retreat to the stairs where she sat, skirt drawn in around her legs and hugged there. With her leaning forward against them a little she sighed heavily, watching him from where she sat, "It's not you, Gerold." She closed her eyes, sat up a little bit and shook her head as she made her own correction before opening her eyes and looking at him again, "I -- it is, but it also isn't. Its more everything else, everything. All of those fears. I do not know how to get past any of them besides facing them, of fighting them. And I am willing to do that. I am willing to fight, because what I said out there was no lie."
Gerold gathered himself. She was not herself drinking, he noticed, but she was right about him, and he did toss back what she'd brought him. More so that he could then ignore it than for any sense that it might lead to clarity. She went to the stairs, and he didn't know if it was to ascend them, so when she simply sat down he moved toward her a little. Closing some distance. She'd been warm in his arms an instant ago it seemed, and now he was feeling the absence.
He listened.
"I didn't lie, either," he said quietly. "Not with the kiss and not with the confusion."
He thought about her wording a little more and sighed. "It does not please me to think that the 'everything else' might grow as one acquires years. For I've acquired a healthy share. And you have yet to. --I wonder if I would have been able to even conceive of this feeling in my head, when I was younger. Even if I'd tried, I think I'd have failed. Maybe that's the real difference."
She was feeling it too. Her world, in the blink of an eye, had gone from warm and full to cold and -- empty. It wasn't just the joy of the kiss that had fled her, it was the feeling of his arms as they wrapped around her. It was the subdued scent of tobacco that seemed to have baked itself into him. It was the feeling of him so whole and totally close to her.
Her head lowered as Gerold spoke, Liessel fighting off the memory of that embrace so she could hear him without feeling her heart aching.
It ached anyway.
"I think," she managed, "that 'everything else's are inevitable. I think they come with life, and there is no stopping them." Her arms had become wrapped around her as he closed the distance some, a pale replacement for what had been moments ago, "We just learn which ones are the more important ones, and which ones can be let go."
Her head shook, her eyes closed and she forced herself to breath, "This confusion, is it because of that? Because I am so much younger? -- Inexperienced?"
... and which ones can be let go.
"I can't let this one go any longer." He knew they weren't necessarily on the same topic again, but couldn't stop himself. Fortunately, she went on with a question. Or maybe not so fortunately.
"Some of it," he admitted. He moved closer, set the glass down, and rested his hand on the banister. "There's such a clash."
Her arms tightened around her body as if with the very strength of them she might be able to fend off the tears that were already forming.
So, tell me how to fix it!
What do I need to do?!
I can't make myself any older!
Those words welled up within her, a scream to the world that went unheard.
Gerold got closer, and in his shadow she was shaking.
What came from her were none of those declarations. What Liessel practically whispered was, "Differences can be overcome."
If it went unheard, it was only because it went unspoken first.
"No one knows that better than I do," Gerold said, coming around and easing down to crouch--carefully--before her. "If we're speaking in generalities. Only we aren't."
Unsure why he felt the need to say that, Gerold to work to get another clear thought. "I'm tied up and turned around, Liessel. It's what I told you that night. Now, at least, I believe that if I can go and get this done, I can let go of it. Come back as something I can respect. Offer you more than... this."
Confusion. Mixed signals. Half-doused self.
He moved, and his shadow shifted with him and with that motion the quality of light changed. His voice came from lower, closer to the level she was at there on the stairs.
She wanted to let herself fold in, to disappear there where she sat. Liessel didn't want to open her eyes and see him crouched there before her because she was certain that she knew what haunted his expression just then.
She did it anyway, opening her eyes to the sight of her knees and then lifting her tear-filled gaze until she found herself studying the way he was looking at her just then. Then, just as slowly, Liessel unwound her arms from around her body in order to reach for him where he crouched. She had to lean a little bit, and used her other hand as an anchor point against the stair she was perched on to do it, "I'm not asking you not to, Gerold. I'm not. Go. Go if you must, see to it. Do what you need to do. I do not need you to change your plans for me. I don't need you to change anything for me."
What she saw when she looked at his face was absolute grief. Her tears and his own were there, plain to see. His hands met hers, and he asked, "What do you need, then, if not those things?"
His hands were so warm, and were so much larger than her own. They were also harder, not nearly as soft as her own hands, but she didn't mind. She didn't care. It was only a testament to the life he had lived before she knew him. It was a testament to the life he continued to live.
What did she need?
Liessel didn't need a second to know her answer to that question. It came with her sliding forward against the stair until she was sitting just at the edge of it. What she needed was, "Just you, Gerold. Your long nights, your dangerous work, the raucous company you keep, the weeks or months you must be away for your job -- I will take it all, as long as I can have you, because that is what I need. Head to toe, ailments and all. Just you. Just Gerold Schoen in any form he would give to me."
It was a very Liessel answer. An absolute Liessel answer. As sometimes happened, Gerold felt it come in around him like a fog, softening and then hiding outlines. It was not cynicism that he had to chop back this time, but perhaps more tiredness. He attuned his ears to hear this for what it was. It was not the first time he'd had to do so. "I want to give you that in a better form than this."
Resolve finally began to trickle back in, under the fog. "I want to be the man who...." His eyes burned suddenly, as much as they had a moment ago. "Even if he abandoned his friend, made it right in the end. And after he made it as right as he could, could see a future for himself again, and say 'come what may.'"
The tails of his coat flared out against the floor behind Gerold where he was crouched, the length of it hiding much of his lower half due to his position. And around them the house was still any sound of Cog was muffled by him being rooms away from where they were in the foyer.
Liessel slipped forward off of the step she was on and came to kneel before him. He held one of her hands in his, and she brought her other up to meet his hands there between them.
The pain she saw there, she wished she could have taken it from him. The guilt he felt, she wanted to help lighten it so it was not sitting so heavily on his shoulders. "You mean, Mister Matthias?" she asked quietly, searching his eyes with her own.
He watched her slide to her knees, and frowned, but he wasn't fully there. He followed her eyes, and did hear her question. His nods were tiny and tight, and only after a few did he agree, "Matthias."
Grief, she knew, could last a lifetime. For some it got easier to carry, and for others it never changed at all. It could stay as fresh and blazing as the day it first hit.
"Gerold," With the sound of his name came a softening of her features. She could very well imagine what this was doing to him, what it had been doing all those years to be partnered to a shell of his dead friend. She had thought about it often enough while alone in her room, at night when the house was still and just as quiet as it was with them in the foyer as they were.
His name came, and her words stopped there for a moment as she tried to drum up something hopeful, something that might help him through. Everything sounded trite, and nothing quite fit the way she wanted it to. There was a level of respect that needed to be given to this that she just couldn't achieve with things that sounded like mundane placations to her ear just then.
What she settled on, what she told him, was said with a nod of her head, "Give him the rest you know he deserves."
His hands tightened on hers. Only after that did his brow lock up, and his eyes close. They were shut for only seconds, but in that time he said, "As I should have ages ago. I will."
Liessel gave him a few moments, letting what he said become a vow in the stillness of the foyer. She let it have the gravity that it needed, that it called for, before bending over his hands and bringing them to her lips.
As she righted herself, she told him, "And I will pray for him, wherever he may be right now. I will pray for you both."