[OPEN] you don't know my brother he's a broken bone

[katabasis]

WHO: Flint, Marcoulf & YOU
WHAT: Catch-all for Solace
WHEN: Solace generally, backdated or forward-dated as is convenient.
WHERE: Kirkwall, various
NOTES: N/A, will update as necessary.

FLINT
i. a tavern

Kirkwall rises out of the sea, shaped like Tevinter and the Qun both. In the shadow of the Gallows, there can be no shaking the reminder of either nation. Flint thought it first from the Walrus' quarterdeck as the ship had made its way into the harbor under full sail and no colors at all. The city which finally greets them looks for all the world as if it could promise only one thing. You do not matter, whispers every old stone in Kirkwall - even the ones under the shadow of the Inquisition's banners. But maybe if the stones can't be convinced, there are people in the city who might be. That's the trick.

--and the trouble, seeing as they can't very well show up and start making demands of the Inquisition's local leadership. No, his job at present is to seem non-threatening enough so as not to induce panic and so pointedly ever present so there can be no choice but for someone who should to pay some attention to the anchored ship, to the men on it, and to Max and her money and to what she will eventually ask for.

To that end, Flint's acquired the use of the back room of one the grimy taverns along Kirkwall's docks. He keeps the dividing screen between it and the rest of the floor poorly extended so that he might go about his work - perfectly legitimate bookkeeping and discussion of revictualing - in sight of the other patrons and vice versa. Surely it takes no time at all for gossip to do its business:

There is a ship in the harbor which flies no nation's flag. Her crew has only been allowed ashore in small numbers which must mean they have a secret worth guarding and tongues loose enough to ply. Meanwhile, her captain does business from The Boar & The Bat. He speaks with the unmistakable accent of a Vint, asks lots of questions, and might just be persuaded to pay for the answers.

ii. the library

It's late, but there's a light burning in the library yet. It illuminates a table where Flint has seemingly taken up permanent residence, presiding over a mountain of charts, pamphlets, papers, and reports deemed unimportant enough to be shelved rather than locked in someone's desk drawer. Given the prodigious range of reading material at hand, it's not immediately clear what exactly he's looking for. It must be of some importance though as he's been at it for hours tonight and in days prior has combed through more than his fair share of the stacks.

He keeps a small ledger at hand, noting down names and places and figures as it pleases him. In the rare intervals where he steps out for some much needed fresh air, the light is left burning to ward off any ambitious late-night clerk from clearing away his collection and the notes are taken with him - folded twice and tucked away into his pocket. When not bent over his work or stretching his legs in the nearest half-lit courtyard, he can be found picking through the library's collection: pulling books out, then re-shelving them if they don't suit.

MARCOULF
i. the training grounds

The flash of his sword is one among a dozen in the yard. Marcoulf works quietly and systematically with the rapier, running himself through a series of lunges and pulls and side steps against his own shadow as the sun rises high and hot over the Gallows. For anyone with an eye for swordmanship, he's not poor with the blade; and for anyone familiar with an Orlesian chevalier or two, the exercises are like enough to doubtlessly be informed by some sensibly trained hand.

Marcoulf's clearly no teacher though despite the smattering of green hands swinging swords and maces around their more experienced peers in the training yard. He's too tight lipped to be useful to his neighbors, largely reliable only for trouncing unsuspecting victims and for accepting any challenge.

ii. notice board

The Inquisition might house, feed and clothe its ranks, but mostly what that boils down to is a lot of linen for washing, potatoes for peeling, and seams for mending. Even given the toll the delegation to Minrathous had taken on the stabels' population, Marcoulf's found plenty to busy himself with. Today that means patching shirts in the shadow of the Gallows' notice board. He's made himself perfectly comfortable on the stone step with a cushion that looks suspiciously like it might belong to one of the more well-appointed state rooms and has been steadily working his way through the basket of linen with his ear tipped toward anyone grousing about whatever they find posted on the board.

He's far too busy diligently closing holes from pulled threads and reinforcing fraying cuffs to read anything himself, you see. And it takes his attention to thread a needle, of course. And naturally it's much cooler in the shadow cast back here than standing in the sun squinting at tacked up bits of paper. All very logical reasons for why he might ask the next person who happens to examine the notice board's postings:

"Anything interesting?"

WILDCARD
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Comments

[elegiaque]

“Ah, I've personally offended you,” she suggests, freed hand upon her bosom, widening her eyes like the ingenue she never really was—a jest, because she thinks she has not, actually, but Gwenaëlle doesn't need to exert herself so much as some to hear the whispered possibility of a threat and attempt with her very particular, if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing sort of charm to defang it. So much her father's daughter, in both thought and response to it, only she has spent much of the past month acutely aware of how far out of the Empress's easy grasp she was not.

