Smoke drifted through the musty air, the scent of it cutting like a knife through the smell of mold and dust that permeated the abandoned building. Laurentia poked at the embers of the fire with a dirty stick. She was hunched over the fire, balanced unsteadily on the balls of her feet, one hand in the dirt to keep her from falling. To her left she could hear Valrin muttering over his wards. She thought she should feel some sort of magical pulsation or crystalline precision in his words, but they might as well have been gibberish for all the meaning they had for her. She sighed, the exhale making the coals flare up briefly.
After a while, the fire had been clumsily coaxed into some sort of life. Laurentia leaned back against a grimy stone wall, halfheartedly tossing the stick to the side. Her knees were still bunched up before her, and she wrapped one arm around them, holding the other over the fire to get whatever meagre warmth she could. The muttering to her side abruptly ended, and in a few moments Valrin came shuffling over to the opposite side of the fire. Laurentia regarded him over the tops of her knees, wiping a smudge from her chipped spectacles. The glamour he was wearing today was grizzled and scarred, all copper-toned skin and ragged clothing. Laurentia wondered if the glamours he selected reflected his moods.
The silence stretched out longer than an Imperial’s wingspan, broken only by the occasional popping and crackling of the fire. Laurentia nudged at a rock with the scuffed toe of her boot and only succeeded in getting it dirtier than it had been. She huffed indignantly, a shadow of her former arrogance flickering across her face, and kicked the rock across the room. It kicked up clouds of dust as it bounced, and Valrin turned his head to watch it impassively before turning back to the fire. She turned her scowl to him, for lack of a better target.
“Have you ever gone outside with your real face?” she snapped at him, jerking her chin up and demanding answers. The routine was familiar, comfortable, and for a moment she had her equilibrium back. Her spine straightened and her eyes glinted in the firelight. She could almost imagine the weight of a crown on her head and the reassuring presence of Aureassima behind her.
The expected pattern was disrupted by Valrin turning his cool gaze to her, the ghost of a smile flickering around his lips. “Have you?” He regarded her with that air of superiority that he had decided he could have around her, even though he was a gutter-born brat and she was the emperor-to-be, damn it all, she had breeding and pedigree and gold and a palace and he had his stinking sewers, and-
And his ability to ward their hiding place from intruders, and his glamours and veils, and his tracking enchantments and his impressive ability to gather information, and all she had were the tattered remnants of a once-respectable outfit and a tendency for her skin to break out under stress. Which she was under a lot of, and she looked awful. Somewhere in the middle of this realization her chin had sunk back down below her knees, and Valrin’s smile had become more self-satisfied. She wrapped both arms around her knees now, hating herself for showing weakness in front of stupid awful Valrin but too tired to do anything about it. Her shoulders rose up and she leaned further against the cold roughness of the wall. She closed her eyes. She exhaled.
“I did. When I was younger.” Above her spectacles, in that blurry zone of vague color-shapes, she could see what she was fairly sure was Valrin’s head jerk up at her words. “I do not remember it, of course. But there’s photographs of me as a child that I am told are of just me.” She scuffed at the ground in front of her with her boot. “Then, of course, once I reached the age of seven or eight I became less adorable, and the alterations began. A bit funny, I suppose.” She smiled bitterly behind her upraised legs. “I have no idea what I looked like between then and now. No image of myself. No photographs, etchings, portraits of my real face. Just the ones that the palace constructed for me. Isn’t that odd.” She considered it for a moment, and then added “No, that’s not right. When I was… oh, maybe thirteen, one of my minders managed to get me to sit still for enough time to get a sketch of me. I suppose it was the only way I could be persuaded to sit still. I had the sketch for a while, but I think I lost it. I remember it though.” Her eyes closed. “My hair looked atrocious.” Exhausted, she rested her forehead against her knees.
The fire crackled, seeming far away in Laurentia’s ears. A piece of firewood fell and the embers underneath snapped loudly. Silence yawned over the half-ruined room once again.
“...I don’t, either.” Laurentia’s shoulders twitched, and she raised her head a fraction of an inch to look at Valrin. “I have no idea what I looked like.” She could tell from his voice that he was looking at her with his mouth twisted in a mocking smile. “This may surprise you, but those of us not born in a golden cradle do not have paintings made of us at every birthday.” His voice was not as harsh as she would expect, though. It was tempered with something… perhaps something like regret. “One does not consider one’s own face much, when one lives a life as I have. One is more concerned with concealing it..”
Laurentia rested her chin on her knees, looking through her peripheral vision at Valrin. His body language was more reserved, now, his shoulders drawn in and one knee up. She suspected that the only reason he was not copying her pose was that she had gotten to it first. Even through the glamour, his eyes looked pensive. He was staring into the fire, and for just a moment his face softened into contemplation, the corners of his mouth drawing downward into almost worry. For the briefest instant Laurentia contemplated saying something, and she opened her mouth, quietly sounding out “Va-”
“Area’s all clear!” Andraste bounced in and settled on a fallen flagstone like it was a councillor’s seat in the Senate. “And look, you two managed not to kill each other while I was gone! You really must like each other by now, hey?” She winked at Laurentia, who was the only one deigning to look at her.
Laurentia snorted and rolled her eyes. “What, me? Respect that gutter trash? The fact that he is useful to me for now does not- does not change the fact that he is a criminal.” Her imperious proclamation would have been perhaps more effective if she had not looked at Valrin midsentence and seen him glaring at her. She looked away, feeling oddly guilty.
Andraste seemed to catch the looks, and flicked her gaze between them. “OoookAY, well, I brought food so get over yourselves and eat the shit out of this grub.” Laurentia and Valrin both grunted assent, and Andraste handed out bread to the both of them.
Author's Notes:
Written 8/26/2014. This is set at an undetermined time in the Empire AU timeline where our merry band is on the run.