| Squire with the Blue Dress On |
| Summary: | Magden shows her makeover to Tameron. Well, sorta. |
| Date: | May 13, 2014 |
| Related: | Boy Troubles, Girl Troubles, Dornish Makeover |
| Players: |
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It's late morning, near afternoon, and for the first time since taking on a squire, Tameron found himself training on his own in the early hours. Perhaps it's just as well. He's washed and changed his clothes, and now he sits out in the garden of the White Stone Manse. His sporting an assortment of fresh little wounds. Bruised and bloody knuckled, a split lip, a bruised jaw and a cut across one cheekbone. He doesn't seem bothered by any of this fresh purpling. Tameron sits on the lip of the fountain, crumbling bits of bread so that he can drop them into the water and feed the silvery fish teeming eager around the area where said breadcrumbs fall.
When Magden — gowned in sky-blue silk and golden chains, her hair brushed to a sheen and beautifully arranged — comes upon him, it's from the wrong angle. She's been over this in her mind a hundred times a hundred times — lost sleep over it, not eaten a bite. She never meets him straight on, in her mind. It spoils something in the presentation. In her mind, where all goes perfectly according to plan, he's facing away. She calls to him. He turns and… he sees her. So when she strolls toward the garden — almost despairing of finding him, musing that he may have fled Westeros to avoid her — and glances up just in time to see he's sitting on the fountain, facing her… she panics. The panic is a frozen instant, followed by a wild flailing as she darts behind a huge stone urn overflowing with flowering vines. She presses her back to the urn, eyes shut tight, panting. And she waits. Has she been seen? Or is there still time to flank him? Or, a coward corner of her heart insists, flee. This was such a terrible, terrible idea…
Magden moves quietly when she wishes, but not so quietly, when distracted, that she cannot be heard. Indeed, when tameron looks up it's just in time to see a swirl of blue silk vanish behind a large, viney urn. He frowns, setting down the remains of his bread and brushing off his hands. "Mistress?" he queries And then, considering the fineness of that flash of silk, "My lady? Are you hurt?" There's quiet crunching as Tameron steps over gravel on his way to the urn that conceals this peculiar, skittish female.
Shit. Magden's heart pounds so hard she's lightheaded as she listens to the crunch of gravel that heralds his approach. She edges around the urn, carefully timing her movements, so she's just on the other side of it when he arrives. "I'm fine!" she calls. "I thought… I thought I saw a dragon!" She pauses, listening for his position. "One of the tiny ones! People have been seeing them all over Oldtown, you know."
The crunching stops as Tameron hears the lady's voice and recognizes it. He frowns faintly, brows furrowing as he finds himself, once again, on the wrong side of the urn. "Magden?"
Double shit. Magden grimaces, pressing flat against her side of the urn, as though she could melt into the stone. "…Yes?"
"Um…" Tameron murmurs, his tone rather perplexed. "…What are you doing?"
There's a long beat. "…Nothing?"
The crunching quietly resumes as Tameron steps around the urn to see if he can locate his oddly-behaving squire on the other side of it.
Nope… nope. Nope nope nope. Magden jumps in alarm at the quiet crunching and scramble-sneaks further around the side. "What are you doing?" she asks. It's a wild stab at conversational, as though there were nothing at all amiss. NICE WEATHER WE'RE HAVING.
"Well," Tameron muses, still walking slowly around the urn like a hound laconically pursuing its own tail, "trying to figure out what you're up to, and if you've perhaps lost your mind."
"That's possible," Magden mutters. She takes a breath and pitches her voice to be heard again, a tone of forced lightness. "I'm fine! Just fine. So… why don't you just stay. Right. There. And I'm going to go away again. All right?" They're coming up on a full revolution, so this is her opportunity to flee back inside.
Tameron's brows aren't sure whether they want to shoot up or draw together and kind've end up somewhere in between. "Suuuure…" he agrees as he turns and, rather more silently, begins moving around the urn in the opposite direction.
Magden breathes out softly, knees wobbling as they jelly with relief. After briefly wishing she believed in gods to thank, she says, "Good! Right, then!" She looks to her right. "Goodbye!" And flees to the left — which, of course, brings her around in the direction that Tameron's creeping. Full-on collision, right into his chest.
Oof! Tameron's hands snap up to curl around Magden's upper arms before the girl can make another attempt to flee. And then he eases her back gently from his chest so he can take a look at his Squire's transformation. His eyes widen as he fully registers Madgen Quick standing before him in silk and gold, and then his expression becomes a bit more like he found out his puppy was stabbed before settling into carefully contained anger. "Who did this?" he asks, ever so softly.
'This' is quite a thing indeed. The dress is a shade of blue that nearly matches her extraordinary eyes, eyes that are emphasized with the faintest trace of khol, lashes dark and outrageously long. Her arms are elegantly bared, the pretty sweep of her back on display from shoulder blades to small. The design of the gown, if it can be called that, is daring, a criss-cross that winds behind her neck and also, somehow, bares the nip of her waist on the sides before sweeping in tiers of silk to the ground. Glistening chains of gold are looped about her slender throat, hanging long; there are the same delicate links about her ankles, and rings on her bare toes. Her hair is swept up and back, fixed with combs that leave the promise of how easily it will all come down. Gold and aquamarines dangle from her earlobes. Her lips are kissed with a gloss of wet, berry-hued rouge.
