marquisvincentdegramont

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

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[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

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[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

officer someone stole my heart. thanks

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

◃ Back ⚜ Next ▹(coming soon)

Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

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[marquisvincentdegramont]

⚜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣 - ℂ𝕙. 𝕏𝕍𝕀𝕀: 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕚𝕗𝕖 ⚜

*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ ✧.*★ Thank you to @kavalyera for the beta read!

Summary: Vincent and Chidi withdraw to a more private winter home to escape the bustle of the High Table for a while. And it's helping - Vincent is getting better. ...But does that mean he won't need Chidi by his side anymore?

TW: mention of drug addiction, lots of angst

The master of the Gramont house set out again, leaving Il Palazzo as vacant as he had left Versailles. Where there was no conquering to be done, he and Chidi could never linger. Onward they went, chasing the frontier. Fittingly, the United States came first. New York. Dallas. Later, Osaka. Casablanca. Chidi watched these cities pass in front of him with mild curiosity. They interested him primarily for the power Vincent held over them. He traced the lines of Vincent’s network with his own footsteps, his own jet trails, and saw firsthand how power ensnared the whole globe. There was nowhere where anyone could possibly escape from the Marquis, and nowhere where the Marquis could escape his constant work. Christmas had come and gone by the time the alliance with Gianna had reached enough stability to give him a moment’s rest.

“À ce rythme-là, ils vont encore me mettre à terre. [They’ll run me into the fucking ground again at this rate,]” Vincent said, in a Beijing hotel, severely jet lagged. He lay prone, his face half buried in a pillow. It was the kind of night on which he was liable to whine about wanting a hit, and if Chidi wasn’t careful, he’d get one.

How many days had it been since the last slip-up? Eleven? That was a new streak. Chidi closed the curtains against the city lights and pulled his Marquis’ head into his lap. “Je suis fier de toi. Ils ne vous ont pas encore mis à terre, et je ne les laisserai pas. Que pouvons-nous faire ? [I’m proud of you. They haven’t run you into the ground yet, and I won’t let them. What can we do?]” Can I kill someone about it?

Vincent made a small, unhappy sound and blinked up at him cheerlessly. “…Je pense que j’aimerais devenir complètement inaccessible cet hiver. Disparaître de tout le monde. […I think I’d like to become completely unreachable this winter. Just disappear away from everyone.]” Very softly, “Sauf toi. [Except you.]”

“"Je ne voudrais rien de mieux, monsieur. [I’d like nothing better, sir,]” said Chidi, playing with his hair. “Où pouvons-nous nous retrouver enneigés ensemble ? [Where can we get snowed in together?]”

In the northern part of France, near Calais, the Gramont family kept a summer home (which Chidi quickly understood to mean a small castle dating back to the 16th century). Àlderic had barely set foot there, Vincent explained, but the young Comte had enjoyed a lovely few months there once when his father grew tired of him. “Il m'a plutôt envoyé déranger les tuteurs pendant un été. [He sent me away to bother the tutors for a summer instead],” said Vincent, and laughed in a way that tore Chidi’s heart open without noticing anything unusual about it. “Mais la plaisanterie était contre lui, car c’était le meilleur été de ma vie. Beaucoup de temps pour lire et pratiquer le piano, et courir autour du lac pour me lier d’amitié avec la sauvagine locale, au grand dam de ma nounou. [But the joke was on him, because it was the best summer of my life. Plenty of time to read and practice piano, and run around the lake making friends with the local waterfowl, much to my nanny’s chagrin.]”

Chidi smiled, picturing it easily. “Cela semble parfait. Même si vous aurez de la compagnie cette fois-ci. [It sounds perfect. Though you will have some company this time.]”

“…Je vais. […I will.]”

Chidi liked ”Château de la Lune” just fine. To the south, it overlooked a lake where he might go walking or riding anytime, and to the north, a vast forest of hunting grounds. It was a patchwork of eras, renovated several times and partially rebuilt in the wake of an 1850s fire, but retaining its old gothic grandeur in its west wing. Thanks to that eclecticism, it didn’t strike him as such as frighteningly rigid place as Versailles, nor even as curated as Il Palazzo. It simply was what it was – unique and historied and extremely comfortable.

Besides, he liked any place where Vincent was to be found, and where there was hardy work to be done. His friendships with Vincent’s attendants and secretaries and his own favorite trainees among the guards had grown into something dependable. He spent his days making sure that everything ran smoothly with all of them. But Vincent remained the one and only person who understood him not just in part, but in full. The Marquis was the only person who could motivate him not just to take general pride in his work, but to go into a kind of adrenaline-fueled frenzy over something as simple as making sure Vincent got the exact kind of crème brûlée that he wanted for dessert. To say that Chidi enjoyed this work would have been a vast understatement.

