faderift | [OPEN] I have never known peace

She follows the direction, stopping briefly to hand the bottle to Kit before sitting down. She’s pulling her knees up in front of her before she remembers she’s wearing boots and doffs them with a tired groan before completing the movement.

“I don’t know what it is, actually. Could be anything from good whiskey to... what is it the Wardens call it? Ritewine?” Nari makes a face, “Which makes it either a proper gift of gratitude or further infringement on your hospitality.” She says it with a wry smile, and then sobers as she notes the Medicine Seller’s presence and absence.

“Is... is he sick too?”

"Is... is he sick too?"

Kit's in the process of pouring two glasses of whatever this stuff is for them when Nari asks that question, and then he pauses, looking to where one of his friend's multicoloured coats remains hanging on a hook on the wall. He looks almost perplexed for a moment; sure, there's obviously an, ahem, physical aspect to their friendship now... but when had he grown so accustomed to just seeing the Medicine Seller's belongings interspersed amongst his own?

A thought for another time.

"Yeah," he says quietly after the pause, then comes back to the table and offers the glass out to Nari. "It's the weird... thing afflicting the rifters. He's all right, right now," he adds, and hopes he isn't saying something false, "he's just got to stay in the Gallows 'til this is all over. I'd be with him normally, but if I don't come back here sometime, there's this guy who sometimes just shows up and sleeps on my floor."

A shrug. Just part of life in Darktown.

She’ll raise her eyebrows at that, wrinkling the vallaslin that curves above them, and extends her hand for the glass. She tilts it back and forth in the low-light to watch its reflection slide back and forth through the amber liquid.

“The Templar have it too,” she says, leaning her head to rest it against the back of the chair. She doesn’t have to say more than that for Kit to know why she looks as drained as she does, nor why liquor had been the present. He’d been there when Cade had carried her half-frozen to Kit’s doorstep.

“Well.” Nari raises her glass with a small but warm smile to clink it against Kit’s. “To Darktown hospitality, then. And strange bedfellows.” Ostensibly the migrant man—or ...whatever else.

Edited 2018-02-03 04:47 (UTC)

Or whatever else indeed.

The Medicine Seller does make for a strange bedfellow; an unexpected friend from the beginning, and a more than unexpected lover, though he'd been such a constant and trusted presence throughout the end of Kit's relationship with Vandelin that turning to him had seemed natural.

(Yet clearly he hasn't completely let go of his feelings for his old lover; evidence of Vandelin's time here is present, too, in the furniture so generously donated to Kit when he first moved in, to the dormant plant he still desperately attempts to keep alive near his wood stove. Feelings, in short, are complicated little fuckers, and Kit has never been well equipped to manage them.)

He lifts his glass in a small toast as well, smiling crookedly. "I can drink to that," he says, and he does... then grimaces at the burn of the stuff on the way down. He coughs. "Damn, Nari, you sure this isn't straight up lighter fluid?" (They've got that stuff in Thedas, right?)

With the glass at her lips and the liquid not yet tipped into her mouth, Nari watches Kit's reaction with a mixed grin of anticipation and trepidation before deciding that burning would be a fully acceptable sensation at the moment and taking her own drink. It's like fire all the way down, and her eyes water as she lets out a cough of her own that sounds a bit like "Creators!", covering her mouth with her unoccupied hand. The crinkles at the corners of her eyes betray the grin beneath it though, and she actually laughs. It helps that behind the fire is warmth that spreads, pools in her stomach, and she relaxes with a sigh.

"I can't tell if I'm never going to fix anything for them again, or if I want to go back and start a bar fight so I get another chance," she says. A pause, and then "It's nice though. I needed that."

"--Oh!" Suddenly her eyes flash, remembering something, reaching for it in the satchel she'd brought the bottle in. Out comes a tunic, clean and folded, and she leans forward to hand it to him. "I... Thank you."

"It's nice though. I needed that."

"You and me both," Kit says heavily, and the Ancestors know he means it, too. He's in the process of reaching for the bottle to pour them both additional shots when out comes his shirt. For a moment he just blinks at it, before his memory catches up to him. Then he chuckles some and reaches out to take it back.

"Guess this is a little big for you, huh," he teases her with a friendly wink, then sets the garment aside and sits back down. He kicks back into his seat and, for a moment, doesn't say much, just focuses on the drink and the friendly company. Then, peering over at Nari, he raises his eyebrows.

"So, you and Cade," he starts. There's a significant kind of look there. u know

"A little," she admits with a grin. Since he's paused to take the shirt, Nari takes the opportunity to refill their glasses instead. She tilts her head curiously when he peers at her and raises his eyebrows, taking another drink and was not prepared in the slightest for that conversational shift, which she demonstrates by gasping too much whiskey into her mouth, and immediately coughing it up through her nose.

"Bellanaris Fen'Harel ma'pala!" she splutters hoarse and loud, the hint of tears that emerged from her first swallow of the liquor re-appearing (and doubling) to track down her cheeks.

