[ closed ] my past has tasted bitter for years now

[apostasia]

WHO: Martel Leblanc + Cassandra Pentaghast.
WHAT: A nice evening in.
WHEN: Early Harvestmere.
WHERE: Skyhold; Martel's private room.
NOTES: His hair's still white, currently. No I'm still not photoshopping that.

What surprises him isn't that it's different.

Of course it is; he'd dropped revelations on her like a rock into a pond and watched the way they rippled behind her eyes. He could see the moment when he shifted from her handsome daydream to something else, and it felt right, but it had still ached. No; that she looks at him with new wariness, that she hesitates where before she hadn't, that she studies him when his vague past had seemed not to bother her before, these things don't surprise him.

What surprises him, when she's settled at his side - up enough, by now, that his linens can be changed regularly enough not to make this a sweat-soaked mess - is that it isn't more changed. That she hasn't (yet) cut her losses, that his mistakes might perhaps not be insurmountable. That he can still put his fingers in her hair when he isn't turning a page, and she still hasn't hit him with the book yet for raising his eyebrows at her over it when reading aloud a particularly salacious paragraph.

Comments

[apostasia]

"Me? No. There's not gold enough in Orlais to persuade me to spend my life in troll-country." He doesn't, off the top of his head, recall if he ever told her; presumes that he might well have done, but if anything was memorable about her interview with him when they were less...personally entangled, it was probably that he asserted himself as an Inquisition agent above all else and that part where he very nearly took his shirt off.

"Though I share a background with them. I'm an Elene by way of Elenia, further south. Vardenais, where I was born, is a port city - but our lands were further inland. And I left it young for the Pandion motherhouse and the knighthood, in any case."

There's still some sweetness in those memories, whatever else there is now. Bittersweetness, to be sure, but not nothing. Every day it gets a little easier in some ways, and a little harder in others.

"There are four Elene countries," since he'd prefer a history lesson to a specific rehashing of his own history. "Elenia, Thalesia, Arcium and Deira. My mother was from Arcium. I've a little of the accent." The slight lilt to his voice that sounded, to Thedosian ears, like someone with the very slightest touch of Orlais.

[stabsbooks]

Cassandra remembers the shirt. Specifically, how he had opened it in the middle of their interview, entirely without warning. Though she had seen him entirely shirtless - entirely unclothed - many times since, she will always remember that first time.

Perhaps it was the Maker who sent you to us, she had said then.

Or...perhaps not. But still, she is able to smile, imagining his port city, his family's lands, and all he describes.

"My own childhood was similar," she says. "I was twelve when my uncle sent me to the Seekers. I have avoided Nevarra ever since."

[apostasia]

Probably, he could have stood to have warned her, but in this as in most things in his life Martel is nothing if not unnecessarily dramatic. (He might say, aware of his impact - and he is that, too.)

"I don't miss Elenia," he observes, an implicit and intentional opportunity for that lack of desire to return home to be something they share, or something she confides in him they don't. "Queen Ehlana has, I gather, made great strides in unraveling the harm done by her father's rule, but I am myself a product of Aldreas's Elenia and it is nothing I care to revisit."

He curves his hand around her arm, settling, fingers still. "She married my brother. Prince-Consort Sparhawk, Champion of the Pandion Order and interim Preceptor. As well as he who is called Anakha, the man without destiny, before whose footsteps gods tremble, waiting to see what the big plodding Elene who thinks he's funny is going to do next. Develop a terrible case of the headache, in all likelihood, wearing that many hats. No, I leave all that to those better men, I think."

There is a trace of regret in it, of falsehood; he would like nothing more than to be the man wearing the hat marked 'Lord Preceptor of the Pandion Order', to serve at Sparhawk's side instead of with a blade to his throat, to swear his allegiance to a sovereign worth the oath.

He'd give anything, he said once, to be a man like Sparhawk. Knowing that he'd thrown it away with his own hands is a bitter thing to swallow, but there's little else for it. His life is here, now, for better or worse, and the only thing left for him to be in Elenia is a cautionary tale.

[stabsbooks]

It is something that they share, that absence of love for their respective homelands, but Cassandra does not comment on it. She is listening too closely to what he does not say, her brow furrowed faintly in concern.

I am myself a product...and it is nothing I care to revisit.

I leave all that to those better men.

She lifts her hand, cradling his cheek gently, fingers caressing his jaw.

"You are so hard on yourself," she murmurs sorrowfully. "But there is wisdom, I think, in recognizing when it is best to seek a different path. And...and goodness, in turning away from power that is not yours to have." She smiles at him, encouragingly, her expression full of affection and pride.

"Perhaps you are a better man than you think."

She wants so badly to believe it.

[apostasia]

If he could - God, if he could.

Martel presses a kiss to her temple and stays there, the affection and gratitude in the gesture as real as the ache in the pit of his stomach at being looked at that way, a hard thing to bear after so long. So unfamiliar, and will it ever not feel undeserved?

"What I believe," he says, finally, quieter, "is that I can be."

A better man. He has to believe that, or the only worthwhile thing left for him to do is die, and -

Well, he goes back and forth on that.

[stabsbooks]

Cassandra studies him for a moment. She can feel his melancholy, even if he doesn't put words to it, and she can't help but be affected by it as well.

She sighs quietly, lowering her head to rest on his chest and curling close and warm around him. Really, there doesn't seem much else to say.