And I can't navigate the stars like my father

[foxsays]

WHO: Araceli Bonaventura; open
WHAT: Coping, coping, absolutely coping with life at present
WHEN: Timestamp for Haring
WHERE: Kirkwall and the Wounded Coast
NOTES: References to Sina's death, will update with others. Actionspam is good, I'll switch up to follow.

Kirkwall; the docks
For a change, there isn't work to be done at the docks. Or not all the time.

Or even most of the time.

No, most of it is Araceli with her boots off, trousers rolled up to the knees or skirts tucked back so her feet can kick back and forth water cold enough that it'd sting if she weren't used to it. A flask is never far from her hand (the fox isn't far either, an unhappy pacing creature ready to bark in alarm with his fur puffed up twice his usual size) that she might share if you ask nicely. You might not want it, why would she need a sailor's ration right now?

Most days there's a stack of letters getting smaller as the days go on, all with the same name on them being slipped into the waters to be carried to wherever they're meant to go. It was always time to get rid of them but as she holds up one - fumbles it, numb fingers from the rum or the cold or both - she stops, looks it, sniffs away her smile at it.

"Two years. More than that. Time to go where he went too."

The Gallows;
Life carries on the way life always carries on. When Martel died and word came she was the one to pick through his room for things people shouldn't get their hands on, with Sina she doesn't have to do that but she does have actual work to do that might swallow her if she's lucky. There are always shipping reports and forecasts, any strange sightings even if someone might have been drunk or just seeing things compared against anything the books here know about the sea, progress on what the Inquisition actually has that she can pass on elsewhere.

A volume on spirits is tucked away somewhere in the stack, light reading. Everyone reads strange things when they're grieving and wondering where dead people go when it isn't their own don't they.

The lute is in the office for now though and the afternoons find the door closed most of the way so she doesn't disturb anyone working nearby while she plays and sings because you can't let the bard skills go rusty, and it's one of the better ways of working through it.

The Wounded Coast;
Some days and Araceli doesn't want to be in Kirkwall. Wants to be away from the bustle of the city, from a job she's not putting her all into presently if she's entirely honest about it (given the circumstances-- she could be blamed, someone could point fingers but Sina is dead and she's not about to turn her heart to stone to make another person happy) so she makes for the stabels to saddle up her nuggalope.

The Wounded Coast isn't particularly special she can ride there without someone being offended by a great overgrown nug thundering along the paths, down to the water. The black fox goes scampering over the shingle to hunt down anything that he can scavenge or pick a fight with, the nuggalope follows sedately to the patches of grass.

Out here though she can kick off her clothes, weigh them down with her boots and most of her weapons - one or two stay strapped to her, this is Thedas and she's not foolish - to swim. Or to take a deep breath and submerge herself for a worryingly long time if someone strolls past at the wrong moment but sometimes the only place to be yourself is where you're from, and this is as close as she'll get.

wildcard
Pick your poison if you want something different and I'll roll with it!

Comments

[provenforce]

Rey thought about that for a moment, quiet as she stares out at the water. She had considered it in the past, what trying to go through one of the rifts might do. But it wasn't something she cared to risk. Of course she does have one advantage some don't. Looking down at the water directly before them she spies a few rocks that have been pushed up by the tide. She focuses on them, holding her hand out over the water, dragging them up until they splash out of the water and are floating before her hand.

"I wouldn't have to get close," she finally replies, glancing over at Araceli with a small smile on her face.

[foxsays]

Two years, close to rolling into her third mean that Araceli's seen plenty of things during her time in Thedas, including her first ever instance of blood magic. Watching what Rey's doing is something different. It isn't fire or ice, lightning or the earth being projected. It's not the strange glow of healing. This is a control of something that she's seen only in the street performers when there's been something behind it that Rey wouldn't have had the time to set up, that Araceli knows how to spot because you know what you're looking for once you've figured it out.

"How did you do that?" It's asked very quietly, no horror, more wonder and still just enough awareness of Kirkwall but she isn't alarmed. She's smiling. She could count her true smiles on her fingers lately.

[provenforce]

Rey's smile grows a little at Araceli's reaction, and she releases her hold on the rocks, allowing them to fall back into the water.

"It's a power I have. In my galaxy it's called the Force. It's sort of... hard to describe, but it helps me do incredible things." Things she'd never imagined being able to do, as a lonely girl on Jakku. Even when she'd first come to Thedas she'd been unsure of her powers, but with Obi-Wan's help she had grown stronger and more confident in what she could do. Even without him now, she trained, and learned how to better control it.

[foxsays]

So many places where people do things that come out of story books; would it make Castileos seem plain by comparison? To have stories where the things are real because someone lived them but no one sets things alight with their will but instead the sea lives in the body and in another land a demon was defeated by twin girls in masks since it didn't know their names or faces from the other?

(If only all demons were so easily beaten.)

"You move things with the Force, you have a laser sword - what else can you do?" How much better to speak about this, about something bright, promising, hopeful.

[provenforce]

"More than I realize, I think," Rey replies, sliding her hands into the pocket of her coat and looking out over the water. She's heard of amazing things that Jedi are capable of, but Obi-Wan's training had focused on many of the basics. She had learned a few things on her own.

