ain't no comeback gonna come your way

[apostasia]

WHO: MARTEL LEBLANC + ... probably his CR.
WHAT: Martel had a horrifically bad time with the Venatori, and he's looking forward to feeling much better.
WHEN: Kingsway, after the shardbearer plot.
WHERE: Skyhold; Martel's private room.
NOTES: While this is mostly for Martel's existing CR, if a character has been interested to meet him and is ballsy enough to roll up on a man who can't chase them out of his room, please feel free.

For once, in the quiet of the room he's been glad not to have been obliged to share, Martel almost looks his age. For one thing, the likelihood of being up to having his hair fixed in the near future is - decidedly unlikely, and it had seemed to him the more expedient thing to do to simply clean out the colour that still lingered and deal with it when he's capable of standing unsupported. The hair that clings to him when the warmth of the room makes him sweat is ice white, and - well. Merrill had always wanted to see him so. Perhaps she'll get her wish.

Weariness is set into every line of his body; the worst is done, he's cleared any danger of dying (again), but it will take time to recover in truth and healing takes a remarkable amount of energy for something that one does lying down in a bed while other people bring you things and tell you what a nuisance you are. As if he were mysteriously not aware of that, after more than forty years of making an absolute spectacle of himself.

The medallion he wore has yet to be repaired; it sits on the side-table near him, along with a pile of books he's occasionally reading and a credible picture of himself walking around with a cane drawn by one of Adelaide's young mages. Ha, ha, ha, he had said, dutifully, without changing his expression. Truly, this is penance.

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[stabsbooks]

Cassandra is among the first to be informed of the party's safe return - and yet, it is not soon enough. The road from Halamshiral to Skyhold seems twice as long going back as it had coming in, though she rides hard, pushing her horse nearly to the breaking point.

By the time she arrives, Martel has been released from the healers' custody, returned to his own room. He is still weak, they warn her; he is out of the worst of it, but he is still healing, and it will take time before he is whole again.

But nothing they say could have prepared her for what she sees when she hurries up the stairs and flings the door to his room open, forgetting, in her haste, any semblance of propriety or respect for his privacy. She stops cold when she catches sight of him, staring in horror.

He is still, undeniably, Martel. The same handsome face, the same strong, broad chest, the same lazy, aloof posture - even flat on his back, unable to so much as sit up, he still gives off an air of casual, self-assured lounging. Cassandra's heart swells at the sight of him, even as she raises a hand to her mouth in shock. He is changed; he looks older, somehow, or perhaps just very, very tired, exhausted as she has never before see him. And -

"Martel - " She steps forward, outstretching a trembling hand as she perches gently on the side of the bed, leaning towards him. "Your hair..."

[apostasia]

A man who can look indolent when perfectly upright, he can scarcely help the insouciance he brings to his own infirmity. (This may or may not be true. The second part; he can definitely lounge standing up.) It is, however, somewhat undermined by the sleepy bemusement of him when he takes in her reaction - does he look that bad? He hasn't passed a mirror, did something happen to his face? (Surely not the face.)

And then -

His hand catches against his ribs when he laughs, quiet and rough, but the other catches her hand, laces his fingers through hers, warm.

"My father's fault," he tells her, gently, "not the Venatori. I was a lanky boy still when my hair truly looked as dark as I wear it now, and when I first arrived in Skyhold I thought to be a little less - eye-catching." For as much as it can seem otherwise, he doesn't particularly court the attention that he still draws; that he handles it so deftly is unavoidable, some instincts more ingrained and harder to curb than others. "Hacked most of it off and covered it up. Did a terrible job," a bit ruefully, "and Adelaide took pity on me and fixed it. She's done it ever since, but it'll be a nuisance while I'm..."

He makes a small gesture with his free hand. Here. Like this.

"She'll fix it for me again when I go back to my duties."

[stabsbooks]

"Oh." Cassandra blinks, startled. "I - I did not know." And Adelaide had, had been quietly helping Martel fit in this whole time while Cassandra had remained ignorant of such a basic thing as his hair color. It makes her feel - not stupid, perhaps, nor a failure, exactly. Still. As if she has been...less than she should be to him. As if she should have known.

She knows so little of his life before he had come here, she reflects. So little of him. But now is not the time to ask. Cassandra smiles, fondly tucking a lock of Martel's white hair behind his ear and searching his tired face.

"How are you feeling?"

