[CLOSED] got a feeling in my gut there's more than this

[paladingus]

WHO: Simon Ashlock, Luwenna Coupe
WHAT: MO-OM DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO KNOCK?
WHEN: After the kraken castaways return from Rivain.
WHERE: Simon's quarters.
NOTES: Rated R for full-frontal male nudity.

The first order of business, when he finally gets back to his still-solitary quarters in the Gallows, is a good scrubdown. The sea is well and good, and he's quietly humming one of the shanties Araceli taught him as he goes about stuffing all his clothing into a laundry hamper, but it's better to feel an autumn chill in the air and wash off all the accumulated salt-crust with water that doesn't feel brackish. Maybe he'll hit the baths later, but it's just common courtesy to scrub the worst of it all off before you dunk yourself in a public pool.

There are people to see--perhaps Wren is around; he hopes she is--and training sessions to resume, and a couple of promised souvenirs to deliver, but all of that can wait.

Comments

welcome to hell! welcome to hell!

[limier]

The first order of business did not today include locking the door.

The creak of footsteps down the hall isn't anything unusual; half the Inquisition's stuffed into the Gallows' towers, and so many so recently returned and about their business. There's no reason to think they'd be turning towards his room, particularly when they don't seem to pause —

"Ashlock," The handle pings against stone as it's thrown abruptly open. Wren steps in, doesn't bother to shut the door again. "We need to talk."

She casts a dismissive eye over him. Not missing any limbs, then. Small miracles.

hell is empty, and all the devils are here

[paladingus]

Simon is not a man of quick reaction times when he isn't actively trying to be, and especially not at the particular moment the door bangs open, when he has just progressed from quietly humming his song to belting the chorus jubilantly as he scrubs at an armpit.

There is a too-long, silent moment, during which all the color (all of it, and any passerby out in the hall can confirm) drains from his skin, before his nerves break past his calm conviction that this must be a nightmare and send him scrambling for the nearest pillow to cover himself with. His flailing hand promptly knocks it behind the bed.

"About what?" he fairly wails, grasping in vain for the edge of the blanket. "Andraste's tits, what's so important that you couldn't knock?"

[limier]

Her eyebrows lift to a dangerous angle. This sort of melodrama might be fit for the opera, but even so,

"Welcome back."

A voice from the hallway titters, a sandy head peeks about the edge of the doorframe —

This conversation doesn’t require a bloody crowd. She shoves the door closed (not before the Parilla sisters have had time to start pointing and giggling) and crosses her arms. There’s a towel on the chair, well within her reach. This is to say that there's a towel on the chair and if Simon wants it, he's going to have physically shove her aside to grab it.

"I've been briefed on the broader situation." Now she's not breaking eye contact. "I trust your own report will be forthcoming."

There's an implication behind the words, pointed as a pantomime villain's. All she needs is the mustache mask.

[paladingus]

The strangers and tangential acquaintances parading past to observe his nudity aren't even what bother him (at least not until they start laughing, and then his entire body seems to experience an inch or two of humiliated shrinkage.) It's just that he might have thought better of Wren. He's never wanted Wren to see him like this, dignity flapping in the breeze and caught more off-guard than he's ever been in his life. There's no impressing her or coming off well like this.

The eye contact, then, is both blessing and curse, but he'll hold it if it means keeping her eyes in the safe zone. His own are narrowed, sensing the underlying trap and yet at a complete loss for how to avoid tripping it. He could argue that she doesn't need a report from him if she's already been briefed, could argue further that she wasn't the one who sent him on the mission anyway and therefore even less entitled to a report on the subject, but under any circumstances other than these, it wouldn't occur to him to make those arguments at all. He'd do it as a courtesy, because she's the only authority he actually trusts to do anything useful with whatever report he might give.

"Of course," he says, his tone hovering uncertainly at the end. "That can't be what you came to ask." If 'ask' is the right word for what she's doing. (It clearly isn't.)

[limier]

"I came to ask," Her chin tips aside; something tenses in her jaw. "After its veracity."

It's not the stance she's affected before, those few times they've quarreled — too defensive now, too squared against the air. She's drawn herself up, but there's no invitation in the challenge.

"Now we've both seen Harriman's back, I'd know whether there's continued reason to go behind mine."

[paladingus]

He hasn't forgotten Cade's habit of self-flagellation. The experience of walking in on one's roommate scourging himself bloody is not something one ever forgets, even months distant from the incident. He tugs the corner of the blanket to cover the essentials, and his eyes dart briefly, unbidden, to the few long-dried spots of brown on the floor under the empty bed that had been Cade's.

He has the vivid memory of wanting desperately to turn the matter over to Wren and wash his hands of it. It's stronger than the memory of why he hadn't, but he remembers that too.

"You can't be serious."

[limier]

"I asked you," Cold, now, quiet. Her knuckles click. "I asked you to tell me."

What good would it have done, to know? Some voice in the back of it whispers.

"Instead I scraped him off the floor of a cell, beat to the void and back." What could you have even done? "If you could not tell me of it, you can damn well tell me why."

[paladingus]

"You asked me to make sure he didn't hurt himself." And on the surface, right now, it sounds like he's admitting to failure, because there's almost no clearer definition of 'hurting oneself' than literally whipping oneself until it scars. He remembers agonizing over the semantics of it, berating himself for focusing on what had felt even then like a technicality.

