( open ) like some child possessed, the beast howls in my veins

[eviscerates]

WHO: Ruby Lucas & open.
WHAT: Following the events of the missing shard bearer plot (here) Ruby insists on being taken to the dungeons and held there until she is fully detoxed from lyrium.
WHEN: From a gently timey-wimey point in mid-September to early October, at least. She may be in the dungeons longer, depends a bit.
WHERE: THE DUNGEONS, Skyhold.
NOTES: Rumours page & OOC report details, although the latter is more likely pertinent to people who were on the mission/were told about the mission directly/the advisors than general gossip. Alsi new cr is welcome! Ruby's info sheet is here.
WARNINGS: Horror themes! Reference to the events of the shard bearer plot, which include the Wolf attacking and eating people, forced lyrium ingestion, hallucinations, death, violence, torture.

She’s never forgotten that she’s a monster, that the people of Storybrooke had been ready to take up arms against her. Ruby Lucas wasn’t the sweet girl who remembered your coffee order and fixed you whiskey neat from the top shelf on a bad day. She was a vicious, wild thing. The Big Bad Wolf.

After the mission she told them to kill her or shackle her, and when she arrived back to Skyhold she refused to go to the medical tents. It wasn’t worth the risk - keep her locked up, keep her cloak bound across her throat so she couldn’t pull it away during a delirium. She had to stay in at least a month, she had to try and keep people safe.

The first two weeks she’s still recovering from her injuries and the lyrium is still distorting her memories and thoughts and what she sees, leaves her with a constant thirst and the unhealthy pallor in her skin is obvious. Treating the injuries will be ongoing, but the first week she sleeps almost constantly, and the second she is struggling with memories. If people visit during this time there is ever chance of her mind taking flashes from other people’s memories though she can’t make sense of much of anything.

After that she can be found in different states.

She might sit on the floor with her hands through the bars, putting together the most basic, non-volatile components and mechanisms for traps, setting then all in a box to be taken to the Requisition officer.

She might be standing with rotten fruit sliding down the side of her face and splattered across her clothes, perfectly still. Either the guard just hauled the offending fruit thrower who posed as a visitor out, or they might have been distracted by another job so the produce producers are there to be chased off. Unless your character would throw fruit? But then they might be hauled away.
(Note: probably only two of this one unless we work something particular out, just because I don’t want to undermine the efficiency of the Inquisition’s guards at protecting prisoners, even willing ones.)

Ruby may have stripped down some and be treating her wounds and attempting to change dressings and apply poultices, because healers shouldn’t have to go into her cell, as far as she’s concerned. Vicious puncture wounds dot her skin, perfect circular marks that are mostly uniform, but vary in size here and there. There is a jagged gash over her ribs and a burn across the other side, which make her hiss as she tries to pull the rank dressing away.

Or maybe she’s just sitting or lying down on her side, defeated and curled inward.

Wildcards welcome, pick your own location-limited adventure and give me an idea of timeframe/if you are okay with Ruby picking up memories or not if it’s set during the first couple of weeks.

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[eviscerates]

It's the pause that kills her. Not just the sight of Araceli, who she's fairly sure has some sort of anti-gravity powers that make being on the ground offensive to her very being, struggling across the stairs and the floor. The pause carries all kinds of possibilities for what could or should have been said.

Ruby looks at Lux, and back to Araceli, and she has no idea what to do or say. Her skin is unhealthy, feels constantly grubby, somehow, and her face has that ache that comes after too long spent crying, even though she hasn't indulged herself in that for a while.

"You shouldn't be here."

Her voice is very flat, gaze dropping from Araceli to Lux to the ground.

[foxsays]

"I am a thief," so maybe her full height is not so very impressive anyway, and less so on one leg but she does manage to do it for a moment, tries to-- tries to be herself. Because it was fun wasn't it? Laughing and joking, and telling Ruby to tell Martel not to break his hip because he's an old man. "My whole life is being where I shouldn't be."

