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Someone commented on Best Kept Secrets asking for a Sybil-&-Havelock sequel. Apparently, I was in the mood, though I don't know how well it came out -_-;
Title: Unexpected Gambits
Rating: PG
Fandom: Discworld (Watch)
Characters/Pairings: Sybil, Havelock, Sam, Rufus Drumknott. Sybil/Havelock, Sybil/Sam/Havelock
Summary: Sequel to Best Kept Secrets. With Sam ameniable (or at least too stunned to object), Sybil moves next to pull Havelock into orbit. Whether he means to let her or not.
Wordcount: 2245
Warnings/Notes: Sneaky!Sybil. And again, not sure on this one
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Unexpected Gambits
Rating: PG
Fandom: Discworld (Watch)
Characters/Pairings: Sybil, Havelock, Sam, Rufus Drumknott. Sybil/Havelock, Sybil/Sam/Havelock
Summary: Sequel to Best Kept Secrets. With Sam ameniable (or at least too stunned to object), Sybil moves next to pull Havelock into orbit. Whether he means to let her or not.
Wordcount: 2245
Warnings/Notes: Sneaky!Sybil. And again, not sure on this one
Disclaimer: Not mine
Unexpected Gambits
"Ah. Lady Vimes. Do come in, won't you?"
Sybil smiled faintly as she stepped into the Oblong Office and stood slightly to one side so Rufus could politely shuffle out behind her, leaving his master high and dry behind him, as it were.
Havelock had been expecting her. Well, of course he had. But judging by the term of address, by the subtle apology and acknowledgement of guilt it implied, what Havelock imagined he should be expecting right now and what he should actually be expecting looked to be two very different things.
Which was fortunate, really. He didn't look like he was enjoying his current expectations very much.
"Havelock," she said warmly, bustling forwards to seat herself cheerfully in front of his desk. Enjoying, she must admit, the slightly alarmed expression lurking beneath his carefully placid acceptance. "I'm sorry I'm late, dear. Sam was a bit upset."
He didn't blink. It had long been something of a game for her, to see if he might. To see if she might make him. If nothing else came from it, she rather hoped this conversation might finally grant her that opportunity.
Instead, he narrowed his eyes ever so slightly, suspicion and appraisal rearing their heads as her opening gambit didn't quite match the anticipated game. She couldn't see the scenarios running rapidly and quite possibly alphabetically through his mind, but then she rather thought she didn't have to.
Good gods, she'd forgotten how much fun Havelock could be, sometimes.
"I'm sure he was," he murmured, faintly. Balancing his chin gently on the crook of his finger, giving every impression of relaxation as he met her cheerful, guileless expression. Sybil smiled softly. Yes, oh yes. She had been waiting quite some time, for this. "I do apologise, Lady Vimes."
"Sybil, dear," she corrected, enjoying the subtle twitch of consternation it received. "This is hardly a formal conversation, Havelock. And it's alright. I quite understand."
He didn't blink. He so placidly, defiantly didn't blink that Sybil could not have helped the surge of warmth in her chest if she'd tried. Silly. So utterly silly, the pair of them. And so very, very dear.
"I'd say not the best timing on your part," she went on, gently now. Well. Gently enough. "But I understand that if you attempted to wait for the best timing, the opportunity might never arrive at all." She shrugged, smiling ruefully. "Sam tends to be a little dense about these things. Even despite my best efforts. You know how he is, I'm sure."
He surrendered the placid expression altogether. The game had gone far enough off track that it was no longer of any use to him. Instead, Havelock frowned openly at her, and dropped his hand from his chin with a smooth, almost threatening motion. He really didn't like being on the wrong foot, did he?
"I begin to think I don't know what you mean," he said, slowly and with a weight of intent behind it. "Lady ... Sybil. In the interests of not talking at cross-purposes and wasting each other's time ... perhaps you might like to enlighten me as to what, exactly, had Commander Vimes so upset?"
He had the look of a man who is well on his way to abandoning passive means of acquiring information, and looking instead for a claw hammer with which to pointedly excavate some answers. In his defense, she didn't think Havelock had had to play the game on so personal a field before. It presented ... some rather different challenges to his usual fare.
Sybil smiled. It probably wasn't a very nice smile. She was having rather too much fun to remember not to put too many teeth into it. Havelock still didn't blink, but he did look slightly discomfitted.
"You know, you really ought to have said something sooner," she admonished, still showing rather too many teeth. "A few years ago, for example? Young Sam rather complicates the matter, and you know how traditional Sam is about these things. You've left me with an awful lot of work, convincing him to give this a try. Really, Havelock. This has not been your best venture, not by a long shot."
