Chapter Text
The cottage he rented is closer to the Italian border than it is to the nearest French town. When Nathalie wakes up, she wonders if she’s on a different planet. All her life, she’s lived in cities, surrounded by brick and concrete, sandwiched among the nonstop lives of the urban public, who were always on the move to catch a bus or train or cab threading their way through narrow passages. Her eyes flutter open and blink out of the window by her head, where none of that remains. They left that behind miles ago. Now, all she sees is vast blue sky and magnificent mountain slopes, cascading in swaths of white and green and gray. They are surrounded. The road winds around the mountainside. Gabriel’s grip on the steering wheel is firm. His eyes are dull. They flick to her briefly, and then front again.
“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says.
Pressing her thumb and forefinger to her eyelids, Nathalie tries to shed her grogginess. The mountains were a slightly alarming sight to wake to, so she keeps her gaze fixed on her shoes as she fights to keep herself from falling asleep again. She doesn’t speak. It feels as though months have passed since she and Gabriel have said more than a few words to each other at once. It might’ve been less. A couple weeks.
There just hasn’t been much to say. She wants to believe she knows how he’s feeling anyway.
In one of their fleeting exchanges, she’d suggested, simply, that they should get away. To her, that seemed the obvious solution. They couldn’t speak, because they were suffocating where they were. And he’d nodded. He’d said, “We should,” like it was some thought he’d forget when the day passed into night. He didn’t, however. He’d hung on to her words, put them into action.
Nathalie imagined a penthouse on the other side of the city, something still in reach of the life he’d built since calling Paris home. Surely, she thought, he wanted to preserve as much of that life as he could, even as he watched, with helpless consternation, as it slipped between his fingers piece by piece.
He isn’t a man that copes well with change. Nathalie didn’t expect a shift of scenery so drastic as this, from twinkling Parisian lights to the Milky Way. From steel and stone to evergreens dusted with snow. But they left. They packed two suitcases each, loaded them into the back of the largest car Gabriel owned, and set off south that morning. The sun’s light bounces off the snow blanketing the slopes, and the blinding reflections impress upon the car, making Nathalie squint even as she refuses to look. She’s explored landscapes like this before - with him - but something about this place feels especially foreign. Maybe it was that she doesn’t know when she will be back. Maybe it was that there is something permanent and sublime about uncertainty. Nathalie always had a plan. She always thought she knew where her life would take her.
Every time, she has been wrong.
They arrive just before noon, after rumbling for a couple miles along an unpaved road that cuts narrowly through the trees. Nathalie can breathe just fine; they’re elevated but not too extremely, so even her half-worthless lungs aren’t noticeably more challenged than they would be in Paris. But the rest of her body is around the same degree of unusable, which means that when she steps out of the car, she doesn’t trust her legs to function on their own after several hours of sitting. Without a word, Gabriel walks around and takes her by the arm and begins to lead her to the door.
Winter still sticks in the air, and as they walk, the wind rakes its claws down her cheek. As they emerge from the thick cluster of trees dividing the road from the house, she wraps her wool scarf tightly around her face and looks out over the view from the porch.
It’s spectacular. She can hardly believe it. In the distance, mountain peaks press into the horizon as though they’d been painted there, fading into the smoky blue haze. Though the cold air stings her eyes, she can’t look away. When she whispers a soft, “Wow” under her breath, she hears Gabriel beside her, his affirmative sigh. She glances at him, and sees in his face the ache for something familiar.
He grew up with this brilliant view, or at least something similar, straddling the French and Italian border in the foothills of the Alps, walking distance from a church with a spire attempting to rival even Mont Blanc. That’s one of the reasons she’s shocked to be here. As long as she’s known Gabriel, he’s never shown any interest in going home. Home is a hard word for him to even define. Home is his comfort zone, that’s what Nathalie believes. But something must have drawn him back here, if not the people he once knew, his family still scattered across the southeast corner of the country, then the nature: the clear air; the open sky; the quiet - such complete, imposing quiet. She tries not to imagine what it would be like to cross paths with one of them someday. Tall, blue-eyed, stern-faced. Everything and nothing like him at the same time. That is what she’s always pictured.
The cottage is smaller than she expects. He’d shown her pictures before the drive, but somehow, in her mind, she’d pictured something much grander. Perhaps, she is all too used to the lifestyle they were breaking from. Perhaps she is realizing only now that they truly are breaking from it, that they - Gabriel - aren’t being selective about the changes they are ready to embrace. Perhaps it is easier for him to throw everything away in favor of a clean slate, that keeping as little as possible from the life they know will make missing the individual pieces a lot less painful. She doesn’t know.
She can’t stop thinking about it. She can’t stop wondering why and how and what next and if they deserve it.
She might be more like Gabriel than she thinks. After a minute of staring out over the valley, they turn around and enter the cottage.
