Semi-Open

[youwonscience]

WHO: Cosima Niehaus, Ruby Lucas, Avery, Lexa, Herian Amsel, Raymond Gibbs, you?
WHAT: Various odds and ends for Harvestmere
WHEN: Covering the last twoish weeks or so of the month
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Not going to set up open hooks this time. HOWEVER if I a) forgot a thing we said we were going to do or b) You'd like to do something with Cosima this month and aren't elsewhere, hit me by DM or Plurk. ETA: note the warning for discussion of torture in one of the threads.

Comments

For Raylan

[youwonscience]

Everyone's got to eat. Well, Cosima mentally corrects, everyone she knows of. Maybe there's someone at Skyhold who photosynthesizes or something; she's heard weirder. But most people have to eat, and running into a friend around the kitchens is better than, say, the healers' tents.

She's not entirely sure if Raylan considers them friends, but Cosima's relatively sure they're at least friendly. His work is interesting, and he seems to mean well beneath a gruff-ish exterior and, maybe a little contrarily, Cosima likes him. So when she recognizes him from behind, she speeds up a little to catch up to him. "Hey, stranger."

[apostafuckyou]

Raylan turned when she called out, and greeted her with no words, but a kind of up-nod and a pleased raise of the eyebrows. He let her catch up before turning to resume his progress. He was being noticeably quiet and taciturn, but that wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary for him. Raylan generally wasn't behaving all that out of the ordinary, just enough for those who knew him well to notice, despite the turmoil inside him.

"How you been?" he asked, apparently unwilling to waste words.

[youwonscience]

His demeanor is... himself, only a bit moreso, and she wonders about it, but doesn't push right away. Instead, she answers his question: "I'm alright, mostly. The healers told me pretty sternly that I should avoid Venatori kidnappings in the future, but otherwise sent me off with a clean bill of health last week."

She glances up at him, since he has a good six inches on her once they're side by side. "What've you been up to recently?"

[apostafuckyou]

He gave a shrug and an expression that was meant to communicate 'not much.' "Led a mission to my hometown. Did what we could and came back." Hopefully, she'd write off any change in his behavior as just being homesick or weirded out or whatever it was that non-traumatized people would feel after visiting home.

[youwonscience]

"Where are you from?" she asks, expecting it to be more or less a benign question.

[apostafuckyou]

"Rainy little shithole called Crestwood," he answered, tone a little bit tight. "Mostly farms, but they get a steady stream a' coin from the Imperial Highway, town's right on it." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Got a letter from someone back home that some shit was goin' down, so we went and investigated."

[youwonscience]

It's a tense answer for "rainy little farming town," and she's not quite sure how to navigate his reaction. She settles on the assumption that he'll tell her to fuck off (in a semi-gentlemanly way) if she pushes too hard; in the meantime, she'll keep expressing honest interest. "What kind of trouble? Rift stuff or like, regular shit?"

...maybe rift stuff counts as regular shit, these days, but she assume he knows what she meant.

[apostafuckyou]

"Both, as it turned out," Raylan said, and there was a little bit more life in this answer. "We went to stop some people I grew up with who were doin' shady shit, passin' slaves through the area. Rift opened while we were there so they're sendin' someone back to handle it."

[youwonscience]

"Shit," she says, blinking. "That sounds like... it was quite the trip." As ever, master of the understatement. "Was that... awkward? I mean since you grew up with the guys, not the rift part."