Kit why

Helpfully, Kit bursts out laughing.

"Yeah, I thought so," he says wryly, taking another slow drag off that drink. It still burns going down, but not nearly as much as it had before.

Nari glares, rubbing at her flared nostrils in a completely useless attempt to stop the assault on her sinuses, but looks so utterly pathetic that it's not threatening in the slightest.

Plus, it shortly thereafter disintegrates into an aggrieved sigh and an arm flung across her eyes as she leans back into the chair. And drinks more.

"It's like watching a tree fall on you," she says. "No time to get out of the way, but a brief eternity to contemplate what it means. Except I have no idea what it means, and I've never... had... a tree fall on me before... and I don't know how the tree feels about it--" this metaphor is getting out of hand "--or how to find out and--" she cuts herself off and sits up, lowering her arm to look at the dwarf solemnly.

"How did you know? With the Medicine Seller, I mean."

Edited 2018-02-05 21:12 (UTC)

The more she talks, the more Kit's little smile grows. Awww. That's actually kind of cute, tree-falling metaphor included. "You think he's more like a pine or a spruce?" he asks her, ostensibly to cut the tension, and is about to take another drink when she asks him that.

"With--?" He looks startled, then looks around at all the evidence of the Medicine Seller's stuff around them, proof that he's been crashing here if not quite co-habitating, and then he quickly shakes his head, as if to correct some misconception, but maybe a touch too hastily. "Oh, no, it's not like that, it's--we're not serious. Or--not that serious. We're just friends."

Right. Just friends.

"Besides," he adds, and at last takes that drink, swallowing down the burn with a grimace, "it's too soon for me, after Vandelin." That, his tone makes plainly clear, was serious. And painful.

"It's good to have friends," Nari muses. Friends who live with you and sleep in blanket nests big enough for two and who make you deny things very quickly. She's not prying though. Yet. Besides, the way he talks about Vandelin makes it seem like pushing more at the Medicine Seller would be wrong. She lets the silence sit companionably instead, sipping at her own drink and letting it burn its way into a muzzy mellow feeling.

Then, out of nowhere, "Black Cherry."

"Rough bark, but the heartwood is beautiful. Can be tough to work, especially when the grain is curly." a huff of laughter through her much abused nose, "It requires patience and care, but it's strong and it lasts." She leans her chin on her hand, rests the glass on her knee. "If you crush the leaves they'll hurt you--I've seen animals die from eating them--but it flowers in the spring. Bright pink." Like his ears. "Fruit's a little tart unless you watch for its right time, but then--" The woodworker comes back to herself and looks embarrassed.

Distraction time. Even so, it's gently asked. "Tell me about Vandelin?"

Friends who worm their way into your heart whether you're ready to welcome them in or not--yes. The thought is going to require further exploration at some point, but not now; not while he's got the burn of the drink making its way down his throat, leaving him comfortably mellow for a while. He listens to her describe Cade as a black cherry tree and... yes, he decides, he can definitely see it.

"Tell me about Vandelin?"

A short, wistful chuckle, his eyes turned to his glass. Yeah, he should've seen that one coming, shouldn't he. "...he's like granite," he replies after a pause; he knows nothing about trees, but you can't be a dwarf from Orzammar and not know a thing or two about stone, even if you're casteless. "Molten to start with, liable to burn anything that comes too close. It turns solid under pressure, you know," he adds this like of course she knows, of course a Dalish elf would know this. "Solid, beautiful. You ever seen a sheet of polished white granite before? I got a glimpse of it just the once when I was working a job in the Diamond Quarter when I was still just knee high to a nug and--Ancestors." A low whistle, and a shake of his head. "I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life, back then."

A spell of quiet follows in which his dark eyes have gone distant. Then he swills the contents of his glass again, looking down into it. "So... yeah. Granite. Solid, beautiful, and unyielding."

The last said with a touch of tired sadness, and he takes another swallow from the glass. Then, chuckling some, he adds, "Frankly though, I bet he'd say the same about me. The unyielding part, that is."

Granite. She'd seen some of it during the reconstruction, mostly in Hightown. It was beautiful--especially when cut and polished with care. None of it white, but she could imagine it, the reflective flakes scattered through it. Brilliant and breathtaking, like glittering plains of new snow that would remain unbroken forever. She thought about it for a bit, about what kind of person that would make. Perhaps the kind that would make someone say they'd seen something more beautiful since the stone.

Nari nods into her own glass, fuzzy enough to enjoy looking at how the liquid it contains catches the light more than tasting it and fuzzy enough to ask questions she didn't deserve answers to. "Did you crash into each other, then?" she murmurs, "Some way you couldn't move around?"

Edited (I CAN’T STOP) 2018-02-09 05:30 (UTC)

Maybe that's one way to describe what drove them apart--a difference that drove them together too many times, but not the coming together of lovers. It was too fractious for that.

