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He moves and she does, too, in the space of a breath; trading places, Gwenaëlle doing the rest of her finding composure curled lazily to the shape of him, draped over his body and making herself quite at home there, tucking her head so she can commit that smile to memory and treasure it without feeling quite so immediately vulnerable looking back at him. There's all these -

She's got lots of practise at meaningless sex. And she likes the alternative, but it's new and strange and permanent in a way that has to be processed.

On top of him. It's comfortable there, she's going to do loads of her processing in this position in the future.

“There'll be no getting rid of you now,” murmured into his collarbone, warmly affectionate in a way she rarely is.

He wraps his arm around her waist once she’s curled herself against him, holds her close. She’s real, and here—and he knows that, as sure as he knows there is a stream, and trees, and the elk grazing nearby. He simply—did not account for this to happen, ever again, secure in his widowed state, not so much celibacy as a lack of desire, but—

Here he is. Here she is. Both of them with shard and he with the weight of what he might be behind his heart but locked away. Thranduil tucks it all side, and kisses the top of her head. It’s a good position. A shame they cannot share a bed every night.

“Oh, no, not at all.” He smirks, strokes a hand down her hair, fingers threading into it. “I have my teeth in you. Weren't you warned?"

“As it happens, I was.”

Guenievre perhaps did not have this in mind, particularly, when she had warned her daughter not to get her heart broken or her reputation ruined; Gwenaëlle is relatively sure the first one isn't going to happen and that the second...will be survivable, when it comes. Probably. There are many choices that will need to be made, in the future, but even before kissing him in the library it had seemed less and less likely that that future would be in Orlais.

Certainly unlikely it would look as any of her parents had imagined it. It's hard to reconcile, sometimes-

but she isn't second-guessing herself, doesn't regret. She is quite sure of where she is, and where she's meant to be.

“Specifically,” he says, breath hot but brief at her ear, pulling her just a little bit closer, so they can lie chest-to-chest. “About large Rifter elves?”

More dangerous than the garden variety of elf, less tame, more dangerous.

“You are precious to me,” he says. “I would have no secrets between us. You know you can tell me whatever you like, and I will still love you, no matter what it is. I will not think less of you.”

His will test her, when she asks after them or when they are no longer secrets, but he is not speaking of those. Instead, he considers her ‘I am afraid’s, her ‘I need you’s. The help he has not yet pulled a promise to agree to ask for.

Her sigh is slow and more air than sound, breathed out against his collarbones, her body fit lissome to the line of his, her foot sliding up his leg like they're interlocking parts of some clever dwarven contraption, or, no - no, like rose vines cultivated to grow together, blooming different colours. Lovely things that don't keep secrets, except,

“You'll peel everything back from me and find there's nothing left underneath,” and it rings hollow where it should have been a joke.

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