[ closed ] go ahead and cry little girl, nobody does it like you do

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, Lex Luthor, Alistair, Bellamy Blake, Thranduil, Herian Amsel.
WHAT: Comte Vauquelin has information and records for the Inquisition. A small group including his daughter go to collect it. Everything is fine.
WHEN: End of Kingsway.
WHERE: Orlais, the Vauquelin estate.
NOTES: Violence, character death, assholes.

Comments

[dashing]

Six? You are marvel of our times, to be sure.

It is the first thing on the tip of her tongue, and she steals it away before it has chance to gather momentum. Some days it is easier, being what she must be. Calm, even, focused - no offhand comments, no accidental offence. Humour was reserved for those known well to her, or the moments when her guard slipped and forced her to reprimand herself, to remind herself to be better.

(She struggles, sometimes, and progresses others, and yet it often feels to her like the moment she reinforces one part of herself another collapses. Compromises in what a knight must be were but a step short of compromises in honour, she will not so bear it. Wit and humour were a relief, and yet they felt like an abomination, like some monstrosity breaking apart what she has tried to make herself, what it has been necessary to be ever since the Spire fell. As if in letting a joke claim her voice might be a betrayal to all they had lost, in some way.)

"Sabine," Herian says instead, very simply. "We met near Halamshiral, 'most two years past."

[byblow]

"Oh," Alistair says.

He doesn't light up. This is because lit up is his default state. Even at the most haggard and exhausted depths of the false Calling, he was bright-eyed and energetic--if only out of stubborn principle, if only when anyone else was looking--and now that that's passed and he's tanned and reasonably well-rested and -fed, it's dimming that takes effort. Effort he makes, right now: he looks down from where Herian is seated above him, eyes straight ahead, lips pursed to suppress an involuntary grin into a twitchy but mostly straight line.

He could ask if she's mentioned him. He doesn't. Halamshiral and two years sinks in, and tamping down his smile no longer requires work.

"Oh," he says again. "Not under circumstances too awful, I hope."

[dashing]

It is not so surprising he is aware of Halamshiral, given that the Inquisition has a base of operations there now, he knows Sabine, he is significant to Sabine. And yet for a human to react still surprises her a little. Perhaps she should have shed some of her own cynicism by now. It was surprise that cut both ways, even as the blade should have been long ago blunted. Some parts of her burned with that longing which had been satisfied a little in the Circles, a kinship that was stripped down to nothing and felt as though it might never have existed once she walked through alienages once more.

So many times had it been that a human woman with a sword at her side who walked with the authority of a knight had made elves press into the shadows, flinching and cowering. Their resolve to fight united had been shattered, still, pieces to be gathered up. To walk into the nightmare of Halamshiral and be seen as one who had been responsible so soon after the White Spire had been a visceral kind of horror she'd sooner forget, and knew she could never cast away.

The point is this: he acknowledges. He feels. It is but a moment and it is only on the surface, but it is something in his favour.
"We had both of us endured some hardship," she says, and it is one of the gentler ways she could say the truth, "though I suspect little can compare to the agonising aftermath of trying to match pace with her in the consumption of wine."

Still said far, far too seriously— still. It is a fragment of an olive branch. An olive twig. Maybe just an olive.