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This is a dumb thing to be embarassed about, but the HDM fic I just wrote didn't work, because someone had an answer to the naming thing I could never find, that's the official version. So, pulled the fic down and must rewrite at length. Feh.
I've posted it below the cut for the sake of my own reference, but it either needs a serious edit or to be rewritten from scratch. I've contcted teh commenter to se if he'll allow me to put his comment here as well, just because this is a better medium for how I organize my mental space.
Certainly, I feel touchy about it all, because I knew getting into this fandom that the detail of Pullman's universe was going to have me tripping over myself. In HP you can pretty much write anything because JKR is so inconsistent at worldbuilding and is essentially writing mystery novels, there's LOTS of wiggle room.
“You always make it so difficult to manage the seating arrangements, dear,” Dame Wintster said as she patted Lord Asriel’s arm.
“You’ll pardon me for being in the North, I hardly had time to find an escort,” he said, willing Stelmaria back to his side and away from her less than friendly interest in Wintster’s daemon; the fat and apparently flightless bird was being dragged along on the train of the insufferable woman’s gown. Certainly, it was a novel solution to the problem, he thought grimly, almost embarrassed for her by the thing.
“Yes, yes, of course, we were so worried you might bring something back with you, of course,” she said, half enjoying the wickedness of the suggestion, but ultimately uncomfortable with the topic.
Lord Asriel smiled to himself and looked distractedly around the room, thinking, rather specifically, of the flesh of a witch between his teeth and wishing it were possible to take larger steps with this boring old woman clinging to his arm, but in the name of politics and position it seemed there were always many sacrifices to be made.
“Tables for nine are extraordinarily impractical,” she was saying.
“Well, it is the number of challenge,” he muttered to her disapproving glare.
“Well, yes, luckily Jeanette Drapsford was widowed this year, but early enough that she decided to come out for this anyway, so a table for ten,” she said, clearly pleased with the serendipity of basic arithmetic and utterly unconcerned with any grief the widow might have felt. “Perhaps you’ll find each other pleasant company. A titled man, unmarried,” she scoffed shaking her head in what Lord Asriel imagined was a nearly perpetual state of awe, before adding suggestively, “although I suppose you’d want your bride to be new.”
Had anything ever come out of the woman’s mouth that mattered, Lord Asriel might have considered feeling ill. Instead, he just mumbled in the affirmative at her, happy to finally reach his seat. He bowed to Dame Wintster, acknowledged each of the men at the table, and then took and kissed the widow Drapsford’s hand before taking his seat.
“So I hear you’re proving us with a show tonight,” Count Belacqua said, only half raising his glass to Asriel and fidgeting absently with the scales of his daemon’s tail. That he was bored was obvious, that he was making a performance of it where everyone else had the sense to refrain was rude.
“Yes, a visual spectacle,” he said, being sure to look around the table and include everyone in the conversation, “of the sort popular in Muscovy. It’s not a particularly technological marvel, but unable to find an appropriate companion for the evening, my only hope of avoiding our hostess’s wrath was by providing the entertainment.”
“Is it true that it involves gunpowder?” the widow asked, feigning a bit of fright and hoping it flushed her cheeks enough to make her seem attractive. Lord Asriel merely thought she looked feverish as she compulsively stroked the small and somewhat frantic squirrel in her lap.
“Yes, in very precisely measured explosions that should fill the sky with colour. The Muscovites call it something that translates to “lightening works” more or less and I assure you the name is just as unwieldy in their language,” he supplied.
“A celebration of heaven then,” Belacqua’s wife interjected, her voice stunningly precise, but not sharp. Lord Asriel’s eyes flicked to just over her right shoulder for a moment, as he daemon, a golden monkey, emerged from who knew where to perch on the back of her chair and gaze at him as intently as the woman herself was doing.
“You could say so,” he said, his voice echoing her restraint and masking, he hoped, his lack of enthusiasm for the idea. She graced him with the barest crescent of a smile, and he nodded as minutely, before she bent to whisper something to her husband.
