[OPEN] a dwarf making bad decisions

[ragweed]

WHO: Kit + you?? (starters for the Medicine Seller, Simon, Anders, and Cyril)
WHAT: The best way to deal with your problems is to act like you don't have any, right??
WHEN: The latter half of November.
WHERE: Kirkwall and the surrounding area.
NOTES: None immediately come to mind, will update as needed.

I. DARKTOWN (THE MEDICINE SELLER)


Killing demons is far from tedious work, but for Kit it’s frankly a nice respite from having to think about the low-key disaster the rest of his life is swiftly en route to becoming.

It also leaves him cagey; magic and magickery in general set his teeth on edge in a way he finds difficult to articulate, even to the peculiar elf (the “Painted Blade,” Melys, really?) who has become his friend. Perhaps especially because they are friends. Possibly this explains why, as they meander back down the poorly lit Darktown streets back to Kit’s house, he’s a little rougher than usual when he drags a couple of Coterie thugs back from hassling a pair of frightened dwarf kids.

The end of the encounter--the street fight, more like--leaves his knuckles bruised and bloody, but he wins, which is all that matters!! A bit roughed up, and keyed up, he’s in the middle of snapping, “--yeah, piss off back to your rat holes--” to the backs of their retreating figures, when he realizes that he’s frightened the children off, too.

That realization seems to take the wind from his sails. He stares at the spot under a bit of rotting lumber where they’d been hiding, rubs a hand along his jaw, then glances uncomfortably towards the Medicine Seller. He spits some blood out into the dirt. “..well.”


II. TRAINING GROUNDS (SIMON + OPEN)

(OOC: The thread with Simon is closed, but other characters should feel free to approach Kit after training/sparring on another day!)


He’s off his game.

It’s not the recruits’ fault that they’re still wet behind the ears and don’t know the difference between a parry and a riposte, and on a good day, their inexperience would trigger his patience, his understanding, the part of him that has always made him good with stubborn kids and loose cannons alike. Today it just makes him cold.

(The bruises on his knuckles and what looks like a split lip probably don’t help much.)

Once they’ve cleared out of the training grounds, Kit directs his attention towards putting up the last of the training weapons, then retreats to the pier to light himself a cigarette, squint at the early morning light coming across the water, and try not to feel anything.


III. NEAR THE DEEP ROADS (ANDERS)


The door sealing off a section of the Deep Roads from the surface isn’t that far below ground; sunlight still reaches the stone floor of the ancient roads from what time has turned into a ravine, far above. The worst that they’ve had to tangle with so far were a couple of ranging deepstalkers who tested their luck against a Legionnaire and a Grey Warden mage one too many times. Kit’s now wiping a bit of viscera off of one of his axes.

A Grey Warden and a Legionnaire down near the dark shouldn’t be unusual, but it is, given the two in question. Did Kit invite Anders on this trek seemingly out of nowhere? Probably. Has he been his normal chatty self for most of the trip? Nope.

“I’ll check the map, but I think we’re close,” he says at length, expression distant and neutral.


IV. THE OTHER POWERS OFFICE (CYRIL + OPEN)

(OOC: The thread with Cyril is closed, but other characters should feel free to pop by the office on another day!)


It’s taken about a month for Kit to wrangle the office into some semblance of control, or to sort out the previous project leader’s archaic filing system (translation, there was no filing system)--but he’s in the perfect mindset to perform mind-numbingly dull labour at present, and so cobbles together order out of chaos with remarkable speed.

This is where he spends his early mornings--and a handful of very late evenings--when he isn’t on the training ground with the recruits… or covertly killing demons in Darktown with the Medicine Seller.
 

Comments

[ragweed]

"There's a door, further in," Kit replies, "or there's supposed to be. I guess the intel could be full of sod, but I'm guessing not."

He gives his axes a quick onceover, then affixes them back in place over his shoulder blades. Then he looks at Anders, reads his look in an instant, and grimaces. He spreads his hands to either side. "Look, you don't have to come the rest of the way with me, salroka. This ain't exactly the best way to pass an afternoon."

[justice_is_blond]

Anders exhales, shaking his head and looking a little amused.

"Please. I've spent many afternoons in far worse circumstances. I could tell you stories... but perhaps let's not." He straightens back up. "Besides. Only an asshole leaves a friend near the Deep Roads without backup and I try not to be too much of an asshole. Some days. But no one enjoys deepstalker muck on their gear or outfit."

The cloth gets discarded. Maybe in a few years some adventurer will come down here, find it, and sell it to a merchant for a few copper bits. In the meantime he's grabbing his staff back off his back and nodding forward.

"Lead on, Kit."

[ragweed]

Kit cracks a grin at him. "All right then."