After having a moment to breathe and feel a little less daunted by the thought of how much farther she has to go, she leans on the wall to make her way to Ruby's cell, hands on the bar, pushing Lux out of the way before she falls over the top of him. If she did that, she wouldn't be able to get up, and she'd probably cry. Again. She's done a lot of that. Usually when the fewest people can hear her since she's got some sort of privacy.

All she can see is Ruby though. Ruby bleeding, and Adelaide's face because she hadn't been Madame LeBlanc, hadn't been Dama de Oro, she'd been Adelaide, and she can't bend to pick up what Lux has dropped for Ruby when she carries on. "You shouldn't be here either Ruby, everything they did," anger chokes her voice for a moment because anger is better than being afraid (but she's still afraid, still jumps if someone touches her in the dark, if they put a hand around her wrist) before her good hand wraps around the bar. "What we did."

[eviscerates]

"And I'm a murderer," Ruby replies, without any venom, though heat does burn through it. "This is where I belong. If not here, then in front of a mob coming after me with all they've got. An executioner. I belong here, Araceli. You don't."

The others come and they say they know who she really is, but they all seem to ignore that she is the Wolf, the Wolf is her. The monster is part of her, and she has had to embrace it and welcome it for any chance of control, and that control was taken away from her anyway.

"What you did was what was necessary. If you hadn't then more people, good people might have died." She can't remember what the Wolf did, that's the black out, but she had pieced together the kinds of injuries and the numbers of dead left after and the full feeling in her gut, and how close she'd been to Ciri when that silverite sword had burned a path through her gut.

[foxsays]

"No!" That's the loudest sound out of Araceli since she lost her ability to argue back at their captors, her face seeming to crumple as she holds the bars. "We weren't ourselves after everything they did to us, and I thought-- I didn't even know if you were alive until I saw the wolf," she admits in a rush because she hasn't said as much because she couldn't when she didn't even remember to speak a common language at times, and Araceli is sort of known for trying to salvage some good in everything but how much hope can you hold to in a place like that.

"I know what they did to me. And I don't want to tell the people I love because what they saw was enough but I know that it hurt. And that I was frightened. And I know that frightened and hurting things bite." True, Araceli doesn't know Ruby well but she knows of her, and sometimes that's enough, enough to have her wipe her face and try to smile as Lux wriggles and squeezes because he would very much like to comfort someone please. "I don't think that was you. The wolf was there with all of us fighting demons and never hurt us, because that wolf was you. You know, the person that brought everyone together to play in the snow even if that is the maddest thing I heard about when I was in Rivain?

"Please. Don't...don't let them win? I am trying very, very hard not to let those bastardos take things from me. I wouldn't want them to take things from my friends." Because you're her friend too now Ruby, and you're hurting, and honestly? Araceli's loved ones hurting is worse than a bullet.

[eviscerates]

"I attacked my friends," she counters, looking at Araceli with incredulity. "I attacked people of the Inquisition. I didn't just take down our enemies, Araceli, I ate them. Tore them into pieces." Ruby doesn't mean for it to happen, but her voice gets a little louder and a lot more strained. "They already won. They— took away my control." They turned her into her own nightmare. Even Regina and Rumpelstiltskin had never done that to her.

"We weren't ourselves, not with the lyrium and—"

And the silver, the pins, the knives. She doesn't even know if the others were put through something similar, had the the grade of the silver noted by one person and written down by another, had the count of pins that had been pushed into her skin and left there tallied and registered. Monitor the effect of the silver on the patient, on the shard, see if pain or fear or anger caused surges in power, and then re-test, to be thorough. She does not know if the others endured anything like that, but she hopes they didn't. There was a while in that room when she could only remember herself as Subject Eighteen. Not Ruby or Red or any of the other names that were hers. Just Subject Eighteen.