If Lord Asriel had ever run the risk of forgetting why it was he preferred to travel abroad and study independently, celebrations such as this would certainly have been an effective reminder. He’d danced with three of the five women at the table already – the widow out of pity and the others because their husbands insisted, with pointed glances, they were not dancers themselves.
As he led Julia Narr back to her seat, he leaned over the back of Countess Belacqua’s chair, very nearly touching her daemon, not on accident, but more to see if it would make her nervous.
She turned too quickly and beamed at him, or rather, gave the tight and perfect smile that clearly passed as such from her. As she rose from her seat, Stelmaria growled, and Lord Asriel was curious to see that the golden monkey had no need to rush after her person as so many daemons did. She was a powerful woman, beautiful, and unwise.
She placed her hand on his shoulder, although it wasn’t really that; truthfully she slid it up his chest before it came to rest where it should. Somehow she managed it primly, and he found himself emitting just the slightest internal sigh of relaxation. Here was a true and fierce woman, a creature of will, not a puppet or a doll, and the sort of being he simply hadn’t encountered since returning from his most recent explorations. Her face was true Brytish but she was also Ruta in caramel silks and steel, smelling vaguely of flowers, burnt butter, and ozone, and her lips were moist. She was, Lord Asriel thought, the most dangerous thing he’d ever seen. And she knew it.
“You’re a skilled dancer Countess –“
“Marisa, please. I miss having a name.”
He gave a small laugh, a slight rumble indistinct from Stelmaria’s purr. “Marisa then.”
“And don’t you have a given name?” she asked, teasing, as she moved the nail of her first finger in circles on his shoulder as they waltzed, Stelmaria standing guard at the edge of the dance floor, and the golden monkey pacing and peering about inquisitively,
“I do, but I don’t prefer it. Asriel will do. I have no more private name.”
“Asriel,” she said, nodding but clearly displeased that the exchange had been less than fair.
“It is a good thing you married a Count,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Otherwise, your title and your first name would be the same,” he said, drawing out the letters of “Mrs.” into her name.
She laughed, bright and sharp and Lord Asriel couldn’t help but think the ozone was more distinct now.
“I hope your husband doesn’t mind,” he said, referring to the dancing, mainly for the sake of making small talk.
“No, he’s probably relieved to have me away for a bit.”
“Arranged?” Asriel asked bluntly.
“No. Merely well-considered.”
He nodded with admiration at her particularly unfeminine brand of honesty. “It’s something I have no taste for,” he said, matter of factly.
“And the luxury to indulge.”
“Being a man?”
She nodded. “And unworried about sin.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
“We may gossip about you, Asriel, but that doesn’t mean your intentions are unclear.”
He shook his head slightly, pleasantly unaware of the rest of the room around them. “You have a strange way of flirting, Marisa.”
She laughed again, but it was at the very clear touch of his daemon by hers that he couldn’t help but tense, and he pulled her slightly closer to mask the reflexive twitch in his muscles.
“You should be careful,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Stelmaria is very protective of me,” he said, straining slightly to keep the pitch of his voice even and his dancing fluid even as the golden monkey ran its small claw-like hands the wrong way under Stelmaria’s bristling fur. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt, or cause a scene.”
Marisa arched her back slightly so as to press herself closer to him. “You wouldn’t, you’re enjoying this too much.”
He laughed as pushed her away slightly, at the same moment Stelmaria batted at the monkey that had decided to pull on her ear. “I think I’d enjoy the scene more.”
“I’m terribly curious about your entertainments,” she said, possibly changing the topic.
“You mean the gunpowder,” he said, bemused.
“Of course I mean the gun powder,” she said, the ringing laugh returning this time accompanied by a hint of annoyance. Their daemons were no longer touching, but whether she had backed off because he was better at the game than her or because that was in fact part of her strategy he wasn’t sure.
“Well, if you’d like to see how the ordinances are set up, I’m happy to provide a brief tour before we light them. The Count, of course, is welcome as well.”
