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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[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."