faderift | Nothing to eat but fears in the back seat

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Nothing to eat but fears in the back seat

WHO: Yngvi; open
WHAT: Yngvi takes a moment to reflect on Asher's passing
WHEN: August 14th, evening onwards
WHERE: A quiet spot, the fringes of Hightown
NOTES: Discussion of character death, general state of the Yngvi given previous outings

Today creeps up on Yngvi. That must be what keeping busy does to you, makes you notice the days passing but not the dates until it lies heavily on him with the letter thats that they've all been dancing about. Funny how him and the rest of the Boneflayers can talk about death, joke about it, even laugh about it until it was Asher's. Maybe it was how. Maybe it was just how unfair it was.

The whole day he can't settle. Feels himself pulled from one thing to the next or sitting and watching time stretch out impossibly; minutes crawl by the way hours do on a stake out, his heart beating so loud everyone must be able to hear it.

So when he leaves coin for the meat he 'borrows' from his lady's kitchen (he's left the coin, he'll go with whoever has to buy more) he doesn't feel guilty because she was there, she'd understand, and the Avvar do their death thing and that's fine, that's grand, time doesn't mean much but if Asher is off with his Lady of the Skies and the birds took him--

"Stupid," he mutters to himself as he bundles the wrapped meat close and sets off, Avvar mead and a cup in the other hand to a spot that looked like the last place someone would go find him. No Chantry remains, no stupid fucking weird garden that makes him itch like the tree he hit in Halamshiral, no Darktown and Carta, no Gallows and red lyrium ghosts, no one.

Just Yngvi and the meat he unfolds from the waxed paper, weighed down on one corner with a cup of Avvar mead and another cup he drinks himself in silence for a long time as the sun starts setting until the words come out.

"Wish you were here mate, could really do with you here now. Wasn't right. None of it was right." Quiet. There's a dark bird with glossy feathers watching from a rooftop across from him; they gave Asher to the birds to give him to the Lady, this is all he can try to cobble together just now.

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A year to the day.

Gwenaëlle shakes off her servants and will not be persuaded not to go alone - no, she does not require anyone to be sent for, no, she will not hear of being accompanied, ordering Yva back into the house in no uncertain terms when the issue is pressed - and she lifts the hood of her cloak over her hair and hides her hands beneath it so she doesn't have to know if they shake, a little, when she thinks of it. How much time has passed. How little time there had been.

She isn't entirely alone. Hardie trots at her heels, as she goes to the last place that Yngvi might be, which is the first, because it's where he is. For a moment, she hesitates, just out of view. He didn't ask her here. Maybe she shouldn't have come. Maybe she shouldn't have brought Hardie. Maybe--

"It's just me," she says.

The thought had occurred to ask her.

After all there she had been, and there her maidservant that had passed had been, and Yngvi and Gunnar had been with that very kind elven lady as her unneeded escort because it had seemed fitting and right but the words had died-- Keep pushing and you'll be pushed back, is what his mind says in a voice that's his but not wholly his so off he'd gone.

But here she is and he smiles, watery, wobbly, sees Hardie and chokes up a laugh to hold out a hand to be sniffed.

"M'lady, s'good to see you, view's not up to much but...I met him here. Not here here but here so I just thought that maybe? Maybe he could hear me or somethin'? Stupid. I mean, he's gone. I saw and I was there and there was the hold," he's rambling, getting faster and faster but there's a thing he needs to say that's so stupid, he said it didn't matter and it doesn't but it does, just the littlest bit right now, "I don't dream so I won't-- Thought this'd be a way to say hello."

Hardie sniffs it, circling dwarf and meat with interest - obedient to the last, he doesn't go for either (he likes dwarf, and he hasn't been told he can have meat) ... but he casts longing looks, as if a sufficiently penetrating stare will make it obvious to them what he wants and they might be moved by his plight.

Gwenaëlle, not moved by his plight, arranges her cloak to protect her dress when she sits down beside Yngvi and nudges his shoulder with her own. It seems sometimes like it might have been just the other day that she sat up nights, trying to fathom the idea of a world without Asher in it. It seems impossible that she can have been living in that world for a full year now. She still doesn't understand it. It still isn't fair - all the tears she'd saved up, sparing him her grief when he needed her steadiness, they threaten for a moment and what's fair about that, either?