“Of course,” she said with a smile, and pulled back from him with a spin and a curtsey and was back in her seat before he had even the opportunity to discern whether his invitation had been accepted, or on what terms.
As Marisa walked beside him along the edge of the lake, he couldn’t help but notice her face each time her delicate shoes broke the thin crust of ice over what was barely an inch of snow. It was as if there was a rapturous taste to the sound and sensation of it, and when they finally came to a pause by the first row of ordinances, he noted that the monkey was content to crouch on the ground, doing all he could to disturb whatever snow had remained untrod.
“Have you traveled much?” she asked, fidgeting with her gloves and surveying the area as if it belonged to her.
“The North exclusively, I confess, unless you mean the continent which doesn’t really count at all. It suits both research and commerce,” he said.
“So I see,” she said, not quite hiding her rather literal appraisal of him.
He raised and eyebrow at her, but didn’t reply or linger, turning instead to the men who had set the lightening works, speaking to them quickly about the evening’s plans, and looking for the fellow who had lost a hand in some similar evening somewhere else, thinking somehow that Marisa might find that amusing. When he turned back, he found her crouching by one of the cannons, fingering a fuse.
“That sets off merely enough of a charge to get the thing airborne and light the other fuses within so it shatters in the air. Backfires, as you can imagine, are quite dangerous.”
“Let me light one,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I hardly think that’s a good idea,” he said standing, utterly dismissive of the notion.
“You’re going to light some of them,” she said as she got up, dusting her hands off on her coat and shooing her daemon down form on top of one of the cannons.
He smiled and turned to her. “What makes you think that?”
“The fact that you’re salivating.”
He gave a short, curt laugh like a bark and stared up at the sky as he scratched the top of Stelmaria’s head. Finally he looked at the countess. “No, that’s you.”
Her smile was oil retextured over heat and she stepped up into his personal space before he could call her to him.
“The men will see,” he said, bemused.
“Are they yours?”
“Yes.”
“Then I imagine they know what happens if they betray their lord,” she said, all sweet and syrupy poison.
There were any number of sharp things he could have said to her in reply, but instead he gave a wry, unpleasant grin before grabbing her arms and pulling her close.
“I don’t leave things unfinished,” he told her.
“My piety is selective,” she noted, amused.
Stelmaria growled, but it was a hiss from the golden monkey that told him they were already supposed to be kissing. Before he could note it, he realized he had pushed Marisa up against a tree and that as the air had left her at the force of it, they already were. He was startled too, to realize that she didn’t taste like much of anything really, except himself, and he groaned into her mouth. She smiled, such as she could, looked at his closed eyes and then the sky, before dancing her first finger on his shoulder again, glad for the snow she would soon have to blot onto her swollen lips.
She pushed him away slightly, just enough so that they could speak. “I take tea most afternoons in town, whereas the Count prefers the affairs of the estate,” she said, twisting out of his arms now, and bending for the snow. “I shall let you know where to attend to me, tomorrow afternoon, assuming you can tolerate the wait,” she said, standing and surveying her hair and makeup in a small pocket mirror as Stelmaria paced around her.
Satisfied, she clicked the compact closed and began the walk back to the great house, but Asriel grabbed her wrist and yanked her back to him, before lifting her hair to bite the skin over her spine.
“Careful,” he hissed, clearly pleased.
“Say the clasp of your necklace caught you,” he breathed still focused on his task.
“He never looks there anyway,” she replied softly, and then was out of Asriel’s grip. She scooped up her daemon and began to hurry along the lake.
Asriel merely followed her at a leisurely pace, smiling.
“Set off your explosions,” Marisa turned and called back to him, adding, “I’ll say I was frightened!” before she fled.
Lord Asriel laughed and went in search of fire.
I've posted it below the cut for the sake of my own reference, but it either needs a serious edit or to be rewritten from scratch. I've contcted teh commenter to se if he'll allow me to put his comment here as well, just because this is a better medium for how I organize my mental space.
