#perrine pepin

This tidy letter, sealed in white wax with the crest of House Pepin, is left on the desk of Gwenneth Ledigne with a small, bright autumn bouquet of agrimony and coreopsis.

Lady Gwenneth,

(though mayhap that title remains as odd to your ear as “Lord” to mine,) 

I wish to express my very deep gratitude to you, to House Dufresne, and to the people of the Bellworks for the many moons of employment I have here enjoyed. To not only be afforded an opportunity to work and learn under Negotiations, but to be warmly embraced by its people, has been a true blessing, and I come away with a turn-and-a-half of memories to revisit with fondness and cheer. In particular, the opportunity to work alongside my   partner has been a great gift, and mayhap was in part responsible for the happiness we now share.

But as one who has (unbelievably) received the honor of bearing the name of Pepin, I am now (even more unbelievably) to be entrusted with bearing the corresponding responsibilities – and, too, to serve as dutiful help-meet to my spouse here in Ishgard. As House Dufresne and its Bellworks now negotiate their parting of ways, mayhap the moment is also right for me to bid my farewells and enter the sole service of my new lord. 

Yet I understand that this timing may be particularly inconvenient for you and that you may soon, and for several moons, need extra assistance at the office. If this be the case, pray be certain of my gladness to stay for as long as you need, for I not only owe an invaluable debt to the Lord Ledigne but am indebted to you personally for all the accommodation and kindness I have received, and indeed confess to mayhap being happier as your secretary than I ever was at the Tribunal. 

Whatever your preference, I am certain I shall continue to see much of you, as I remain a partner of the Institute along with both my families – and, I pray, your admiring and devoted friend, 

Valroit Faucheux.

It is not unusual – in fact, ‘tis closer to usual – for a fairy tale to center as heroine a simple country girl: a milkmaid, a shepherdess, a little cinder-girl, who one day raises her eyes with wonder to the figure of a handsome stranger astride a white chocobo. He is gentle and polite, and after doing her a courtesy, he touches his hat and rides away; he is, she learns, a knight, the son of the Count, even a prince, in some tales.

It is not right, for a woman as lowly as she to close her eyes and see, impressed on the back of her lids, his face. But she does; she cannot help it. She remembers his face, his voice, his kindness, and carries the memory in the secret chamber of her heart. There it glows and gives her courage as she confronts the dragon-bridegroom, the evil stepmother, the wicked, wyrm-toothed witch. And someday, when they meet again, he bids her lift her face from where she’s turned it down in the lowliest curtsey – and when he looks into her eyes, shining with love, he remembers her, and he reaches out his hand to raise her to the seat beside him. 

… It is passing rare that things unfold like that in the cold daylight of the real Ishgard. Nevertheless, the tales are told, and the young maidens told them at least permitted to dream of gentle, kindly noble knights, highborn men who’d judge them not by their low origins but for their beauty and goodness. The expectation is balderdash, but the hope – the hope is allowed, allowed to keep hidden in one’s heart as a secret charm, to glow and give one courage: a fancy, a distant dream that maybe, just maybe, she might have her fairy tale someday, too. 

… Though the maidens in the fairy tales differ from Valroit Faucheux in one very important respect: they are all, without variation, impeccably pure and virtuous – in heart, body, and mind, exactly what they should be, and not one onze perverse. 

He recalls a day, three or four years ago, when he sat with Inquisitor Ledigne not in his dusty Tribunal office but in his pleasant sitting room, the fire burning warm with fragrant applewood. His lordship was suffering with a cold, and so Faucheux, his aide, had brought him papers and news from the Tribunal and ended up sitting with him over a pot of tea, asking questions and listening to his wisdom. Such occasions were, after all, the best time to do so — for the Inquisitor could say things he would never within the Tribunal’s walls, with its ten-thousand ears.

“I disagree with him,” said the Inquisitor this time, for example: “I do not think inquisitors ought to prosecute the mere consideration of heresy." 

"Truly?” Faucheux balked, surprised to hear this even from Rosaire Ledigne’s lips. 

“I do not think, mind, that open profession of heretical sympathies ought to be allowed. That talk encourages others, and the evil spreads like a pestilence. But mere brief fancies that flit across the mind – a moment of doubt – proposing that we hound people for so little seems, to me, madness. And even if a man confesses, in confidence, that he has felt a prolonged temptation, debated it within himself – is it not the truer testament of his character that he has felt it and yet resisted, that he kept that darkness locked away inside himself, never acting on it, never allowing it to spill over onto others?" 