They were so perfectly settled. And Vincent had never struck him as a settled sort of person. Chidi waited for the restlessness, for the explosion. But instead, something heartier was unfurling in the evenings when Vincent sat playing him sonatas or dancing with him or joining him for an evening walk. The Marquis talked more. He made jokes. And when he went quiet, it was with calm, private reflection, not with emotional shutdown.

A reflection that Chidi couldn’t enter into.

He went quiet like this more and more often as the days turned to late February and the dismal cold started to wear on Chidi’s nerves. He had to be thinking about something, but wouldn’t say what. The Marquis had started to work alone in his study, to dismiss Chidi outright from time to time. But no matter how many times Chidi asked if he was okay (which provoked Vincent into irritation more than once), the answer was always the same – yes, he was perfectly content. And he could meet Chidi’s eyes when he said it. His voice no longer shook with concealed pain. He really was okay, and upon that realization, Chidi’s fear shifted.

He was watching Vincent pull away from him with newfound independence, he realized. He tried to be happy for him, and he was, sometimes so happy he could hardly contain the heartbreaking joy. But at the same time, it made him feel physically sick, adrift. Me, as Vincent's protector... What a joke. It's him who has protected me from purposelessness all these years, Chidi thought. First Vincent had been a daydream that he’d hoped for as a child, then the man he met and pined after, and then the lover he served. But this was the tragedy of his situation: that if he ever succeeded in healing the man he loved, what would be the need for him? Only then did he understand how much he needed Vincent.

Once, when Chidi could no longer contain himself, he asked, “Mon amour, tu penses que les choses changent entre nous ? [My love, do you think things are changing between us?]”

Vincent simply said, “Oui,” and smiled maddeningly. Chidi walked out that night into the forest. He walked until many layers of barren branches had hidden the lights of the castle windows, and the reflected glow of yesterday’s snowfall sparkled as the only, unearthly light under the stars. Then he screamed himself hoarse.

The worst part was that he couldn’t even blame Vincent. His favor had always been a fortunate and perhaps temporary blessing. He was the wildest person Chidi knew, and he loved him for that. To restrain him…it wasn’t worth seeing him trapped in yet another gilded cage.

So when Vincent announced that he planned to spend a few days without him in Paris, Chidi felt the ground drop out from under him. He had no real reason not to trust Vincent to go on his own. He couldn’t say no, even knowing that the reason could well be an affair or just…time away. Time enough to contemplate a permanent severance between them. The best he could manage was, “Je préférerais de loin vous accompagner, maître, pour votre sécurité. Es-tu sûr? [I would greatly prefer to go with you, master, for your safety. Are you sure?]” And Vincent said he was sure.

He kept in constant contact with the guards who did follow the Marquis. His fear, he told himself, was all for Vincent. A protective rage just like every other. But it didn’t abate when they told him that all was well. “He’s in the best spirits we’ve ever seen,” wrote his second-in-command. “Practically skipping. And no, not from intoxicants.” Chidi looked down to find that he’d shattered the glass tumbler he was holding.

Another text shattered him on the second night of Vincent’s trip, this time from Vincent himself. “Je rentre demain matin, tôt. Retrouve-moi au bord du lac à 7 heures. J'ai quelque chose à te dire. Habillez-vous bien – c’est important. [I am coming home tomorrow morning, early. Meet me by the lake at 7. I have something to say to you. Dress well – it’s important.]”

Chidi shut his phone and let his chest shudder with silent tears for five whole minutes before he could bring himself to answer. “Oui, monsieur.” And then his chest fully caved in, and for the rest of the night, he was, whether loudly or silently, inconsolable.

So it was with finality, with resignation, that he donned his grey suit for the last time, held his pin to the light till it flashed in his eyes, and stabbed twice through his lapel as he had done each and every day. One piercing on the way in, one on the way out, each one a rending deep in the fabric that left a small but irreparable hole. For your freedom, Vincent, I will tear out even Cupid’s arrow. I will do as you say.

It was the warmest morning in quite some time. There was mist over the lake, and it settled into Chidi’s skin and into his eyes, that vast damp blurring of an uncertain future. Would he at least be allowed to stay at Vincent’s side, enjoying the torturous sight of his master’s unreachable perfection? To guard the gate of a life into which he would never again be permitted? Damn it all, but he hoped for even that small pleasure. Because if he could never see him again…

But Chidi couldn’t bear to think of that after catching sight of the Marquis, picking his way over the dormant winter grass in riding boots. He must have risen hours ago and seen to his appearance somewhere on the road, in a hotel perhaps. That majesty might look unstudied, but Chidi alone knew the effort that went into it, the thought and the fretting. His own morning routine seemed like nothing to him by comparison. Vincent’s lips, pinkened by the chill of morning, kissed him softly while the dew beaded on his polished shoes and kissed his ankles with flecks of sweet cold where the grass had poked its way under his starched hems. He let himself be present in his body and hold the Marquis, their breath intermingling in air, looking out across the dawn in silence.

