He did what she expected, always the kicked puppy when he was forced to account for himself. His silence didn't surprise her; his cowardliness certainly didn't, but the look on his face, as if he was somehow the one being wounded, flipped a very unhelpful switch inside her. How dare he look at her as if she was the monster here. How dare he make her regret and resent the part of her that couldn't stop wanting him.

When he turned his back, something snapped. No, she wouldn't sit here without a means of defense and bleed for this man again. Absolutely not. She was out of her chair before she could think better of it, but she managed to keep from closing the distance between them. She didn't trust what she would do to him if he were close enough to touch. As it was, Angelica couldn't entirely dismiss the idea that hexing him might make her feel better.

"Don't you ever turn your back to me again. You will not run away from me tonight." It was as much a warning as it was a demand, neither of which she was sure how to enforce.

---

  

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MJ made this miracle!

Emrys looked back at her over his shoulder. He didn't turn back to the room. What had she been thinking would be achieved tonight? What could she possibly have been hoping would happen? She thought she was fighting, but for what? According to her there was nothing to fight for. He'd never cared for her and he'd never tried. That was her honest perception of events. Years of his life, years with her, and she had never seen any of it. Now she demanded he look at her, demanded he stopped running away. If she was trying to force him to action, he doubted she would like the result... but he didn't know what she'd wanted, so maybe this had all been part of her plan.

"This relationship is over," he said in a low tone. "You can have a divorce if you want one."

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Lou made this! <3

tw: pregnancy loss rears it's ugly head below

She hadn't come into tonight expecting to fight. She'd had an absolutely idiotic rush of optimism that maybe this time he would see how far she would go for him. Maybe he would see her and remember the way she would melt at his attention, her joy at the sight of him, how she made a bit of a fuss when her sheets lost the smell of him. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The words did what they were meant to do, they stung the betrayal evident on her face. But so was the exhaustion. So was every night she'd cried for him. Every time she wrote him an owl begging him to take her back into his heart and home before burning the parchment. There were a million reasons to agree, to cut her losses, and swallow her pride as she spent a few months as the laughingstock of Society with a newly tarnished reputation. It would be easier, maybe kinder to them both, but it wasn't her way. She'd never been smart when it came to him.

"If I wanted a divorce, I wouldn't be here." She didn't expect her words to move him, but she couldn't keep her mouth shut. Yet another unfortunate side-effect of being in her presence, potions be damned. "I want to come home. You are home. That never changed, but something did. You look at me differently now, now that I lost, that I wasn't," Angelica tried desperately to keep from saying the next words she knew were coming, would have cursed herself into silence if possible, but her hubris had made a potion instead. She'd engineered her own humiliation, and this time, when the tears threatened, she couldn't fight them, not as her tongue betrayed her. "I lost a dream, Emrys. I lost my baby, and it lost me you."

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The following 2 users Like Angelica Selwyn's post:2 users Like Angelica Selwyn's post
   Emrys Selwyn, Rosalie Hunniford

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MJ made this miracle!

It had been so long since they'd said the word that it startled him to hear it on her lips. The baby. He turned to face her, lips slightly parted. The baby had never existed according to the healers. The pregnancy symptoms were a facade over nothing of substance. Out of earshot of Angelica, the healer had even confided that this wasn't entirely unusual, for a woman her age. Too much hope and too little left in their body to make it a reality. He would never have dreamed of telling her that; at the time it would have crushed her to have her grief so handily dismissed. Later, they didn't talk about it. Now he'd said the relationship was over, and suddenly they did.

"I never cared about the baby," he said, shoulders sagging. He'd said that from the beginning. She'd never believed him. She'd accused him of agreeing to marry her because he wanted an heir. She'd pinned so much of her ideal for the future on the idea of the baby: that it would arrive and everything would be different. Maybe if she hadn't put so much into it she would have realized sooner what the healer had eventually had to tell them. Maybe it would have been conceivable to pick up the pieces and carry on, if she hadn't let all her hopes die with the imaginary child.

He looked at her a moment, so full of anger and desperation, with tears on her cheeks. He hated this, but even now he couldn't have held her. She looked like she would singe his skin if he tried. Maybe she had never meant to be held on to. "I can't do this."

