IV. OPEN.

[glandival]

WHO: Sabine and other people who don't care enough about things Sabine cares about probably. >8(
WHAT: A catch all post with prompts!
WHEN: After losing her mind on the crystals through to the end of Cloudreach.
WHERE: The valley; the main hall, the archery range, the kitchens.
NOTES: Happy to construct some specific starters, too, if you'd like to do something different than the below!

THE VALLEY;

[ A break in the Shitty Weather™ sees a little life in amongst the tent city established in the valley. Incessant ice and sleet is quick to melt into mud, and some apply their hands to the fruitless battle of clearing the established roads and other sundry chores. Small fires are maintained, supplies are moved, and structures that had suffered the driving showers of mountain spring-snow are repaired.

Sabine has been helping with some of these things, but is taking a break.

As are three small elven children, who seem familiar enough with her and vice versa to make a game of the unusually muddy land. The game is without order, largely made up of chasing in circles, with a side of tickling, and a modest amount of mud-throwing when they seem like they can get away with it. Feet sink deep and lift high out of icy mud-slick, and laughter is sharp, loud, stark against the pervading sense of misery that bad weather brings. Sabine has an easy, toothy grin, catching the littlest girl with tickling hands, generating a happy shriek.

Which is where it ends. A second elven woman, hair as blonde and fine as her littlest siblings, swoops in as swiftly as a hawk to take the little girl's hand. Her flatly guarded look down at Sabine communicates everything it needs to to have Sabine remain where she is in her semi-crouch, a flash of injury crossing her face as the children are shepherded away, the sounds of complaint dimming into the background.

This isn't the first time, and won't be the last.

But at least the elder of the small family waits until they are out of earshot before she warns the littler ones about staying away from the Rifters and the shardbearers, for all that Sabine can imagine it, and has heard it before. She stands, again, shaking her skirt off of dirt, expression schooled back into something severe and neutral. ]

THE MAIN HALL, THE ARCHERY RANGE, THE KITCHEN;

[ The driving rain thunders against the stone walls and glass windows, forcing people indoors, where it occasionally feels too full if not for the pervasive illness that knocks people back into bed.

Sabine is not sick, nor in bed, seated on an unoccupied stretch of table, legs crossed, while she applies knife to wood to create small carvings she has to squint to see in the flickery light of the nearby hearth fire. Her mood has dragged in some of the outside cloud, her brow pinched and her mouth hard, and when she looks up enough to catch the eye of an Orlesian, disapproval simmering behind a mask, she bares her teeth until they turn away again. Slivers of pale wood gather on the table in front of her, a draft occasionally scattering them onto the ground.

The sky opens, for a brief amount of time. She tests arrows that she has made against targets, and doesn't mind being openly capable where others can see, her skirts still floury from pre-dawn baking efforts.

No matter what the sky is doing, habit brings her here again, the kitchens that are always warm and rarely empty. There is at least one cook who says rabbit like an endearment, and a sort of top-down kitchen hierarchy from the pâtissier through to the boy that washes potatoes, standing on a stool, but otherwise a pervading equality that depends only on your ability to work hard and be discreet when you steal the occasional pear, or mouthful of cooking wine, or wedge of cheese. Learned lessons mean that no one actually gets Sabine to cook anything, but she sweeps, plucks feathers off chickens, breaks down vegetables and lamb bones for stock with a knife she wields unflinchingly.

Later, she takes her hair out of its braid, and nurses an ale, listening to the clamour of the kitchen nearby with what could be fondness if she wasn't driven to distraction. ]

Comments

the courtyards. martel.

[glandival]

[ Her hands are empty of sending crystal, palms smarting where she'd rained slaps on whatever parts of Martel were in unfortunate proximity. Just as swiftly, she squirms out of range, pink around her scattering of freckles and hazel eyes ablaze and accusatory.

Rain is coming down in inconsistent patters, threatening to break open again in deluge.

