Nothing to eat but fears in the back seat

[inagutterson]

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.

Comments

[elegiaque]

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?

[inagutterson]

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."

[elegiaque]

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."

[inagutterson]

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.

[elegiaque]

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."

[inagutterson]

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?"

[elegiaque]

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.

[inagutterson]

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.