"He told me he did it because it was the only thing keeping him calm. Trading real pain for the pain in his mind, like. It sounded like bollocks then and it still does, but it was the first time he'd said more than a sentence to me since Darton told him he was a dead man. I could have gone and betrayed his trust by turning and tattling to you, or I could have made myself someone to confide in. I did what I thought would help him more."

[limier]

"And has he been?"

Confiding in you. It snakes out, more vicious than she'd meant to voice —

(They've all been trying to help, she knows. Truly, she does and. And Maker, Coupe, don't drive off the only one you've got left.)

"Knuckling down on Fereldans in a bar, there's trust for you." She's saying things she doesn't mean, hears them trip past her teeth unbidden; slithery and smooth. "But none of them apostates, so he must be fucking well."

[paladingus]

He jerks futilely at the blanket, pulls that corner painstakingly further out to hide what little more he can behind it. It doesn't conceal the bright, hot flush that creeps down his chest at the skewer she shoves through it.

It's one thing, bad enough, to be lectured in well-meaning earnest by a mage who'd gotten further into Cade's good graces over a single game of cards than Simon had managed over the entire course of their acquaintance--but to have Wren jam her thumb into the arrow wound of his guilty negligence is intolerable. He could have been there to prevent that tavern brawl, should have been there, should have known Callum was someone to protect Cade from and not anyone who could have been expected to take care of him.

"So why the hell did you task me with looking after him, knowing that he doesn't listen to me one forsaken bit?" he snarls back. "If all you wanted me for was a snitch, you should have told me as much. I've none of the authority that makes him take you seriously, but you expected me to keep him out of trouble all the same, and I did the best I fucking could. Should I have had you tie him to the bed to keep him from moving out of here? Would you rather I have let you find him an inn that wasn't full of criminals to stay at? What about when we were stranded in Rivain? I'm so sorry I didn't bother you about it from afar."

[limier]

"Because I thought I could trust you,"

Her volume pitches up, higher than fits their quarters. It sends a thump of skittering feet away from the door, a reminder they don't go unobserved here.
Her arms slowly uncurl, nails peel from her palms. A breath out.

"Maker, Simon. I trusted you wouldn't lie to me."

Says the lying liar. Who lies. But she's said his name, too, and that's the worse tell.

She turns aside, stalks to the hamper to drag out his trousers, still filthy from that ill-fated expedition. Wren tosses them over, unceremonious.

"Tell me to stay out of it, perhaps." As though either of them believes she'd have listened. "Explain your plans. But not just,"

A gesture. How eloquent.

"It is not bothering me. This is not only Harriman -- there will always be something. Always. Do you understand me? I need to be able to trust you."

If their positions were reversed, she'd call the assessment unfair. He's stuck his neck out, quite literally, on her behalf.

But they are who they are now, not fifteen years ago. And then, the stakes were never so high.

[paladingus]

Holding the corner of the blanket across his hips seems, at the moment, almost preferable to the indignity of having to struggle naked into a pair of trousers with her gaze still unswervingly fixed on him. That flush of dismay hasn't faded, and he cringes visibly, like a dog avoiding a blow, when she calls him by his given name. It triggers that knee-jerk urge to capitulate, to apologize, even when he's still at least half certain he was right.

"It's not lying to decide that you don't need to be a part of something!" Even if she's not raising her voice, he will, listeners be damned. "It isn't dishonesty to think that when you delegate something to me, you want me to handle it on my own! He didn't want you to know. And I chose to respect that. Even when it's not about him--" He mirrors that wordless gesture of hers, unconsciously, with the hand that isn't keeping him decent.

"What's the point of keeping me around, if I'm not to do anything of my own accord? Am I really just here to be the muscle for your chores, then? I might as well be anyone else at all, if I'm good for nothing but hanging off your apron strings and saying yes-ser-no-ser."

It could sound petulant and self-pitying, if it were only about her. It isn't.

When u roll a metaphorical 1 on your "being a reasonable adult" skill: the coupe story

[limier]

There's so much she might say --

Kind things, reassurances, the truth she's been battering about his own shoulders.

(You're the only one of them I do,)

There are so many right things to say, things that he ought to hear. She can't make them fit her mouth.

"Perhaps you might be," Anyone else. "If you want to go it alone so badly, then try."

Something hitches briefly in her expression. She swallows, turns for the door.

"Best of fucking luck with it."

She's cocked this up. If she doesn't leave soon, it'll only get worse. Distance. Distance to listen to what he's said, to,

To what? If he wants to make his own decisions, let him reap his own bloody consequences. They're all in the cold now, and no reason to try and warm his hands.

This isn't only about her. Just now, it's all she can see.

two giant people who when combined make like 1/4 of a grownup

[paladingus]

Simon's habit of taking things at face value is not always an entirely honest one, not when it can be passive-aggressively weaponized. You said you didn't want me around, you said, you said, how was I to know, punishing without any benefit of doubt. But when the you said is spitting things his mind has already been whispering on a treacherous loop for months, the line is finer there, the belief sincere and uncalculated.

Perhaps you might be. That flicker across her face is lost on him, even when he's looking right at her. The way his own crumples is harder to miss.

But it, too, is transient, and it takes only a moment for his expression to harden again as he grips the blanket with whitened knuckles. "If I'm no longer subject to your command," he says, his accent near-unrecognizable in its sudden tight formality, "you've no business in my quarters. Leave them."

like the power rangers but it's just a disconnected foot and hand

[limier]

The door slams behind her; the Parilla sisters jump, and hasten the sudden business of retreat. Wren slumps in place, back pressed to the wall, wills the stone into her skin.

Let him try it,

It's not working. It doesn't work.