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Lou made this! <3

"But I do." Did, she wanted to say did matter to her, past tense and gone. But it wasn't the truth; it had never been. She had dreamed of being a mother herself since she first held her baby sister as a teenager. Angela had imagined her own children before many had complicated the dream, thinking of how brilliantly clever her own child would be, the witch they would become. She always pictured a baby girl, expectations of Society aside, she'd always wanted a little girl that she could raise to be a brilliant witch, the envy of those around her. The dream had changed as disappointment paled her reality, but it was still a little girl she saw in her mind now, dark-haired, fair like her, and with Emrys' beautiful eyes. But her body betrayed her; the doctor's instance that she wasn't pregnant still seemed impossible. How could anyone be so fooled? How could she?

"Please. Please try." She begged. There wasn't a better word for how degrading it felt to ask for his effort. Almost as degrading as what her legs did now. She found herself going to the floor, going to her knees. The gravity in the room had changed near her, the weight of her despair too heavy to hold. She'd like gravity to do its job and crush her, remove her from existence, and make her heart stop hurting. But with her luck, she'd come back as some sort of spirit, doomed to haunt the walls of her home with her heart forever breaking.

She didn't stop breathing. Her heart wasn't good enough to stop clenching. No, her humiliation for the evening was not complete, not with a potion in her veins compelling honesty. She bit into her tongue, hard. Doing everything in her power to stop speaking, but the blood she tasted didn't silence the compulsion; only took her blood as an offering and found it unworthy. She would confess her deepest truths to this man, and she would live, cursed to remember what the cost was for ever falling in love.

"I will do anything you ask of me. I will be whatever you require of me. Please don't leave me. Please."

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The following 1 user Likes Angelica Selwyn's post:1 user Likes Angelica Selwyn's post
   Emrys Selwyn

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MJ made this miracle!

She was on her knees, begging. She would do anything, she said. Emrys felt ill. He wasn't the sort to take advantage of her vulnerability. He wouldn't have done it when he met her, or when he married her, and certainly not now that he'd broken her. The fact that she thought it was worth saying, that it might be something he would want to hear, was sickening.

He had told her from the start that it would never work. He had agreed to marry her because she said if he didn't then he would have ruined her socially, but by marrying her he had ruined her heart. It was always going to happen. A few months of an intense love affair wasn't enough to make a marriage, and they'd never had a chance to build anything more after the loss of the pregnancy. She'd been chasing something ephemeral and unrecoverable. She blamed him for not being able to do the impossible. He had tried to do his best by her. For years he had tried to comfort her through a grief he couldn't understand. He'd changed his entire lifestyle for her because he knew that it would sting her to hear about his habits. She didn't see his efforts. They were fundamentally opposed in personality, and maybe that was part of why they'd been so quickly drawn to each other when they'd met, and why they had been in the end so entirely incompatible. She wanted every fiber of his being; offering anything less was, to her mind, an intentional betrayal. He wanted freedom to be himself on his own terms, in his own time; it was impossible not to resent her prying intrusions. Particularly when they had risked putting an end to his relationship with someone with whom he was comfortable. But she didn't think about consequences, only about action — and here was the proof of it, with her crying on her knees.

"Angelica," he said softly. "You're better than this."

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The following 1 user Likes Emrys Selwyn's post:1 user Likes Emrys Selwyn's post
   Angelica Selwyn

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Lou made this! <3

"Were that true, we wouldn't be here. You'd fight for me. Not fight for us. And I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know what I said. Why?" There was no dignity left to lose in her grief. The survivor in her watched from a distance, coldly numb and removed from the broken witch her husband's floor. She looked smaller, the assertive decisiveness that made herself taller than she was shattered. The woman hugged herself as she cried. It felt cold, her body freezing despite the fire in the grate. She was exhausted, empty of anything but the well of her grief, which seemed endless. She'd poisoned herself, sick on the potion that was meant to be her deliverance. Honesty would be what finally killed her because, between sobs, she was compelled to disclose. "I need you to hold me. Please." She gasped, the effort to fight that last word making spots dance before her eyes.

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MJ made this miracle!

