bakerstreet | Painfully pining

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Painfully pining

The Painful Secret Pining Meme

You've been with them for a long time - years, perhaps, maybe even their whole life. More than that, you served as a true friend and supporter. No one could be as dedicated as you are, and you're content to stay in the shadows and let them shine if it just means you can stay by their side a little longer.

But you're not a perfect saint or a martyr of friendship. There are somewhat selfish undertones to your loyalty. You love them.

You feel like you’ve loved them forever, yet while it’s a great affection - no, “great” is probably not enough - in your heart, these feelings are your secret, kept away from everyone…possibly from the object of your desire themself! After all, you couldn’t burden them with anything like that. So, you’ll allow your own emotions to come in second place.

Of course, you haven’t allowed yourself to figure out how this could come back to haunt you in the end, could you? What about when your love moves on to someone who’s “more than a friend?” They won’t need you as much any more. Can you take into account the moment when you snap and can’t hold back the truth any more? And even if you’re really “together,” others won’t know if you keep your relationship under lock and key, and you’ll have to endure others approaching your lover.

Then again, the shoe could be on the other foot. You could be the side being pined after. Will you ever realize your friend’s feelings; if you do, can you return them? After you are certain that you do, will it be too late? Can one burst of passion lead you both to something that changes your relationship forever?

Basically, it’s a meme about (one-sided) love one friend has for another over a long time. Devotion, angst, all that.
Thread out withheld desires, stoic facades, attempts at leaving this all behind, anger, awkwardness, breaking down, confessions, and all that.
Comment with your character and preferences. You might want to include your smut/no smut status.
Mention if you’d like your character to be the pining or the pined for.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Could be either tbh. ]

[ It could be construed by others as unorthodox, he knows. Bordering on the inappropriate. To pay an unannounced visit to the home of Miss Esther Moreau, an heiress whose unwed status has always attracted more than its obligatory amount of attention and conjecture (the gatekeepers of society proclaim her a most eligible prize for the taking, even if no few express dismay over "a certain odd coolness of manner"). Despite the fact that she and Lieutenant Little met in the most mundanely suitable of ways, through mutual bored acquaintances; despite their unlikely friendship proceeding with zero evidence of anything but the most seemly intentions.

And if often in those fleeting times of privacy they've shared, there have been occurrences their peers would deem gossip-worthy—moments of frankness, unexpected humor, and a strange, near unsettling understanding—it was only because neither one of them ever verged into the slightest flirtation.

From the first Edward knew that the admiration growing between them was fostered on an utter lack of frivolous romantic leanings. He recognized what a boon it was to have discovered such a like-minded individual, and so too the importance of keeping his public conduct around her unimpeachably proper, to prevent others from turning their regard for one another into something untoward.

Hitherto he's been entirely successful in that aim, he believes, and equally so in preserving the trust Miss Moreau has placed in him to remain the pragmatic officer, career-focused to the point of exhausting even his naval-devoted family; never a fair weather friend no matter his seabound absences, and as likely to plague her with a suitor's pleas as a rising cog in the steering gears.

It is a hapless turn, then, that he has found himself unutterably in love with her.

Edward would rather have a swim round the Horn in winter than attempt to reveal as much today. In coming here his only design is to see her, as he promised he would do, after near seven months at sea. Near seven months in which he was convinced this disastrous longing would subside. Determined not to neglect his letters to her, though every time he put pen to paper, dutifully well-wishing her health and describing their latest sailing conditions in such dry terms as to surely have her nodding over tea, he had some stirrings of sympathy for that Catholic practice of self-flagellation.

Promise or no—undiminished, and if possible, burgeoning attachment or no—it's not without risk, arriving at her threshold like this. At the least he ought to have sent ahead a card. But though he's fresh off a shared carriage, in civilian clothes and back on half-pay (two states he would spare her from ever receiving him in, if he could possibly help it) he cannot regret the decision. Nor the one to first spend some portion of his scant free coin at a top-drawer barber's; he keeps his whiskers in line, but a shipboard shave is a shipboard shave.

The doorman lets him in, and leaves him waiting in the parlor, hat hung up and heart in his throat. ]

[ Unorthodox or not, their friendship – as tentatively as it might have started out – had been nothing short of a breath of fresh air. It suited Esther far better than the sort of interactions she had grown accustomed to. That wasn’t to say that every person she saw on an even remotely regular basis was intolerable, but there was an air of façade to most (if not all) of the conversations and appearances she witnessed and was a part of.

People were first and foremost concerned with what others thought of them, of the company they kept, of what those around them were talking about and who was associating with who. Gossip was seemingly inescapable, and where Esther was concerned, it was almost a relief when the whispers concerning her moved on from the mystery surrounding her parents, the pitying comments regarding her scar, or why someone of her age and station had yet to allow anyone to court her, let alone marry her.

It was complicated, it was tedious, and it was exhausting. And she had realised with great relief very early on that Edward was none of these things.

He had been a little awkward at first, though no more than she herself felt. He was kind, and of course polite, and in his own quiet way, he was charming. However, she’d warmed to him and his company, and even allowed herself to believe that that feeling at least was mutual.