"He..." Kit starts, then pauses, seems lost in the thoughts, and the pain, surrounding that last conversation between them. He closes his eyes. "...he figured out sooner than anyone else that I'm a dead man walking. He did what was right for him." He brings up the glass and drinks from it again, a slow, deep drag, before setting it down again with an exhale. Staring at the empty glass, he says quietly, "Dead men don't make great partners."

A kinder way to voice his real thought: I'm no good for anyone, and I never was.

Edited 2018-02-13 15:42 (UTC)

"You're not dead, though," she replies, dipping a finger in the whiskey and then running it around the edge of the glass to see if it will sing. It creaks instead, so she stops. "You walk, you care, your heart beats, and you love. The dead don't do that. You're alive, whether you acknowledge it or not.

"We're all dead walking, Kit. Life is fragile. Even moreso now that rifts can split open and spill demons into the streets. Now that we're fighting an implacable enemy who won't stop until he kills us all. Sina--" Nari paused for a moment, closed her eyes to ride the tide of anguish she'd become used to whenever she said her clansister's name, and then opened them again to look at Kit. "Sina was dying. She was dying for a long time. By the last few months, everyone knew it, no matter who would say it. But she... she deserved love. She deserved someone who loved her. Who stayed."

She leans back, scoots her legs in closer to her body. "I don't know Vandelin, but if you loved him... you see things in people. Good things. I think your heart shoots true as any arrow Andruil ever shot. We all carry our own weights, and it may be that that weight was too much for him. Maybe he loved you too much, and he was afraid. I can't judge him for that," she chuckles ruefully. "I'm afraid. But you--" Nari frowns, having forgotten what she was trying to say. Also having forgotten about the bottle, she reaches out to carefully share what remained in her glass between the two of them.

"I guess what I mean is... Falon'din has his hand on all of us. Knowing that makes us better partners, not worse. We know what time is worth. We know what one moment of holding, of being held; touching, or being touched, is worth." It's everything. She knows he knows that. The elf casts a look around the room, her gaze lingering on the bits and pieces of the Medicine Seller that have integrated themselves into the space long enough for Kit to follow what she's doing. "There are other people who know that too."

What heart wouldn't break even the tiniest fraction at the way Nari speaks of Sina? Kit's heart, always worn on his sleeve despite his best efforts to keep it covered by his Legionnaire's armour, cracks a little for her. He barely knew the girl, but she'd left an impression, and knowing that she isn't around anymore, that she's gone for good and won't ever brighten another stranger's morning with her gentle smile, leaves a painful tightness in his chest. She was so young. No one should have to bury someone so young.

"Maybe he loved you too much, and he was afraid."

"Maybe," Kit agrees, though doubt shows in the shadows of his face. There's a bit of hope there, too; hope that the love he'd felt had been, in some small measure, reciprocated, even if the toll it took on Vandelin was too much for him. "Maybe," he adds a moment later, sounding a little more sure of himself.

He does note the way Nari's eyes wander around his small hovel, resting on the Medicine Seller's coat, his nest of blankets near the woodstove, bits of a tea set waiting for him to return to tend to them. Kit scratches absently at his beard, smiling wistfully. "What," he asks her, chuckling wryly, "you think he could be the one?" Insofar as anyone could ever be 'the one' to anyone else.

Nari spreads her hands, "Like I said, I don't know about Vandelin, but... I can't imagine the thought of you being gone would tear someone up enough to need to leave without it being because the feeling was too big and too hard to hold. That's something more than just friendship."

As far as the Medicine Seller? She smiles her quirked gentle smile, pleased he'd noticed what she was doing, "I don't know about the one," she says, echoing his thought, "but with the skills he has and the wares he sells, he must have spent time with death and grief. Probably a lot of time. People like him have learned to hold those things well enough that they don't have to walk away. They've carved room into themselves to hold the fears and worries of others without breaking."

Whether it's advisable or not, she pauses to finish the rest of her glass. "And you made room for him too. You can hold the things he's seen and done." As far as she knows, anyway. "Holding someone you can hold all of is special. As is being held in all your broken trampled glory."

Nari frowns thoughtfully, talking into her empty glass, "Don't wait too long, Kit. Our lives aren't fair or just, and things happen. Be with him, if he'll let you. Live now. You can die when you die."

Edited 2018-02-14 19:54 (UTC)

"Don't wait too long, Kit. Our lives aren't fair or just, and things happen. Be with him, if he'll let you. Live now. You can die when you die."

There's still something left in that bottle of wicked liquor that Nari brought with her, so Kit reaches out for it and finishes off the contents of it in both their glasses. "That," he says knowingly (and perhaps a little drunkenly), "sounds like something to drink to, in my opinion."

He lifts the glass to Nari, smiling at her lopsidedly. "To living now."

And dying when they die.

She smiles back, her own just as lopsided, and lifts the glass to Kit.

"To living now."

And dying when they die.

[OPEN] I have never known peace

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