lost myself and I am nowhere to be found

[fightingale]

WHO: catch-all for Leliana, Ruby & Herc
WHAT: all sorts! some open prompts for each, as well as closed starters.
WHEN: throughout Bloomingtide
WHERE: various
NOTES: Depression, discussion of death, alcohol, potential violence, others to be added as necessary. If we're threading and something comes up in a tag, feel free to add a warning to the subject line.

Starters in the comments! If you'd like a personalised thing then just prod me via pp (@karmacharging) or pm and I will whip something up C:

Comments

[fightingale]

A young woman in a time of war, a mage, gloves, regret. Even if she were not a mage there are plenty of things that can be done that demand protection. Being a mage, though, there are so many more reasons to be afraid, and so many more ways to be dangerous. An accident, something planned, something of pure intent being twisted (she remembers Redcliffe and Connor's attempt only to save his father that had been akin to living through a nightmare.) Desperation was something Leliana knew.

Leliana frowns, making sure the picture is set down safely, allowing the nug a final look before letting her focus settle more obviously on Clarke, gaze sharp and attentive.

"I wondered," she starts, easily enough, ignoring Plucky as he hops along the railing with his beak open. "There are any reasons for a person to wear gloves." For example; there were other things, there always were, but nothing thus far has marked Clarke as a threat. "Many people have come to the Inquisition who have things in their past that they might regret." Her voice is low as well, though the Rookery is empty save for them. "Many people have gone to the Chantry for the same reason," and there is something wry in her tone.

"What is it you seek here, Clarke? Immunity? Forgiveness?" Or something else? For others the question might have been mocking. Here it is genuine curiousity.

[levered]

Clarke shakes her head, a small but immediate gesture, certain—with her whole eighteen years of life and two years of fighting, already sure she knows everything she needs to about sacrifice and forgiveness—that neither are possible. "I want to help," she says. It's a word less weighty with self-awareness or -importance than atone, though that's what she means. "And I don't want to try to do that and hide something from you at the same time." There's a brief spark of good humor: "It sounds hard."

She extends a hand toward the raven. She isn't close enough to touch him; it's more of a hello.

"If someone else finds out—" Norrington, she means Norrington. "—I won't ask for anything."

[fightingale]

"It would be," Leliana agrees. Difficult, exhausting. There were those who attempted and those who succeeded, at times. She appreciates the measure of openness, for all that she takes it with a grain of salt, because there is are few misdirections so effective as a confession of guilt. Even so, there was a strange extent to which being a master of spies relied upon trust. Lives were set in each others hands. (One day, when Thedas has criminal databases and background checks and fingerprints and other such things, she will have to take less on trust when it comes to personal histories.

Anyway.)

"If," Leliana continues, very deliberately (if almost hangs by itself for a second, a solitary syllable sent out to survery the terrain by itself or something else similarly dramatic and spy appropriate), "your desire to help is wound into a desire to become one of my agents, then you would be under my protection. Asking would not be necessary. However, I would need you to tell me more. Be open with me."

egregious infodump i'm sorry i love you

[levered]

Clarke looks up at her for a moment, bottom lip sucked into her mouth, with wariness she's straining to discard. Then she sits down on the nearest crate, as if invited, and tells Leliana more. She sketches out the broad strokes of a group of apprentices, saved from the Circle's fighting but then left abandoned, trying to reach Redcliffe--none of them having ever fought or even held a staff. Taking help from a demon. Taking a knife to the resulting abomination. Taking help from the Avvar when half of the apprentices were caught and caged by Templars and then losing that help at the last moment.

"We thought if we distracted them," she says, "maybe we could... We started a fire. But they just let the village burn." Quickly: "I don't mean it wasn't my fault. It was. If we'd been more careful we would have seen that they weren't in their right minds. But it was too late for a better plan, so we--" Her inability to say it isn't dissembling. It's her eyes very briefly stinging, and then need to divert energy away from talking and into blinking away the horrifying possibility of crying in front of the spymaster. She succeeds and continues steadily. "I haven't used blood magic since then," which is important, probably, "but I'm really good at it."

Good means blood boiled in veins, and Templars turning blades on their brothers, and shades springing out of the Fade to feed on the chaos, and so much screaming. And it means her friends are safe. She looks unhappy, but not quite sorry.

wow fucking ten years later i'm sorry D:

[fightingale]

Leliana is silent a long while, content to listen, to absorb and to watch and dissect Clarke's every explanation, every motion. There was much that could be given away over the course of a story - it was rare to meet one who could withstand scrutiny for extended periods of time over such stories when they were lying. Inevitably there would be something. Perhaps something small, perhaps even something she did not realise until picking over it again later in her mind, but always something.

"You did what you believed was necessary." That she understood all too well, and as she mulls over the circumstances as Clarke painted them, she is not so certain she could condemn the decision made. Not simply, not easily, not without undercutting much of what she herself had done. "Such moves do not always play out as they ought."

Painfully aware of how condescending that could sound, Leliana pauses and leans forward, and she hopes the sincerity in it is apparent in her tone or in her gaze. There are times when she is so used to calculating that she is not nearly so good as she'd like to be at being genuine. Other days she is too genuine and not calculating enough. The balance seems eternally in flux. But many things did not play out as they might have; Justinia's ultimatum to Celene, the White Spire, Kirkwall. She did not feel entirely at ease with their decision to leave Branka with the Anvil, and that was a decade past.

"That you do not shirk responsibility means much with me, Clarke." It is more than most adults do. She cannot imagine the weight such a thing would leave on one who by all rights should be little more than a child. At Clarke's age, though, Leliana had long been under Marjolaine's sway. The difference was that Leliana has relished it.

Clarke's hand had been forced, from what she can see. She inhales, exhales, and let's the lack of breath hold a moment. "Desperation is one thing the different people of the Inquisition know well." It is something she knows well, that she has become far better reacquainted with these past months than she'd thought was possible.