open & not.

[spellshatter]

WHO: Alistair, Jehan, Kostos, Silas, you?????
WHAT: Open post for Silas, catch-all for everyone else.
WHEN: Throughout Cloudreach 9:44
WHERE: Mostly the Gallows probably
NOTES: If you want to do something feel free to either hit me up (via pm or discord or plurk) or just throw something down here without warning and I'll tag it.

Comments

loghain.

[byblow]

The letter Alistair receives is from Eamon, not the Queen, which is—fine. It's fine. It's good to hear from Eamon anyway, even if the thing written between all five lines of the letter is you can't come back, not yet, probably never, and the things written on the lines are polite and distant, because Eamon raised him the way Eamon raised dogs and horses: outside, under someone else's care if anyone's, often set loose to run himself out. But Alistair is still grateful, and grateful for the letter, and grateful to have a reason besides his own moral failings not to go to Denerim for the funeral.

He puts the letter in a box that will eventually be sorted through to separate what's necessary from what can be burned, and then he goes to the Wardens' office.

Loghain is there when he walks in. Alistair has been avoiding spending any time alone with him, successfully, for weeks. Months, now, technically. But it's been long enough, and he's tired enough, that turning around and leaving would be just too petty and unreasonable for him to do it, so he crashes down into the chair at his desk instead and opens the first of a stack of letters that are, probably, hopefully, not about anyone's dead fathers.

[mactears]

This broom closet of an office somehow has managed to cram three different desks into it, which is how Loghain is able to also be sitting at a desk when Alistair arrives. (His desk is not as nice, but, to be fair, Alistair got here first.)

He's pouring over some document or another in preparation for the journey to Ferelden for the funeral when Alistair comes in; when he doesn't immediately turn around and walk back out again, Loghain pauses and looks up. It might be reasonably accurate to say that their avoidance of each other is mutual; now that it seems to be at an end, Loghain hesitates, unsure of what to do or say.

So he opts for nothing--for a minute.

Then he clears his throat and asks quietly, "Would you like me to bring anything for you?" A pause. "To the funeral pyre."

[byblow]

Alistair looks up, eyes narrowing and head tilting into a look of sullen incredulity—but one of his milder forms of that expression, overall. One that only says no with a hint of why even ask rather than no with a dollop of how dare you. If he were younger, he would say that Maric never gave him anything. Now, older and wiser, he knows the man did at least try to give him a life free of the crown (mixed results) and the stigma of elven blood (so far a success), and for that he can be appreciative. But it doesn't mean he has anything to put on a pyre. There's nothing material to return. No memory to reference. This handful of mud, for the mud on my shoes when I first saw my father, at a distance, that one day he came to Redcliffe and didn't even look at me—

And when they found him in Seheron he was rather busy looking at Loghain, wasn't he.

Anyway, the answer is no. And considering that answer delivered, Alistair doesn't add anything aloud before he looks back down at the correspondence in his hands.

"They're letting you go back?" he says, but obviously they are, so he doesn't want for a response. "Try not to start a war."