the bones of a marriage — eurydice x lennon. [blitz]

[gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

↳ EURYDICE LE ROUX

Eurydice’s skin felt armored long after she had removed her heavy-brocaded dresses and other accessories that she wore to keep herself together. Something had grown over it, wrapped her up in its cocoon.

It was grief. She was a woman armored by her losses, shielded by her pain, and nothing could make Eurydice lower these defenses again.

Nothing, and no one.

The cold night air was only a whisper against her nightgown as she strode into the bedroom, well knowing Lennon would be there. They hadn’t gotten to the stage where they slept in separate beds, but there was an invisible chasm between them. They both hadn’t acknowledged it, and yet they knew. And it had grown larger after Eden, Echo, and Steel.

They were why she had come to bed early. They hadn’t talked about them, or rather, she hadn’t talked to him about them.

Now was the time.

“I don’t expect you to be their father,” she began abruptly. “But they are my children now, whether you like it or not.”

[calla]

↳ LENNON LE ROUX

He reads in the evenings now. The business calms down when the weather cools, and the children have been growing, no longer running through the halls screaming for him to play knight and dragon.

The absence, as most things do, make him ache. He's a soft man, maybe too much for a woman like Eurydice. He'd brought her flowers on their first date - red carnations, and she had looked at him like he was the strangest little specimen someone had stuck under a piece of glass. He adores her - always has, always will. But losing the children has done something to them both.

Lennon had stumbled on the new ones in the middle of the night, when he couldn't sleep and had gone down to the den to sit by the fire. One of the girls had been standing there, hands near the flames, and Lennon had turned around and gone back to bed.

There were plenty of weirder things he'd seen while living with the Le Roux's.

“You replaced them, Eury,” he says when she storms in, though not unkindly. “They're welcome here, but you know it's true.”

[gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

↳ EURYDICE LE ROUX

A coat of gold a coat of red
a lion still has claws
And mine are long and sharp my lord
As long and sharp as yours

She scoffed. Replaced. What a bold proposition, one wholly removed from the truth. Eurydice knew she could never replace her heir or her twins. If she could, the hole in her chest would have been long gone instead of growing cavernous. Instead of festering.

How can you replace blood?

Even a woman such as herself wouldn’t dare try.

No, what Eurydice had done was simply a means to an end, a way to nurse her hurt. And it was selfish and it was twisted, enough to distance her from her other children, but she couldn’t stop herself. She had lost too much for someone who had never felt loss before.

Eurydice walked up to the vase on their bedside table and ran her fingers along each red carnation rotting in it.

“If I can’t have my children back, I will have power instead,” she muttered. Then she faced him. He looked older, they both did, but his eyes remained as kind as they did the first day they met.

Hers, on the other hand, burned with white hot grief.

“One of my children – our children – a victor. Imagine that. We could take back everything the capitol took from us. We could,” her throat seized up then, pinpricks of tears filling it, but she gulped it all down and finished the rest of the sentence in a whisper:

“We could burn it all to the ground.”

And so he spoke, and so he spoke
That Lord of Castamere
But now the rains weep o'er his hall
With no one there to hear