Now and then her writing served its original purpose, drew in those who might be inspired to fill the gaps she had artfully outlined; she thinks that is not, in fact, why Captain Flint of the Walrus is interrupting her return. It would stretch credulity near to breaking if she were to presume that the man before her had been so moved by her words as to bring his ship to the Inquisition's cause, for all stranger things might have happened. This is possibly some other strange thing entirely—it's already interesting enough that when the tall, gaunt gentleman clearing her belongings from the ferry pauses at her elbow (silent, his gaze settled upon Flint and not his mistress), she says, “To the Provost's office,” without making any move to join her belongings or, indeed, her gentleman.

He acknowledges the instruction with an inclination of his head, expressionless gaze committing Flint's face to memory, and withdraws. (He will not personally deposit her things there; discretion is the better part of valor. Gwenaëlle will be present, the next time he crosses paths with her husband.)

“I'm afraid if you were looking for more light reading, Captain, I ceased publication after the—” debacle, “—business at the Winter Palace. But I'm happy to discuss my work.”

[katabasis]

A retired essayist in a traveling coat who now has her things being delivered to the office of the Provost? Interesting is one word for it. Tactical manuevers could be two others. Useful might be one too under particular circumstances and with the right encouragement. 'Necessary' is undeniable and unavoidable in any case. Flint glances after her man as he goes. By the time he looks back to her, he's decided:

"That's considerate of you." The polite question to follow should be something along the lines of 'But I've interrupted you. When would be convenient?'. Fuck that though. "I was curious as to how much of it was fiction, but I think you've answered that already." In so many words - that faux dismay, the contents of what had evidently been her very last essay, the tawny fur at the collar of her travelling coat. "In which case, I wonder if Orlais can really be the your only concern and what good your pride for it could possibly still be doing you here."

It's a real, genuine curiosity scored by some flash of fervor. Maybe by that merit, calculated though it is, he skirts just this side of interrogation.

[elegiaque]

Droll in expression, Gwenaëlle turns her bare left hand palm up for him; the dull green of her anchor-shard a wrong note that explains itself. “Absolutely fucking nothing,” she proposes, mock bright. “Unfortunately, my personal concerns haven't had much to do with where I spend the bulk of my time for the better part of the last three years. As a guest of the Inquisition,”

guest, yes, and she says it so dryly but she knows the difference between prisoners and the situation with the anchor-shards well enough by now,

“I've been obliged to find my own occupation.”

Propaganda, for instance, but there have been many months between now and that last dramatic send-off. She doesn't have the look of a young woman at a loose end, precisely, and if it were all as simple as that then she might not be as easy with his unexpected company.

Fastidious correctness obligates her, though: “I didn't agree with everything I felt it was necessary to write.” The Dalish can fuck off, for a start. And then, because it's still not that simple, “At the time,” a concession to some of the opinions espoused that she did, in fact, come around to.

Like, rifters might be people.

[katabasis]

He imagines that's true for most in that trade - a quiet lack of belief in the particular words if not the purpose they served. What sense could there be in talking to strangers in a language they couldn't understand? That's obvious. He doesn't care about that part. Flint's eye slides to the sickly green glow in her hand, head cocked by some small degree. Guest, she says.

"Is that why you stopped writing for the Inquisition when you did? Because what you agreed with no longer aligned with what would be the most beneficial to the Inquisition, or because no one was seeing to your interests in return?'" An Orlesian propaganda writer quits her work the moment the civil war in Orlais is put into the ground. That can't be coincidence.

--But then Flint pauses, some measured consideration flickering across the set lines of his face. He straightens like he realizes he's being rude or careless or at least like he should have. "Forgive me. I'm only after an informed opinion." A personal concern of his own, you see.

[elegiaque]

Probably, she thinks, it would be a bit of fucking hypocrisy to take offense at his line of questioning. All things considered. This isn't to say that she wouldn't, if she were of a mind to, just that she knows how much leg she wouldn't have to stand on in doing so—

but she says, “No one was ever seeing to my interests,” dry, and maybe less bitter than something like that ought to sound. Less bitter than it would have sounded if she were saying it a year ago; a resignation that sits oddly on her slim shoulders, her short years. Or doesn't: Flint, certainly, must have been well-placed to have seen old eyes in young faces. Unusual, then, only in the softness of her hands and the privileges that she still enjoys, Vauquelin or no.