Magden's first reaction, caught out, is pique at his trickery. "Sneak!" she cries, huffing and rolling her eyes. But then he's looking her over… and this isn't at all what she imagined, a hundred times a hundred times, in her head. She looks stricken — struck, as one who's been slapped — and guilty. Mortified. Then angry, in her own right. She wrenches away from him. "I did." Eat it, Tameron Sand.
"What?" Tameron murmurs, his thumb lifting to press to Magden's lower lip before she wrenches away. If he can manage it, he'll stare down at the berry hue on his thumb, as warily as if it came away bloody. "Why?"
She blushes all the deeper for that touch, flooded with conflicted feelings. It takes her a moment to find her voice, or words to shape with it. "Why shouldn't I?" she demands. "And why are you looking at me like — like — " Like not at all the way she wanted. Like she's done something awful. This was such a terrible, terrible idea… "Like that?"
"This isn't you," Tameron replies, rubbing his thumb against his trousers to remove the offending rouge, "This isn't who you are. Who told you you needed to put on silks and bangles? Who told you what you are needs changing?"
She stares at him. Really? "You did."
Well, now it's Tameron's turn to look like he's been punched in the gut. He trips back a step, mouth open, eyes wide. "… What?"
"Well, you didn't want anything to do with me, the other way!" says Magden, the hot blush creeping from her cheeks down her neck pure, excruciating humiliation. "Or at all. Obviously. So." She looks away, swallowing hard, then up, hoping to keep the tears from falling. Then, suddenly, she lashes out, giving his shoulders an angry shove. "I look beautiful, you stupid, stupid — STUPID!"
"What?" Tameron asks again, seemingly unable to get much past his lips beyond this one word, even when he's shoved. "Of course you look beautiful. You always look beautiful. I didn't… I don't… Magden." He lifts a hand so he can point to his battered face. "I got into a fistfight because I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. Of course I want you."
Magden stops short, still looking as though she might burst into tears or hit him again, but at least — for a moment — she's quiet and still. "What?"
Tameron breathes out a slow breath before swallowing tightly. "It's not about wanting you," he replies softly. "It's that I want better for you than… well. Than me."
Magden frowns, taking a deep, slightly hitched breath. "What about what I want? Or do I not get a say?"
"You get a say," Tameron replies, "but you've seen so little of the world, Magden Quick. You might want to wait on that say until you've seen a little more."
She breathes out a single, voiceless huff of a laugh, looking away, and shakes her head. "You have no idea what I've seen." Her bright blue eyes snap back to him, keen and incisive. "Do you." She raises her eyebrows a tick. "This," she flips out the edges of her skirts, letting them flutter and settle, "isn't me. How do you know? You put me in a tunic and trousers, made me a squire, decided I was an innocent flower." She looks at him flatly, eyes now bone dry. "This person you want, who is too good for you — I've never met her."
Tameron is quiet as Magden speaks. "I have some little idea," he offers quietly. "I know you've seen terrible things. I just don't think you've had a chance yet to see much else." His head bows and he swallows softly. "I did do that," he agrees quietly. "And if I was wrong, if this…" one bloody-knuckled hand lifts to gesture towards those filmy skirts, "is you, then I'm sorry. For making you act otherwise."
"It's part of me," says Madgen, stubbornly. "Like the rest. No one makes me be anything. Even you, Tameron Sand."
Tameron manages a small, weak smile. "No? Well. Good, then. I'm glad of it." He stares down at his hands, having run out of anything else to say.
Magden stands there, as well, as though expecting him to say something more. When he doesn't, she lifts up her hands and lets them drop to her sides with a flop. Done. She turns on her heel to go.
"Magden," Tameron tries quietly as she turns to go. "What… what do you want? From this. From me."
She stops, not turning again to face him. Her shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath, in and out. "I want to see desire in your eyes, when you look at me," Magden says, "rather than apprehension, or anger, or disgust." She's starting broad.
"You don't disgust me," Tameron argues, because the other two. Well, those he's certainly felt. "Never that."
It's fair to make the distinction, but it certainly doesn't address the point. "If you can't do this," says Magden, "or don't want to… tell me."
"I don't know," Tameron confesses, pushing a hand fretfully through his hair. "I don't know. I've never done anything remotely like this, before, and I can't tell if it's right or wrong. If I'm a fool for denying or a villain for accepting what you offer me."
Magden frowns and bows her head, taking another breath and turning again — this time to return to him. She cups his face in her hands… and just stands there, close and quiet. "I don't want to torment you, Tameron Sand. It makes me sad to make you sad."
Tameron closes his eyes, simply resting his cheeks against her palms. "I don't want to hurt you, either," he answers softly, "or trap you or… I just want your happiness, Maggie."
She laughs, the sound soft and bleak. "I wish you could make me happy without making yourself so unhappy. Because all I want, Tam, is for you to tell me how pretty I am, and kiss me, and let me be yours."
Tameron's brows furrow, his expression somewhere between pleasure and pain. "Gods, Maggie," he whispers softly. "You say I don't know you, how are you so sure you know me?"
"Because I have eyes," says Magden, just as soft. "And I have watched you, very closely, every day since we met." She takes a breath, then asks, "But if you don't believe me, then tell me. Tell me who you are. And watch what happens. Watch me stay."
Fade Out