He stared at her. His features flickered through a very complicated series of incredibly minute expressions in rapid succession, before finally settling on:
"... What?"
And there. There. That was the expression she had been looking for, in this silent and so very gentle game they'd been playing for all these years. That little flicker of stunned bemusement, that dart of pale eyelids. After all this time, she had finally made Havelock Vetinari blink.
She pressed her lips together, smothering the smile rapidly. Swallowing it down, letting the small triumph slip away and be swallowed by the rising warmth in her chest. The rich, rather giddy delight that had nothing whatsoever to do with victories, and everything to do with the pale, startled expression on his face, and the wariness beneath it.
"Sam told me," she said, very gently as she leaned across his desk, laying her hand atop his with all the care she usually reserved for handling dragons with upset stomachs. Or Sam. Either Sam. "Or rather, he didn't tell me. He just paced a hole in our parlour floor, sending half-terrified glances my way for about half an hour, before I put him out of his misery and explained things to him."
Havelock blinked, carefully. Once he'd started, it seemed he didn't stop. "Things," he echoed, a little flatly. And a little dangerously, too, but then that was always the risk of cornering deadly things, even when you meant well. Sybil patted his hand soothingly.
"That you've loved him for years," she said, and only tightened her hand a little bit at the barely perceptible tremor that flinched through him. "That he'd rather loved you almost as long, though he never really wanted to admit it to himself." She smiled, a little, at the aborted blink that almost made it through, smiled at the ruthless nerve that tamped it down. "And ... and that I had been expecting you to make your feelings known years ago. And maybe ... hoping that you wouldn't take that much longer?"
He didn't move. She wasn't completely sure he was breathing, to be honest, and Sybil got the distinctly alarming impression that she was seeing Havelock Vetinari more disarmed than he had been in a long, long time. It was ... It gave rise to something inside her, something warm and trembling and more than a little fierce.
"You need to be sure," she told him softly, still holding his hand, tethering him gently to her. "Havelock. It's like ... Do you remember what you told me once? About music? About how it's only pure in the score, inside your head, because as soon as there are musicians involved, actual instruments and actual people, suddenly there's all this spit and fumbling and imperfect timing, and it just isn't pure, anymore?"
He blinked, shaking himself out of his stupor a little. Frowning faintly at her, some spark of his usual curious, analytical self staggering back to its feet. He nodded, carefully, and she smiled encouragingly at him.
"This will be like that," she said, gently. "This will be like moving from the score to a live orchestra. And ..." She paused, remembering Sam, remembering his stunned expression and his worries and his fear and his stubborn, snarling refusal to bend, and she smiled. Soft and rueful and proud. "And perhaps not a very good orchestra, either," she admitted, and grinned at little for the impeccably raised eyebrow it garnered in response. "Oh, shut up, Havelock."
"I don't recall having said anything," he said dryly, with some of his usual aplomb, and Sybil felt a small lurch in her chest, a small and so very painful twinge of hope. So silly. So dear.
"No," she agreed, with a very old smile. "But you were thinking it."
He didn't deny it, either, his mouth curving faintly at the corner. Sybil pressed her lips together, something in her chest suddenly too heavy to be borne, and carefully pulled his hand towards her. Carefully brought it between both her own, feeling the callouses that quietly announced a profession as deadly, in its way, as Sam's.
"It will be very messy," she told him seriously. "Me and Sam. You and Sam. Even you and me. And there's young Sam to think about too. It will be ... very messy." She shook her head ruefully. "There will be spit. And bad timing. And dropped instruments. And a punch-up in the stalls. And knowing Sam, the conductor's baton will probably end up shoved up someone's nose."
She paused, having let the metaphor run away from her a little bit, and found him smiling at her. Not his usual smile, not the little I know something you don't know smirk, or the placid Oh dear, did you really think that? quirk of amusement. Something more personal, instead. Something directed purely at her, and warm with it.
She carefully pulled one hand away from his, carefully disentangled her fingers, and reached out to touch his cheek gently. Not so familiarly as she would Sam's, not so confidently. But as gently, maybe. And as genuinely.
"I don't want to see you hurt," she said, brushing her thumb carefully beneath his eye, touching softly at the greying hair at his temple. "And neither does Sam. Never mind his grumbling to the contrary."
Havelock laughed softly. He didn't touch her, she wasn't sure why, but he leaned into her hand ever so faintly. "I always do," he confided. "I have the measure of his spring, how far it can be cranked. I have a rather alarming degree of faith in your husband's ability not to kill me, unless he really means it." He paused, and then said, much more slowly: "And in his ability to judge ... when meaning it might be necessary."