"What if they want to make me Tranquil? Take the Wolf away? Or... what if they just forget, like I never did anything? Or execute me? I can't figure out what I'm more scared of." And she is scared, though it sounds more like simple exhaustion than concern for her well-being. She shrugs, shakes her head, because her head feels muddled. "Snow fights don;t outweigh people being hurt."

[foxsays]

"Because they--" She doesn't have the right word at first in this language, a few stop-starts of trying to settle on something and what she goes with is, "poisoned us. Bruce told me that lyrium does that. A small amount within a certain time isn't bad but I...I stopped looking, I don't know how much they gave me, I tried to drown out all the noise." Quite likely that she will never sing that song again so long as she lives but people don't need to know that, no one but dead men and women that no one will ever mourn, so it is what it is. "Bruce said it was like drinking, too much wine, end up hungover but there's truth in drinking, there was't in that. Not when I forgot everyone I loved."

Almost without thinking she cups her right hand over her left arm, a couple of inches below the elbow where it hurts too much to put a poultice sometimes even if it shouldn't (the tent has a flap, not a door, she can hear what they say outside it when they think she's asleep). Even names from home had started to slip at the end, blurring until she couldn't match them to faces, and the tighter she'd tried to hold to them, the harder it had been.

"And wanting to know if it was Antivan or another language," she murmurs in the space between one heartbeat and the next because that had...

Because she'd forgotten.

(And what if she does and what if the sea forgets, what if, what if, what if.)

"I am not angry with you, or upset. I will argue against any of these things until I am blue in the face." And she will, because that's the sort of person that Araceli is. Because that is a thing she can do. Because she was there. How many other people were there? And if she must cry and weep and try to make people feel shame and guilt and embarrassment to get her way then she will because they weren't there feeling what any of them felt, hurting and alone in ways they can't understand. "I would not let them Tranquil you, or kill you, or take away a part of what you are. No one will forget, this world? This world remembers anything that hurts, and there are likely some who would wish to make it hard, but you won't be alone. I will be here, if you will let me."

[eviscerates]

Ruby is quiet for a long gathering of moments, “In my world I never encountered anything like lyrium. There’s probably something, but it’s not something I knew about.” Thank God she doesn’t need to say. Her breath feels ragged.

“What I did see was a spell that robbed a person of their will. It was… awful. Mages in my world,” wizards, witches, those used to be the words that came to mind first, “they can access dark forces. I saw a man have his heart pulled out and put in a box, and he still stood and breathed, but he wasn’t himself any more. What he did was dictated. He might not want to do it, but he was bound to her will.”

It was kind of terrible, waking from the Curse. They remembered so much, and there was not even time to remember that Graham had been the Huntsman, and that while they had mourned the Sheriff with his penchant for bearclaws and playing darts and occasionally terrible jokes, they’d never mourned the Huntsman, the man who sacrificed himself so she and Snow could escape Regina, and placed himself back under her control.

“I’ve lost who I was before,” Ruby starts, softly, before trailing off.

The Huntsman, she remembers, had loved wolves better than people. Wolves were honest, not so duplicitous as humanity. Would probably be horrified, either that she had perverted what a wolf really was, or that it had been perverted by another.

She wishes, not for the first time, that Snow was here. She misses Storybrooke and her diner with the ambient sound of Granny and Leroy trading the snark of old friends and breathing in the scent of the sea when she went running and seeing Emma’s yellow beetle parked around town. And maybe, shamefully, she misses being under a Curse that took away part of what she was, but she hadn’t been a Wolf, when she had only been Ruby, waitress extraordinaire. She’d just been a girl who wanted something more.

She misses being the girl that thought lemurs sounded like the best thing in the world.

You might not be able to stop them, Ruby thinks, but she knows better than to say it to a girl who’d probably take Snow’s most reckless ideas in stride. “Well,” she starts, instead, “it’s not like I can do much about where you are from in here.”

It’s meant to be a joke; it doesn’t quite work.