"Specifically, I can sense things, changes in emotions. It's easier to sense in others who are Force users, but if I focus, I can sense it in anyone. I also have... visions, though I don't know how to control them. Obi-Wan said that power is less common." She wished she knew how to control it, maybe make it stop.

[foxsays]

"I met Obi-Wan, once or twice. That was a long time ago now." Sometimes it's – tiring? Frustrating? Confusing? – hard to still be here when so many other people aren't without knowing where they've gone exactly. Without any way of getting answers from them. The assumption is that they've gone home but they're gone. Not away on a mission, not returned to their homes, not away elsewhere. Just gone.

Absently, she rubs the base of her left thumb as her mouth pulls into a line. "That must be hard, I'm sorry you don't have him to help you with it now – are there any mages who might understand it at all?" The Rivaini Seers are all back at Skyhold, their visions induced, and even then Araceli doesn't know if they'd assist someone else even if they needed the help and asked for it. "I—I was made to take lyrium. A lot of lyrium once, I felt and saw things that weren't all mine, it isn't the same but it took a long time to get back to normal afterwards. Some of us must seem as if we're screaming even if we don't look it."

[provenforce]

Rey has talked to a few mages about her abilities, but she's finding that while there are some similarities between Force usage and magic, overall the differences are enough that she doesn't know how much talking to them would help. Though she hadn't met any who had visions. Araceli's mention of the lyrium causing similar things to what Rey experienced with the Force surprises her and she looks curiously at the other woman, wondering how such a reaction had happened.

"Is that normal? For lyrium to make you see things?" She wouldn't know, she has no need for the lyrium and has never been particularly curious. It seemed to her that something that dangerous shouldn't be cavalierly consumed.

[foxsays]

The only person to ever give a satisfactory description of lyrium had been Bruce, and Bruce has been gone for so long. The only doctor. Real doctor. Someone not about to try healing magic first before the poultice, and his answer hadn't been comforting but it wasn't meant to be.

"Apparently if you take a bit in a certain period of time, it's safe. Safe enough. But say when you drink too much, and you feel awful later. You get drunk, you get hungover, and between those things you have other things happen where you aren't really you the whole time. Only with lyrium, the things that-- that happened," her thumb pops when she presses too hard, and Araceli drops her hands into her lap as though scalded. It takes her a moment to school her face again and continue. "The things that I described, that was from having too much, and I'd never had any before, obviously, since I don't come from Thedas, and all over a short period of time. Mages and Templars would know better, they take lyrium for different reasons but it can be dangerous. Unstable. That was what Bruce called it. That's how it made me feel to have my mind not be my own."

[provenforce]

Rey's eyes narrowed and she leaned her head forward a little, tilting it so she was looking more directly at Araceli.

"And someone forced you to take it? Why- just to see what happened?" The answer to that was obvious. She knew that there were those who were cruel, who would experiment on other humans just for the sake of it. It was something that happened regardless of what galaxy she was in. That kind of cruelty deserved to be wiped out, but it seemed like that would never happen, not truly.

[foxsays]

"To see what happened to people with anchors," Araceli clarifies since they were the ones taken. "Not just rifters, one was native." Lexa and—and Araceli hadn't talked about what happened with her, the way she doesn't. Some things stay in that dark miserable place. That terrible place.

If it had been a normal attack even with the wounds inflicted would it still be living with her in odd moments all this time later? Why is it that the intent behind it to hurt them, how little they'd cared what happened to them, to strip them of being human, to make them into subjects with numbers instead of names—it stays. The moment you stop being a person in the eyes of another. That moment you look back and realise it's when you started to change.

[provenforce]

"It's surprising, what other people can be capable of." Rey pulls her legs up, resting her feet on the edge of the dock she wraps her arms around her knees, resting her chin atop them as she hunches her shoulders. It's one reason she'd isolated herself on Jakku. It's hard to know who to trust.

"I was taken captive once. Before I came here. Kylo Ren took me, because he thought he could use me to find out where Luke Skywalker was hiding." She knows these names mean nothing to Araceli, but she doesn't expand upon them. "He could look into peoples minds, extract information that he wanted. He tried with me, but I realized I could fight back." It had still been a jarring experience, one she never wants to repeat again in her life.

[foxsays]

Watching Rey from the side of her eye, Araceli makes a conscious effort to relax her body, a hand outstretched out to settle on Rey's arm. Gentle. They don't know each other well, not everyone likes to be touched but sometimes it can be enough.

"I'm sorry," she says softly. Names don't matter because it's as Rey said - what other people are capable of, what they can do. "If there are places that should belong to us alone, it should be us. Our bodies but that's not always possible but our minds...our minds should always belong to us, someone doing that, going in there-- Without permission. I'm sorry, I'm glad you could fight back but I'm sorry that you had to."

[provenforce]

Rey hadn't talked with anyone besides Obi-Wan about what Kylo Ren had tried to do. Even then, she'd felt like he had been holding back, though she couldn't fathom why. It feels good to speak about it with someone else, however.

Glancing down at Araceli's hand, Rey looks over at her and gives her a small smile, letting her know the gesture is appreciated. Not too long ago, Rey would have taken any unexpected touch as a challenge, but she's learned that there are places kinder than Jakku.

"I know it could have been worse, I've heard stories of things that people like him are capable of. Some things that... Blood mages seem capable of, here. There's evil no matter where you are. But there's good, too."