Lead on he does, far enough down the ravine that the last of the light winks out, and they have to resort to the use of a torch. It gives them enough light to, eventually, illuminate the large dwarven door that rests ajar fixed into the side of the stone wall--and to catch the reflective glint off a pair of eyes belonging to two prowling genlocks.

Kit should not be this pleased to find them. "Sodding finally," he grunts, almost under his breath, and drops his still-burning torch to the ground where it continues to flare, providing light as he grabs for the axes again.

[justice_is_blond]

He gives warning before the genlock show themselves, sensing their closeness, and then it's time for the fray. The first step is simple, tossing up a barrier around them both. Getting back home is pretty important in his opinion.

"Finally, he says, as Darkspawn show up. As if he wanted them to show up." His voice is dryly amused as he targets the rear genlock, making spikes of earth that drive upward into it. The thing howls and charges, swinging his axe and Anders twists away to stab with his staff blade... where it gets stuck. Close combat isn't his specialty but he's decent at improvising and sends lightning down the shaft to hopefully blow a hole through the genlock's chest.

[ragweed]

"Maybe I did," Kit answers, and there's something unsettlingly fatalistic about the enthusiasm with which he throws himself into the fight.

There aren't that many of them--genlocks, that is. The two here look like they'd wandered out away from the rest of their band and, having been separated, haven't been able to relocate their group. It makes them desperate in their fighting, but hardly difficult for veteran combatants like Anders and Kit to do away with. Kit dispatches the other genlock with comparatively little effort, embedding one war axe in its skull and raking the blade of the other roughly across its throat.

(There's a spatter of black blood across the front of his armour; probably a minor miracle he didn't get any of it in his mouth.)

He shoves the corpse to the ground, hardly looking like he broke a sweat, then wipes some of the blood off his forehead and moves towards the door. "Should be a gear around here somewhere to get it working again," he says, like he didn't just engage in some incredibly reckless and dangerous behaviour.

[justice_is_blond]

It's starting to sound like Kit has a death wish, and while Anders had been a little concerned about their heading before, now he's actually starting to get concerned about the dwarf.

"Why would you want darkspawn to show up?" There's no point in beating around the bush as he starts to look for a gear. Something is definitely wrong, and Anders would like to get to the bottom of it before Kit is bleeding out.

"Here," he says a moment later, finding the gear and holding it out."I don't know how it goes in. Mechanisms aren't my strong point. And don't think that opening the door will get you away from my question."

[ragweed]

When he takes the gear from Anders, Kit gives him an unreadable look; it's not unkind, either, but it's clear that there's some intense emotion roiling around inside of Kit that he either isn't capable of discussing, or frankly just doesn't want to.

"We're closing it, anyway," he says, and hopes that is itself a reassurance. His recklessness doesn't appear to extend past the amount of darkspawn blood he's left strewn across the floor of the roads. (For now.)

The effort required to reach the gear gives him a brief flash of deja-vu--of the worst variety, he realizes, because that was his first meeting with Vandelin, wasn't it, being rescued from the Deep Roads by him, and Teren, and Melys. That was how they'd met, why they'd been unable to stay away from each other--

He says something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like 'sod it,' and reaches up to affix the gear into the vacant slot. It requires a little shifting and adjusting to get it to fasten securely into place, and once it does, Kit is in the process of saying, "All right, let's just get this thing shut--" when a genlock launches itself through the crack in the door and bowls him clear over. Kit hits the ground with a grunt, rolls, and is struggling to keep the damn thing from biting his shoulder--

--this is clearly not going as planned. (Or maybe it is! Anders' theory about this figuratively dead dwarf having a literal death wish might not be far off.)

[justice_is_blond]

Anders blasts pure force magic at the thing, flinging it off the dwarf and against the wall, where its head smashes open. There's reckless, and then there's whatever Kit is doing which strongly reminds him of deliberate carelessness. He can hear more darkspawn gibbering up ahead, feel enough of them to make his blood curl, and he's not ready to see himself or Kit dead today.

"Quickly. They're coming." He holds out a hand for Kit, eyes on the darkness beyond the door. "Is it repaired? And what in the Maker's name is distracting you?" He'll worry about if the Dwarf's cut or bit in a moment; right now they need to get out of here. Alive.

"Because I'm not returning to the surface alone, even if that means I have to drag you out by your ankle. I don't have so many friends that I'm fine abandoning one to the dark."

The scrabbling is getting louder, and it's entirely possible Kit can hear the darkspawn approaching. Next time Anders is asking for the precise details of what they're doing before they go. And demanding backup if it's anything remotely like 'wander into a nest of darkspawn to really slowly close a door.'