There, on that glassy surface turned to agate by the rising sun, a pair of swans circled. The first of the spring. “J'ai entendu dire qu'ils s'accouplent pour la vie. [I’ve heard they mate for life],” said Chidi. “Quand l’un meurt, l’autre aussi. [When one dies, so does the other.]”

“J'ai entendu dire qu'ils pouvaient tuer un dogue allemand avec leur bec nu, [I’ve heard they can kill a great dane with their bare beaks],” said Vincent, “pour être sûr que cela n'arrive pas. [to make sure that doesn’t happen.]” For a second, Chidi almost laughed, but he didn’t trust the choked sound that came out of him, and quieted it back into soberness.

He turned to his master, searching. His eyes came up against a wall of porcelain and glass and placid smiles. In his desperation, he found himself asking for the first time, “À quoi pensez-vous, monsieur ? Vous me désavantagez, et je – [What are you thinking, sir? You have me at a disadvantage, and I -]” His voice broke against that impenetrable wall. “Je sais que tu n'as plus besoin de moi. Je suis si heureux de te voir plus heureux. Je ne peux tout simplement pas supporter ce... suspense quand je sais que tu... finis-en, juste – [I know you don’t need me anymore. I’m so glad to see you happier. I just can’t take this…suspense when I know that you…just get it over with, just - ]” He narrowly prevented himself from collapsing onto Vincent’s shoulder and instead turned the other way, face hidden by his hands.

“Chidi. Non, Oh mon Dieu, je ne voulais pas dire… [Chidi. No. Oh god, I didn’t mean…]” Vincent’s arms were around him then. “C'était un plan stupide. S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas. Je n’aurais peut-être pas dû être aussi mystérieux, mais ce n’est pas comme si je voulais tout gâcher… [It was a stupid plan. Please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have been so mysterious maybe, but it’s not like I meant to ruin it…]”

“Attendez. Quoi? Détruire quoi ? Non, vous n'avez rien fait de mal. Je comprends. Tu n'es plus obligé de me vouloir, c'est juste – c'est juste dur pour moi, je suis désolé – [Wait. What? Ruin what? No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I understand. You don’t have to want me anymore I just – it’s just hard for me, I’m sorry – ]”

Vincent grabbed him by both shoulders so roughly that he was shocked out of his tears. “JE te veux! Bien sûr, je te veux. C’est exactement de cela dont il s’agit. [I DO want you! Of course I want you. That’s exactly what this is about.]”

“… Je ne pense pas savoir ce que tu dis. […I don’t think I know what you’re saying.]”

Vincent just pulled him close, and whispered, “Soyons heureux, d'accord ? C'est un moment spécial. Il y a un photographe sur la colline qui va le capturer, alors… dis-moi quand tu te sens prêt. [Let’s be happy okay? This is a special moment. There’s a photographer on the hill who’s going to capture it, so…tell me when you feel ready.]”

Chidi hastily tried to clean up his face on his sleeve, but he still wasn’t following. “D'accord. Je vais bien, je suis prêt. Mais je ne le fais vraiment pas… [Okay. I’m okay, I’m ready. But I really don’t…]”

And then he looked back to Vincent to find him on one knee.

“Oh.”

Vincent, he realized, was faintly shaking. So was he, rather more violently.

“Dios mío… [Oh my god…]”

Time went surreally slow. With the motions of a person underwater, the Marquis was pulling a small velvet box from the pocket of his overcoat. To his surprise, Vincent spoke in somewhat stilted, practiced Spanish. “Una vez me devolviste algo que pensabas que había dejado caer. Me lo devolviste cuando sentí que... como si no tuviera nada. Me encontraste en mi punto más bajo y me ayudaste incluso entonces. Eso fue más que una amabilidad. Cambiaste mi vida permanentemente con ese acto. Pero aquí está el problema: quería dejarlo. Lo intenté para que lo disfrutaras, porque quería que hubiera alguna conexión entre nosotros. Así que ahora te lo doy de nuevo. Para siempre. [You once returned to me something that you thought I had dropped. You gave it back to me when I felt like – like I had nothing. You found me at my lowest, and helped me even then. That was more than a kindness. You changed my life permanently with that act. But here’s the problem: I meant to drop it. I intended it for you to enjoy, because I wanted there to be some connection between us. So now, I’m giving it to you again. Forever.]”

There in the box: a gold ring, with a band of clear resin at its core. And embedded in that band, amongst flecks of gold leaf, were flecks of white. “El pétalo de rosa blanca. [The white rose petal.]”

Vincent nodded, unable to speak. Finally, he managed it. “¿Quieres casarte conmigo, Chidi? [Will you marry me, Chidi?]”

And again, Chidi saw that bottomless depth in his eyes. That desperate, hidden thing that had called out to him with irresistible compulsion from the first sight. Vulnerability.

And again, he answered its call. “Sí. Dios, sí. [Yes. God, yes.]”

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Image Sources: One | Two

[marquisvincentdegramont]