[apostasia]

"Ill-used," he says, wry, the way his head turns slightly toward her hand more instinct than thought; for all he holds himself so insouciantly aloof, these smaller, quieter moments in private tell more of the man he might be if he let himself. In the months he's been in Thedas - nearly a year, now, a strange thought - it's as if he's slowly and methodically folded away, the sharp and sharply read expressiveness he'd had when he first arrived turning subtler and smoother and more controlled.

Sparhawk had been shocked by how easily read he was, sitting in a tent in Rendor with an old madman who thought himself a prophet, but it had been Azash's power like a fist around his throat, molding him to the Elder God's temperament and tendencies -

He is a long way from that, now, but lying in his bed, tended to do by those who have come to love him - it weighs on his mind.

Eventually, "I thought I was in hell, when I came through the rift. My brother had put a sword through my chest. I nearly killed Adelaide for trying to help me."

[stabsbooks]

Her eyes widen, her expression suddenly startled. He had shown her the scar at their first meeting, and explained, and she has seen it since, of course. But this -

"Oh," she says again, an unhappy sigh. "I am sorry. I had not known - I had not known it was your brother."

A horrible thing. She is not a stranger to the concept of betrayal and murder even within one's family, of course. But his brother...And of course, it's something else she had not known about him. Something vastly more important than the color of his hair. Cassandra frowns, her eyes troubled.

(Something else he had said was important too, terribly so, but she cannot quite hold onto it, not when she is so worried about him, and about her own failings - )

"Do you have no happy memories of your home?" she asks gently. "Will you tell me?"

[apostasia]

His gaze is searching when it settles on her face. There are easier answers than the most honest one - answers that don't even require him to lie. How far back he'd have to reach, ah, that would be telling, but he'd not suffer for it; she's in sympathy with him, ready to be moreso. Nothing could be simpler than to pivot now, neatly, and wind her deeper in with it. Reassure her of the sort of man he must be, and build her trust in him. Make her smile at him the way he's come to like, and let the past be a distant, bitter memory that can never make her unhappy in him.

After so many years of teaching himself to be a monster, the lesson is a hard one to unlearn. Perhaps he will never unlearn it, entirely, but always there has been that conscious moment of pause; the awareness of what he's doing. The moment he chooses.

He chooses something else.

"When I was a younger man," he says, at length, "I made an error of judgment I could not have foreseen the consequences to. An error that by all rights and reason I'd no business surviving. And I had a crisis of not faith, but knowledge; the knowledge that my gods looked upon me and found me wanting. And turned away." His eyes close, a moment, but when he opens them he does not allow himself the luxury of looking away, too. "The wreckage of what I did went - much farther than I could have imagined. Could have known. But the things that a man becomes capable of when he is nothing and no one are things that are not soon forgiven. Nor did I seek forgiveness that I could not imagine receiving. I made my bed and I lay in it."

The way he exhales sounds as if it hurts, and not only because of the battering to his ribs.

"It is a happy memory," he says, softer. Almost to himself. "My brother did, as is his wont, the right thing. And he was kind to me in the end in ways I did not deserve. Our little mother blessed me, and I departed my world in the company of those I had loved best and failed worst. And I thought to myself that perhaps, if she could love me then - if he could stand with me as I died when I had caused him so much pain - perhaps there is more left in me than I might have thought. I meant what I said to you, once. That I owe Thedas a debt I mean to pay. I wasn't worthy of Lady Sephrenia's blessing, then, but I will live the rest of my life here trying to be. And that is a better memory than any of those I would have to reach much, much further back to recall for you."

[stabsbooks]

It would not have been kinder, in the long run, if he had been less honest; if he had chosen an inoffensive story from his childhood, the kind of story she had wanted to hear. It would not have been kinder, but it would have been easier, and Martel would have been amply and immediately rewarded with his lover's unquestioning sympathy and affection, and all that came with it.

Instead, she listens. Instead, her concerned, doting expression fades, to be replaced by something else.

For a moment, she looks at him as if he were a stranger.

She does offer him a smile at his conclusion, at the promise and reassurance he offers, but the smile does not reach her eyes, and it does not stay. She is silent, for a moment, her hand forgotten where it still lies on his shoulder.

"You tried," she says at last, and her voice trails off, uncertainly, before she rallies herself. "You did - what you thought was right. What you believed to be right. You could not have known otherwise."

