#daphnée YOU'RE JUST SO SWEET

[moonb-eam]

Hi, sorry if you're already answered it, but i wanted to ask about the dinner at Eliott's castle, when Lucas went to the drawing room to the teleskope and Eliott came to him, can you please tell me (if you want!) what was Eliott thinking? He wanted to say something to Lucas and they were interrupted by Arthur. It's totally okay to not answer, thank you so much for that story! ❤️❤️

hello lovely!! 🌷you’re so sweet thank you!! ☺️

I actually haven’t answered this question before, so let’s dive in!!

It goes like this:

They finish dinner, and decide to play cards.

Eliott doesn’t know where the suggestion comes from, somewhere between Arthur and Herman’s conversation about horribly lost bets, and Daphné’s insistence that she had never lost a hand of cards in her life (which is true), but he’s grateful for the enthusiasm with which the idea is received, because it means that they stay.

It means that Lucas stays. Just a little longer.

Eliott can feel minutes falling from the gaps between his fingers like water, and inevitable end to the storybook night where every smile was shy and every glance was a secret between two people.

Eliott remembers the story only vaguely. Perrault, with a young woman who ventured out her cruel household to a ball. Then, the chiming of midnight, and it all goes away. A dress that turns to tatters. A carriage that turns to a vegetable.

It’s far from midnight still, but Eliott fancies himself the young woman counting down the minutes at her ball. Or maybe he’s the carriage.

He wants to follow them into the drawing room, because he wants to see their faces when Daphné holds her promise to win back any money she lays down, and because he wants to get a spot at the card table where he can be across from Lucas again, and watch the way candlelight caresses his skin.

But he stays behind to help clean from dinner, because the dishes are heavy and the staff must be tired, and because that’s what he always does, whenever they finish a meal. He waves off Daphné with their guests and tries in vain to ignore her when she points at Lucas’ turned back and mouths at Eliott, I like him.

Eliott makes a face at her, picking up another plate.

How could you not?

Clearing the table is usually a quick process, quicker tonight for how distracted Eliott is throughout, thinking of Mr. Savary’s obvious and alarming admiration for Daphné, Mr. Broussard’s keen eyes that seemed to catch every heartfelt look Eliott sent to Lucas that night, and of Lucas himself, and the sweet way he smiled at Eliott over his glass of wine.

It’s likely that Eliott was too obvious in his longing, his heart a phantom weight in his palm, and that was what Mr. Broussard noticed when he stared at him. It’s likely the reason Mr. Broussard was staring at him in the first place. Eliott would be embarrassed by it, if it weren’t for the shrewd grin that accompanied Mr. Broussard’s appraisal, something that was more approving than judgemental.

But perhaps Eliott is overthinking it.

Perhaps he’s overthinking Mr. Broussard’s perception just as he may be overthinking Lucas’ smiles and soft gaze. Just because he didn’t exude any outward ire towards Eliott doesn’t mean that he...

It doesn’t mean that...

(It doesn’t mean that a garden of hope needs to bloom in Eliott’s chest like this.

Yet, it does.

It does.)

“Eliott?”

He started when Madeleine touches his arm.

“Yes? Yes. Um.” He glances around the room. “If that’s the last of the dishes then you can...um.”

“Yes, we’re headed down.” She grins, patting him on the arm. “Best to return to your guests, chéri.”

The glint in her eye makes Eliott want to hide under the dining room table.

Tonight, it seems as though everyone knows.

“I shall...do that,” he says lamely, and he scurried away from Madeleine’s teasing smile, turning towards the drawing room, before he recalls the conversation he had with Mr. Leplein about literature, and how Herman said he had not yet had the chance to read Candide, and Eliott pivots on his heels, heading the opposite direction down the hallway.

He’s certain has a copy of the novel in the smaller drawing room. The study, as he likes to call it, even though it’s more a reading room than anything else.

Eliott has never been one to shy away from lending things out, and he can’t imagine anything that’s better to share than a book. Besides, the copy he’s thinking of is new, purchased to sit on the shelf and be an addition to his library. He has an older copy, one that is well-thumbed with tightly-scrawled notes inked into the margins. It’s the copy Eliott bought for himself after his father died, a delayed act of rebellion for the man who banned any and all Voltaire from the house.

Eliott bought himself a copy in Paris, on a trip to see the family lawyers, and he’d spent that entire night awake in his hotel room, reading in a daze. Then, on the journey home, he read it again. Then, he read it again, with a pot of ink at his side.

There was something about the novel that speaks to Eliott directly - its insouciance, its boldness, its humour, the main character’s journey of disillusionment. It gives him a feeling that someone has looked directly into Eliott’s mind, his heart, and has given him the words they pulled from him, but rearranged them differently so they make sense, so that Eliott can find and be found all in the turn of a page.

