[OPEN] now that you're living on the hill

[paladingus]

WHO: Simon and OPEN.
WHAT: Getting reacquainted with Kirkwall.
WHEN: Justinian, just like whenever.
WHERE: All over the city.
NOTES: I'm always happy to write up another starter if you'd like!

I. Hanged Man

Simon's never been a big drinker. He doesn't mind letting people size him up and assume he could drink them under the table, but on the whole, he thinks he has enough vices to atone for without being a lush on top of it all.

But some boredom needs the big guns busted out to take care of it. The Hanged Man has mostly lost the aura of forbidden mystery and excitement it had held when he was a teenage recruit in the Gallows, but the aura of shame and insufficient sanitation that's since replaced it isn't enough to keep him away when it's the only place in town he can afford. He's at the bar, on his third pint, cheering on the brawl that's begun on the other side of the room.

II. Living Quarters

There's plenty about the city that seems unfamiliar now that he's returning to it in his thirties, after nearly a decade and an intervening war, and on the whole, the strangeness isn't a bad thing. He hadn't liked the place to begin with. But all the same, there's something to be said for a little bit of familiarity here and there, and sharing the old templar rooms with Cade again isn't the bad kind of deja vu. It's certainly an improvement on the group quarters. He's on his way to move what few possessions he has into the room, whistling as he carries the box.

III. Markets

The marks from being electrically charbroiled by a furious lightning mage are beginning to fade, but the excruciating stiffness of having all his muscles involuntarily locked up and the bruises from the resulting deadweight collapse aren't quite so quick to dissipate.

Or perhaps they would be, if he were a little more patient with them, but Simon is not a man who takes well to any kind of imposition on his physical fitness. An injury that thinks it's going to keep him off the training grounds is an injury that needs to be taught a lesson and slapped right back into its place, damn it. To that end, he's wandering the market in his civvies, in search of some kind of potion or poultice that can teach his ornery muscle strain who's boss.

IV. Wildcard

Go nuts!

Comments

wild card.

[indocile]

Things Simon is expecting while performing the necessary maintenance of his weapons and armor: probably not Margaux, small and quiet and in that smallness seeming to almost materialise out of no where on the bench beside him, swinging her bare feet above the ground. This is a bench designed for someone his size to comfortably sit on, not hers.

"You served here, didn't you? A time ago? The Gallows."

Yes, baby, he knows where you mean.

[paladingus]

It's probably a good thing that he's not holding anything heavier or sharper than a gauntlet when she speaks, because he drops it promptly on the floor with a clatter and an uncharacteristic "Maker's balls" when she startles him. Simon's not a difficult guy to sneak up on.

He remembers her from the advance crew; it would be difficult not to recall someone with a face like that and hair like that, but the question has him looking confused and guilty in equal measure.

"I--yes, I did, but it's been years and years. I don't remember you from there." The should I? is unspoken and vaguely implied.

[indocile]

"No, no. Of course."

Before she skedaddled up the Frostbacks, she'd never left Orlais - there's always been plenty of Orlais, if she found herself in need of a quick exit somewhere. And she could have gone on that way, probably, if she preferred...but the Inquisition is a beacon of hope, and hope has been hard to come by. It's something she wanted to be a part of -

which hasn't turned out how she'd imagined, really. She hadn't envisioned her heroic escapades thwarting certain doom involving quite so much sitting quietly in the shadow of the Gallows, sorting through the effects of the dead and the simply gone. Feeling, for once, how truly small she is and how small they all are, really, how close to calamity.

"Are you afraid?"

Maker's teeth, Margaux, ask the man the easy questions, why don't you.

A moment later she corrects herself, holding up a letter written years ago, to someone she doesn't know; "Do you think on it? That it could have been your things, left behind?"

That he could have died here, like so many did.

[paladingus]

Before she produces the letter, Simon's expression is almost entirely blank, save for its tinge of slightly helpless bafflement and a not-imperceptible note of concern. 'Are you afraid' is not the sort of cryptic question one wants to be asked, out of the blue, by a mysterious woman who has appeared beside you without sound or warning.

The letter and the correction do help, of course, at least with the creeping unease that had come from the ambiguity of the question, but it doesn't make him want to ponder it any more. But she asked, and she has such an unenviable job to do. He can't blame her for wanting to talk about it with someone.