[foxsays]

"There's no magic where I'm from. Just stories. Things we make up in books or songs or in the streets, and in the streets it's how fast you move your hands with an act to pull coins out or say 'is this your card'." Magic that doesn't hurt, that doesn't have any sharp edges because it's just a trick, it's just a story, and even if it scares you what do you do - turn on the lamp and look, no monsters under the bed, and this is how we make fire, let me show you.

But she listens to that, and there are things she should probably say and explain, about what she does believe since they're laying things bare to the bone as it is. "I believe that I am as the sea made me though. And that there are things beneath the waves that sea all, and that once we had an empire beneath the waves before the moon was in the sky. I don't know if people would call that magic. It just is. It happened." How do you explain something that you just know to be true in much the same way that you don't have to tell your heart to keep beating? You don't. Not really. Magic was something she didn't believe in, not something that excited her when it was Korrin, or angered her when it was used to lock people up, or something that has made her feel feverish and sick, as if she's turned herself inside out and put her skin on backwards.

Glancing around to make sure no one is listening, she hop-steps closer again, and Lux shoves himself tight to her good leg like he knows what she's going to say when she can't meet Ruby's eyes, when the shame shreds her throat. "I thought-- I thought that was it. I keep thinking that it will happen. That I won't be as the sea made me, and the hand was enough, and I am so far from the sea every day. That would be the worst thing I could imagine. Worse than dying. To not be who I am."

When she talks about home all the time, it's to keep it there. To never let herself forget. It hurts worse than a fishhook caught in some very vital part of her that doesn't even have a name but maybe it has to, maybe that's the price you pay to remember, to never forget. And it isn't the same because it's not magic but she cannot imagine. But she has nightmares, and those nightmares? Those nightmares started not so very long after falling through the rift in the first place.

"You won't be in here forever." It almost sounds like a promise, because freedom means so much to Araceli, but then she pauses because this isn't all about her. "Do you--" she didn't think it would hurt so much to ask but she's going to finish asking it, "do you not want me to?"

After all, they had their choices taken away from them. She's not about to go taking more from Ruby when they're slowly getting any half-measures of themselves back.

[eviscerates]

“It’s awful to say it,” she starts, and there is something so apologetic in her tone, because of what Araceli just said. “But when Regina cast the Dark Curse… when she sent us to another world, took our memories? It was meant to rob us of all our happiness. And for so many people it took them away from the people they loved, and stripped them of the things that defined them, you know? Gave them purpose? But for me… for me the Curse just took away all the things I wanted to forget.” She wonders if that’s what Tranquility feels like to some mages; a chance to absolve themselves. “I wouldn’t never want to put someone else under that Curse, and it hurt so many people.”

And yet for her? And for Whale? And Archie?
There were a few of them who had terrible things that it was a blessing to be free of.

“Point is, I guess, even if you do get lost for a while, you’re still you. It can just take time to remember. I lost who I was for twenty-eight years, but it came back to me. It might just be like navigating unchartered waters for a while. A good sailor can probably set the course right again though, I think. Maybe have an adventure in the process, learn more.” A shake of her head, and she shrugs. “I’m sorry, I’m— I hope that didn’t sound dismissive. I think you’ll hold onto who you are. When you’re leg’s better,” as if it were not Ruby that damaged it, “maybe you can go to the sea. It’s not yours, I know, but when I let the Wolf out in the forest and just run I always feel better. Take some time to reconnect, or something.”

Watching Araceli, Ruby tries to conjure up a smile. “I won’t be here forever, hopefully. And I like the company, but I don’t want anyone else being stuck down here when they don’t have to be.”

[foxsays]

Ruby talks and honestly all Araceli wants is to clap her hands over her ears very tight, to not hear things like this when her head is a mess, when she can't pick through it like she might have been able to before any of this. Salvaging, that's how she's always thought of terrible things, broken systems, taking the bits you can use and stripping out as much as you can but she's talking to Ruby through bars. That makes it difficult.

