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queenwar · 3 years

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𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐍𝐘.

They love with a love that is more than love. Love is not enough. She’d known it as a precocious little girl, her flawless braid swinging with the same vehemence obsidian curls did nowadays, countenance jolted by a passion blooming the honeyed flames rooted at the crux of her soul, unbearable to quench, impossible to keep contained. A concerning conviction, perhaps—as much at nine as twenty-nine—when little girls are norm-shackled to the sugar-sweet daydreams of faerie-tale aspirations they are spun. Though most all children are predisposed to wide-eyed questions, seldom did those questions disregard princes whilst rooting for the princesses and dragons. Where are your rose-tinted glasses? Her mother had asked, her laughter stained by exasperation. Thorn-ridden. As it is in their nature to be, Ginny might have claimed.

Foreshadowing, she considers now.

Is Dom not her dragon, after all? Her precious, terrible beast. The monster bound to ivory tower—who would shield her from all as she slumbered, ensconced in a dreamland, whose kisses burn her to the marrow? Who else could it have been for Ginny but her? Mundane romanticisations were for fleeting paramour Juliets, of whose importance she would not altogether dismiss, yet who paled, nevertheless, as mere backdrop of all that had been toppled and turned, to bind the two of them in this moment. To an eternity Ginny would not settle for less than, now that she knows what it is to finally, finally have found this: this soft place to land, their glass house draped in ivy. How could it have been anyone else? How could it ever have been anyone else for her? Anyone, or anything, but this love that consumes her and feeds her alike. A love that is not mere love, but devotion – fealty. As if there is a force beyond it.

Not when they remain true to one another. They had long ago avowed it, swathed in pristine sheets and bathed in dawn’s golden touch. Dom upholds it now, as she does perpetually, with diamond-cut clarity, and does not parry inquisition with defensive indulgences that meant nothing beyond coddling placations that could only earn Ginny’s affronted wrath. “I despise it,” she replies as truthfully, words glossed by venom before the mouth that spits them presses to ivory knuckles with unbridled tenderness. No matter their choices, or the circumstances that had led to the interweaving of their paths, they walk theirs as equals, fingers just as intertwined, in a hold that could not be broken and would not be relinquished.

Even as her nose wrinkles at the mention of a man’s blood on the hands she holds, Ginny cannot condemn Dom. She has never asked Dom for a list of names of the bodies that have stained them with their blood already to sentence her – has never demanded a tallying of sins for her to have to answer to Ginny’s knife. There had been no need to, when her lover would be subservient to naught she could not make peace with, and Ginny, disgruntled and dismayed, leeched enough peace from the knowledge that every name would be placed at her feet were she to ever ask for it to wave it off, banishing it from line of sight when it was as inconsequential as the point was moot. Were she to ask her if she had ever killed a good man, Dom would tell her there were no good men, of this she is certain. And has she not seen enough of the world to know this was the truth? Of course. Of course she has. There were prices in this world, and many to be paid in blood. She had learnt that much long before Heloise Arsenault’s shadow had ever endeavoured to eclipse her life. She would not call this a comfort. Yet the warmth of Dom’s mouth is one. A balm that soothes her, as much as the lilt to her tenor is, smoothing the furrow of Ginny’s brow as though a touch to the flesh wiped it out like a wrinkle in a bedsheet. “Lives are not petty,” Ginny laughs despite her ire, head shaking at Dom. “Though, of course, I’ll grant there are those of use to ambition and those which are not.” She does not apologise for words. For all that Ginny refuses to be executioner based on Heloise Arsenault’s say-so, like a marionette on her strings, she has never had reservations against being both judge and jury.

