wolfe. (abstention) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-03-10 22:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !log, hippolyta flynn, wilham wolfe |
are you all right? 'cause it seems like you disappeared.
Who: Hippolyta Flynn & Wilham Wolfe
What: Birthday shenanigans, a gift-exchange, and feels.
Where: The Mages Tower.
When: Backdated to his birthday, February 18th.
Rating: A little bit of language.
Status: Complete!
There was purpose in Flynn’s steps as she made her way to the waystone on her Tower floor, fiery hair fluttering behind her as she pushed on, determined. Today was Wolfe’s birthday, a day she’d anticipated for weeks, as evident by the poorly wrapped gift clutched in her hands, and there would be no stopping her from giving it to him in person. She’d expected his day to be busy, knowing he wasn’t a party person and that it would’ve been difficult to drag him out to one even if it was for himself, but now in the early hours of the evening, she wanted to lay claim to him. They were friends, weren’t they? He couldn’t say no to her. Her knuckles eventually landed on his door, raps in quick succession. There was an answering rustle and muttered “Hang on!” from the other side of the door, then a series of muffled thumps: what sounded like a stack (or two) of books toppling over. The door to the geomancer’s quarters eventually opened, and a rumpled Wolfe tottered into view, having wound his way around and over a few towering fortresses of textbooks on his way to the door. The tower rooms were small by necessity and after moving back in, despite Wolfe’s general lack of worldly belongings, he’d still filled his quarters to the brim with studies. “Ah,” he said, wryly, squinting down at the much smaller mage. “Now I see what a press-gang looks like.” Despite her height, Flynn looked up to him evenly, eyes automatically narrowing as if by habit. “Yeah, yeah. Here,” she offered without too much tact, shoving the package at him. While it looked as if it’d taken a mere ten seconds to wrap, she genuinely had put in effort, much to her annoyance. Stupid gift wrap. Why couldn’t gifts wrap themselves? But it was the thought that counted. Accepting the shoddily-wrapped gift, Wolfe could tell from its soft pliable cover—so similar to what he had purchased for Araceli—that it was probably a book. He held it up to his ear, however, shaking the parcel back and forth as if it might rattle and click and give away some indication of its contents. “Hmmm,” he said thoughtfully, with fake gravitas. It was a relief that after three years apart, Wolfe and his old mentee could still flow back into place like a diverted river, water filling up its former vessel. It was a friendship that still held fast (when so many other things in life decayed, slipped away despite his best efforts to hang onto them, in the shape of disappointed commandants). “Am I allowed to open it now?” With some (mildly) uncharacteristic nervousness, Flynn allowed her gaze to flicker away, shifting in place and only managing to scuff her boot on the floor. The gift wrap might not have been anything special or taken enough time, but what lay beneath it certainly had much more value. (She hoped to him as well.) “I guess,” she muttered, wondering why she hadn’t expected him to open it right away with her there. That, generally, was what people did. Wolfe pulled the door open the rest of the way, gesturing for her to enter—“Come on in, where are my manners, I shouldn’t keep you hovering in the hallway all night”—as he finally opened the package. Not with the eager ripping and tearing of a child hopping up and down to celebrate their birthday, but carefully, preserving what little remained of Flynn’s wrapping paper. He neatly peeled the edges back, stripping the tape until it revealed a thin leather notebook, decorated with the carved silhouette of dragons on the cover. An arch of the eyebrow, before another uncomfortable throat-clearing from Flynn and her eyes still not meeting his. That was new. She was always brash, unapologetic, in your face. So he opened the notebook, and then went abruptly still. There were letters: pages and pages and pages of them, endless reams of Hippolyta Flynn’s messy handwriting, all dated from his tenure abroad but never postmarked. They started at the beginning, her grief and anger spilling itself onto the paper in hard lines, pen almost ripping through to the next page. Betrayal. Entreaties for him to return. Fuming over not even having an address to send these letters to. The further he flips, the cooler her famed temper becomes, until it turns into something else: part missive, part epistolary, part diary. All three missing years, now handed back to him. Flynn’s voice from across the void, a perfect parallel to the piles and piles of memstones he’d recorded for her (foreign sights and his dry commentary in the background until they had become less tourist display, more confessional). Wolfe’s hands tightened around the edges of the book, knuckles turning white. Something was caught in his throat; he couldn’t speak around it. “Thank you,” he said, looking up and trying to meet her eye. “Hippolyta, thank you. And I’m sorry. Again.” There was nothing else for it: he reached out and pulled the girl, his former student, into a bone-crushing hug. His reaction was to be expected, Flynn understood. They had so much behind them, so many memories, that it felt almost criminal to deny him those three years apart, much as he’d denied her. While in the beginning she’d been angry, so angry, betrayed by one of the people she loved most, she’d come to forgive him, instead quietly hoping he’d return (to her) and come back into her life to stay. The gift itself had at first been something to stubbornly keep to herself, a way to keep Wolfe alive in her thoughts, as if she were writing to him and not a notebook that no one would ever see. It gave her comfort; it gave her letters purpose. And it was for that reason she’d almost become too shy to watch him open it. The notebook had been hers alone, her private memories. Now, they were his— theirs. Without hesitation, she drew up her arms around his back, fisting the back of his shirt. “S’fine,” she muttered against him. “Just don’t leave again.” Perhaps it had been a mistake, leaving all these people behind and snipping himself from the tapestry of Emillion, abandoning everything that anchored him to this city in favour of finding himself in the wilderness. But what’s done is done, Wolfe reminded himself, grasping that comforting thread of philosophy (as he so often did nowadays). Time had passed, he had made his choices, and now he had to live with the consequences and mend the bridges. He could, however, make another choice. “I won’t,” he said. “I’m rooted. I’m done. I’ll be here from here on out.” His hands tightened at the back of her shoulders, then absently patted Flynn’s red hair. She was something like the niece he’d never had, perhaps, if Mathis had ever been the type to settle down and have a child. (Or perhaps the daughter Wilham would never have.) “Now... I think you said something about us going out, and I had no choice in the matter?” The touch was soothing in a way her own parents’ hands had rarely ever been, something comforting that she often pined for but received only in polite company (and when she had been very young, but that Flynn was of another time). Rather than melting into the hold, she squeezed him once and nosed at his chest, space providing. “You got that right,” she shot back, her earlier confidence returning as the shyness slowly retreated into the dark recesses where they longed. “We’re having drinks and you’re not allowed to say no. I’ll even foot the bill.” Not that Wolfe was as heavy a drinker as she was, but he was the birthday boy, and she could afford it. “Hey, big spender,” he remarked, in fake surprise. They both knew she tended to drink him under the table; several nights in the past had ended with Wolfe plucking up his unruly student, hefting her over one shoulder, and lugging a disorderly black mage back to the tower. She would mumble and grumble all the way, keeping up a running commentary on the sights spied from her perch on his back. Wolfe, on the other hand, was an exercise in self-restraint: he walked that careful line of drinking enough to become cheerfully blitzed, broadening his smiles and loosening his laugh in his chest, but not enough to rattle that steady gait and stability. “Alright.” He carefully set the notebook aside, balanced on another pile of books on his nightstand, now taking pride of place on the very top. “We’re off to paint the town, then—if not red, at least a very fetching shade of pink.” She snorted her amusement, despite how much she wanted to grin, and reached up to brush red locks from her temples before playfully pushing at him. “If it’s gonna be pink, let it be fucking magenta at least, okay?” “Magenta,” Wolfe repeated soberly, somberly, as the pair made their way out of the room and back towards the waystone at a buoyant stride. “It’s a deal.” |