There are more questions she wants to ask but she's tired. Her leg hurts but she's too proud to ask the guard for something to sit on, and she's equally as mindful of the fact that she's standing in front of Ruby. That just standing up in front of Ruby might even mean something. The healers can give her looks all she wants later when she pretends to be sleeping.

"Some sailors never spend a night away from their ships." She couldn't be like that. Couldn't be that much her father's daughter for all that people would know Felix Bonaventura to the bone if a rift ever dropped him here just from spending time around his daughter. "Maybe," is what she says when she gives herself a shake because she misses him. Misses too many things. Doesn't want to say that there's probably not a good enough reason to go off again anywhere near the sea after Rivain. "You can carry Adelaide, right? For dinner. I might have it on the roof when I'm better. I might not come down again. Just stay up there for good unless I have to leave Skyhold for something. Korrin says she can't climb but I think garlic toasts could persuade her, they're very good."

Lux barks his agreement, loud in the cells until Araceli flicks his ear with her good hand. "If I stay stuck in the tent I'm going to scream, and I don't think they'd fight me in front of guards. Ah, I meant to ask, do you have your sending crystal still?"

[eviscerates]

"I can carry Adelaide," she confirms, a little foggily. Her head still swims, sometimes. "I'm good at climbing trees but I've not done as much scaling buildings. Honestly, it might take a while before I trust my body totally, you know?" Ruby tilts her head to the side, rolls her shoulders in a vaguely uncomfortable way. "I'm still trying to figure out how to be in my own skin. That might take a while. I think I need solid ground."

Annnd then she shakes her head, and rolls her eyes. "Sorry. That got a little bit more metaphorical than I intended, but do you know what I mean? I'm up for dinner on the roof, but I don't know when I'll be ready for it. Are you flexible on the timeframe?"

Ruby leans over, a slow motion that ends with a quiet sound of protest at the stretching of her injuries, a sting she has to still for a moment to let subside, and reaches under the blankets on her cot to grab her crystal. "I haven't really used it. Have it, though."

[foxsays]

"I think if I go up before I'm ready people will have me watched but...I actually don't have solid ground? Not really? Where I live is all islands, lots of islands all connected so little bits are solid but we have our homes and ships and bridges, but most of the bridges are rope and wood to let them move. Solid ground is," she leans in a little closer as if confiding a great and terrible secret, and in a way she is, "terrifying to me. I need to know I can be up there. Watching it all and knowing where everyone is."

Maybe it's silly but when she can feel her body moving again the way it should? She'll be happy. "I think I'll need to wait until I can get some of the ingredients anyway, and to chop things with," it's the slowest slightest bend of her left thumb, just to work it because she doesn't want to keep saying 'yes, I broke my thumb to get out of my bindings and a Venatori kicked me over so I landed on it then another one or maybe the same one stepped on me, and no don't heal me with magic gracias'.

Wincing, Araceli regrets asking at first until she sees it then grins. Ruby doesn't know Araceli well enough to know that it's the smile she aimed at the sending crystal when she was asked if she wanted to come help show people how to seal rifts, but there it is. "Perfect, I sleep at odd hours anyway so if you're awake? We can talk if you want because Josue is going to throttle me with my own hair, or maybe Aintza. Josue will just sigh so much I wish he would throttle me which is worse." Save her from Rivaini healers Ruby, it's such a trial. "And if Korrin finds out she will...I don't know, she will look very sad and I can't throw Lux at her. But if you want something from the kitchen? Especially sweet things? Me and Burly. We are close. I would fight duels for his honour so tell me and I will have it here like that."

She did not know snapping her fingers on her right hand would echo that loud but it's a plan and it's the first sort of plan she's had since coming back that hasn't been just a nebulous 'get better'. This one is little things she can do. Helpful things. Things that will make her feel less useless even if she's just probably being a messenger and trying to escape her healers again. Gotta keep them on their toes.