[ OPEN ] We shift and turn and swear and yearn

[fleurdesel]

WHO: Adelaide & you
WHAT: Catch All for the month
WHEN: June/Justinian
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: Wine, swearing, PUPPIES, allusions to demonic violence. Prose or Brackets are fine, roll with what you like most. If you want a specific prompt hit me up on plurk @ here!

[ Courtyard -> Stables ]

When her sister wrote 'their arrival is imminent' Adelaide had not quite considered how imminent Juliette meant. Perhaps she might have been better prepared for signing off with the courier when they herd the rather rambunctious litter of several month old mabari pups to one of the few empty stalls in the barn. Playful things that they are- Dennet is a horse master not a hound master and it will be some time before the appropriate point of authority finds their way down to check on the five puppies ready for imprinting or...whatever it is these dogs do- but they will need minding until they are handed off and as she'd had the fortune to sign for them- Adelaide finds herself sitting in the barn, trying to keep the dogs from gnawing on one another, on her, or on anything valuable. Moments like this are a thorough reminder as to why she is a cat person.


[ Library ]

She can be found, as ever, at her table tucked into one of the unoccupied nooks of the library- a cold cup of tea at her elbow, a sheaf of notes she writes and reorganizes- a quill on occasion hovering over a sheet of blank paper and mimicking her notes stroke for stroke so she might produce them in duplicate. So long as she remembers exactly how she's laid out the paper, it works well enough. For questions, comments, concerns, condemnations or complications that have arisen during research she has made herself thoroughly available.


[ Return of the Attache ]

"No." That is all she has to say. No. She won't bother to stop or listen, she won't bother to mind him in the slightest- that same family attache doggedly tails Adelaide about the hold, hovering just behind with a leatherbound sheaf of papers in his hand while he awaits for some sign that she'll take them or at least listen. He spends the bulk of his time holding the odd extra book or pen or, in a singularly distressing moment, a pad of gauze against a seeping wound as she mends a patient in the healing tents. He's a step down from a personal valet- he is not meant to be dealing with literal bloody commoners and yet- this is his life. Someone please help him convince Adelaide to at least take the papers and look at them.


AFTER JUSTINIAN 19th

[ Stairs ]

After the final ritual is all said, done, and finished Adelaide finds she has a wealth of extra time due to no longer needing to spend several hours picking apart what went wrong with the last and what could go wrong with the next- and at least a few hours extra that she'd otherwise spend training with Martel in the evenings due to the incontinence that is her leg. Magic, even hers, can only do so much and the nasty break in that last fight leaves her less walking with the calm poise she's known for and more hobbling from place to place, staff less an afterthought and more a requirement for keeping her weight off her leg. At the moment she's glowering at the stones underfoot as she takes one slow, shuffling step up the stairs at a time. Her research is in the library- and eventually she would make her way there. Just- give her some time.


[ Healing Tents ]

Here, at least, there are fewer stairs. Adelaide splits her time between minding patients and beginning new notations on old research she'd set aside- tending to those she could while moving as little as possible for the first few days. Her humor is...subdued, somewhat, but that is easily explained by the weight of her work of the past months finally catching up now that she is forced to spend less time on her feet. Now and then she might be caught dozing, chin tipped to her chest, fingers still holding the page of her book in place.

Comments

[foxsays]

"Events easily forgotten when so many have been lost, and when such words are all too easily twisted." There are lots of mages in Skyhold, but she cannot imagine that it holds nearly as many mages as there once were. How ill-equipped so many of them must be to survive, and she allows the mask to crack, to let the sorrow show when she has to force her jaw to clench, her bottom lip not to wobble when it wishes to. Her eyes are full of sympathy when she looks to Adelaide though, a pain that isn't hers but Araceli has only ever known freedom and she wants that for them, and though she's a rifter, she has tools they do not simply by not being a mage.

So she listens. Readies herself for what she will hear the way she does when she looks over the edge of a building or the mast of a ship, letting herself fall without bracing. She will accept what comes as her unmarked hand (not because she is afraid to reach out but she wants a hand that doesn't mark them as different, wants a hand that is rough from handling her rapiers and lockpicks and from climbing, that always carries the scent of her hair oils and Korrin's horn balm) reaches for Adelaide's if she wants it. It is never a weakness to reach out and to offer to help another with a burden.

They must have lost many along the way. Those who wished to take their chances. Others who were not strong enough after a life cooped up, or too afraid to keep going, too traumatised perhaps; how many of them now have scars no one can see at all, when people open their mouths to say whatever ignorant thought flies into their head, without thinking that they too are people, that they have suffered. She checks her anger, feels it simmer low in her belly where it will boil over later into angry cursing and swearing, things kicked and thrown, the tears she will dissolve into when she is alone but for Korrin and Lux.