She'd thought he'd forgotten her, and she'd told herself how it would be all right, how she wasn't even going to be offended, how it would be unreasonable to expect...

He was proud of her. Only imagine.

"I think it's good," she says, quietly. "I think he'd like that."

Quiet, then. Eventually,

"Do you know, my lord was afraid of him. That's why he made him so angry. He thought," the smallest hitch in her breath, "he thought I would run away with you all. And I thought he wouldn't want me to."

She doesn't mean her father. What if she'd been brave? What if she'd believed him before he lay dying?

Strange how he wishes Bronson and Hardie could've met so he could've watched one dog teach the other one how to be a dog even if it would've meant Asher being the one on the floor with him, playing tug-of-war. (That's how he was, it's how he likes to remember him. The flipside to not dreaming are not having nightmares about the bad things that happened to you either.)

Yngvi nudges back, tips his head to the side so he can look properly at her. Not many people left are going to miss Asher like he does but he can guess how hard it's been. How she tried. Understood how to hold in the tears instead of drowning in them because that wasn't fair to make Asher hold everyone up and the rest of them were all holding it in--

He smiles in surprise because lately he's used to people not listening to him but her and Wren? They listen. To what he says. To what he doesn't say. To how he says it and all the ways he says it and it scares him more than he likes but it's good to hear that he isn't stupid, that he's not just a dwarf spouting nonsense people don't want to hear for whatever reason, that all their lives and problems are so much more important than his.

"He taught me all the stories, me and Gunnar, back when he picked us up." Imagine how that must have sounded to two dwarves who knew nothing but Kirkwall's darkness, the cold of a Stone not for them, a Maker shunning the world, the elven Creators locked away. Gods alive and living and watching, rituals to draw them close. No wonder Asher had been so alive.

No wonder the world is so much less without him now. Yngvi listens and the crow lands down, still feet from them but it croaks, head tipping this way and that. He holds his breath a long time.

"We would've had such adventures," Yngvi has to sniff hard to keep it in before he starts leaking all over the place and makes a mess of everything, he's been upset but he's okay just now. Not like he might go if someone rattles him the way some of Gunnar's bottles and flasks do. Volatile, that's the word Gunnar always used for them. "It would've been so grand, all the places we got to go to. Our brave wild princess he'd have made you one of them head garlands," a flower crown is what he means but crowns are metal and flowers are garlands so there, "but bear claws and teeth."

Corsetry prevents her from doing as she'd like to do and tucking her knees up to her chest - she settles for wrapping the arm she'd have put about her knees around Yngvi's shoulders, small together, grieving together the man who had seen their very best selves when they couldn't. Who gave Yngvi his taste of adventure; who'd have given a great deal to Gwenaëlle if she'd only been able to say she wanted. She isn't sure anyone's loved her the way that he did - she'd let herself imagine, a little while, that perhaps Alexander...

He's gone. (And Thranduil-- is not for her. She tells herself this.)

"I would have been happy anywhere," she says, willing it to be true and ignoring the shadow that's always dogged her heels, that would dog them no matter where she was, "with the lot of you."

Edited 2017-08-22 05:55 (UTC)

Crows are intelligent birds and certainly very brave birds, and this one comes from Kirkwall so it finally descends from the rooftop to land a distance away. Tips its head to the side to assess them and starts to hop closer, stopping again to quork for more.

There's always a space for a lie at the table (Yngvi was raised on lies, with lies, is in so many ways a collection of lies) and that wouldn't be a bad one. Boneflayers life wasn't perfect. Road life is hard life. Unpleasant life. But Yngvi had an open sky and the safety of people who didn't demand much of him that he wasn't willing to do.

"D'you know what the weirdest thing was?" He asks without stopping to let her answer because he'll answer himself, because he has to do it anyway since he knows the answer and she might guess but he knows, it'd be better to let her pretend if she wants to. "That I got to do what I liked? There weren't lots of rules? Just a few and good ones? Don't steal from the rest of us, treat captives decently but that was contract stuff. Just got to be one of Asher's boys and that was so good because I could. I could do that."