... Yes. Yes, she supposed he did. And that was the darker part, that was the more painful part of it, of this tangling of hopes and wants and needs. That was the part of loving both Havelock Vetinari and Sam Vimes that might ... that might kill them all, before they were done.
But she had watched Sam walk out into the night for years. She had watched him, she had walked with him, she had helped him build something to walk back to. She had done all that, for years and years now. And she thought she could do as much for Havelock, if he let her. She thought they could do as much together, if he let them.
"... Sam was very upset," she whispered softly. Holding his cheek in her palm, wondering at how very frail the most deadly of things could be. "He was shocked, and upset, and afraid. But I think ... I think I might have talked him around. I think we might ... have a chance." He didn't hide the tremor this time, didn't hide the flinch of hope that ran through the cheek beneath her palm. Sybil smiled at him, crooked and pained and so very, very warm. "Will you take it?" she asked, soft and serious. "Will you play out this score with us, Havelock?"
He paused, for a moment. Holding her gaze, holding her hand in his. Letting her see him turn it over, letting her see the considerations and the calculations and the way the question was deconstructed inside his head, to be reconstructed again as he saw fit. And then ...
"I had not thought there might be an 'us'," he said, very quietly. Watching her carefully, letting a faintly shamed flicker touch his smile. "I had not, I admit, allowed for the possibility of your complicity. Or even your approval. I realise now that was ... a very grave error."
Sybil snorted (well, yes, obviously), and something knifed suddenly through his expression. Something rich and dangerous and so smooth as to barely ripple the surface. A sharp, hungry thing, so very like the slow, dark thing that lurked inside Sam and inside her, and Sybil blinked as the warmth in her chest spiked suddenly to heat.
Oh. Oh. Yes. That ... that might be very useful. Yes, that had possibilities.
"Yes," Havelock said, low and dark and sure, as his hand tightened around hers. The assassin, she thought, more than the Patrician. Or maybe just the young man he had once been. Her old and dear friend, who had always been ... so very dangerous. "My Lady Sybil Vimes. Yes."
For a second, she did nothing. For a second, she could do nothing. And then she grinned, with rather too many teeth than she ought, and gripped his hand in return. As much to make sure he couldn't run away as anything else.
"Good," she said, very brightly as his expression flickered minutely towards alarm once more. "Then you won't mind having lunch with Sam and I this afternoon? Captain Carrot has agreed to make sure Sam is in attendance, and Rufus has already cleared your schedule, of course. Dear man, very dear, he really was most helpful ..."
They were very dear, very silly men, she thought. There really was a truly alarming amount of enjoyment to be had in getting a leg up on either of them. And here she was, with the pleasure of having both.
It was fortunate she was more than up to it, then, wasn't it?
"Ah. Lady Vimes. Do come in, won't you?"
Sybil smiled faintly as she stepped into the Oblong Office and stood slightly to one side so Rufus could politely shuffle out behind her, leaving his master high and dry behind him, as it were.
Havelock had been expecting her. Well, of course he had. But judging by the term of address, by the subtle apology and acknowledgement of guilt it implied, what Havelock imagined he should be expecting right now and what he should actually be expecting looked to be two very different things.
Which was fortunate, really. He didn't look like he was enjoying his current expectations very much.
"Havelock," she said warmly, bustling forwards to seat herself cheerfully in front of his desk. Enjoying, she must admit, the slightly alarmed expression lurking beneath his carefully placid acceptance. "I'm sorry I'm late, dear. Sam was a bit upset."
He didn't blink. It had long been something of a game for her, to see if he might. To see if she might make him. If nothing else came from it, she rather hoped this conversation might finally grant her that opportunity.
Instead, he narrowed his eyes ever so slightly, suspicion and appraisal rearing their heads as her opening gambit didn't quite match the anticipated game. She couldn't see the scenarios running rapidly and quite possibly alphabetically through his mind, but then she rather thought she didn't have to.
Good gods, she'd forgotten how much fun Havelock could be, sometimes.
"I'm sure he was," he murmured, faintly. Balancing his chin gently on the crook of his finger, giving every impression of relaxation as he met her cheerful, guileless expression. Sybil smiled softly. Yes, oh yes. She had been waiting quite some time, for this. "I do apologise, Lady Vimes."
"Sybil, dear," she corrected, enjoying the subtle twitch of consternation it received. "This is hardly a formal conversation, Havelock. And it's alright. I quite understand."
