some men you've reduced to ashes are finally dusting themselves off

[ungovernable]

WHO: Benevenuta Thevenet + ensemble.
WHAT: Hercules Hansen has died.
WHEN: After Solace 7th.
WHERE: Skyhold, Warden Camp.
NOTES: Planned threads, but please feel free to give me a bell via pm or other means if you'd like to add to them!

Word travels quick in Skyhold. Not uniquely - word travels quick anywhere there are people, everyone knows. Less usual is that when word of the party's return from the Deep Roads travels (less one member), it stirs Benevenuta early from her work - but not to meet them. No, though she goes to the camp she goes directly and without tarrying to the tent she's shared with Hercules for these past weeks and for a long time stands there, studying the small signs of a life briefly shared.

By the time Alistair finds her, first, Herc's belongings are already half packed and Benevenuta does not look surprised to see him.

Comments

[byblow]

He looks—mildly—surprised to see her, or surprised to see her like this, packing. His first thought is that she's leaving Herc, and it's good he's not here to see it, but the thought dies of its own lack of logic before he can voice it. Small blessings.

Alistair pushes the tent flap further open. Max is with him, pushing past his legs now while he unconsciously straightens up and sucks in his stomach. (It's half because she's pretty, half because she carries herself with a nobility that reminds him of Anora. Isolde.) He clears his throat.

"I hope you know how to handle a mabari."

[ungovernable]

"I will learn," she says, neutrally, with a steadiness that doesn't quite take her by surprise. She can do this - she can do all of this, and she will. It will -

It will be what it has been. It's official, now, that's all. Official doesn't change anything, except insofar as it does, somehow, and Benevenuta is not nearly so prepared for it as she wishes she were. Maybe no one would be. Maybe she couldn't be, and it doesn't matter.

She sets down a folded shirt, smooths her hands over it, looks up. "Someone will need the use of the tent. I am sure. I will make my arrangements."

[byblow]

To Alistair--who's doing well on a day he can wrangle his heart onto his sleeve instead of having it sprawled out naked on his face--the steadiness is a surprise. A cold one. He'd cried.

But he's not crying now. He's standing there awkwardly, watching Max sniff at shirts and trousers and--not letting the dog make him sad again.

"We're hardly recruiting," he says, looking determinedly back up at Benevenuta.

[ungovernable]

It's rather as if she's condensed herself down into nothing else but that calm, that coldness; absent her usual sly edge, the amused tilt of her mouth that up until this moment he might've just thought was how her face always looked due to it being so routinely turned upon him, the lightness of tone such as she employed to forcibly give him what everyone is still politely referring to as a dog. All stilled, the clear, calm face of dark water, and

she can't quite look at him. Not for longer than a moment. His gaze shifts back to her and she looks at Max, instead, which isn't much easier but feels less revealing.

"Dorian will not mind my company a while," she says, instead of the many other things she might, and - it is the smallest of concessions to make, that she allows herself to need his. "Regardless."

[byblow]

"Right," Alistair says, in a tone that suggests she is perhaps being unreasonable but he has too much self-preservation instinct to argue, which is ridiculous for multiple reasons, including that Alistair has no self-preservation instinct at all. If he did he wouldn't use tones like that with women like her at times like these.

He crosses his arms. Rubs his own elbow.

"You don't have to do the packing. We can send everything up."

[ungovernable]

"No," she says, more sharply than she'd planned to, the first hint of anything past calm behind that opaque facade; a moment later, more measured, "no, thank you. I prefer to do it myself."

That she stepped between Alistair and the piled up belongings is probably nothing. Unintentional and coincidental, meaningless.

"I have it well in hand," awkward only conceptually, regaining that tight grip on herself, "as you see. Thank you."

[byblow]

He looks past her for a moment, as if there might be something in the tent that's more the Wardens' than hers. But Hercules was either more careful than that or he wasn't. There's no helping it now either way.

"I didn't mean you weren't capable of folding shirts," he says after that glance. Despite the circumstances one eyebrow and one corner of his mouth do a thing, in concert with a slight turn of his head--a flicker of skeptical amusement. There and gone. "You'll let us know if you need help carrying anything, at least."

[ungovernable]

"The desk," she says, after a moment. "I will need someone to move the desk, eventually, but we'd not much between us." Even including Herc's belongings with her own, it's not more than she can carry up to the hold; a benefit, when she's not actually informed Dorian as yet that she's going to need somewhere to stay, trusting that he wouldn't turn her away.

(And he won't, so.)

Eventually, more gently, "He didn't want you to know. Before. To go into a fight, knowing you would lose a man whatever you did."

But she knew.

[byblow]

"Wouldn't have been the first time," Alistair says. "That's what we're for."

It's a reach for brisk stoicism that falls short, into some mixture of resentment and regret that is not all for Hercules. Some of it is for the Wardens at Adamant Fortress, baring their necks. Some of it is for a beacon lit ten years ago, too late. But neither of those things have a place in this tent--he's that tactful--so he squares his shoulders and steps back to leave.

"Let me know when you're ready for the desk. Or tell Kaisa. She can probably carry it on her own."