The wind picks up and tugs at his hair, he smiles, rubs his nose. His nose is already suspiciously red but that's good, that's fine, it's healthy to let things out now and then.

The ache of such words is a terrible, bone-deep thing that she - accomplished poet, incisive art critic, noted propagandist - hasn't the vocabulary to express. It hurts in a simple, childish way, to be satisfied with so little, to have needed that little thing so much. To understand how much bigger it is, in truth. What Asher had given him - him and Gunnar, all of the others that followed him and trusted him and loved him - was immeasurably valuable and some of the hurt is just the echo of her own.

She'd expected to mean nothing and he'd looked at her, for a short time, as if she meant everything. He had been there, unquestioning, when she'd expected to always be alone. He'd been proud of her when the idea of it had been incomprehensible. He'd given her without seeming to even think about it things that she'd dreamed jealously of and clutched at with the desperate, greedy hands of someone whose heart was still that small, hurting thing -

Her arm around Yngvi presses close. She leans, a little. She says, "You're still one of Asher's boys. Nothing and no one can ever undo that."

When he thinks of her, it isn't the lady even if he forever calls her that because it's the sort of thing too long instilled in him and it suits her best to always be m'lady, but the bits other people never see. Tripping into her room in an untidy tangle of pelts. That she never wept in that tent when others did. How good she was to Aura when she didn't need to be but she was because she is.

She's good. She is so good and Yngvi has never had much so he always clings with his greedy empty little hands to this and down comes another crow and another and another, a raucous chorus of black feathers and long beaks.

"You're his favourite." He tips his face up so she gets the smile that's for very few people left in this world now as the first crow hops to the meat and pecks at it. Says you're because she was and still is - time is a weird flexible thing for the Avvar it's not what it is for everyone else. "We both get that, out of everyone? Makes us pretty special yeah?"

On impulse, when he turns his smiling face up, she presses a kiss to his forehead. (Which is a rather brave thing to do when it's been some time since soft elven hands had handled him.) What a thing to be and have been, she thinks, Asher Hardie's best girl.

She thinks of Aura, sometimes, holds the letter in her hands more often than she unfolds it to read again, remembers a line of it well enough not to need to; each day the sun rises, each evening it sets, and I sit here writing this as winter takes hold knowing that in time the ice will melt and spring will come. Winter ends, and even Gwenaëlle's terrible heart thaws, and here they are together, the two of them, the best of them. A year has passed. The days are cooling down, but they have lived winters before, and spring has always come after.

"It's the very best thing in the world that you can be," she says, eventually. "Loved. We are. And he was. And he knew that he was."

Maybe there are things she should have said -

but she thinks he knew enough. Enough to be glad of.

Few things in this world can make Yngvi flush. Discomfort usually, when someone's said something that strikes in a particular place that has him wanting to squirm away but he stares up (cross-eyed, she's very close) and they're sitting, she's not the tallest of ladies he's ever known or tends to be around often but she might as well be some far off star burning brightly come down to touch him. He doesn't duck his head away but his breath lodges uncomfortably under his ribs because what does he do, he can't even make a joke about it because he doesn't want to.

Kirkwall is a lot of things to him. Wren looks at him because she has to know there's a vocabulary buried in him for the things he doesn't say and Gwenaëlle knows that better than her because how can she not? He knows about the things that happened. That it wasn't okay. (Stronger words but right now it's enough to just admit that in his own head when he looks at people: what happened to me and to Gunnar and all the rest wasn't okay and I'm not okay with it still.)

The first crow which is so much braver than the others tears a great chunk out of the meat and tips its head back to swallow before it hops over to Yngvi and to Gwenaëlle, inspecting the mead. Yngvi smiles, dares to hope.

"It's yours, from the hold. Always make sure I've got some, you didn't spend all that time weaning me off the Hanged Man's swill for me to slide back to old habits mate," he manages through a choked throat because that's him, it's really him.