It is a squat, square little building with two floors, small windows, and a thatched roof. The lower floor is clearly older, built out of irregularly sized stones and a door that sticks when Gabriel pushes it against it. The paint job on the wooden upper story looks new, a cranberry red with white trim and windows that open out while squeaking. The ceiling is vaulted, and they will have to duck when standing near the outer walls.
Gabriel seats her on a flannel sofa situated between two wooden posts in the middle of the space and disappears to find the distribution board. Nathalie takes in the room. The floor is almost entirely carpeted, except for one section of it beneath the kitchen, which is checkered with white and gray tiles. It seems like it has been updated recently. The appliances are stainless steel, and the cabinetry has been painted a robin’s egg blue with dark butcher-block countertops. A square window above the kitchen sink hides behind taupe-colored curtains. It’s quaint, but functional. It’ll work. They’re alone here, after all.
In the sitting area, the sofa is accompanied by a rocking chair and a short coffee table, the surface of which is a little banged-up, but the legs of which had been ornately and beautifully carved. Nathalie swipes her hand across the dust and rubs her fingers together. An old stone fireplace gapes directly at her, its maw dark with soot.
To her left, near the kitchen, is the table and three chairs, pressed up against the window overlooking the porch and the valley behind. The outdoor furniture had been covered in canvas and stored against the wall of the house for the winter. It’s early March, still too cold to put it to use, but as Nathalie gazes out, she imagines that it would be lovely to sit in the fresh air with tea and a book, gazing into the picturesque view.
“How are you?” Gabriel asks, startling her out of her thoughts. His voice shatters the silence. She realizes for the first time that their environment is so absent of sound that the quiet takes solid shape around them. Suddenly, she is uncomfortable. An eeriness tiptoes up her spine.
“Cold,” she answers.
“It should warm up in a few minutes. I was warned the heating here isn’t ideal, but we’ll layer up. And I packed a heated blanket as well.”
“Great.”
He walks to the sink, and the pipes hiss as water spurts out of the faucet. The pressure evens out after about ten seconds, and Gabriel shuts it off.
“What do you think?” he asks, when she begins to look around again. On the fireplace mantle sits a frozen analogue clock and a dusty plastic plant with leaves that spill over the side of the tarnished bucket containing it. The stairs, which are steep and narrow, rise against the wall by the front door and have rows and rows of storage space beneath them. Nathalie notices travel books and encyclopedias, airport novels, folded towels, candles, a feather duster, and flashlights upon first glance.
“It’s nice,” she answers.
“It’s enough.”
“Does it remind you of where you grew up?” She gestures to the window, “The view I mean.”
“The view is better than anything I encountered in my hometown,” he responds. Then, a long pause elapses, and Nathalie expects that yet another conversation has come to its abrupt end. He begins opening the cabinets, familiarizing himself with the whereabouts of the dishes and glassware.
Then, he looks back at her. “My house was larger than this. There were six kids.”
Nathalie hadn’t remembered. She nods, giving him a small smile.
“But it was similar. We had a fireplace like that. A thatched roof. Low ceilings.” He reaches up and knocks the wooden panels looming not even a foot above his head. “I shared a room with my brother until he got his own life. I’m going to go get our bags.”
He leaves swiftly, and when the door bangs shut, Nathalie remains, still in her coat and shoes, still with the scarf around her throat. The silence fills with the rattling of the baseboard heaters.
It’s a lot to get used to.
When Nathalie wakes up in the mornings to the unrest of her stomach and a stinging throat, a part of her can take comfort in what she never had before: the fact that she was still the same. Even though it seems as though the rest of the world has flipped inside out, her body is the one thing that hasn’t changed, for even the melancholy that clings to their spirits is a new melancholy. The grief that weighs like silence in the middle of nowhere is a new grief. She isn’t sure they can recover here. She fears they’ve run headfirst into a place where those forces are amplified like echoing voices in an open valley.
But she shouldn’t be so quick to wonder if they’re making a mistake. Bearing in mind what they left behind, Nathalie tries to steel herself against her doubts. In time, they would adapt, immerse themselves in their new surroundings, and begin to heal.
Gabriel drops both of Nathalie’s suitcases in the house first and returns with his own a minute later. They hang their coats on hooks by the door before ascending to the second story. Right at the top of the stairs is a pair of double doors hiding a washing machine and dryer to one side and linen shelves to the other. A small, but nicely-furnished sitting area takes up about one-quarter of the upper floor, where a pair of armchair recliners face out towards a door leading to a balcony just large enough for two people to stand comfortably. The rug adorning the space looks like something Nathalie would have in her room in Paris, and she wonders if there’s a store in the nearest town where she can find something to bring back with her, whenever it is that they decide to go back. A tall bookshelf filled with yet more airport books but several immediately noticeable classics rises as high up as the sloped ceiling will allow. She’ll have no shortage of reading material while she’s here.