Certainly, I feel touchy about it all, because I knew getting into this fandom that the detail of Pullman's universe was going to have me tripping over myself. In HP you can pretty much write anything because JKR is so inconsistent at worldbuilding and is essentially writing mystery novels, there's LOTS of wiggle room.
“You always make it so difficult to manage the seating arrangements, dear,” Dame Wintster said as she patted Lord Asriel’s arm.
“You’ll pardon me for being in the North, I hardly had time to find an escort,” he said, willing Stelmaria back to his side and away from her less than friendly interest in Wintster’s daemon; the fat and apparently flightless bird was being dragged along on the train of the insufferable woman’s gown. Certainly, it was a novel solution to the problem, he thought grimly, almost embarrassed for her by the thing.
“Yes, yes, of course, we were so worried you might bring something back with you, of course,” she said, half enjoying the wickedness of the suggestion, but ultimately uncomfortable with the topic.
Lord Asriel smiled to himself and looked distractedly around the room, thinking, rather specifically, of the flesh of a witch between his teeth and wishing it were possible to take larger steps with this boring old woman clinging to his arm, but in the name of politics and position it seemed there were always many sacrifices to be made.
“Tables for nine are extraordinarily impractical,” she was saying.
“Well, it is the number of challenge,” he muttered to her disapproving glare.
“Well, yes, luckily Jeanette Drapsford was widowed this year, but early enough that she decided to come out for this anyway, so a table for ten,” she said, clearly pleased with the serendipity of basic arithmetic and utterly unconcerned with any grief the widow might have felt. “Perhaps you’ll find each other pleasant company. A titled man, unmarried,” she scoffed shaking her head in what Lord Asriel imagined was a nearly perpetual state of awe, before adding suggestively, “although I suppose you’d want your bride to be new.”
Had anything ever come out of the woman’s mouth that mattered, Lord Asriel might have considered feeling ill. Instead, he just mumbled in the affirmative at her, happy to finally reach his seat. He bowed to Dame Wintster, acknowledged each of the men at the table, and then took and kissed the widow Drapsford’s hand before taking his seat.
“So I hear you’re proving us with a show tonight,” Count Belacqua said, only half raising his glass to Asriel and fidgeting absently with the scales of his daemon’s tail. That he was bored was obvious, that he was making a performance of it where everyone else had the sense to refrain was rude.
“Yes, a visual spectacle,” he said, being sure to look around the table and include everyone in the conversation, “of the sort popular in Muscovy. It’s not a particularly technological marvel, but unable to find an appropriate companion for the evening, my only hope of avoiding our hostess’s wrath was by providing the entertainment.”
“Is it true that it involves gunpowder?” the widow asked, feigning a bit of fright and hoping it flushed her cheeks enough to make her seem attractive. Lord Asriel merely thought she looked feverish as she compulsively stroked the small and somewhat frantic squirrel in her lap.
“Yes, in very precisely measured explosions that should fill the sky with colour. The Muscovites call it something that translates to “lightening works” more or less and I assure you the name is just as unwieldy in their language,” he supplied.
“A celebration of heaven then,” Belacqua’s wife interjected, her voice stunningly precise, but not sharp. Lord Asriel’s eyes flicked to just over her right shoulder for a moment, as he daemon, a golden monkey, emerged from who knew where to perch on the back of her chair and gaze at him as intently as the woman herself was doing.
“You could say so,” he said, his voice echoing her restraint and masking, he hoped, his lack of enthusiasm for the idea. She graced him with the barest crescent of a smile, and he nodded as minutely, before she bent to whisper something to her husband.
If Lord Asriel had ever run the risk of forgetting why it was he preferred to travel abroad and study independently, celebrations such as this would certainly have been an effective reminder. He’d danced with three of the five women at the table already – the widow out of pity and the others because their husbands insisted, with pointed glances, they were not dancers themselves.
As he led Julia Narr back to her seat, he leaned over the back of Countess Belacqua’s chair, very nearly touching her daemon, not on accident, but more to see if it would make her nervous.