"Her voice rings out and blood follows." Araceli's voice is dangerously soft, choked nearly - by rage or grief, even she can't be sure which has a tighter grip on her at present. "You had all voted, the majority - slim, but still a majority won, and then rally beneath her banner. To see more blood after all that?"

Adelaide did not use her voice. She notes that. Yes, she was healing but well, that isn't something Araceli will forget, it is something she will tuck away to keep safe when she has need of it later because she mentions a code of ethics that she will have to come to but Vivienne is what matters, Vivienne and Loyalists and how much blood must there be, how much blood do they all need. She shakes her head, swallowing the bile scorching her throat, flexing the sudden ache in her fingers.

"Thank you for telling me that, I could not have been easy to relive such a day but...well, if Vivienne did then her recounting would have been very different, and no one else sitting upon the Council would have been present for it. Her voice could have rung out to stop more bloodshed too; think what it might have meant then - we Loyalists will not fight our fellows, we will seek another way. Or to have calmed them, to have risen above it all. She has shown her hand." Perhaps she already had if she had a reputation for being merciless, and from Araceli's readings about the Orlesian court, for a mage to have risen so very high she must certainly have. "Perhaps she hoped that her Loyalists would be fervent enough to be victorious and that she would have fewer opposing voices left at the end of it."

Leandra would despise her. Leandra would have all the guard destroy every single thing she held dear for all the world to see and leave her with nothing as they calmly walked away. Araceli cannot do that (not yet, perhaps not ever) and her blood boils at the thought--

"There would have been so many children, so many not even my age, and I am not yet one-and-twenty," a whisper, one that she can't help, staring at Adelaide for a long moment before she shakes her head again - what else can you say in the face of what she has been told?

[fleurdesel]

"You see, now, why so many gathered at Redcliffe, hoping for something better? If we cannot hold a fort against our own, if we cannot trust our own kind- how are we to know we might stand against a siege? Some stayed. The Isolationists fled and I do not blame them. I remained to tend to the wounded." And then word of the Inquisition. Of someone taking the mages as allies without the questionable mystery that had been at Redcliffe. Without quite so impossible a walk to make with ill, injured, and young. It had been sensible enough to risk the journey. After what happened at Haven- to know that the world might look upon mages and how they helped?

It is such a little thing, that hope. So terribly fragile. But what other option did she have other than to go where she and her students might be the most safe? Than to go where other mages gathered and pray that, perhaps, she was not the only one of the Spire to find her way there?

That trembling tension, that kind ache does not go unnoticed. Adelaide extends a hand to rest it on top of Araceli's, some of the cool mask of distance required to recount the matter softening. That Araceli is young is easy to note with her love of life and her willful energy- but she had not thought her quite so young. "We hid. I hid them as best I could, as many as I was able to find. Those of us weary of fighting- we did what we could. But it would be a lie to say there were not smaller bodies upon the pyres than there ought to have been in the days that followed. That, and the Spire- that is why I put my faith in the Inquisition. In what we do with the Council. To prevent such things from happening again. We must do better, be better. Or what is the point of even trying?"

[foxsays]

"Hope does not keep a belly full, believe me I know that well enough from home, and if any of you had tried to steal, you would not have been good at it, not even with magic, or those who were the quietest, the sneakiest." She doesn't say it unkindly but when you've been a thief for a long time then you know how hard it is to do it, and stealing food is sometimes one of the most difficult things of all. People never seem to think it is but it is so jealously watched. And when you are very hungry, you're so clumsy, and you can never get very far before you curl around your prize. She's seen too many do it and had to step in somehow. She doesn't ask of the Isolationists, not when she has the feeling it would be too cruel right now. Some might have slipped in, some might forge their own path, some might be dead.

More likely they will be wondered about for years, picked at like an old wound that never gets to heal. Never before has she been so grateful that the rulers of so very long ago in her home had the sense to hash out terms to end war, terms that aren't perfect but better than this. Skirmishes at sea, plots and intrigues, assassins but not so much death that she wants to put her hands over her ears and curl beneath the covers to scream until her throat is raw.

Swallowing carefully, she blinks slowly until the itch in her eyes is gone, another little breath through her nose that stings but she manages. "And yet now you must sit on the Council with Vivienne in every session and appear as if all is well because there are so many who would jump on any chance to widen a single crack or division if they ever saw it." Said as if she knows how these things work, because she does, because she knows how that all works from the guard and watching Leandra's council sessions as they all must with carefully neutral expressions. "If I can help in any way...I do not know what I can do but I don't want this. More death. More pain. I don't want all of that to have been for nothing. For all the work that all of you are doing to go to waste. I want all of you to be free as I have been my entire life to live it as I see fit, with good judgement to do right by those around me the same as any other person in the world. There will always be good or bad people who might take advantage of others, or seek to do harm, to be born with magic...if you are to serve man, you should not serve as if serving a sentence in a cell."