"Not really," he admits, after giving it due, fair thought. "The thing is, I left before the worst of it happened. I don't think I was ever in much danger. At least, no more than a templar is anywhere else. I should have been here for it all, to be sure, but--I wasn't." He tilts his head to give the letter another look, trying to make out the unfortunate addressee.

[indocile]

There are no obvious identifying details at a glance - the letter is written to my son - and that is, perhaps, in part the source of her current unhappiness with her task. So many people who did not know that one day they would be the unknown answers to the thankless task of asking these questions.

"You must be..." She gropes for a way to express her thoughts, settles finally on, "glad of providence, no?"

There but for the grace of, etc.

[paladingus]

"I suppose so," he says, sounding guiltily unconvinced. "I ought to thank the Maker for my deliverance, and I do, but then that begs the question--what did I do to deserve it, when he didn't?"

He jerks his head toward the letter. "Or any of the rest who died. I know He works in grand and mysterious ways, but it wasn't divine inspiration or anything that made me move to Ansburg. I just didn't want to see any more mages get their brains zapped out who shouldn't have, and they did a lot less of it there."

[indocile]

"Providence is the wrong word," a quiet acknowledgment. Where is the hand of the Maker in the suffering of her people? Is she to accept that they deserve the hand fate has dealt them? --no, and she'll scream herself hoarse in the face of it.

She tips slowly sideways until she's leaning against him, an unhappy moue making her defined features more severe.

"There is nothing they do, or you do. Or anyone does." Just the cold hand of an unforgiving world, and everyone trying their very hardest.

[paladingus]

"That's all well and good for you if you want to believe it," he says. He doesn't quite mean it, but his evangelizing days are behind him, mostly. And he's been made aware before of the problems with ministering to elves in particular. The old but I think the Canticle of Shartan should be restored to the canon, really I do schpiel never had been much use, curiously enough.

It's hard to argue theology in any capacity when she's doing that, though. He looks down at the top of her head with unabashed surprise.

[indocile]

He doesn't push her away, so she stays, and so does her expression.

"If the hand of your Maker is at work in fate," she says, eventually, "then I have looked at a lot of fates, and I think he can fuck off."

Because if she accepts that fate is meted out, and that things like deserving or undeserving have anything to do with it - what does that mean for her people? What is she then to accept, about the aunt for whom she was named and never knew, or the children who never live long enough to leave the alienage walls?

She reads the letters of the dead here and knows sorrow, but most of all because it shakes what she had long taken for granted - that elves in the circles were better off. That there was somewhere, maybe. And there isn't, any more, but maybe there never was at all.

[paladingus]

Simon is struggling a bit with his options here. On the one hand, he can make the revered mothers proud and defend his faith against the onslaught of the infidel, et cetera, et cetera. On the other, he can keep his mouth shut and appreciate the proximity to someone pretty. Historically, he's usually opted to prioritize the physical over the spiritual.

But he's been working on that. "Enough people keep up that attitude," he says mildly, "and He'll do just that. I'd rather He not."

He can feel the insensitivity as soon as he's said it, the unavoidable and libelous implication, it's your fault if He never comes back to safeguard His children again, the kind of sentiment that's driven Exalted Marches before and might well again. He doesn't want to be that kind of zealot anymore. He doesn't want to be on that side.

"It's not as if the Chantry's ever given you a reason to believe. I know that."

[indocile]

Margaux pokes him in his big, round ear-

"Of course you'd rather not," as if being objectively wrong is just some barely-charming foible of his that she is obliged to tolerate, having decided to tolerate the rest of him. It isn't his faith she questions - in a way it's something to know that at least some of them actually believe what they say, as unhelpful as any of it is - but his god, and so there is no clear way out of that conversational pothole that ends pretty.

She swerves it entirely, instead:

"I have been writing letters to try to return belongings to their kin. Some of them write back." One in precisely the same hand as the diary that had mentioned his name, insisting he knew nothing of it and had never had a brother in the Templars, and didn't fucking want to hear any more of it - Margaux thinks of it but doesn't show him. Templars, particularly the big and earnest sort, might feel differently reading that one than she did, might feel differently about her choice to obediently consign to the fire any evidence of his service here.

She'd nearly burned Aoife Bronneach's things along with it, after the letter from her parents that had made it clear their daughter had died in a childhood accident and had certainly not been a mage, but she'd still had much of it when the younger daughter wrote not long after, requesting her sister's effects.

"Do you think your family would want your things?"

Is she actively planning how to handle the event of his death. Probably not. But, like, just in case.