Christine had been to Hightown several days ago to shop, and now that several items are ready for pickup, she retrieves them in their brown paper parcels, hugging them to her chest as she navigates her way back home. But her thoughts are clouded up with heavy thoughts on this day, and she nearly runs into someone before snapping to attention and slipping out of his way. She'd known the date was approaching, and though today has been hard, the days leading up to this were even worse. Because those were the last few days of Asher's life, when he was in pain and she was screaming on the inside that she'd failed him. She had been so sure that she had healed him properly, but then he kept deteriorating and nothing she did could fix it.

Today saddens her, but this is also the day he found peace from the pain. In remembrance, she wears several items she received for her birthday: a necklace with a bird and a hair accessory of the same, sweeping her hair up off her neck. Birds remind her of freedom, and of the Lady of the Skies, and of Asher too. As if that man is watching over her, she then spots Yngvi seated not far away, and she makes her way over to him, taking note of the extra cup beside him.

"Yngvi," she says softly. The natural thing to say would be "How are you?" but she can't do that bit of politeness right now. It isn't necessary when she's sure his heart must hurt far worse than hers, and that's only because he knew Asher for so much longer. It isn't because she loved Asher so little; she did, but it was in a way that had nothing to do with romance. With romantic love, no explanation is needed. People just understand. If she ever tries to describe what she felt for Asher Hardie, she'd need a diagram with little arrows pointed everywhere. He'd teased her, frustrated her, left her shaking after amazing nights in his tent, made her laugh, left her worrying, and educated her about spirits. He'd opened her eyes in such a positive way, when most of what she'd learned after leaving the Circle was that everybody bleeds the same in war.

If only... if only she had been a better healer. If only she had been more stubborn, more cautious, more observant. Who knows what would be different today? Christine carries loss close to her heart. It isn't what a healer should do. She should be more detached. But caring so much is what keeps her trying so hard to save every life. Maybe if she had less compassion, she wouldn't try as hard, and more patients would die. So this is how she is.

Last Yngvi saw Christine--

Last Yngvi saw Christine he was either doing better or probably doing a much better job of pretending that he was doing better. It's been months. Maybe spotting her in passing because the Gallows is only so big and he still lives there most of the time but that's about it. Not that he'd blame her if she heard of the incidents and heard everything he'd said on the sending crystals, he would if he could but he's Yngvi and he's here with a lump of raw meat borrowed from his lady's kitchen with coin left in place and mead from Asher's hold and a raven he's hoping will come down.

Because Kirkwall was Asher's home for a bit. Kirkwall was where he picked the Boneflayers name. Picked up Yngvi and Gunnar. Picked up Liadan. Settled the whole company since Nasir and Amalia got properly settled in too by the time they were all running out the gates with the Arishok setting it all on fire.

A croak comes out when he tries speaking because it's been a bit by now without touching the mead and honestly? Yngvi doesn't exactly trust himself speaking to people. It's been hideous. He knows where it's coming from. He could just make it go away before. Or it wasn't there. All close. Not a fresh bruise. Just an old one that got bumped and jostled now and then.

"Not got y'self locked in a room again?" That's a shitty thing to say but he can't think of anything else to say so that's about all he's got, his short sad self waiting for the birds to come.

Ordinarily, she'd answer what he's asked, even knowing he doesn't want a serious answer. She does it because it keeps conversation flowing, but apparently some people think it means she can't take a joke. She'd rather not add one more person to the list who thinks they know better than her.

So instead she moves to sit down on the other side of the meat and drink, staring down at it thoughtfully.

"Waiting for someone?" she asks. Christine doesn't know what's in the mug, and the raw meat seems set out for a wild animal or a stray domesticated one. The question is, who?

Setting almost every relationship he's had with everyone around him on fire is pretty much Yngvi's raison d'être currently, or it seems that way to him, if he claimed he knew that much Orlesian.

Yngvi looks up, meets the beady black eyes of the crow and he's not a mage but he got raised with Asher's stories, Asher's life, Asher's way of loving life and living it that he feels something. Is Aura dreaming? Aura writes, Aura sees a lot of crows in dreams landing on the things she needs to see and she says that they're Asher, Asher pointing her, making her pay attention or be brave or ready as she needs to be.