With a weary sigh, her lashes flutter shut, splaying shadows over the apples of her cheeks. “Mmm,” she hums as she thinks, an involuntary habit before she takes a trek down her own mind’s labyrinthe, plundering copse and thicket, scavenging for baubles to be bartered. Bold though she is, and brazen when she must be, Ginny is hardly one to exit discourteously, and never one to leave her lover in her wake. With Dom alone, when she delves, she takes with her; thinking, but aloud. “I could always offer her dirt on the others,” comes the first idea, and just as quickly as it comes, Ginny herself casts it to the wayside. “No, that is for me to use; it is more useful ammunition in my hands than hers, when I am to continue to be her agent undercover. So, what if—?” Her eyes open, just like that, widening as her jaw drops, her breath leaving her in a theatrical gasp that precedes a feral grin. Gotcha! she thinks. There were two things that mattered most to the Arsenault matriarch, the way that Ginny saw it: the success of her business, and the children of whom one would rule it when time snatched the reins from her cold, dead hands. Didn’t Ginny have just the thing? A stone for both birds. And a third’s feathers for garnish. “There was a cover-up,” she discloses. “The buffoon hardly asked for tens of millions to cover it up himself, but I’d venture your mother would value intel concerning a Femenias oil spill after Raf’s little stunt with Bast. The environmentalists would have a field-day with that shit, take political lens away from Bellum Nova’s next move. Make a trade with FemEn, if she wants to use it as leverage? Hell, I’d feed it to the bloody press myself to keep her hands clean if its blood under my manicure she so craves; what do I care about gouging a handful of Famine’s bloody hide? I’ve known about it for far longer than I will tell her, obviously – but what do you think, baby?”

Born to a gilded, ivory castle and legacy steeped in generations of éminence grise, as a little girl she’d grown with a head full of myth and fairytale. It seemed only fitting, only right, that as princess to her own kingdom and dominion, that she envisage herself a storybook future that would unravel according to perfectly laid fantasy. The architecture of her world was beautiful and glorious, a concoction of daydream make-believe and the boundless expanse of a child’s imagination. Romance, chivalry, courtship were the pillars of picturesque tales woven in gold thread and reverie, and the lodestar of these stories, the shimmering pinnacle of the hero’s journey and the maiden’s patient sacrifices, was love. Love, the undying revelation of truth and virtue and all that was good and worthy. Love, the unparalleled force that could conquer all. Love, she would think to herself, splayed in a garden amidst the wildflowers of the Arsenault’s Summer Villa, dazed by Monaco sunlight, was worth everything and anything. Even to possess a little scrap of it, a wisp of bliss clutched in the tiny constellation of her palm, would be sacrosanct.

That little girl would indeed suffer her share of fairytale trials and tribulations — locked in spiralling tower, caged in a glorious prison of her family’s own making, cursed with the blood that ran through her very veins — and she abandoned the illusions of happiness and rapture that came with love. What use did she have for illustrious fantasy and vaunted hopes of finding the keeper of her soul, the object of her singular, perfect love, when she could not make her own mother bare her heart to her? And what was so wrong with her, intrinsically, that she could not make her mother love her? The answer was more elementary than Dom could have conceived: there were simply more important things in the world than love. Ne sois pas bête, her mother had said. Bien sûr que je t'aime. But do you like me, do you see me, do you know me at all outside of maternal obligation and onus. Yes, she realised, there were worse things in this world than not being loved.

It was as if she had been blinkered, blind and deaf when Ginny found her. It was Ginny that had picked her out from a crowd, a lone asteroid in a black sky, silhouetted by her own solitude and reclusion. It was Ginny that had sparked their awakening, the cosmic phenomenon that had rewritten the laws of all that she had known and come to understand about the world, pulling her into orbit of solar flares and soft lips. They had created their own covenant, a binding of truth and honesty, seen without skin or artifice. With Ginny, there was no need to conceal or aggrandise, no purpose for deception or justification. She had seen it all: the horror and the swallowed sins, the trail of blood and bodies spanning a thousand miles to Babylon. The incarnation of War, dressed as beauty and wisdom, was a monstrous thing to love. In many ways, their story was an underworld myth — Persephone descending into the kingdom of the dead to be with her deathless lover, her Queen of shadow and bone. Better creatures could love you, I know. But now they’ll have to get through me.

If it was a matter of happiness, of relinquishing heritage and birthright for a dazzling, sunburst chance at peace, then Dom might have taken it just for her. For her, anything. — But they had both been named for goddesses, born with a hunger for the divine, for purpose and glory and the right to rule pantheons with an empyrean burning that outweighed any mortal longing for ordinary bliss.