[ragweed]

Kit can hear them, and when he glances at Anders, it's with a flash of guilt and regret; this was stupid, this was beyond reckless, and above all that, he should not have brought Anders down into this mess with him, not while he's in this state.

"Almost," he says quickly, then turns and throws his shoulders and back into the work of muscling the door closed. It creaks and screams on its ancient hinges, but it gives under the dwarf's weight and the press of his strong, flexing muscles--

--and finally swings closed, latch falling into place, just as that distant rumbling, scrabbling, and howling shifts into the shriek of an emissary, now blocked from pursuing them beyond the stone. Kit staggers back from it and braces his hands on his knees, head dipped as he catches his breath.

[justice_is_blond]

He breathes a heavy sigh of relief when the door seals. Anders has defended a fortress against Darkspawn, but that guarantees nothing. Slowly he leans against the wall and sinks down to a sitting position near Kit, watching the Dwarf. Something is wrong. It doesn't even take a healer to see it, but that does mean he really should have seen it sooner before they got this far deep.

Several moments go by as they sit there, Darkspawn scrabbling fruitlessly at the door as Anders works to sense any getting closer. It seems clear for now so he stays seated.

"Something is eating at you," he finally says before trying to offer up a half-hearted joke, "at least it's not the Darkspawn."

[ragweed]

"Something is eating at you--at least it's not the Darkspawn."

Not yet, at any rate. Give it a little time.

Kit barely cracks a smile at that comment and doesn't answer immediately. He listens instead to the scrabbling of claws against the solid dwarven door beside them, listens as the scratches become fewer, more intermittent, and then recede entirely. (The good thing about these monsters, at least, is that they've got the attention span of deepstalkers.)

"...Yeah," he admits after a lengthy pause, glances down at the haft of the bloodied war axe he still holds in his hand, then chucks it down onto the stone. He reaches up to rub at his eyebrows, squeezing his eyes shut.

Even if he wanted to talk about it, to talk about the grisly work done down in the Deep Roads with Yngvi and the rest of the others who journeyed down there with him, he's not sure he could. The words don't come.

[justice_is_blond]

"I suppose I was asking for that." Anders settles in and gets as comfortable as he can against the rocks and dirt. Right now there's no risk in the area. Heading back they could find things, which means sitting here and letting Kit breathe for a time is their safest bet.

He summons a wisp, letting it dance around and provide a little light. Too long with the dark and he gets to places he'd rather not be.

"The first ten times I went into the Deep Roads I was counting, you know. Keeping track so I could tell people later." Anders chuckles. "I was young. I didn't know anything about what my life was going to be like after Joining, or after I'd gone in to the dark so many times. ...Not like that would have changed anything. It was join or die, for me. I chose living. Which wasn't always the easiest choice, but back then it was."

Silence is oppressive. Words ease the feeling of being caught in a tight space, and maybe they'll help Kit as well as Anders.

[ragweed]

When Anders conjures the wisp into the air, Kit's eyes dart to it and fixate, muscles gone tense for a second, before he forces them to relax. The floating green thing emanates a cool light that chases away as many shadows as it creates; down here, that's something to be grateful for.

He listens to Anders speak into the dark around them, and finally at last turns his face to the side to consider his friend in profile. "When it comes right down to it," he begins heavily, "I think the animal in us always chooses living. Even if it would be easier on everyone else around us if it would just.."

Just crawl into a hole and die, as animals do. Kit doesn't say the words. Instead he reaches into one of his packs and fetches out a cigarette and a book of matches. If he's got time to be depressed down here, he's got time for a smoke.

[justice_is_blond]

He's quiet again, waiting as the small flame flicks to life in the near dark and lights Kit's cigarette. Those who smoke find it a comfort, so he wants Kit to have had a chance to inhale before he speaks.

Then, quietly, "There are some whose death would make life easier on a great many people. But you're not one of them, Kit. And even those in that group have people who would absolutely object to that thought." He has Nathaniel, among others. Loghain has Anora, among others.

The wisp does little swoops around the place, savoring the short burst of freedom and life it gets. He absolutely understands.

"Even on days I don't see you, knowing you're about Darktown is a comfort. You're around. I have, there's..." He takes a breath to get a little more on track. "Sometimes the dark and the closed-off nature of the place gets to be heavy. Everything feels too closed in. And then I remember that if I need an escape, I've a friend down there. Someone who sees me, not the destroyer or the liberator. I would not find losing you an easy thing, Kit. I'm certain that I'm not alone in that. ...And you're not alone in dealing with feelings like this."

He has no cure. He didn't even heal naturally when he'd dealt with them - Justice had decided there was no laying down and stopping and that was that. But he can be company, at least.