"Asher," he replies as if that's the most normal thing to be waiting for, for a dead man to come back. He's put out the meat to bring down the birds to him and there's a crow that's waiting, the same dark bird that haunts every sight of blood and battle in the world since they started, the ones that drowned out every sound when they took Asher. "Asher's with his Lady. The Lady of the Skies is the wind and the birds, her messengers, so, if I leave this out? Sit with it and his good mead, then they come. And it'll be Asher." That was how Asher had taught Yngvi (and Gunnar, but Gunnar's far away just now, remembering with the rest of the Boneflayers wherever they happen to be) when a dwarf who only knew dwarven ways and elven ways and Chantry ways about his ways. At campfires and long walks. At holds in cold mountain air that burned the lungs. No augur is Yngvi, no Sky Watcher, but lay out an offering and the Lady of the Skies sees because the Avvar gods are still living and watching and haven't been sealed away or turned their backs on those who know to look for them.

It sounds so poetic for a soul to fly back down to the world in the form of a bird, but what are the Avvar if not people who rejoice in the beauty of the world around them? They aren't simple, bloodthirsty warriors, holed up in the mountains because they're just as wild. They sing songs and tell tales, and the notable members of the hold are gifted with a title for their deeds, or cursed with one if the deed wasn't impressive. And the spirits surround them, talk to them, aid them. Even now as Christine thinks of it, she feels Faith's presence in her mind as a welcome reminder that she does the same.

Her gaze follows Yngvi's and she spots the crow, so reminiscent of the wooden one in her hair right now. It's looking back at them and Christine feels her chest tighten with emotion. She remembers watching the birds in the sky at Asher's funeral and then having to turn away, unable to watch them land on his body. It was only on her next visit to the hold when she was able to look up at the spot and watch them circle, her heart lightened that they were doing their Lady's bidding and bringing a soul up to her.

Christine wants to believe all this is true. She wants to believe that spirits have the ability to command birds and carry the souls of people, because it's them doing something. It's not being told that the Maker loves them but abandoned them because not every single person believed. It seems like a convenient excuse created by scholars to explain why they were alone in the world with no loving god assisting them in their most dire times of need. But spirits help. They always help. Maybe that's why the Chantry teaches everyone to fear them: because people would worship the spirits instead of the absent Maker.

"He will come," she says, deciding to believe it. "Though it may take time. He always has to make an entrance, does he not?"

If he could've left Kirkwall he would've gone off to see Aura.

But if Yngvi left Kirkwall then he doesn't know if he'd ever come back and he said he'd see this through, he could change with someone else but he said, and Asher was gone and they sat down in the place where Asher had a family in his wife's house where his son was sleeping and Yngvi said yeah, right, sounds like it'll be a laugh and an adventure, I'm good for it and he was, he-- He is? Not as much. They'd understand if he left and begged off and that'd be the worst thing he thinks.

So he'll write Aura again after and find out what her dreams told her, send some exciting Kirkwall luxuries off up to the mountains for her since he's got the means to do that.

"How you make a living in this business. Need to make a mark on the world and carve a space into it so the world knows you were there." That's how a lot of things work everywhere, legacy isn't so different when it comes to mercenaries and Carta than nobility would like to think, harder to make a name for yourself when you come for nothing and scrape for it with your blood, sweat, tears, with your reputation, with making yourself into something. Asher got that. Yngvi's trying. "Worked everywhere that weren't Tevinter or Qunari lands because we didn't go there. Let people think a thing 'bout you and it works."

Asher's dead, not going to mind Yngvi talking about him now and the crow starts to come down, quorks to call more. Yngvi reaches for the mead, slow and easy so he doesn't startle it but birds that live around Kirkwall don't spook like others do and these are the sort that peck at whatever lies bleeding in a darkened alley, not usually offered up a choice cut by a small shabby dwarf toasting to them.

Christine has never considered making her mark on the world so she could be remembered. All she's ever wanted was a safe place of her own choosing and the ability to save lives. But mercenaries live and die by their reputation. They get work because a friend of a friend told this guy's uncle that this is the company you hire to get things done. So she can see Yngvi's point, even if she never aspires to have a legacy of her own. Children would be nice, though. That's a different kind of legacy.