He was uncomfortable, and surrounded by her grief. This wasn't new. Her emotions consumed her; they suffocated him. It had been that way ever since the baby. Her words, if anything, only served to convince him further. If she had really taken the truth serum tonight, if these assertions were really true — she didn't know what she'd done wrong? He'd explained it to her so plainly, so patiently, how she could wrest trust from him like a prize to be won in battle. She hadn't heard him, or the meaning had already been lost on her. She truly didn't know? And she had no idea what she'd said? Were the words she'd thrown at him so trivial to her that she'd already forgotten them? She'd accused him of never trying, of doing nothing. There was no version of him that was capable of giving her what she wanted, because anything he'd done to date was too insignificant to even register for her.

Why did she still want to fight for him? She said he did nothing, never tried, never cared, and then she called him home. What twisted world was she living in, where both things could be true — true enough to say them under veritaserum? Was this a matter of pride to her, of not wanting to admit that she had lost?

No; there was nothing proud about her now. Emrys swallowed, throat thick, then wordlessly went to his knees and wrapped her in his arms.

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The following 1 user Likes Emrys Selwyn's post:1 user Likes Emrys Selwyn's post
   Angelica Selwyn

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Lou made this! <3

"This hurts." It was a gasp of a creature dying. A prayer to a God she almost, sometimes, believed in to make it end. How would she hold herself together when her truth was already, "I miss you. I miss you so much." It was her litany, the only thing that could be true as he came to the floor. The idea of a life without him, without the hope of ever earning his smile again, to never see the adorable way his face pouted when he woke too early, wasn't possible. The only thing worse than remembering the smell of his cologne was the idea she never would again. She dissolved into him. Oh God, she couldn't do this. "Please don't give up on me. Please, don't give up."

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MJ made this miracle!

Emrys continued holding her. He frowned as she spoke, and as she cried, and stayed silent for a long while. This was impossible. She didn't understand, but there was nothing he could do to make her understand, was there? She didn't see the inherent contradiction, when she said she was fighting for him and he had done nothing for their entire marriage. She didn't see what there was, according to her own words, according to what she absolutely believed to be true, nothing to fight for. It was illogical... he didn't know how she'd gotten herself into this position, so he was never going to talk her out of it.

(Unless she hadn't meant the things she'd said. Unless the veritaserum had been a bluff, and one she'd only haphazardly committed to. If she hadn't meant it then he could understand her denial now, not understanding where this was coming from, but — this whole thing had started because she said he didn't trust her. He was going to take her at her word that it had been a truth potion — and if she believed this then there simply was no alternative).

"You don't remember the last time I could stand you," he said, on the idle chance that maybe hearing her own words repeated back to her would illuminate the situation. "You fight every day and I have done nothing. I haven't tried." Her words, again — her honest, truthful perception of their relationship. He looked at her. His eyes were full of hurt and they were too close to make holding her gaze comfortable even if she hadn't been crying, but he thought it was worth it to try and get this through to her clearly. "There's nothing for you to miss."

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The following 2 users Like Emrys Selwyn's post:2 users Like Emrys Selwyn's post
   Angelica Selwyn, Rosalie Hunniford

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Lou made this! <3

Her hands clung tight to the arm around her, her grip on him feeling like the only thing binding her to reality. She’d made a mess of his shoulder already, a softer part of her regretting it, knowing how important to him his appearance was. It only made the tears come harder.

He turned her words against her, for what purpose other than to humiliate her, she wasn’t sure. She looked at him then, ready to beg for him to stop, to not mock her when she was this low. But his eyes were confusing, his look of hurt completely nonsensical. Why did he get to hurt when he was crushing her heart?

"There's nothing for you to miss." She shook her head at that, his ability to misunderstand her sparking a flicker of exasperation even in her distress. “I miss everything about you.” She searched his eyes through her own tears, looking for anything that signaled he heard her. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I missed something. Tell me I am blind and cruel and that I missed something, that I’m not remembering. Please make me wrong. I need to be wrong.” Never something she imagined asking.

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MJ made this miracle!

Tell her she missed something? She expected him to produce a laundry list of all the ways he'd loved her since they'd met while she sobbed into his arms? To what end? If they hadn't mattered to her in the moment, they weren't going to suddenly become meaningful with the benefit of hindsight. The ways in which he loved her were simply insufficient. He was reminded, cruelly or ironically, of his response when she'd first asked him why he wouldn't marry her: I do not believe we would suit. In the end perhaps that was what it had come down to; they were unsuitable for each other. People too intrinsically at odds for even the wealth of sentiment they had for one another to create any common ground.

