reasonablysunny

Tension and Tenacity

waffleguppies:

K, who as I may have mentioned several hundred times basically has the best ideas, asked for something along the lines of a Portal/Jane Austen AU for Christmas.

I’m a very slow writer.

I also quickly discovered that I can’t write like Jane Austen. Plus, I tried to historypick this as much as I could, but if I’ve screwed up I’d rather know about it, especially as I might even manage to write the other half of this at some point.

Also thanks to Sunny for the awesome title idea. IT IS PERFECT.

Tension and Tenacity

The dining-room was very big, very ornate, and very empty. As with everywhere else in the rest of the house, its colours were faded white, cold marble and moulded plaster, with a touch of scarlet napery here and there among the polished silverware on the long table.

It was a very long table. The newly-wedded Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton had each taken one of the only two place-settings, one at each extreme end of it, and there was at least twenty feet of dead space between them. A fraught sort of silence presided over the scene, cold and somewhat shell-shocked on one side, nervous and frustrated on the other.

There they sat, stranded at opposite ends of the long table, unspoken opponents in a helpless kind of entrenched cold war.

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Erin, you bloody genius, you.