He didn't blink. He so placidly, defiantly didn't blink that Sybil could not have helped the surge of warmth in her chest if she'd tried. Silly. So utterly silly, the pair of them. And so very, very dear.
"I'd say not the best timing on your part," she went on, gently now. Well. Gently enough. "But I understand that if you attempted to wait for the best timing, the opportunity might never arrive at all." She shrugged, smiling ruefully. "Sam tends to be a little dense about these things. Even despite my best efforts. You know how he is, I'm sure."
He surrendered the placid expression altogether. The game had gone far enough off track that it was no longer of any use to him. Instead, Havelock frowned openly at her, and dropped his hand from his chin with a smooth, almost threatening motion. He really didn't like being on the wrong foot, did he?
"I begin to think I don't know what you mean," he said, slowly and with a weight of intent behind it. "Lady ... Sybil. In the interests of not talking at cross-purposes and wasting each other's time ... perhaps you might like to enlighten me as to what, exactly, had Commander Vimes so upset?"
He had the look of a man who is well on his way to abandoning passive means of acquiring information, and looking instead for a claw hammer with which to pointedly excavate some answers. In his defense, she didn't think Havelock had had to play the game on so personal a field before. It presented ... some rather different challenges to his usual fare.
Sybil smiled. It probably wasn't a very nice smile. She was having rather too much fun to remember not to put too many teeth into it. Havelock still didn't blink, but he did look slightly discomfitted.
"You know, you really ought to have said something sooner," she admonished, still showing rather too many teeth. "A few years ago, for example? Young Sam rather complicates the matter, and you know how traditional Sam is about these things. You've left me with an awful lot of work, convincing him to give this a try. Really, Havelock. This has not been your best venture, not by a long shot."
He stared at her. His features flickered through a very complicated series of incredibly minute expressions in rapid succession, before finally settling on:
"... What?"
And there. There. That was the expression she had been looking for, in this silent and so very gentle game they'd been playing for all these years. That little flicker of stunned bemusement, that dart of pale eyelids. After all this time, she had finally made Havelock Vetinari blink.
She pressed her lips together, smothering the smile rapidly. Swallowing it down, letting the small triumph slip away and be swallowed by the rising warmth in her chest. The rich, rather giddy delight that had nothing whatsoever to do with victories, and everything to do with the pale, startled expression on his face, and the wariness beneath it.
"Sam told me," she said, very gently as she leaned across his desk, laying her hand atop his with all the care she usually reserved for handling dragons with upset stomachs. Or Sam. Either Sam. "Or rather, he didn't tell me. He just paced a hole in our parlour floor, sending half-terrified glances my way for about half an hour, before I put him out of his misery and explained things to him."
Havelock blinked, carefully. Once he'd started, it seemed he didn't stop. "Things," he echoed, a little flatly. And a little dangerously, too, but then that was always the risk of cornering deadly things, even when you meant well. Sybil patted his hand soothingly.
"That you've loved him for years," she said, and only tightened her hand a little bit at the barely perceptible tremor that flinched through him. "That he'd rather loved you almost as long, though he never really wanted to admit it to himself." She smiled, a little, at the aborted blink that almost made it through, smiled at the ruthless nerve that tamped it down. "And ... and that I had been expecting you to make your feelings known years ago. And maybe ... hoping that you wouldn't take that much longer?"
He didn't move. She wasn't completely sure he was breathing, to be honest, and Sybil got the distinctly alarming impression that she was seeing Havelock Vetinari more disarmed than he had been in a long, long time. It was ... It gave rise to something inside her, something warm and trembling and more than a little fierce.
"You need to be sure," she told him softly, still holding his hand, tethering him gently to her. "Havelock. It's like ... Do you remember what you told me once? About music? About how it's only pure in the score, inside your head, because as soon as there are musicians involved, actual instruments and actual people, suddenly there's all this spit and fumbling and imperfect timing, and it just isn't pure, anymore?"
He blinked, shaking himself out of his stupor a little. Frowning faintly at her, some spark of his usual curious, analytical self staggering back to its feet. He nodded, carefully, and she smiled encouragingly at him.
"This will be like that," she said, gently. "This will be like moving from the score to a live orchestra. And ..." She paused, remembering Sam, remembering his stunned expression and his worries and his fear and his stubborn, snarling refusal to bend, and she smiled. Soft and rueful and proud. "And perhaps not a very good orchestra, either," she admitted, and grinned at little for the impeccably raised eyebrow it garnered in response. "Oh, shut up, Havelock."
