open.

[byblow]

WHO: Alistair, Kostos, Other People
WHAT: Open posts for Alistair & Kostos, catch-all for other people doing other stuff.
WHEN: Justinian, vaguely backdated or forward dated to work around plots, whatever.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: If you want a specific starter let me know! Or if you want to drop something in here, do it. Jehan, Silas, and Tomek are available too, I just didn't do open prompts for them.

ALISTAIR

I. THE GALLOWS

The Wardens have their own money and technically their own food. Or they could have their own food, if someone told them they had to have their own food. No one has yet. So here Alistair is, well after midnight, rifling through the stocks in the kitchens beneath the (former) Templar tower for whatever doesn't look like it's necessary for a planned meal in the coming days and doesn't require him to put significant effort into eating it.

He's found an apple. And a hand-sized loaf of dark bread. And a cookie. And raw carrots, which are good enough for horses and therefore good enough for him, and which he waves at whoever comes in, saying, "I saw them first."

II. DARKTOWN

Alistair isn't frequently accused of being too clean, but in Darktown he stands out—because he's had a bath sometime this week, maybe, probably, and because he definitely has been accused of carrying himself with more noble-mimicking confidence than a scullery maid's orphan ought to. Got his head held down in mud puddles over it and everything. But he never learned. Never learns.

Exhibit Q: he is absolutely being mugged, right now, cornered by several armed and obviously hungry Darktown denizens on his way down to the clinic, but while he holds his arms up to let them pat him down their blighted selves, he's saying, "Yyyes, my money," in his usual quietly animated drawl. "My money that I brought with me. Here. To shop."

Identifying himself as a Warden might be easier. Or it might get him stabbed faster, since he's not carrying proof of that anymore than he's carrying coins, or a sword, or anything else that would be useful in this situation if they decide letting him walk away with his tongue and all ten fingers isn't in the cards.

Talking them to death is clearly his best option.

"My lady requires jewels, and I thought, where else for rubies but Darktown?"

KOSTOS

I. THE GALLOWS

The Ander invasion isn't Kostos' personal fault, probably, but for a while he takes it about that hard. When he isn't out drinking and fucking and gambling his way into unpayable debt like they're all going to die any day now, he's almost always in the central Gallows tower, scowling at paper.

The type of paper varies. Maps, lists, letters, notes, books. Scraps of anything that might contain anything that would stop anyone in any of the countries he's meant to be keeping an eye on from acting up in the future. His desk becomes a disaster zone, and he indefinitely borrows a somewhat frightening number of books from the library to store in the Northern Powers office instead, in case they're necessary at some point. Most of them haven't been yet.

He'll narrow things down after a week or so, around the same time he stops considering it a personal moral failing that he didn't see it coming; organize, delegate, all of that. But before that time arrives, his stubble grows to rival his brother's, and he can periodically be found sitting slumped over asleep on a map or standing leaned over and nearly asleep with his forehead pressed against the books on a library shelf—

II. THE DOCKS

—which absolutely does not stop him from going out at night. And usually he knows where his line is, how to drink enough to feel his limbs loosen and for talking to stop being quite so difficult and for punching people to seem like a better idea than normal, but not so much he can't convince people who don't know him that he isn't drunk. Even on bad nights, if he's with someone whose opinion he cares about (or someone he intends to sleep with, which is not a complete overlap), he stays on the right side of the line.

But this is a bad several weeks, and he doesn't wind up with company every night, and after at least one of those nights he staggers back to the ferry's slip alone, shortly before its first departure for the morning, and has to sit down on the edge of the dock to keep from falling in. And then lie down, while he's at it, with his feet hanging over the water.

He sits up abruptly once, thinking he might vomit, but changes his mind.

It's very sexy.

Comments

[galvanising]

Nell shuts her mouth and just smirks back at Alistair instead of speaking. Better his words, not hers.

"So what's the plan?" she asks, weight braced against her staff in a casual lean. She glances at Gwen, then Adalia, before settling back on Alistair. "Do we go in turns, or can you handle us all at once?"

[elegiaque]

"Can we do that at the same time and stay out of each other's way?" is a genuine question, self-aware about the fact her grasp of combat is significantly less than any of the rest; it's almost certainly good to learn how to manage all these moving parts, but she is coming to that as an absolute novice.

"Because I can't cover up my own death, talented as I am."

[galvanising]

"Of course," Nell replies with a shrug, "If we're careful. Battles aren't generally one on one, you have to learn how to keep your elbows in. But I take it you've never done that before," she's super perceptive, see, "So maybe best we start slow if you're just as likely to open a rift in your allies."

[thunderproof]

"I'd prefer to remain non-rifted, if that's an option," Adalia says, helpfully. "If we go one by one to start we can at least have an idea of how we each move. May make for fewer injuries in the long run, even if it takes longer."