Her beloved is fair and magnanimous, a searing beacon of justice and compassion. She says Lives are not petty in the same breath of laughter that she kisses Dom with, sweetness melting upon their mouths like sunlight and the distant warmth of stars. “In the grand scheme of things, Darling, some lives are.” They don’t hold their tongues with each other, no bitten tongues or suppressed words to smooth the fault lines of difference between them. She loves Ginny for every way they’re different, the many and varied paths they diverge. She understands things about the world that Ginny would interrogate and argue into submission before she would allow it to become prosaic. Death, murder and War’s laissez-faire approach to morality are just the tip of the iceberg.

“I’m not saying that betraying us should automatically equate to death — trying, sentencing, due process and all that —” Dom gives a little wave of her hand, a teasing acknowledgement of Ginny’s unwavering conviction in the law. I know the scripture and the holy writ, she thinks, I learned it all by heart before my world ran red with blood and retribution. She shrugs, insouciant and cold-hearted even as she strokes a hand across Ginny’s jaw, a finger brushing her cascade of dark curls across her shoulder. Not so much a rationalisation because Dom doesn’t deal in philosophical quandaries or existential doubt, but a reinforcement of stark reality. In the law of War, treason is tantamount to worse fates that death; to die swiftly, quietly, is a mercy. “But he knew what he was getting into. Everyone that swears allegiance to us understands that what we do to our enemies as a necessity. Whatever he chose to value more than his own life — money, sex, power — he chose it knowing that crossing us would make him an enemy of the House of War.”

She watches Ginny think, admiring the intricate machinery of her cunning and calculation. Their attraction had been wrought equally by mind as it was by body, an understanding struck between equals perfectly matched in wit, brilliance, and political savoir-faire. It was glorious to watch her in the House, castigating the ancient Lords that reigned from the comfort of corruption and languorous rot, but it was something else to see her like this, her guile and adroitness out in the open, artfully constructing manoeuvres. “That would do quite nicely. Appropriate, too, with their recent campaigning to greenwash their activities and paint themselves as saints of the new environmental crusade.” She spares a wayward, far-flung thought of Rafael and what this would mean for his family’s empire, before discarding it just as easily as a devious smile blooms across her face. “FemEn served up on a silver platter for the life of one man. She’d be a fool to turn down such a trade. It wouldn’t even have to be you if you planted the information with the Daily Mail. And of course, with you leading the exposé, all she’d have to do is sign on the dotted line.”

A little thrill of pleasure and adrenaline runs through her spine as she leans in to capture Ginny’s lips, licking into her mouth with a blossoming of heat and desire. It’s fiery and a touch obscene, her hand anchoring on Ginny’s jaw so she can press deeper, closer, harder. When she pulls away, the slight hitch in her breath and composure tellingly reveals the state of her arousal. “Have I ever told you that watching you plot the destruction of our enemies is extremely attractive?”

#GINNY. / 𝒊.#𝑱𝑨𝑵 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟏. / DUBOIS & ARSENAULT TOWNHOUSE.

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queenwar · 3 years

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𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐍𝐘.

And whatever else your heart desires, she is anointed with a honey-steeped avowal apropos to gods & monsters — though the line between both, Ginny supposes, blurs inescapably. To be a Arsenault is to emulate both, nevertheless. To embody the blurred line, and to saunter ahead, over it, with canted head and cutting gaze. To be dignified as a king, yet mythic as the kingmaker. And then there is Ginny, the fortune symbolic kingfisher amidst this kingdom within which she survives but can never belong to. Not beyond the arrowheads that pierce the veil, now and again, ensconcing this paracosm the two of them have built, hand-in-hand. Their own minor universe, where her ivy ensnared Dominique’s marble and glass, and makes a home of it. As she has made a home of the vaulted, volatile heart that beats the syllables of her own name to perpetrate a rush of blood that lingers in Ginny’s own mouth. As hers belongs to the palm of Dominique’s hand.

Everything has its exceptions, after all.

