why should i retract my claws for you? ( closed )

[elegiaque]

WHO: Gwenaëlle Vauquelin + Raleigh Samson.
WHAT: An interview.
WHEN: Before the Kirkwall move.
WHERE: Skyhold cells.
NOTES: Warnings will be detailed as necessary!

It's remarkable how many things Gwenaëlle has written down, lately, that she has no immediate intent to publish. Indeed, what she's written generally, since her project began - pages and pages of filled notebooks with things that might or might not in time see the light of day. Interviewing the enemy commander falls under this same purview; information that's worth pursuing, but potentially too dangerous to thoughtlessly fling into the world--

Potentially.

Assuming that he actually fucking talks to her, which she is not.

With her soft hands and full skirts, she makes a somewhat unusual visitor to the cells - the first time she's been here and, she hopes, the last - accompanied as she is by two Inquisition soldiers, one presumably for her safety and the other having been press-ganged by probably the lady herself into carrying down a cushioned stool. She might well be wasting her time, and if so, she might as well be comfortable while she does it. She unclasps her reading-glasses from their chain at her waist, rests them on her nose; arranges her skirts about herself when she sits down on her stool, and arranges her wooden desk set on her lap to lean on, opens to a clean page of her notebook and dips her pen in the ink.

"My name is Lady Gwenaëlle Vauquelin," she says, neatly, precise without quite sounding polite. "In the not unlikely event of your timely death, would you care to have anything recorded for posterity?"

It's as good a start as any.

Comments

[redinside]

The enemy general has been writing, too. Since he's been so very well-behaved, so docile and mannerly, and all that shit, he was granted the tools for it. The reed pen is abysmal to write with, but they won't give him anything sharp. The book looks like it was bound by someone's niece or nephew still learning the craft. The ink, well, it does what it's supposed to; it all does, all of it meant to bleed out and soak up what thoughts and feelings he has beyond that singular need always dogging him. And since the lyrium began to flow again, he has many.

They'll read through it later, no doubt, looking to wring a few secrets out of him that he wouldn't otherwise volunteer—maybe they'll even find a telling phrase that could prove useful in some arcane fashion. The spymaster has her ways. In truth, it's only a journal. But whatever importance it lacks in the grand scheme of things, this journal—more importantly, the habit that grows it—does decrease the likelihood that this Lady Vauquelin will be dismissed without getting any of what she wants.

However, she will have to endure the rest of him to get it.

"I might," he says, from the rear gloom of the cell, fussing with his trousers as he comes forward. (In a putting-on way, not a taking-off way, no need to be alarmed.) "Depends on who's doin the recording. Why? You here as a harbinger of something sinister?"

As ever, Samson's low-born accent plays slightly at odds with the educated words it shapes.

[elegiaque]

"Only Orlais's failure to completely destroy itself," she says, managing the glibness despite a moment of being visibly taken aback when presented with (mercifully not all of) Samson's ... glory, sure. Gwenaëlle has seen many things a gently-bred creature such as herself might not expect to see, the past year and change, but it strikes her that what red lyrium does to a man is an obscenity. The man who led armies against the Inquisition looks too sickly to lead a horse to water, but appearances can be deceptive. And confusing. And weird, and also gross.

Her head tilts, studying him.

"I've been writing on the Inquisition. I suppose you might know some of it," though she doesn't assume he was carefully following her publication before his capture - certainly the possibility of the wrong hands picking it up has influenced what does and does not get published. "Either way. I write more than I send. It'll matter one day, if anyone's still alive at the end of this."

You know. If.

"I'll write of you regardless; that's unavoidable." Even if she might prefer it, honestly, what a charming topic he isn't. "It struck me as a courtesy to give you the opportunity to speak to what you'd have remembered."

And not invaluable, yes, if she can get him to talk to her.