She turns, and kicks the mass of gathered, neatly trimmed oak sticks she'd been working on, which had been gathered into an ordered bundle that had practically begged to come undone. They scatter across cobble stone and where packed earth is puddling into mud. Even her hair seems angry, fly away curls of red wild and hackling, while furious splotches mottle the skin high on her chest. But she doesn't seem in danger of weeping, frustration and anger running hot rather than watery. ]

[apostasia]

( he takes a breath to speak -

reconsiders, a moment later, and follows the scattered oak, bending to collect each stick methodically until he's recovered the lot. there is probably not going to be any more work on these today; he loosens the leather strip that holds his hair to the nape of his neck and leans just out of the direct rainfall, beneath a stone overhang, bundling the sticks together and knotting the leather around them. )

I don't mean to disagree with you,

( he says, as if she'd spoken. )

But that wasn't productive.

[glandival]

[ With the subject of her ire vanished into Martel's pocket, Sabine is left to shiver in silence as she pointedly doesn't watch him clean up after her. She folds her arms, more a defensive closing off than Attitude, and watches where rainfall streams in through a leak in the stony overhang, staining green and brown.

She snorts at his words, gaze steering further down, the toe of sensible boots scuffing cobble. ]

Would saying nothing be more productive?

[apostasia]

Nothing is, and I struggle to forgive myself this grammar, never productive. Neither, of course, is losing your temper and allowing someone else to use that to martyr themselves and ensure the particular narrative of things is read as they'd prefer and not as it ought to be.

( he tucks the bundle under his arm rather than set it down, considering her. )

You could hear it happening. Poor Sabine who doesn't understand the harshness of the world.

( there is a hint of contempt in that. )

[glandival]

[ That gets a wide-eyed look of disbelief, but that Martel is not saying this himself and is making, instead, an example, stops her from arguing it. She has not taken full leave of her senses.

Her gaze falls on the bundled sticks, mouth pinching, before she relaxes enough to unfold her arms and go to take them from him. ]

It is they that do not understand it. Or see it, or believe it, or think they can do anything about it.

[ But these words are grumbled rather than wielded as argument. There is still a certain stormy shadow in her eyes, but that's the thing about losing one's temper: something does get lost, leaving you more tired than you began, energy run its course. ]

[apostasia]

A terrible thing was done. So who cares? Now we can only do terrible things, and it is never worth doing anything good, or marking anything unacceptable.

( there is a shade of bitterness in his voice that he doesn't catch until it's already in the air; he has already lived the worst excess of that perspective. he has already seen under his own hands how dangerous it is. what it can lead to. what becomes acceptable when you cease to judge atrocities because you 'can't'.

of course, a man of his ego-- even in the worst of it, he had held himself separate. he had looked down on adus and krager even as he used them as tools to do jobs he wouldn't dirty his own hands with. he had known his own limits and he had held in contempt the men he paid to go beyond them, but in the end...he had hated none of them as much as himself. his own sins. and he'd lain in the bed he made and told himself it was right; that he had done wrong, and that it didn't matter any more.

living with the lessons of that is much, much harder than it had been to die mired in it, and it is hard to look at something that reminds him of it without anger. a man hates most in others what he despises in himself. )

I know.

[glandival]

[ She gives a shiver. A combination of cold from the rainy outdoors as well as something like a vibration out of sheer annoyance. Calming, however, under the shadow of someone who seems to understand her ire as well as the trigger of this particular flash of anger, the specific ways in which she is mad at Zevran instead of just mad at the state of Thedosian elven disenfranchisement.

Clutching the bundle of oak sticks, she leans against a pillar. Not yet asking for her crystal back. ]

An elven man of Halamshiral was slaughtered for throwing a rock at human guardsmen, so they claim. It is a thing that happens every day, but this time it led to a rebellion. Empress Celene, with that man of Zevran's, marched on us all and burned our homes.

[ She is nearly monotone and quiet, but not dispassionate, a tremble in her voice indicative of latent pressure. ]

It is as though it never happened, for many. And even when you force people to look, they close their eyes.

[apostasia]

( that man in particular is not hard to deduce. not just what he represents, then, but what he has done himself with his own hands - it's not hard to grasp. the only people sufficiently jaded to their own suffering who can look at someone they'd thought a friend sharing a bed with someone directly responsible for it without ire are those who've given up, and that is not - he hopes, never will be - sabine.

and fair, he thinks. this isn't impersonal fistshaking at distant pain absorbed because aren't we all truly one elf race blah blah blah no one told much of the dalish that as far as he can tell (as fond as he is of those he's acquainted with); our homes. the distinction matters. )

A common flaw of people who wish to live in a smaller world than they do.