He couldn't answer her. He didn't know how to say any of it in ways that didn't sound like blame. The immediate aftermath of the pregnancy that had never come to be was the starkest example. Every action he'd taken to try and support her had been worlds away from his comfort zone, but she didn't see how far he'd ventured out for her sake; she saw the deficiency between what he'd given her and what she needed, and called it neglect. He didn't think he could blame her for that — she had been consumed. But he also couldn't tell her any of this now and think it would change anything. What would he even possibly say? Her loss, of the baby that had never existed and that he had never wanted, had been difficult for him too? It was insensitive even to think the comparison, much less voice it.

"Fate was cruel to us," he responded. "But I could never accuse you of being cruel. And if you've thought me cruel..." he hesitated. If wasn't the right word; she'd more or less accused him of it tonight, and this was all what she honestly thought of him. The evidence she'd supplied in support of the point were all things he'd done out of love for her, or a sense of self-preservation for them both, but evidently she couldn't see his perspective. Moving her to another house — hadn't she felt how stifling this one had been when they were living here together? Hadn't she felt each day that they were killing themselves? He'd thought it a mercy to give them space to breathe, and to think; she called him cruel. "— I'm sorry."

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Lou made this! <3

"To hell with fate. I have never bowed to fate." The moment, her sincerity in that, her own remembrance of a younger that all spit at fate and paid the price. She wouldn't surrender him without a war against the heavens, no cost too high when it came to him. Couldn't he see that? She sacrificed control over her tongue, her heart exposed by her words. She would have given him her secrets, put his doubts to rest, anything she would do for him. But she couldn't do this alone.

She fought through her tears, a mix of terror and resolution in her eyes, to plead. "It's now I need you to be kind. Emrys, I'm afraid of how I feel. Every day, I wake up in that house, in exile, and it hurts. I'm...I hate breathing." She didn't have better words for the despair that choked at night when even her insomnia abandoned her. It made the mornings twice as bleak, her bed cold beside her. Because what was the point anymore? Why get up and go through the tedium of the day pretending the world had color in it when she would be here without him? "Please, help me try. I don't know how, but please help me try."

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MJ made this miracle!

Exile. Such a cruel term for it, made worse, like everything that had come out of her mouth tonight, by the fact that he knew she believed it. I hate breathing. He didn't know how to handle this. He never really knew how to handle her, but this seemed an escalation for which he was utterly unprepared. He shifted, loosening his grip on her. He didn't entirely let go of her, but he wanted to be able to see her better. His brow creased.

"I don't know how to help," he admitted. She could have anything she wanted, anything she needed. An income to pursue some distracting hobby, or to travel. A house abroad for a fresh start. A divorce.

Well, she couldn't have anything. There were two exceptions, two things he couldn't give her, and they were the only things she said she wanted: him, his being in its entirety, with no holds barred and no secrets kept and no reservations — the version of him she had in her head, the one at least thirty percent larger than he was — and a baby.

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Lou made this! <3

The watery little cough was almost a laugh. Neither one of them knew what to do, but at least they were in agreement. She fought the urge to resist his movement but let him shift his weight away, the action making the room feel colder. She wasn't meant to need him like this. She wasn't meant to need anyone, the idea so pedestrian it almost embarrassed her. She needed him in a way that was killing her, an addiction that seemed so manageable at first, but now the ache in her veins was all-consuming. She needed him.

She needed so many things, wanted so many things that her version of the truth made words impossible. She sucked air, gasping breath to try and reestablish some control over her body. The only sensation beginning to edge out the chokehold between her love and anguish was exhaustion that poured from her. "I'm so tired of all of it. I have so many questions; I thought you had questions. I don't want to pretend. I want to come home." It was bleak, her view of her future, but she was also losing sight beyond the next few hours. Merlin, she was so very tired.

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MJ made this miracle!

She thought he had questions. A nod towards how she'd thought the evening would go, then. She'd take her potion, he'd recklessly pry out everything he had foreborne to ask previously out of respect and care for her, and at the end of the night he would be awash in gratitude for how she had substrated herself to his baser impulses. He didn't know why she thought he'd ask when he never had before. Another critical misunderstanding between them, perhaps. He didn't ask questions knowing it would hurt her to hear him ask. She presumed him a coward for it.

"I have sleeping droughts," he said. He was tired, too. It was obvious in his voice. "Let this night be over."

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Lou made this! <3