This is, at its most basic level, what literature has always done. It’s why Eliott adores it so.

He thinks, that even if Mr. Leplein doesn’t have the same epiphany Eliott does, that he will enjoy the humour in it, and the exciting pacing of events. He seems like a man who appreciates nothing more in the world than a good story.

Eliott stops at the entrance to the study, and as he squints into the dark room, he sees something shift there. A layer to the dim that is thrown into awareness by moonlight. For one wild moment Eliott wonders if he’s being burgled, but then his eyes catch on the slope of the figure’s shoulders, the tilt to their head as they examine the brass telescope in the corner of the room, and Eliott’s heart begins racing for another reason entirely, because he knows it’s him.

Lucas has found the telescope.

(Really, there could never have been any other fate.)

Eliott’s eyes adjust to the darkness, and he can see more of Lucas now. He can trace the slope of his neck and notice how his fingers are clenching in the air, as though they want to close the distance between warm skin and cool brass, but don’t dare to.

Now that he’s here, now that Lucas is seeing the telescope and seeing Eliott’s beating heart in his hand, and extended, the worst thing would be for Lucas not even to use it. Or to touch it.

So Eliott says, “You can touch it, if you want,” and Lucas startles like he’s a rest bird that’s been shaken from its nest.

“You scared me,” Lucas says, and Eliott’s stomach turns when he thinks of the last time those words were said to him, right before his disastrous proposal.

But he does his best to push forward. They’re not they’re, no - they’re here.

He spots the copy of Candide on the small table between the chairs and waves it through the air like a white flag.

“He says he’s never had a chance to read it,” Eliott explains.

Lucas seems to take this in stride, and then he asks, “You wouldn’t mind? If I touched it?”

Would Eliott mind.

He nearly laughs, a hysterical giggle building somewhere deep in his chest, and it would be so simple to tell him then, to say what Lucas has likely already guessed: You don’t even need to ask. It’s yours. It’s always been yours.

Yet there’s a fragile peace building between them, something a Eliott understands is fragile and young. This is Lucas asking, and so he says, without any irony, “I wouldn’t mind.”

Watching Lucas hesitantly reach out, then become more confident as his fingers meet the brass, caressing and travelling and touching so throughly and wondrously makes Eliott’s heart stutter and head swim.

He wonders what it would feel like, to be touched like that. To be touched like that by Lucas.

But watching Lucas fawn over the telescope also tugs in something fond and underneath Eliott’s ribcage. It fills him with something equally wondrous, to watch Lucas be so intrigued by something Eliott was able to give him.

He takes a step closer. “Do you like it?” He asks, at once desperate to know, to hear it, and when Lucas laughs, Eliott can’t help but smile.

“I like it,” Lucas says, and then: “I’m very fond of the stars.”

Eliott thinks of every time he saw Lucas’ head titled back to the sky, every time he saw him inhale the night air as though it keeps him alive, every time he smiled at the mention of a telescope, and he feels himself soften.

“Yes.” He says quietly. “I know.” I know you, he doesn’t say.

He didn’t even realize he’d taken another step forward, and he’s closer to Lucas now than he first thought he was, close enough to see to the depths of his midnight ocean eyes.

In the reaching hand of the moonlight, he looks ethereal. Untouchably beautiful.

Yet somehow, Eliott knows him.

“Lucas,” he says, and he can hear how pained his voice is, straining with the weight of everything that he hasn’t said but is at once desperate to: I know you, It’s always been yours, you can keep it if you like, I love you, I still love you, Do you know what you do to my heart when you smile at me?

And, above all: Do you think you might be beginning to know me? Do you think of me differently now?

Lucas raises his eyes to him, and Eliott’s throat is tight, but he’s opening his mouth again, mortifying honesty dripping from his tongue like too-sweet caramel, and he’s-

“Lucas!”

Eliott leaps to attention as though he’s a boy who’s been caught daydreaming again. The Voltaire drops to the floor with a smack and Eliott’s ears are ringing as he stoops to retrieve it, and he barely manages to take a step away from Lucas before Mr. Broussard is poking his head into the study. When he sees Eliott, then sees Lucas in the room with him, the shrewd smile returns.

It’s still not close to midnight, but Eliott accepts the interruption for what it is, and lets any magic that had been building in the moonlit space between him and Lucas fade to nothing.

Except-

Except there’s Mr. Broussard asking Eliott to join them at their inn, to try some of that famous scotch, and there’s Lucas, saying, “One drink, Mr. Demaury?”

And there’s magic, still.