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The stillness in the air between them that had once been awkward and filled with his nervous prattling. Now, though, the silence between them was comfortable. Lorenz savored that comfortable quiet as he lifted the fine bone china cup to his lips and sipped. While his favorite rose tea wasn’t something they could find during the war, Marianne’s favorite was still stocked in the nearby village.
Lavender… an aromatic tea, with an earthier taste than he usually preferred, but mixed with a splash of cream it was quite a rich experience all around. He had come to appreciate lavender, and all things she liked.
“I need to tell you something,” Marianne’s voice broke the silence. Lorenz looked at her as he lowered his teacup and found that at his side, she was staring at her hands clasped in her lap. She wasn’t trembling, but she was clearly nervous.
“What is it?” he asked, reaching a hand to her lap, cupping his palm over her two, trying to still her nerves.
Marianne took a deep breath. “I want to tell you about my family. About… my crest.”
Lorenz frowned. He was looking at her face, watching the small muscles of her countenance tense with each word. How his hand itched to reach out and massage away all of her tensions. How he wished to shield her from every misfortune that she had ever faced.
“I already know all of that, Marianne,” he murmured, his thumb caressing her knuckles. He silently counted them, savoring each pale bump. It had only been a fortnight since they had faced down the black beast in the misty wood. Since the originator of her crest had been slain. Did she think he had forgotten so quickly of the torment that she had carried all those years?
Marianne shook her head, the short, soft hairs of her forelocks swaying side to side. “No, I mean… I want to tell you about my parents. My father…”
Her voice was so quiet, nearly a whisper, but no less firm. The determination etched into her face like a fine, classical sculpture. Delicate emotions carved in marble.
“Alright,” he whispered back. “I will always be here to listen, Marianne.”
Her shoulders relaxed and her head tilted briefly to one side before she looked directly at him, her soft, brown eyes meeting his. They were wide and bare before him, spilling with memories and horrors and a trust that he didn’t think she’d known for a very long time.
“I was born in a tiny village on the edge of a forest,” she began. “In a small, simple cottage… My father was nothing more than a wood-cutter. My mother never learned how to read. I’m common born.”
Lorenz realized that had she told him this five years ago, when he wore gilded blinders and had yet to really experience any of the world or learn the error of his own upbringing, then he would have recoiled from her. All of his attentions for her would have ended right then and he would have regarded her with polite distance. A cold shoulder between them, to maintain a distance from those outside the nobility.
He felt disgusted with the foolish child he used to be.
“It sounds like it must have been a lovely way to grow up,” he told her.
Marianne’s eyes welled and her lips rose into a fragile, sad smile. “It was. My mother used to make the best cherry pies and my father told me stories by the hearth before bed. I used to be happy and…” there was a catch in her voice, and Lorenz could tell that she was struggling not to look back down at their hands clasped together in her lap. He gave her fingers a squeeze.
Let every brave spirit in Fodlan find her, so that she would know surely in her heart that she didn’t have to hide this from him. That she’d never have to hide it from him, for as long as he still breathed.
“When I was ten years old, I started having strange dreams,” Marianne whispered. “About… about monsters and fog and blood…”
He shuddered to imagine what those terrors must have been. Had she dreamed of anything close to the monster Maurice, then she must have been beside herself. So young and plagued by visions of violence like that.
“I told my father about them,” Marianne continued, her face tensing and creases pursing between her brows. “And he… he pulled me away from the house. He told me I could never tell my mother, that I couldn’t tell anyone. He said that… that the dreams were something I had to fight. That if I resisted, I would be safe.”
Lorenz frowned. He didn’t understand what she was talking about. But he didn’t interrupt, he didn’t dare.
Marianne took a breath. “The dreams started off being very infrequent. I didn’t have them much… but as I got older, they came more and more often. And… they grew more and more violent, I… I would wake up in my mother’s garden, bare footed and covered in mud, trying to scratch at my arms until I b-bled…”
It took all he had not to gather her into his arms right then. Lorenz felt his chest tighten, bursting with the need to hold her, to protect her. He yearned to kiss the creased between her brows and cradle her in his lap like the scared child she had once been.
“When I was thirteen, I woke up one morning in the woods. I was so cold, and covered in dirt and… my hands were bleeding,” her voice was as thin and brittle as an autumn leaf. Lorenz leaned closer, placing his other hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. He could see her willing herself to be strong. “I was lost half the day, but… when i got home again, my parents were gone. Both of them just… disappeared.”
Lorenz’s throat tightened. Only thirteen. That explained the Margrave’s sudden and mysterious appearance of a daughter that no one had known about before. He could remember his own father scoffing about it at the time. Lorenz’s father had made cruel comments about the girl being illegitimate. How unaware they had all been.
“Marianne…” Lorenz murmured, rubbing a circle against her back. “I’m so sorry you had to face such tragedies alone.”
She took a deep breath and nodded, briefly closing her eyes before she met his gaze once again. “My father had the crest too. I didn’t know what happened to them for years, but…” Lorenz knew what happened to them, she didn’t have to say it. Her parents had died, by one means or another, no doubt somehow to do with the beast, Maurice.
“Did you keep having those night terrors?” he asked. “Even when we were students here?”
Marianne nodded, smiling in an apologetic way. “My dreams only stopped… recently,” she admitted. “After Maurice was defeated.”
By the Goddess, she’d been suffering through this alone all this time. Lorenz squeezed her hands. He had to reign in the urge to kiss her head and coddle her completely. It would be inappropriate, no matter how much he wanted to. They were closer than ever, and Lorenz knew how brightly his torch for her burned in his chest, but they weren’t courting.
He had been waiting for the right moment to ask.
“Oh, my poor little dove,” he breathed. “All this time…”
“I’ve just been so scared for so long that I… I didn’t know how to ask for help,” she admitted. “I thought I had to hide, to protect others from--” Marianne’s voice cut off, but Lorenz understood her meaning.
The curse she had always been so afraid of was her parents’ disappearance. She feared anyone else dying like that because they were too close to her.
“You’re not alone anymore,” he asserted. “You’ll never have to be alone again, Marianne. Not so long as I still draw breath.”
“Thank you, Lorenz,” she spoke softly. The downward tilt in her brows lessened, easing the tension between them. “I wanted to tell you about it sooner, but… It’s difficult to say.”
“I understand. I probably haven’t helped,” he admitted. The last time Marianne had tried to tell him about her crest had been before the fight in the forest, and Lorenz remembered how he had insisted she not say anything at all until she could tell him without her hands shaking. While he had meant it to be a reassurance that he would never judge her for facets of her past, he could now see how he may have made it more difficult for her to confide in him.
But Marianne shook her head. “No, you’ve been a help,” she insisted. “Because as… as difficult as it was to say these things out loud, I wasn’t afraid of you knowing. I’ve just never talked about it before. It brings up many… sad memories.”
In one smooth motion, Lorenz indulged himself one urge and knelt in front of her. He held both of her hands between his and looked up into her eyes-- her beautiful brown eyes, so open and emotional.
“We can make better memories, Marianne,” he offered, holding a whole lifetime of implications in only a few words. “To help lift up the others.”
She blinked and she smiled, her cheeks coloring like peonies buds in spring.
“I’d like that, Lorenz.”