There are two bedrooms, both roughly the same size and painted the same shade of off-white above auburn wainscoting. Only one of the rooms has a desk, and Nathalie insists Gabriel take that one so he can use it for his creative endeavors, but he refuses. She should have the room closer to the bathroom, so she doesn’t have to walk as far.
“It’s about a two meter difference,” Nathalie points out, raising an eyebrow. “I can walk an extra few steps, Gabriel. I’m not that weak.”
He gives in, and places his bags in the room with the desk. It reassures her, at least, that he hasn’t totally lost his overprotective tendencies. Sometimes, she wondered if the Gabriel she knew was leaving her, little by little. But beneath his brittle, shell-like exterior, there are still these brief flares of warmth. She tries to hold on to them, hoping they won’t burn her.
Nathalie pulls the curtains from the window in her room. She looks over a different angle of the wilderness now, and here, she watches the ground rise up towards the road, where tall evergreens bristle in the wind and let the sunlight through in shards.
“Would you like help unpacking?” asks Gabriel, standing in her doorway.
She smiles. “Sure. Thank you, Sir.” She points at one of her suitcases. “That one contains the clothes I’d prefer to have hung in the closet.”
“Of course. And Nathalie?”
“Hm?”
He turns the suitcase onto its back and unzips it. “No need to call me ‘Sir’ here.”
“Right.” She flushes a bit, and opens the other bag, sitting cross-legged in front of the stout dresser beside the bed. After removing her bags of her skincare products and makeup to put in the bathroom later, she begins to fill the drawers with her pants, sweaters, and undergarments. Gabriel opens the closet door and grabs a number of wire hangers from the rod running from wall to wall.
“Would you ever want to see them?” she asked, after a silence.
“Who?”
“Your family.” She shrugs. “While we’re here. Maybe it would be good to connect with some people.”
Gabriel chuckles, but no humor reaches his eyes. “No, I’d rather not.”
“Connect with people? Or specifically with your…?”
“Neither, truly,” he answers, hanging a floor-length cardigan. “We came here to be alone.”
We’re always alone, she thinks. I didn’t think two people could be any more alone than we were in Paris, but it seems I was wrong.
She sighs. “How long has it been?”
“I was nineteen the last time I saw most of them.”
“When you moved to Paris.”
He nods.
“I understand,” she murmurs, pushing a drawer shut. It gives a loud creak as she does.
If there was anything about Gabriel she related to outside of his penchant for control, it was having a family he lacked any desire to reconnect with. And she knew that that isn’t what any of this is about. But after weeks of taciturn gloom, she feels that the change of environment should be pulling something out of them. Something new. Because there’s so much of their lives they’re not ready to talk about again.
Nathalie sits still. Her suitcase is mostly empty in front of her. Gabriel finishes hanging her jackets and nice shirts, and then glances at her over his shoulder.
“Do you want this under the bed?” he nudges the bag with his foot.
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
He kneels down at her side. Nathalie hastily empties the other bag as well so he can fit them both, and luckily there is just enough room between the floor and the bed to allow them. Nathalie’s hand drifts over the carpet slowly and meets Gabriel’s right as it emerges from under the bed. He freezes. As her fingers curl around his own, she doesn’t look directly at him, keeping her eyes fixed on the narrow space between their bodies.
She wants to say something, ask him a question, but all she can force out of her lips is a sharp breath.
She can feel his gaze, the gentle, hair-raising impression of their search across her reticent expression.
She waits to feel him even deeper.
And after a moment, she does. His thumb presses into the back of her hand, and in that soft touch, she senses him return, long enough for her to know that living in this unknown place for as long as they will isn’t going to destroy them any further.
He starts to get up, but as he does, his lips come close to the top of her head, where he pauses to tell her, “I’ll bring some sheets, and we can fix up the bed.”
“Okay,” she whispers.
He lets go of her hand.
A perpetual avalanche bears down on the house. Nathalie’s head starts to ache. It starts to ring. Must be the effort of her body to interrupt the sensory deprivation one can only experience in silence as complete as this. Even when Paris is at its quietest, there is always something to be heard; the roar of planes above the city, the din of distant cars, the rumble of an active, thriving world.
But here, there is nothing at all. She turns from her left side to her right, and the sound of rustling sheets temporarily calms the noise in her mind. But if she ever wants to fall asleep, she needs to stop shifting around.
It’s freezing. On occasion, the baseboards release a long, gravelly hum, churning heat into the room. But it’s not enough. Her toes are ice-cold through her socks. Shivering, Nathalie stares through the pitch black room in the direction of the door. It takes her almost fifteen minutes to coax herself to her feet out of reluctance to lose what little warmth she has under the layers of blankets piled onto the bed, but she needs a couple more. She wonders if her condition is making it worse. She already feels like she’s taken half the linen closet with her.