There ought to be. It is all she has ever sought to become, is it not? It is what she is. The half-black, twenty-something woman from Hackney in the House of Parliament. A controversially-bold city councilor to boot. The notorious woman oft blinked twice at, when spectators and sycophants ( as if both are not the much the same ) witness the tender reverence with which her lover touches her, like a prayer for which no words exist. In turn, Dom is her own exception. The only one who has ever been enough, for a woman infamous through the unravelling of her girlhood to be unattainable, committed to naught but her encompassing ambitions. The rarity that has rooted itself in her marrow, that grounds her with warm, steadying weight. A warmth that radiates from the core of her being when she watches her tall, blonde devil pour fresh, matching drinks, whilst Ginny polishes of the remnants of what Dom leaves to her whim. Not even needing an answer before she is already fetching Ginny what she needs not specify – in a gesture of knowledgeability borne of the years that have knit a tapestry of a life out of the red thread of fate that binds them, heart-to-heart.

There is a wistful sweetness to the sigh that is expelled, cloaking the silence Ginny savours until she is slotted back in place in her favourite seat in any house, home or kingdom. The round, flat tip of her nose glides the slope of Dom’s jawline, lips trailing to the corner of her mouth, murmuring, “Thank you, sweetheart,” before the glass’ rim is pressed to her lips, spilling amber liquor in a hot trail down her throat in fortification. A sip required as much as the second that follows it, her eyes watching Dom watching her, while her guts in her belly like stones at the bottom of the sea. It stings her, the question. Like slapping sunburn, it stings. There is an answer expected, she can hear it in the questions she is asked; expectations from Dom, as much, and as oppositely, as there are from the Arsenault that she is just the same.

The daughter at the helm of the Arsenaults’ battleship knows that Ginny has been issued a task as a subordinate: a task to prove loyalty, the Angels are told; a task that Ginny knows is a shut door being locked in place, the key lost forevermore. Yet that woman is compromised by the knives the two of them hold to one another’s jugulars, as is the price of the truest of primordial loves. Her Dominique would never ask this of her. Her Dominique offers to handle it for her. But – at what cost? It is still her Dominique who wishes to rule, and her Dominique who sabotages herself to protect her lover. Ginny’s fingers card through cropped golden locks, her knuckles lingering against porcelain temple in the aftermath. “Divya and I met today already,” she informs, the displeasure in her tone transparent. “I rather enjoyed rubbed salt into the gargantuan wound that is that wretched woman’s hubris when she threw you in my face, for you are to help prepare me for my task.” Her laughter is not laughter, but a dark, mirthless chortle she pours another mouthful of scotch over.

“Baby, no, of course I’m not going to bloody well off someone. And you are not going to do it for me, either. I am a grown-arse woman, and your mother will only sneer in your face if you go and plead my case. Demote you with the ease she did poor Max, if the mood strikes. No—” irked, her head shakes at her own, too-human frustration, “—we both know it has to be me who speaks to her. Over Divya’s head, obviously. The only shot I’ve got is to barter something more valuable to her in exchange. How on god’s green earth am I going to pull it off? Think like a Arsenault, matchless Machiavel. I require your nefarious brilliance tonight. Some handholding. Kisses.”

My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder, and all my riches for her smiles. — It should frighten her, the ease with which she imagines surrendering everything that she has and is, to Ginny. For Ginny. In the magnitude of absurdity and hyperbole, invention and gods at the dawning of the world, she would do anything for this woman. Become anything, destroy anything. It terrified her once, in the early days, how swiftly she had come to know her and see her stripped bare. Her dark, doe-like, dandelion eyes unveiling her with the gravitas of a caress, the unconsciousness of a soul recognising its own reflection. She had seen her without skin even before their lips had touched and their fingers had locked like ivy and periwinkle trellised together. She had seen through to the silt and riverbed of her, stepping delicately past the ramparts and battlements of spiralling ice and steel stronghold — into the labyrinthine maze and tangled pathways of heart and paradox.

