[ closed ] go ahead and cry little girl, nobody does it like you do

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, Lex Luthor, Alistair, Bellamy Blake, Thranduil, Herian Amsel.
WHAT: Comte Vauquelin has information and records for the Inquisition. A small group including his daughter go to collect it. Everything is fine.
WHEN: End of Kingsway.
WHERE: Orlais, the Vauquelin estate.
NOTES: Violence, character death, assholes.

Comments

[dashing]

Councillor Amsel is not a terribly chatty person, perhaps to the preference of almost anyone in the party. She keeps her opinions close to her, will defend them if need be, but does not scatter them as if they were conetti; they are not nearly so bright and joyous, for that.

She carries a staff at her back, a sword and the hilt of a spirit blade at her side, and almost never starts a conversation that is not practical or warning in nature. It is not so much that she is unfriendly as that she is here to protect, here for a reason. And, actually, she is a little unfriendly. A rifter who claims to know what is best for elves, an unknown Templar and a Grey Warden are all amongst her excellent reasons for being less than delighted, and the other members of the party do little to appease her. That it is an Orlesian noble she likes best (or has spoken to the most) prior to this trip does not, perhaps, bode so very well.

Setting up camp has her breathing life into the fire with a touch of her magic, an orange glow starting in the heart of the wood pile that blooms upwards and tangled about the sticks like curls of orange ribbon, or perhaps she's setting up camp. Perhaps you have the misfortune to be her tent buddy. Perhaps she's handing over a rabbit on a stick - for dinner, skinned and cooked, fear not.

On the road she rides on a palomino stallion that was once the property of a chevalier in all places save where the ground is too treacherous, when she chooses instead to walk - or if a member of the party strains themselves and lacks a horse, in which case she offers them her own.

Or wildcard me, bruh.

[byblow]

"You know," Alistair says at one point, walking alongside her horse, "it's not very sporting of you, is it? Carrying a sword. Mages can rain fire on their enemies or turn them into ice or--anything, but you still want to put me out of a job."

[dashing]

"When mages are not cut down with their magic blocked and mana drained, I will feel better assured that I have no need of a sword to protect others and myself."

The Spire is well engraved upon her; the sight of children cut down, unable to defend themselves. "In equal turn, I do not think magic need always be the first resort. You are certainly in no danger of my overwhelming desire to become a Warden."

Though, she does give him a second look. The one Sabine has taken a shine to; the one deserving of more than one warning.

[byblow]

Alistair twists his mouth to one side and glances at her sideways. To those fluent in his particular dialect of facial expression, it's a twist and a glance that together say: That wasn't a serious comment but now I feel bad, yet you should also feel bad for ruining my unserious comment and making me feel bad; no one ever lets me have any fun.

To those who are not fluent--or those who are not looking at him, possibly, because they have better things to look at or think about than the angle of his eyebrows--it more likely translates as a simple awkward.

After his pause for that silent look, he sighs a little and says, "That's what they all say." Until their other options are becoming ghouls or hanging or--the worst--becoming Templars. "Just... keep away from anything that looks blighty, then. For both our sakes."

[dashing]

"The uniform would do me no favours."

It is said very very seriously, gaze straight ahead, shifting very slightly with the minute sway that comes with the horse's legs pushing forward. It might be a very carefully veiled note of humour, or a more pointed comment on the state of the Wardens. The latter might be true of not for her code; inflict offence not wantonly nor recklessly nor inflict words with cruel intent, but share the fruits of thine mind temperately.

No, it is a heavily veiled effort at humour, though effort hardly works. It is weighed down with serious thoughts.

"We've a friend in common, from my understanding of it." A few, actually, though she wonders which might occur to him first.

[byblow]

Alistair looks down at himself, puzzled and preparing to defend the honor of Warden uniforms, which are lovely, very sleek, look at this silver scale, look at this beautiful blue--that veil over her humor is way too heavy for him, in short--but she saves herself from that, however inadvertently, with the change of subject.

He looks up. The mild offense clears from his face.

"Do we?" That isn't very surprising, really. The Inquisition is large but not that large. The members and allies who are something other than farmers-turned-soldiers for the cause tend to run together in more interesting, less illiterate packs. But if Ser Stoic Swordy-Mage of the Raven Hair feels it's worth remarking on, it's probably worth him paying attention to. Probably. "You'll have to narrow down which friend for me," he says. "I have..." A pause to look at his gloved fingers and move them in the vague, twitchy way of someone adding rapidly in their head. "... almost six."

[dashing]

Six? You are marvel of our times, to be sure.

It is the first thing on the tip of her tongue, and she steals it away before it has chance to gather momentum. Some days it is easier, being what she must be. Calm, even, focused - no offhand comments, no accidental offence. Humour was reserved for those known well to her, or the moments when her guard slipped and forced her to reprimand herself, to remind herself to be better.

(She struggles, sometimes, and progresses others, and yet it often feels to her like the moment she reinforces one part of herself another collapses. Compromises in what a knight must be were but a step short of compromises in honour, she will not so bear it. Wit and humour were a relief, and yet they felt like an abomination, like some monstrosity breaking apart what she has tried to make herself, what it has been necessary to be ever since the Spire fell. As if in letting a joke claim her voice might be a betrayal to all they had lost, in some way.)

"Sabine," Herian says instead, very simply. "We met near Halamshiral, 'most two years past."

[byblow]

"Oh," Alistair says.

He doesn't light up. This is because lit up is his default state. Even at the most haggard and exhausted depths of the false Calling, he was bright-eyed and energetic--if only out of stubborn principle, if only when anyone else was looking--and now that that's passed and he's tanned and reasonably well-rested and -fed, it's dimming that takes effort. Effort he makes, right now: he looks down from where Herian is seated above him, eyes straight ahead, lips pursed to suppress an involuntary grin into a twitchy but mostly straight line.

He could ask if she's mentioned him. He doesn't. Halamshiral and two years sinks in, and tamping down his smile no longer requires work.

"Oh," he says again. "Not under circumstances too awful, I hope."

[dashing]

It is not so surprising he is aware of Halamshiral, given that the Inquisition has a base of operations there now, he knows Sabine, he is significant to Sabine. And yet for a human to react still surprises her a little. Perhaps she should have shed some of her own cynicism by now. It was surprise that cut both ways, even as the blade should have been long ago blunted. Some parts of her burned with that longing which had been satisfied a little in the Circles, a kinship that was stripped down to nothing and felt as though it might never have existed once she walked through alienages once more.

So many times had it been that a human woman with a sword at her side who walked with the authority of a knight had made elves press into the shadows, flinching and cowering. Their resolve to fight united had been shattered, still, pieces to be gathered up. To walk into the nightmare of Halamshiral and be seen as one who had been responsible so soon after the White Spire had been a visceral kind of horror she'd sooner forget, and knew she could never cast away.

The point is this: he acknowledges. He feels. It is but a moment and it is only on the surface, but it is something in his favour.
"We had both of us endured some hardship," she says, and it is one of the gentler ways she could say the truth, "though I suspect little can compare to the agonising aftermath of trying to match pace with her in the consumption of wine."

Still said far, far too seriously— still. It is a fragment of an olive branch. An olive twig. Maybe just an olive.