It's not a question, but neither is it a reassurance meant to comfort him. It is a statement requiring confirmation; it is what she needs to be true.

[apostasia]

It's close - it's almost the truth, so near that it's seductively tempting to just agree with her. To rewrite his history that small way. Who can say what was in his heart, truly?

He can. His voice is tired, "I was a young man too clever by half who thought he knew better than those who told him no. I never meant to fall as I did - I never meant to do other than serve, I was a Soldier of God and I had faith. I'd have been Lord Preceptor, in time, I had such ambition for what my Order could do. How we could protect our nation from the petty, spiteful lecher on its throne. But I'd a boy's ego and the desire to prove I could do what I'd been told could not be done and was forbidden, the conviction that I could control the uncontrollable. After my brother, I was the best the Pandion Order ever had, and what we could have done together as Champion and Lord Preceptor; what should be denied me, to that end? And then came my teacher."

That he tempers his bitterness is as clear as the fact that he is bitter - and that he reserves the largest part of it for himself. Zalasta used him, but it was Martel's arrogance that gave him the opening he needed.

"I was a pawn in a game I didn't see until it was far, far too late. I was the fool who walked into the trap laid for me."

[stabsbooks]

Cassandra does not care about the specifics. Notably, she had not asked for them. She has never cared for gossip or sordid confessions; what matters is not what Martel had done, but why he had done it.

She keeps her head down, her fingers now idly stroking the fabric of his sleeve in her concentration as she takes in all that he is telling her. It is not so terrible - not so terrible as it could have been. She, too, had been young once, and she had been rash and impulsive. She still is, though - hard as it may be to believe - less so than she once had been.

"We have all made mistakes," she says now, recognizing the bitterness, the self-blaming in his tone and needing to soothe it. "We have all of us been fooled, at one time or another."

But her heart lies heavy in her chest, and where before there had been only unsullied admiration and trust, even something she had been beginning to think was love, now there is something new. Uncertainty. There is something in Martel, something she had not guessed at.

What should be denied me? he had asked, and she shivers.

[apostasia]

The Countess of Gatas is a pensive woman given to her solitude; an Elenian transplant to Deira, married to a man of the more palatable Alcione knighthood, a woman who dresses demurely and spends little time at court, more time with her art and her daughters and her dogs. Twenty years ago, though, then she had been a vivacious jewel in Aldreas' court, the intended bride of the future Margrave of Damerel, a flirt with a sharp tongue and a penchant for being the most elaborately attired at any given masquerade.

Martel's shadow stretches over her life, even now, the harsh way she'd been turned on by her peers in his disgrace dictating the more sedate path of her steps. And she has lived all of these years since with the knowledge that this shadow was in him even when he lay at her back; that if she could not make herself believe she loved a lie then she had to live knowing she had loved this in him, too.

"You'd have made a far better knight than I," he murmurs, and when he touches her hand it is more lightly; let her pull away without a sharpness that might still them both, if she will.

It hadn't been his ability to care for Cassandra that he'd doubted, when he'd intimated his doubts that she'd ever marry him. He only knows himself better now than he did when his carelessness shattered what should have been Petrana's triumph. He's seen the damage done binding a name to his - Cassandra is too smart, too good not to sooner or later be wise enough to know better than to hold him too tightly. And the part of him that wanted to die in that Venatori cell is the same part that whispers, better now. The same part that knows his honesty to be not only altruistic, but a blade palmed inwards--

He will never have been punished enough. He does not deserve to keep what he should never have reached for.

[stabsbooks]

She doesn't pull away. She could not. Already she feels as if he is in danger of slipping away completely, this man she has come to care for, that she has been so happy with - but when he looks at her he seems almost to be looking through her, thinking of another time or another place or perhaps another woman, and she...

She does not know him nearly as well as she had assumed, and it is terrifying. She does not want it.

"Martel - " She reaches for him, impulsive, as if she can drag him back from the brink of something, drag them both back someplace familiar and safe. But this is not so easy as pulling an ally back from a physical cliff, as blocking an enemy's sword, and her hand hovers, uncertain, in the air.

Finally, she lets it fall, stroking her hand gently down his cheek, resting it on his chest (she loves that chest, so broad and comforting in its strength).

"You should not talk of such things now." Her eyes flick over his face, her earlier concern returning - he could have died - but there is a distance now in the way she looks at him. "You are injured. You must rest."