A liquid warmth spreads through her, sweet and summer breeze soft, from the press of Ginny’s lips to the corner of her mouth. The imprint of her cupid’s bow like a sunbeam on skin. And whatever else your heart desires, I mean it, she thinks. I mean it, I do. Discovering the depth and extremity of her love for Ginny had been a lighting storm, a cosmological event, a cataclysm. Could she have expected anything else? Being consumed by what she felt, be it love or hate or rage, was the only language she knew how to speak. True love partakes of terror. Whatever we love, we give the power to annihilate. It was with this power that Ginny had come blazing into her life, reorienting all that she touched to pull it into her orbit, each revolution around her a confession of muted wonder. It was this power she pressed against her throat, the caress of her mouth instead of a blade — and all the more deadly for it. And here she was, curled up with the monster and maiden, her hand sifting through the crown of her locks, content to hold her in her arms and simply call her my love.

Insouciance hitches languorously with her shoulder, a dismissive flick of her lashes indicating precisely where she stands with the supposed slight. Does Divya, does her mother, imagine this to be some great obstacle igniting strife between them? Do they believe it will strike chaos between them, sowing the seeds of discord? How ludicrously little they know of Dom’s heart. “Of course it would be me.” It would be Dom in happiness and in sorrow, in triumph and in sin, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. There was no darkness she would walk without Dominique by her side, hand in hand, fingers entwined. “I suppose Divya thought it would be a point of contention between us. The initiation.” The topic had arisen before, just the once. Ginny’s tentative curiosity about the nature of the organisation’s hierarchy and the process of becoming one of War. Dom had been diplomatic, tactful, but honest. She did not, and would never, obfuscate with Ginny. There was no point, with a woman so brilliantly incisive and acutely perceptive. She would dismantle any attempt at curating reality into something more palatable with the same ruthlessness that she used to obliterate conservatives on the House floor.

Ginny launches into a Speech, righteous fury firing up in her eyes, one of Dom's favourite expressions on her lovely face. It was always something that staggered people about her — that a woman so beautiful could be so full of vehemence and intensity, that she could burn so fervently when the world had determined her to be the subject of admiration. People in this age had forgotten what it meant to worship beauty so divine it would set you alight, consume you, just for daring to lay eyes upon them. Perhaps the closest thing they had nowadays was the audacity of looking directly in the sun.

“Since you have permitted it, that I can do.” She takes Ginny’s hand and brushes a tender smoulder of a kiss to the backs of her knuckles, the teasing of her voice affectionate to a fault. “You would have to offer her something that she can’t refuse. Something that would make her look foolish if she attempted to barter for the murder of a single, petty life. An attack against our enemies — an investigation or an enquiry, bureaucratic minefield. Some small, inconvenient piece of legislation that would cost them tens of millions to dance around. What do you think, my love? Is there something tucked away in the discerning corners of your mind that we could use?”

#GINNY. / 𝒊.#𝑱𝑨𝑵 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟏. / DUBOIS & ARSENAULT TOWNHOUSE.

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queenwar · 3 years

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𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐍𝐘.

❝ — as JANUARY 26, 2021 dwindles towards an end, ginny returns to THE TOWNHOUSE she shares with @queenwar at the heart of london. the hour is late when her key turns in the lock on the front door. when it swings open, it is for steps are slowed, weighted by her heavy heart. ❞

“Baby, I’m home!” she calls out.

Unnecessarily, most likely, knowing Dom always hears her car in the driveway and her key in the door before she ever calls out with the surety Dom must know she likes to call out all the same, like a checkpoint needed to be marked on her way in through the door. Vintage Jimmy Choo Courts click across smoky marble, echoing down the hallway in announcement, piercing the permeable plume of the laden sigh her stained mouth expels, far headier than the perfume she brings back into their home.