She turned too quickly and beamed at him, or rather, gave the tight and perfect smile that clearly passed as such from her. As she rose from her seat, Stelmaria growled, and Lord Asriel was curious to see that the golden monkey had no need to rush after her person as so many daemons did. She was a powerful woman, beautiful, and unwise.
She placed her hand on his shoulder, although it wasn’t really that; truthfully she slid it up his chest before it came to rest where it should. Somehow she managed it primly, and he found himself emitting just the slightest internal sigh of relaxation. Here was a true and fierce woman, a creature of will, not a puppet or a doll, and the sort of being he simply hadn’t encountered since returning from his most recent explorations. Her face was true Brytish but she was also Ruta in caramel silks and steel, smelling vaguely of flowers, burnt butter, and ozone, and her lips were moist. She was, Lord Asriel thought, the most dangerous thing he’d ever seen. And she knew it.
“You’re a skilled dancer Countess –“
“Marisa, please. I miss having a name.”
He gave a small laugh, a slight rumble indistinct from Stelmaria’s purr. “Marisa then.”
“And don’t you have a given name?” she asked, teasing, as she moved the nail of her first finger in circles on his shoulder as they waltzed, Stelmaria standing guard at the edge of the dance floor, and the golden monkey pacing and peering about inquisitively,
“I do, but I don’t prefer it. Asriel will do. I have no more private name.”
“Asriel,” she said, nodding but clearly displeased that the exchange had been less than fair.
“It is a good thing you married a Count,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Otherwise, your title and your first name would be the same,” he said, drawing out the letters of “Mrs.” into her name.
She laughed, bright and sharp and Lord Asriel couldn’t help but think the ozone was more distinct now.
“I hope your husband doesn’t mind,” he said, referring to the dancing, mainly for the sake of making small talk.
“No, he’s probably relieved to have me away for a bit.”
“Arranged?” Asriel asked bluntly.
“No. Merely well-considered.”
He nodded with admiration at her particularly unfeminine brand of honesty. “It’s something I have no taste for,” he said, matter of factly.
“And the luxury to indulge.”
“Being a man?”
She nodded. “And unworried about sin.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
“We may gossip about you, Asriel, but that doesn’t mean your intentions are unclear.”
He shook his head slightly, pleasantly unaware of the rest of the room around them. “You have a strange way of flirting, Marisa.”
She laughed again, but it was at the very clear touch of his daemon by hers that he couldn’t help but tense, and he pulled her slightly closer to mask the reflexive twitch in his muscles.
“You should be careful,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Stelmaria is very protective of me,” he said, straining slightly to keep the pitch of his voice even and his dancing fluid even as the golden monkey ran its small claw-like hands the wrong way under Stelmaria’s bristling fur. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt, or cause a scene.”
Marisa arched her back slightly so as to press herself closer to him. “You wouldn’t, you’re enjoying this too much.”
He laughed as pushed her away slightly, at the same moment Stelmaria batted at the monkey that had decided to pull on her ear. “I think I’d enjoy the scene more.”
“I’m terribly curious about your entertainments,” she said, possibly changing the topic.
“You mean the gunpowder,” he said, bemused.
“Of course I mean the gun powder,” she said, the ringing laugh returning this time accompanied by a hint of annoyance. Their daemons were no longer touching, but whether she had backed off because he was better at the game than her or because that was in fact part of her strategy he wasn’t sure.
“Well, if you’d like to see how the ordinances are set up, I’m happy to provide a brief tour before we light them. The Count, of course, is welcome as well.”
“Of course,” she said with a smile, and pulled back from him with a spin and a curtsey and was back in her seat before he had even the opportunity to discern whether his invitation had been accepted, or on what terms.
As Marisa walked beside him along the edge of the lake, he couldn’t help but notice her face each time her delicate shoes broke the thin crust of ice over what was barely an inch of snow. It was as if there was a rapturous taste to the sound and sensation of it, and when they finally came to a pause by the first row of ordinances, he noted that the monkey was content to crouch on the ground, doing all he could to disturb whatever snow had remained untrod.