“Other than in the broadest sense, where the Inquisition serves the interests of all people who prefer the world not to fucking end. You'd think that would be everyone, if you hadn't met many people. Maker forbid a war effort involve effort on anyone's part beyond clutching their own balls and whinging about the precise methodology of the people bothering to do anything.”

That perhaps would not have played as well in print.

[katabasis]

There's a particular way this dance is meant to go. Even in Kirkwall, even under the Inquisition's banner. He's supposed to walk that line between reasonable and too sharp, to ask questions that fully lead with his intelligence while leaning into the rounded vowels of how Trade sounds on his tongue, to talk long enough and say the right things to lead her onto the ground he could consider common enough to be useful. He's no writer, but he knows a thing or two about how to arrange the rest of himself into a point to goad someone along with. That's the theory anyway. She saves him all the trouble.

There's a line on his face that's clearly been worn there by a furrowed expression that lingers even when he doesn't need it to. When he rocks back on his heels and his eyebrows climb toward his close cropped hairline, it all but disappears. Well. That's one way to skin the cat. If he's taking a moment to re-examine her, to mentally recalculating her placement on some endless list of names he keeps in his head, it's obvious. He's doing fuck all to to hide it.

"What exactly is it you do for the Inquisition now, Mademoiselle Baudin?"

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle has never been listening to the same music as the dancers; seems only intermittently willing to acknowledge that it is playing at all. She's never had a knack for maneuvering that way—has always known it—and of late she's found playing to the strengths she does have to be altogether more satisfying than struggling uphill in the mold of something she isn't. Maybe if she'd been that thing, she'd still be Lady Vauquelin, and even now preparing her own household, her inheritance—

“That's currently a matter under negotiation,” which would have been unthinkable, then, of course. She refrains, despite being briefly tempted, from answering other than the Provost, instead: “Officially, at present, nothing.” Master of Information would be a useful foot in the door, though, if they're willing to give it to her; if they're willing to let her have it without having officially done any work for the Inquisition before, ahead of those who have.

If she'd done nothing at all, though, Flint would never have known her name. And she has been here some time.

[katabasis]

"Would you like to? If I could find the kind of work that suited you, what would it take you to be persuaded to write again?" Nevermind that he's been in Kirkwall a mere handful of days and has virtually no connections in the Inquisition that he hadn't brought with him. Nevermind that there have likely been dozens of attempts made to bend her toward some useful purpose in the intervening year and a half since her last publication. Nevermind that they're complete strangers. He asks with such unremitting certainty and with so much of his attention fixed there on her that it's as if he has the job for her already.

With that kind of conviction, a person might be trusted to conjure just about anything out of thin air.

[elegiaque]

Her head tilts to one side.

With anything less than that kind of conviction, she'd have already said no, not particularly; there are a lot of reasons why she stopped writing those essays (the open doors that had slammed shut in the wake of the last one, for instance, which she hadn't written knowing it would be the last), but the most significant in the moment had been being confronted with her own face as presented to Thedas. With her own face presented to Thedas. She'd taken pride in her voice, her words, but she'd never intended anyone to look past them; she wanted to observe, not to represent.

All those ears, listening, and all those eyes on her and not the things she had been speaking of, and if that were something she could deftly handle then her name would still be Vauquelin.

“We might have different definitions of what suits me, Captain,” is what she does say, and it isn't the no she's expecting when she opens her mouth, but maybe that's—

Her lips press together slightly. She's far easier to read in person than in print—the proverbial open book.

“For one, I didn't stop writing,” though that's less to him than the sky, and not immediately relevant. She stopped publishing; she'd never stopped making observations. She says, “The Inquisition's made available a position that would involve something a bit less—direct. It's, as I said, a matter under negotiation.”

She could leave it there.

She could, but it must be said before she doesn't that while his focus should be uncomfortable, she mirrors it with interest.

“What did you have in mind?”

[katabasis]

"There are people who could be persuaded to rally behind the Inquisition's cause with the right motivation. Given the rumors out of Rivain, there may be ships and the people to crew them eager for a new home port while the dust settles there. I've also heard there are men in the far south tired of fighting wars in the name of an Empress instead of their own."

To name just a few highly unspecific example in the middle of the day, standing there at the bustling ferry slip shielded only by her interest and his own obstinance.

"All it would take the win some of them would be a recognition of their legitimacy and an honest if deferred promise that their personal interests be seen to when the fight is done. But first the Inquisition would need to be convinced that saying so when no one else will is an advantage, not a weakness. Part of that would have to be looking out into the world and telling the Inquisition what it sees there."

She's written plenty about the Inquisition for those outside it, but that mirror might serve better now as a lens.