She watches Yngvi and the bird, not sure if she's intruding. As much as Asher made an impact on her life, she didn't spend near enough time with him to be considered in some kind of inner circle. She regrets that now. She regrets not putting down her work that could be finished later to go down to the Boneflayers' camp and see what they were up to. She regrets not asking him for more stories of Avvar gods, even if she found herself cast in one of the roles for Asher's amusement. But isn't that the way it always goes? Everyone thinks they'll have more time. Now she stares at Church's glowing hand in the dark when his breath has evened out and sleep has found him, afraid of a rift opening and him falling back through. Afraid of the shard trying to consume his body much like the red lyrium is doing to Templars. Now she is very, very aware of there never being enough time to say and do all the things you wanted to with a person, and she learned that truth from Asher's passing.

Once she's sure she won't spook the crow by talking, she murmurs, "Do you think he will always be this bird, or will he be others too? If I ever wish to talk to him, I mean."

Watching Christine from the corner of his eye, Yngvi can remember the fun times even in Skyhold when Asher was on the mend. He wasn't but it had been different and they'd had chickens for some reaosn. Settled longer than any of them had settled outside of the places they'd come from; sometimes he still meets people who were Liadan's life too, not that they remember him well, the ones that did are gone now with the Chantry and the chaos of that night.

"Here's the thing," Yngvi says as the crow quorks to the others, coming closer. "Everyone burning their dead just feels like it was the Chantry way of trying to be different to other folk. Dalish plant trees over their dead, Orzammar says we go back to the stone and I know what I want for me, Avvar have sky burials - you lot burn them and that's...that's it. Gone. Just ash. Dust. S'all people are to the Chantry ain't it? Walking, talking, breathing dust takin' up space until we don't."

And people say the Chantry loves them, that it's not a scam, he'll believe it when he sees it.

"Aura has dreams." Stretching his right arm out slowly with a small grimace until the elbow pops and he can lean back on both hands again more comfortably, he continues. "She sees a crow in them and the crow is very dark, it comes out of the shadows itself, lands on important things or flies where she should be going. Aura believes, she's a spirit warrior now? If she says it's him then I'm not going to argue, s'not like dwarves dreams." Until now that wasn't something that had bothered Yngvi even in the context of Asher no matter the letters he and Aura exchanged on the subject but today it does chafe, settling under his skin to itch just the wrong way.

Christine is used to keeping her failing Andrastian faith to herself -- or to Church, who won't judge her for it. But when someone comes along who thinks it's all a pack of lies, she tends to sit up and listen.

"My father," she begins, not expecting to get into this but here she is, "died in the civil war. They burned his body on a pyre with the rest of the dead. I cannot visit a tree, or look to the sky and see the birds who carried his soul. There is... nothing left but the ring he wore." Some might say the memories remain, but she barely has any memories of him. She was hoping to form new ones. "It is hard to say goodbye when there is nothing to say goodbye to."

So Aura has become a spirit warrior. Yngvi has spoken of this before, and Christine was confident then that Gjurd would set her down the right path. It sounds like Asher flies over her and his soul guides her now.

"Maybe he will visit me in dreams," she says, though after the words leave her lips, she doubts he will. Instead she focuses on the crow before them now, looking for a sign in its eyes.

"See," and this is territory that's nebulous (another of those words Yngvi wouldn't claim to know, he's just a dwarf from the gutters serah what's a word like that tripping out of his mouth?) but Asher cared about her and Christine has been decent - has been better to Yngvi than several others - so with Asher's ghost laid out between them he can offer her this. Asher was generous wasn't he? Even on his deathbed he tried to keep up his act, keep the face on.

He tries again with a dry throat but the mead isn't for him, that's an offering he can manage. "Right, way I see it is, maybe your old man if you care and there is some place they go 'cause I dunno 'bout all that stuff but say there is, then he'd know? Because there-" and he nods, the crows come down, the first one comes right up to tear a bloody strip off the meat Yngvi took from his lady's kitchen with coin left in its place. What he means is things maybe Asher told her or she might know: Andraste was what the Avvar were before they were Avvar and the Lady of the Skies is the wind and the birds, so all things get carried off and borne aloft in the end. Perhaps not what she wanted but this is life and we seldom get what we want so we make do with what we have.