It was refreshing to have someone to speak to who genuinely wanted to talk to her for conversation’s sake, who didn’t expect anything of her than she was prepared to give. Even if it bordered on improper at times, she found herself able to be frank with him, to be at ease in a way socializing usually didn’t allow for. It meant that his extended absences were felt – perhaps more so than she expected – and that any letters she received from him were opened with a very particular and very new sense of impatience and enthusiasm.

Of course, people talked, that was inevitable. And as soon as she was told who had come to see her and who was now waiting downstairs, Esther had no doubt that this would only stir the pot as it were. He’d told her in his last letter that he would come and see her once he was back on land, but hadn’t provided a specific date. Which was fine of course. She was hardly a priority, and it had been fanciful to perhaps hope she might be.

Not a lot of real effort had gone into her appearance that day, since she’d had no plans to leave the house. She doesn’t usually dress to impress, but as she hurriedly checks herself in the closest mirror – and promptly realises that she hasn’t the time to fix or change anything – she perhaps wishes that today she had. Not that she wants to impress him, no. That would imply his opinion on her appearance mattered to her. Which it didn’t. She’s quick to correct that trail of thought and then discard it completely as she nears the bottom of the stairwell and approaches the parlour, heart beating much faster than can be blamed on how quickly she took to the stairs. It’s that fact that makes her pause, just for a second to take a breath and compose herself, before she goes to the door and enters. ]

Edward..?

[ As she steps closer to him she smiles, broadly and unabashedly, until she can remind herself to perhaps reign her excitement in, just a little. She is glad to see him though, unanticipated as his presence is. Perhaps that's why she feels more giddy than nervous; he gave her no time to overthink. ]

This is unexpected – when did you get back?

[ Accustomed since the age of twelve to a life that takes one far from familiar faces, Edward has long prided himself on two points of voyaging experience.

The first is that portraits in any medium are a dismissibly inferior substitute for their subject. While he can certainly appreciate the devotion that motivates many seamen to carry pictures of their loved ones (and tolerate the baser impulses that inspire others to moon over sweethearts that might be forgotten next port-stop), he's never made it a practice himself. Even the voguish rise of the daguerreotype had not struck him as a worthwhile investment. Challenging enough for memory to hold onto all the intricacies of a person's energy and bearing, but a static image, frozen in time, severed from the ever-dynamic complexity that makes the cherished features unique? He would rather trust to his own mind's recollections, disciplined if necessarily limited, than rely on some intermediary's rendition.

But when Esther walks into the room, he knows himself for a fool. Not only because reality so eclipses even the details he treasures most—the striking brows that draw the eye, yet in no way prepare one for the piercing gaze beneath; the fine-boned face, the scar traversing one side not marring to him, but a badge of endurance whose narrative rightfully belongs to her alone—but because the mere sight, those surging first few seconds in her presence, drive home how desperately he's felt the lack. How he might have begged any middling artist in the fairgrounds for a second-rate sketch of her, just to have the hope of taking some slightest measure of this loveliness with him across the water.

His attempt at overall reservedness would be defeated were she not smiling; as it is, the expression undoes him as neatly as first-mark-makes-it cannonshot. She may be in the process of tempering it, but he knows her well enough to appreciate how (admirably, to his way of thinking) incapable she is of effortless smiles, flashed solely for the sake of putting others at ease. Whatever the further-reaching improprieties of his arrival, whatever other misconceptions he'll uphold, he can't fail to recognize that she's genuinely pleased to see him.

Which leads us to Lieutenant Little's second sailorly maxim, one he is about to break: during any departures or reunions, always be the party refraining from A Scene. It isn't that he thinks less of family and friends, through all the years they've displayed any animation at the comings and goings of his career. He simply believes it incumbent upon himself, as an officer in the Senior Service, to navigate with self-command such tides of emotion as tend to rise on such occasions.

Now he's looking at this woman, whose face and form and being he's gone starved for these seven months, and the pretense of composure disintegrates like a green cadet's. He feels the muscles at his mouth stretch irrepressibly, a condition he normally loathes outside select company (the gap in his teeth has lessened with maturity, but in his boyhood he was somewhat teased for it, and never forgot). ]

Miss Moreau — Esther. [ And instead of stumbling in embarrassment over that hesitation, he just laughs at himself, through the grin that deepens sun-on-sea creases at the corners of his eyes. Edward takes two steps towards her, his hands lifted, palms helplessly open under the cuffs of his jacket—though he stops at closing the rest of that distance. ]

Forgive me, I should have written ahead. Docked in Dartmouth three weeks ago — had some business it took a bit to wade through, but that's always the way portside. Summer storms broke as we left Buenos Aires, so the first fortnight felt like having aged tepid bathwater drizzling down your neck every hour. Don't think I've ever been so happy to come home to English rain.

[ He's jabbering, and he knows it, but he can't be bothered to care. His eyes are leaping over her face, as though she might evanesce before he's able to absorb every curve and plane. As though she is St. Elmo's fire, that phenomenon too exquisite and fleeting, joyous yet impossible to capture entire. ]

You — you look well. Are you? It's crass of me to barge in, I know, but I could hardly wait to hear how you've been. And I figured the chance to tell me is the least you're owed, having endured all my one-sided correspondence. By God, it's good to see you.

Edited 2019-10-13 20:40 (UTC)

esther moreau / original / m/f

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