[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

[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.