Often, publications deem Virginia Dubois immaculate. It is one of the nicer adjectives attached to her these days, the more her name grows known, and she takes it as she takes the venom-steeped vitriol spilt in spades: with a grain of salt, with a smile on her face. The assumption isn’t unfounded. It suits the woman they photograph and memorialise upon their pages—glossy magazine to cheap newspaper—as a symbol they can critique; their caricature to mock, or their icon to idolise. Ginny hardly minds. Isn’t this what she’s worked for—and so tirelessly, at that? To be a name in history, etched in gold and festooned in filigree. Yet that is not the woman who walks into the living-room –

Not once those heels come off, left out of the way but right beside the couch her lover sits upon, iPad in-hand, drink on the coaster beside her. It isn’t the woman tearing at pearl buttons on an ivory silk blouse, pulling it away from the slip that clings to the bronze flesh it adorns, as though suffocating in the envelopment of gloss that isn’t really her. It isn’t the woman hitching a pencil skirt up her thighs to crawl across the length of the couch and climb into a lap that is her personal haven. She is not immaculate. She is not a dauntless enigma that keeps everyone guessing, propped up on their tallest tip-toe. This woman is warm as the heart of a rose, and twice as sweet, with all the thorns to prove it. She is quiet as the secret only one other person knows.

“I’m going to need to steal your drink, my love,” Ginny hums in lieu of a greeting that the warm press of her mouth to those crimson lips makes up for, unable to keep her weary corners of her tired mouth from quirking all the same.

In all her dreams and glorious plans of conquest and unequivocal victory, she had taken one thing to be to self-evident: her triumph would be a solitary achievement. She would rise, succeed, and ultimately rule, alone. Antithetical to the kings whose popularity and reputation flourished as their influence grew, power, for a woman, was an isolating thing. You could be queen, empress, sovereign — but you could not be loved for it. Not by your people, your court and government, let alone by a husband. In the eyes of the world, corroborated throughout history and the rise and fall of empires, power was a selfish, monopolising lover. A lothario and a Casanova, a seduction that would carve out a woman’s soul and render her hollow of anything but the worst thing she could ever be accused of possessing — hunger. Ambition. Self-importance.

Dominique did not plan for Ginny Dubois. She did not imagine an existence for herself that involved any iteration of love, or permanence, or belonging. Ice Queen, cold-blooded and untouchable, she had spent so long insulating herself from anything that could touch her that to be seen, exposed, without armour or even skin, was the first time she had felt true terror. Terror, and awe, a feeling akin to the dawning of the first sun witnessed by someone aware of the cosmic phenomenon that had to align so they could be here. Once, she could not have envisaged a reality that came to orbit around a person that was not herself. Now, she cannot conceive of a world without her.

She finds herself waiting for her beloved at this late hour, and when she arrives, she brings the sun home with her. The sound of her voice ringing through the hallway like a welcoming of sunrise in the dead of night. Ginny comes to her, silk slip ruched up her thighs as she clambers into her lap, warm and ambrosia-sweet, like a sylph that has momentarily abandoned the guise of mythology to fall into the arms of her human lover. Every inch of her surrenders to the kiss, unguarded and bare of any conscious instinct.

“It’s yours, and whatever else your heart desires.” She cants her head at the glass of Domaine Weinbach Pinot Gris on the coffee table. Her hand lifts to stroke softly along the hair curling at her cheek, absent-minded and intimate. Dom can decipher the exhaustion in her words, the tension in her spine even as she sprawls atop her, limb to limb. “If you like, I can fix you something a little stronger.” Loathe as she is to mourn her warmth for even a few heartbeats, she slides out from underneath Ginny and pads over to the liquor cabinet. She pours herself and Ginny both a glass of single malt Laphroaig, returning to give Ginny the glass and tug her back into her arms. When they’re comfortable again, entwined like magnolia petals, she broaches the subject weighing upon both their minds.

Will you do it?” It would soothe Ginny’s conscience to speak of the target, the grey area of killing a man who works for War, his own hands soaked to the elbows in blood. If they were to weigh the man’s heart upon the scales against the feather of the truth, there is no doubt that he would come out guilty. In spite of her arctic demeanour and impenetrable skin, her heart where Ginny is concerned is honeyed soft. If Ginny doesn’t want to cross the last line left of her morality, then Juno will defend it to the death. “I can speak to Divya if you want. To my mother. The last thing we need is for your position to be compromised.”

#GINNY. / 𝒊.#𝑱𝑨𝑵 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟏. / DUBOIS & ARSENAULT TOWNHOUSE.

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