Holding out her hands to feel for the wall, Nathalie shuffles her way out of the bedroom. The door opens with a groan that seems all the louder in the dead of the night, but now, in the hallway, Nathalie can see a bit more clearly. There’s a bulb plugged into an outlet in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, and feathery blue light stretches out towards the top of the stairs, where the door to the linen closet hangs ajar.
She goes through the sheets and blankets remaining on the shelves. Her teeth are chattering. Though not impressed with most of what’s left, she finds one huge knitted blanket she can probably fold a few times to add some extra layers of warmth, and a cloth sheet so soft to the touch, that her fingertips almost melt into it.
Nathalie gathers them into her arms, shuts the door, and nearly has a heart attack when she turns around to find a dark silhouette hovering in the corridor.
“Oh, fu…” she pants, her back running into the closet door.
“Didn’t mean to give you a scare.”
“How didn’t I hear you?”
“I’m sorry,” Gabriel says. He steps out into the open, so that Nathalie can nearly make out the features on his face.
“Did I wake you?” she asks.
“No. New bed. Trouble sleeping. I was debating…” The faint reflections of light she catches on his face tell her his gaze has shifted from the floor upwards. He must be looking directly at her. “Are you cold?”
Nathalie answers, “Extremely.”
“Do you want the heated blanket?”
“I forgot about that.”
“I’ll get it.”
“I thought we’re not supposed to keep those on all night. Especially while I’m not particularly trustworthy of the outlets in this place,” she says.
“It’ll warm up your bed.”
He turns around and vanishes into the dark of his room again, emerging a moment later with the blanket. Nathalie follows him through her door.
“I’m going to turn on the light,” he warns.
It takes a few seconds for their eyes to adjust to the brightness. Gabriel and Nathalie pull back the sheets on her bed and spread out the heated blanket. Once it’s plugged into the wall, Nathalie leans back against the dresser. The ringing in her brain has been mostly tamed, but her head feels heavy. She lets it hang, her eyes drifting shut.
Cool hands on her cheeks startle her for the second time that night. Somehow, it’s not the temperature which makes her tense. In spite of the shiver that runs through her body and the biting air around them which has preyed on her all night, she knows that the cold has nothing to do with this. Gabriel holds her face, the shimmer through his eyes betraying the slightest stir of emotion, like a wing grazing across the surface of water to set off a gentle waver.
“Are you okay?” she asks, curling her fingers around his wrists.
“Me?” He turns one of his hands, presses it to her cheek and then her forehead. “You’re the one with the fever. That explains the chills.”
“That, and it’s frigid,” she counters. Appropriately, her teeth rattle as she speaks.
His visage darkens again. Hardening her grip, Nathalie manages to pull him closer, even just by a centimeter. She almost asks him something, though it’s not as much a question as it is a request she’s too afraid to make plain.
Then, “Maybe this was a mistake,” mutters Gabriel.
“What?”
“Coming all the way out here. We’re so far from everything. What if…?” His thumbs draw crescent moons beneath her eyes.
“I’m okay, Gabriel,” she tells him. “It’s nothing worse than what I’ve felt before.”
“Do you want to stay?”
“I want to do whatever is for the best, and frankly, I’m not certain what that is.”
There’s a pained contortion in his brow. “Nothing is clear anymore.”
Even to Nathalie, suddenly it feels as though Paris is full of too many open wounds like sinkholes threatening to swallow everything.
February battered them raw.
It’s quiet here, but she has her arms around him. Nathalie seals the space between them and holds Gabriel close, resting her forehead against his shoulder. The shirt he’s wearing is thick and soft. He smells a little like old linen.
“Let’s give it a chance,” she sighs.
“Can I stay with you tonight?” He hugs her around the waist, and already, the cold has to put up a fight against him. “I think I’ll sleep better if…"
“Of course you can.” She longs for him, in a way she never has before. Even that is different here. “You can stay any night you wish.”
He unplugs the heated blanket from the wall, and together they reassemble all the other covers on top of it. As Nathalie gets in, the warmth greets her vibrantly. She pulls the blankets up to her chin, and Gabriel shuts off the light. In slams the blackness, burying everything.
Gabriel gets in beside her, and it becomes evident quickly that the bed isn’t large enough for them both. Two smaller people could probably fit comfortably, but with Gabriel and Nathalie’s tall bodies and long limbs, they have no choice but to lie together, shoulder to shoulder, and then, inevitably, chest to back.
It probably won’t be pleasant for long, but in the moment, Nathalie lets out a blissful sigh as he curls his arm around her.
He feels like his old self.
She doesn’t know if that’s a good thing.
It feels good.
“Nathalie?” he whispers into the dark.
“Yes?”
“I’m grateful that you’re here with me.”
She clasps his left hand, his smooth, bare knuckles. “Wherever you go…”