"I don't recall having said anything," he said dryly, with some of his usual aplomb, and Sybil felt a small lurch in her chest, a small and so very painful twinge of hope. So silly. So dear.
"No," she agreed, with a very old smile. "But you were thinking it."
He didn't deny it, either, his mouth curving faintly at the corner. Sybil pressed her lips together, something in her chest suddenly too heavy to be borne, and carefully pulled his hand towards her. Carefully brought it between both her own, feeling the callouses that quietly announced a profession as deadly, in its way, as Sam's.
"It will be very messy," she told him seriously. "Me and Sam. You and Sam. Even you and me. And there's young Sam to think about too. It will be ... very messy." She shook her head ruefully. "There will be spit. And bad timing. And dropped instruments. And a punch-up in the stalls. And knowing Sam, the conductor's baton will probably end up shoved up someone's nose."
She paused, having let the metaphor run away from her a little bit, and found him smiling at her. Not his usual smile, not the little I know something you don't know smirk, or the placid Oh dear, did you really think that? quirk of amusement. Something more personal, instead. Something directed purely at her, and warm with it.
She carefully pulled one hand away from his, carefully disentangled her fingers, and reached out to touch his cheek gently. Not so familiarly as she would Sam's, not so confidently. But as gently, maybe. And as genuinely.
"I don't want to see you hurt," she said, brushing her thumb carefully beneath his eye, touching softly at the greying hair at his temple. "And neither does Sam. Never mind his grumbling to the contrary."
Havelock laughed softly. He didn't touch her, she wasn't sure why, but he leaned into her hand ever so faintly. "I always do," he confided. "I have the measure of his spring, how far it can be cranked. I have a rather alarming degree of faith in your husband's ability not to kill me, unless he really means it." He paused, and then said, much more slowly: "And in his ability to judge ... when meaning it might be necessary."
... Yes. Yes, she supposed he did. And that was the darker part, that was the more painful part of it, of this tangling of hopes and wants and needs. That was the part of loving both Havelock Vetinari and Sam Vimes that might ... that might kill them all, before they were done.
But she had watched Sam walk out into the night for years. She had watched him, she had walked with him, she had helped him build something to walk back to. She had done all that, for years and years now. And she thought she could do as much for Havelock, if he let her. She thought they could do as much together, if he let them.
"... Sam was very upset," she whispered softly. Holding his cheek in her palm, wondering at how very frail the most deadly of things could be. "He was shocked, and upset, and afraid. But I think ... I think I might have talked him around. I think we might ... have a chance." He didn't hide the tremor this time, didn't hide the flinch of hope that ran through the cheek beneath her palm. Sybil smiled at him, crooked and pained and so very, very warm. "Will you take it?" she asked, soft and serious. "Will you play out this score with us, Havelock?"
He paused, for a moment. Holding her gaze, holding her hand in his. Letting her see him turn it over, letting her see the considerations and the calculations and the way the question was deconstructed inside his head, to be reconstructed again as he saw fit. And then ...
"I had not thought there might be an 'us'," he said, very quietly. Watching her carefully, letting a faintly shamed flicker touch his smile. "I had not, I admit, allowed for the possibility of your complicity. Or even your approval. I realise now that was ... a very grave error."
Sybil snorted (well, yes, obviously), and something knifed suddenly through his expression. Something rich and dangerous and so smooth as to barely ripple the surface. A sharp, hungry thing, so very like the slow, dark thing that lurked inside Sam and inside her, and Sybil blinked as the warmth in her chest spiked suddenly to heat.
Oh. Oh. Yes. That ... that might be very useful. Yes, that had possibilities.
"Yes," Havelock said, low and dark and sure, as his hand tightened around hers. The assassin, she thought, more than the Patrician. Or maybe just the young man he had once been. Her old and dear friend, who had always been ... so very dangerous. "My Lady Sybil Vimes. Yes."
For a second, she did nothing. For a second, she could do nothing. And then she grinned, with rather too many teeth than she ought, and gripped his hand in return. As much to make sure he couldn't run away as anything else.
"Good," she said, very brightly as his expression flickered minutely towards alarm once more. "Then you won't mind having lunch with Sam and I this afternoon? Captain Carrot has agreed to make sure Sam is in attendance, and Rufus has already cleared your schedule, of course. Dear man, very dear, he really was most helpful ..."
They were very dear, very silly men, she thought. There really was a truly alarming amount of enjoyment to be had in getting a leg up on either of them. And here she was, with the pleasure of having both.
It was fortunate she was more than up to it, then, wasn't it?