The Inquisitor was as eloquent and able to persuade him as ever, and Faucheux nodded. 

"Besides,” and a faint smile crept into the man’s usually inexpressive face, “the mind is a man’s private kingdom. You may put his body in shackles, but the mind remains free, known only to him and to Halone – and we are all quite the better for it, for after all, what would become of polite society if one’s interlocutors knew what he was really thinking! Aye, 'tis folly to think that we as mortal men can know men’s thoughts, police them, and prosecute some as crimes. Better to know and judge a man by his words and actions, to educate him in the right way and support him on that path – but to allow him the final privacy of his secret heart for wrestling his own darkness." 

And if the Inquisitor did not believe in thought-crimes, Faucheux would not either – and in the secret recesses of his heart, he’d keep that hope, that dream, and though of course he felt a deep shame, still he kept it.

It was forbidden and almost certainly wrong, that fancy. What may be permitted in fairy tales is not always smiled upon in the book of real life. The highborn houses hate to squander their scions even on marriages into inferior noble lines; if a son or daughter dares to wed a lowborn, their parents are invariably outraged. As a low-ranked aide at the Tribunal, not oft allowed to assist on cases of genuine heresy, Faucheux learned that well; from time to time a suit pressed by such angry nobles would come before the court, searching for some grounds on which to declare a child’s secret marriage illegal. 

And – those marriages were even between men and women who, aside from bloodline, were worthy of each other. A knight and the chirurgeon who tended him through the crusade — friends from childhood whose devotion never wavered. And… they were, undoubtedly, men and women. Real men, honest maidens, the latter virtuous and pure, the former lusty and strong, exactly what they should be, unimpeachable on at least those grounds. Their Houses might argue, but no witness to a wedding ever expressed, in their testimony before the court spiritual, the least doubt that the bride had the right to weave those flowers in her hair – the groom to enclose her dainty hand in his. 

To stand together, whether on the church porch or in a secret bower, was, for them, just, right, and natural. 

Forhim, though – he could not say. 

And he assumed that was as it would always be. 

And then, the knight arrived, though without even the announcement of a snow-white chocobo. 

He – Valroit – was, at the time, of two-and-twenty summers, more than enough to learn that he was not ever to be in a fairy tale. It was true that on first laying eyes on the knight – graceful, handsome, and kind – he was dazzled; but with no one to cue him that 'twas once upon a time, he did not attend as closely as he ought to have, was distracted instead with the gibbering of the Tribunal and the anxiety of a city under the gathering Horde’s shadow. 

The tale crept on without his being aware of it. They spoke, walked, fretted over the Inquisitor together; he wore his sister’s skirt one day to his new job at the Bellworks offices, and the knight looked at him and smiled. Somehow fate saw him quit his rented rooms in Foundation and move into the knight’s apartment, all for the very noble purpose of security surveillance, though ultimately the consequences included… other things. Only at that point did he begin to wonder – dared to wonder – if this might not be the act of Halone, or Nymeia, or Menphina, some gracious goddess who brought together this knight and this maiden, one infinitely worthier than the other, yet both of the same, queer kind. 

And even of exactly the same height. 

Consoling him when his mentor fell ill, encouraging him when he worried whether he should change to trousers before stepping outside, passing dresses that were beautiful but not right to wear on to him, telling him that he was suited. Introducing him to lord father and lady mother who, inexplicably, welcomed him with a shrug and a smile. 

The knight even rode down to his mother’s farm, breaking coarse brown bread with his peasant family and addressing them with all the courtesy of knights in tales, courtesy that real knights did not often spare for lowborn. 

His family was charmed – of course they were, faced with one so gentlemanly and suave – and the only comment to him was one of gentle bemusement: they liked this lady knight very well, of course, but they’d all been so sure that their sweet youngest boy would end up bringing home a young man. 

The secret, he thought, was that he had. 

And perhaps – perhaps – if Ser Perrine decided that such a paltry, hapless, lowborn suitor was good enough for her – perhaps it would not be so wrong for them to kneel before Halone’s altar, flowers in the hair of the maiden, the maiden’s hand in the knight’s, if between them they just about made one man and one woman. 

But by this day, when the dawn’s fingers finally reach them where they stand, waiting and shivering, far above Ishgard, Coerthas, Dravania, and the clouds, he finds that he has changed his mind.