“Have you traveled much?” she asked, fidgeting with her gloves and surveying the area as if it belonged to her.
“The North exclusively, I confess, unless you mean the continent which doesn’t really count at all. It suits both research and commerce,” he said.
“So I see,” she said, not quite hiding her rather literal appraisal of him.
He raised and eyebrow at her, but didn’t reply or linger, turning instead to the men who had set the lightening works, speaking to them quickly about the evening’s plans, and looking for the fellow who had lost a hand in some similar evening somewhere else, thinking somehow that Marisa might find that amusing. When he turned back, he found her crouching by one of the cannons, fingering a fuse.
“That sets off merely enough of a charge to get the thing airborne and light the other fuses within so it shatters in the air. Backfires, as you can imagine, are quite dangerous.”
“Let me light one,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I hardly think that’s a good idea,” he said standing, utterly dismissive of the notion.
“You’re going to light some of them,” she said as she got up, dusting her hands off on her coat and shooing her daemon down form on top of one of the cannons.
He smiled and turned to her. “What makes you think that?”
“The fact that you’re salivating.”
He gave a short, curt laugh like a bark and stared up at the sky as he scratched the top of Stelmaria’s head. Finally he looked at the countess. “No, that’s you.”
Her smile was oil retextured over heat and she stepped up into his personal space before he could call her to him.
“The men will see,” he said, bemused.
“Are they yours?”
“Yes.”
“Then I imagine they know what happens if they betray their lord,” she said, all sweet and syrupy poison.
There were any number of sharp things he could have said to her in reply, but instead he gave a wry, unpleasant grin before grabbing her arms and pulling her close.
“I don’t leave things unfinished,” he told her.
“My piety is selective,” she noted, amused.
Stelmaria growled, but it was a hiss from the golden monkey that told him they were already supposed to be kissing. Before he could note it, he realized he had pushed Marisa up against a tree and that as the air had left her at the force of it, they already were. He was startled too, to realize that she didn’t taste like much of anything really, except himself, and he groaned into her mouth. She smiled, such as she could, looked at his closed eyes and then the sky, before dancing her first finger on his shoulder again, glad for the snow she would soon have to blot onto her swollen lips.
She pushed him away slightly, just enough so that they could speak. “I take tea most afternoons in town, whereas the Count prefers the affairs of the estate,” she said, twisting out of his arms now, and bending for the snow. “I shall let you know where to attend to me, tomorrow afternoon, assuming you can tolerate the wait,” she said, standing and surveying her hair and makeup in a small pocket mirror as Stelmaria paced around her.
Satisfied, she clicked the compact closed and began the walk back to the great house, but Asriel grabbed her wrist and yanked her back to him, before lifting her hair to bite the skin over her spine.
“Careful,” he hissed, clearly pleased.
“Say the clasp of your necklace caught you,” he breathed still focused on his task.
“He never looks there anyway,” she replied softly, and then was out of Asriel’s grip. She scooped up her daemon and began to hurry along the lake.
Asriel merely followed her at a leisurely pace, smiling.
“Set off your explosions,” Marisa turned and called back to him, adding, “I’ll say I was frightened!” before she fled.
Lord Asriel laughed and went in search of fire.
Basically, I was working with the assumption that Belacqua was Marisa's married name and that Coulter was a pseudonym or else of course we'd know just whose child Lyra was. This turns out to be not true, as per ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cereswunderkind who I think is about as close to BNF (term used non-judgementally, thanks) as the HDM fandom has:
"Asriel is the younger brother of the Marquis who was supposed to have been Lyra's father and died in an airship accident. That's why she calls him 'Uncle Asriel' to begin with. The family name is Belacqua, so both 'Lord Asriel' and 'Asriel Belacqua' are correct, as is 'Lyra Belacqua'.
Another example of this relationship in fiction is Lord Peter (Wimsey). He is the younger brother of the Duke of Denver. See - it's exactly the same, only Denver is still alive.
I'd be amazed if PP hadn't read the Peter Wimsey stories"
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