It's a sight she won't soon forget. Ever since leaving the Circle, Christine has been drawn to birds flying free over her head, never caged like she had been. She's loved watching them, and it's become a well-known fact about her. But right here at this moment, she's seeing these crows with different eyes. She's seeing Asher and her father approaching her -- two important men in her life that had died around the same time. Christine decides that Asher is the one who took the meat because he was never a man to shy away from what he wanted. From her mother's accounts, her father was selfless and sacrificing. He would be a bird to hang back and wait. She feels drawn to one and she stares at it longingly, wanting to say so much, but holding her tongue. There will be another time for that. Her nose burns with unshed tears and she nods subtly, so as not to scare the crows away.

"Thank you, Yngvi. I see him now."

How do you respond to people saying that when you haven't done anything, when there isn't an edge to it, isn't some sort of bite or sarcasm or just something that can trip you up? A bubble of panic threatens to burst but the crow hops over again (Asher, it's Asher, you know it's Asher and Aura will write because Aura will know; Yngvi knows that in the marrow of his bones same as he still has the stone sense Orzammar swears he's lost for his forebears leaving it and him being born to the light and the sky) with more meat in its beak.

Go out in the wild and wild things sit about on you, he's not some ranger but watches were passed that he got used to them and the nugs are bolder than any nug has a right to be, pet or not.

"Don't need to thank me." He's uncomfortable with it because how often do those words come. Instead he strokes the soft feathers of the crow as it digs sharp nails into his thigh. "See? You're well-remembered, sorry it couldn't be at the Blooming Rose but even I can't swing that with my connections you'd need to shit on Melisende and Liadan's heads for that so y'know, they're off westwards if you're spreadin' the word. Didn't know if any of this'd work but reckon this would've been approved by you either way, seems like your sort of thing right?" That's not just to Asher, Christine has an interest he saw her sloping off and she asked after Gjurd he remembers that much too.

Christine watches in silence because she needs a moment to collect herself. Having someone present that you can actually talk to about your grief feels like a gift, and there's plenty she should say to Asher, yet the words don't leave her mouth. This was Yngvi's plan and she just stumbled into it all.

"Would you like me to leave you two alone?" she asks, and again there is not an edge to her voice. So often this sentence is said mockingly, but she means it. Maybe he has things to tell Asher that he doesn't think she should hear.

"I know it works now."

Cobbled together from watching what happened and Asher's explanations of sky burials and it all worked so he can do this again if he ever needs to. Not enough to be a habit but it'd be good, he thinks, to know that if he really wants to he could just lay out the meat, sit and talk.

"Think that's what I needed most, that this at least would work," he adds quietly as he gets the bird to hop into his hand because small boys in Kirkwall had some time to cultivate to doing weird things and then time as a lookout you just sit and learn to deal with birds. He offers it out to her if she wants, ignores the nails drawing blood because well his hands are always going to be a disgrace and that's just Asher's way.

What he needed most. She looks over at Yngvi and the subdued nature he's exhibiting today. While she'd prefer it if he was subdued more often, not if this was the cause of it.

The offer to have the bird switch over to her is worth a try, so she slowly extends her arm towards it. She wears long sleeves and offers her forearm, the way falconers do. Hopefully the claws won't dig through as painfully there.

"Asher," she greets quietly, waiting to see what he'll do.

When you're at war with yourself you don't get to have any measure of peace because who teaches a surface dwarf carta child a thing about ceasefire?

The bird - Asher - moves but being that it is who it is, it doesn't want the forearm because excuse you, who do you think this crow is and also who do you think you are Christine Delacroix?

Forearm?

Asher Hardie?

No.

Not that shit, fuck that noise. Shoulder or bust. Hey. Hey girl. Hey.

When he doesn't move over to her, Christine lowers her arm, letting out a sigh of exasperation. Even in bird form, Asher has to be difficult.

"Oh, fine. Be that way. See if I bring you any food next time." Ungrateful beady eyed asshole. She's Christine Delacroix. Do you think she puts up with your attitude, Asher? No, she does not. This is the woman who happily tied a gag around your mouth, and don't you ever forget it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Nothing to eat but fears in the back seat

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