They brought with them a branch of orange blossoms from the greenhouse, treated alchemically to endure the journey. By lamplight that morning, the moogles of Asah, who’d converged in excitement on the couple as they donned their wedding dress, helped Perrine thread it into his hair; all the while they’d asked questions – if all their people’s weddings were so, if mayhap the landlords had once walked in procession, as they did, to Bahrr Lehs, where the old Count waited to bless them. 

And… no, most weddings were not at all like this. 

But as he looks over at the face of the one beside him, shining gold in a ray of the sun, he thinks: perhaps it is right to be so. 

It is not only that they are, after all, a very queer pair – such that this, too, should rightly be just as queer. But, too, it is that they are a queer pair – and when he thinks that now, he does so in a different wise. 

Between them they make one man and one woman, and on such grounds they could beg a morning in a traditional chapel, overseen by a traditional priest speaking traditional words. But – gradually, over the recent moons – he’d come less and less to wish to grovel and apologize at the altar of the usual.

It had been easy for him to be… if not always ashamed, perhaps self-deprecating, when it was only his self: an odd and awkward creature, a poor man and just as poor a maiden. But when it is not only he but that perfect knight, graceful and elegant, fierce and kind – he could not even think her perverse, and slowly, as he came to be persuaded that really, actually, she might like him, even want him at her side as her complement, her partner – he could not so easily condemn himself, either. 

If she, shining in the light, woman and gentleman both, is perfect – perhaps he, man and maiden, may be more than forgivable – even valuable, too. 

Because she – and so, perhaps, even he – is exactly what she should be. 

That tale – when, once upon a time, a lowborn country maid stumbled into the path of a shining knight and then, at the end of her long travail, found herself made his lady wife – that tale that he held in his heart as a child and later as a youth, not then as an object of true hope but as a warm and pleasant fantasy, somehow, by the wild fancy of the gods, came miraculously close to true.

Yet today, as they turn away from the old Count and towards the shimmering Mists, a landscape he cannot see for the tears in his smiling eyes – he looks into his heart and finds that fairy tale no longer there. 

But the tale when, once upon a time, a lowborn country maid – Scholasticate pity-case and Inquisition washout, artless and charmless and unable even to answer, if questioned directly, if he were a boy or a girl – stumbled into the path of a highborn knight who, though in competence and courage so exceeding his he could not hope to be her match, still formed the perfect complement to his heart – 

that tale, which must be even more impossible than the first, even ending not in tragedy but in song and smiles –

that tale, he finds, is even better – and it is the one that, by the grace of the Twelve, he lives.

(( I began to write and illustrate this intending it to be a piece for @halonic for our RL wedding and Valroit and Perrine’s IC wedding (which happened at the same time.) It… ended up being a lot more complicated and difficult than I was anticipating – especially the illustration – and competing obligations saw me not finish it until NOW, THREE MONTHS LATER. Buuuut thematically it is perfectly suited to Pride, so at least that worked out nicely.

With love for my husband, my support and inspiration. While we’re binary unlike our characters, we have our own beautiful queer relationship, and I can’t believe I get to live my own fairy tale.

Alarger version of the illustration is up at @hasty-touch. ))

halonic:

@tinycatteandfriends

Dearest Oleander,

At last I worked up my courage to ask him, and he said yes. I have heard rumors of moogle marriages and so we will travel to Moghome in the Churning Mists to elope. One of my father’s old friends (tho not a moogle) is there as well, and perhaps he can help us. Pray we do not get eaten by dragons on our honey-moon!

Yours,
Perrine Pepin

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halonic:

It started innocently enough. Perrine was often tasked with escorting visitors, particularly important ones, through the display greenhouses, graced as she was with the dual skills of nicely asking someone to stop doing something and acting as if no question or comment were unworthy of her time. When she was a child, she had relished the chance to demonstrate her competence to strangers while showing her family how responsible she was; truthfully, she hadn’t changed in that very much by the age of five-and-twenty.

So she was unsurprised to be introduced to two visitors from Ul'dah, a distinguished man and a lady she supposed was his somewhat-younger wife.

“From the East Aldenard Trading Company,” Gratien had said before the meeting, and he gave her a long look that was probably meant to Mean Something. “We are in negotiations to form a partnership for trade with the Far East. A potentially very lucrative partnership indeed. To our mutual benefit, of course.”

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