open | tracks will fade in the snow

[libratus]

WHO: Ilias Fabria + YOU
WHAT: Open post + catch-all for the month
WHEN: Harvestmere
WHERE: Around the Gallows, mostly
NOTES: Feel free to toss your own starter at this if you'd rather!

labs / infirmary;

[ A Mortalitasi walks into the Gallows. There ought to be a punch line, is what he thinks while he does it. Clio would have given it a good punch line. He would have written her a letter, Today I sailed up the Waking Sea in a cabin the size of Grandmother's pantry, sick as you after that custard, and when I landed, they put me on another boat. "You must have been dying to get there." "Sounds like the perfect place to hang around." Something better. Cleverer. The rafters are quite high.

When Ilias reaches the laboratory space that is to be his new home, he still has a touch of pallor, grey to match his robes. But steady hands pull vial and jar from a travel chest, rod and hook, placing each one precisely in its place. The space is different. The people will be different. The work, too. But he can find ways to make himself useful here. It's why he'd picked the Inquisition — a safer place for him today than Nevarra City, even his Grandmother could not argue with that, but not a safe place. Not anyone's gilded cage.

Still, he'll need the tools for it. A bedroll, in case of late nights, is the last thing he pulls from the chest, but not the last thing he needs.

So it's to the infirmary next, by pale lamplight and cautious step. It's late, perhaps a little later than he ought to be poking around a building he hasn't specifically been granted access to, but his nosing is restrained— ]

Excuse me. [ —And his sheepishness is genuine, upon discovering he's less alone than he'd hoped. ] I meant no intrusion.

library;

[ He isn't here to judge the Gallows' library. Truly, he isn't. It's important to understand what one has to work with. The Necropolis would be an unfair comparison, he'd known that before he stepped through the doors, but even Nevarra City's Circle had its specialities. Its particular benefactors. The Gallows, he assumes, will have the same.

Fewer benefactors, he gathers rather quickly.

Still, Ilias cranes his neck to scan the shelves, top to bottom. Careful fingers ghost across the exposed spines, but it's his face that betrays his mind. A considering hover of the eyes over Beyond the Veil. A warm cringe at Enchanter van Heigl's A Life Among the Dead. A gentle raise of the brows at Our Honoured Dead: A Guide to the Mortalitasi Order.

Well. It's better than nothing. ]

kitchens;

[ It'd been late when he'd started; by the time Ilias finds his way to the mage tower's kitchens, it's well into the small hours, the time of night when quiet beings to take on a certain density, a heaviness in the dark. There's a bed somewhere he's not in, a room whose walls and ceilings he's not eager to get to know just yet. Instead, he has a candle burning down at his right side, a cup of tea at his left getting bitter and cold.

In front of him are just papers — pamphlets, Inquisition briefings, the things every new recruit should know about the state of the world, and a few about its future. A battle they know is coming and can't stop. His breath slows, just so. Knuckles tap-tap against the surface of the table like a count-down before he pulls away, abandoning the lot of it. Not forever, just— he could use a smoke. Fresh air. Stretch his legs. Something.

(Maybe he should have picked the cage.) ]

Comments

[indissection]

[ Her eyes drag over him and she resists the urge to sigh. It's aways felt somewhat the same in his company, she's found - bereft of any kindness, feeling a little as though she is still a child and earning his displeasure. It might bother her more if she were not her own woman, now, living on her own with a cause she has chosen without parental input. ]

Who else was there? [ Her brother, perhaps, but he had buggered off as soon as his magic had appeared. The problem was that there were few people willing to teach someone without magic when there was someone with magic of equal talent, and she had been forced to books and whatever she could get away with from the ones her mother had hired.

It was not much, and certainly not enough by her own measure. ]

I've seen enough. [ Handmaidens, mostly, or servants she had peered at in the kitchens. ] I didn't realise you were so concerned for my education. I'd imagined that was beneath you now.

[libratus]

[ Who else? It's not an unfair question. Certainly not him. He had been cold to her, yes -- he had been cold to most people, over the years, once past a certain threshold of scripted social niceties. As soon as he'd started learning smiles to go with names, started giving a shit if he elicited the former once a week or ever again, he'd switched off. Cut his losses early. Left bright young students with questions unanswered, and letters from old friends unopened, imagining somehow these things would turn out fine without him -- better, perhaps, for being untainted by him.

This isn't fine. He rubs a palm across his forehead. ]

Nothing about you is beneath me, Sidony -- and it is not only your education that concerns me.

[ It's-- so many other things, that words alone just now seem woefully insufficient to convey. ]

--Come with me, if you please.

[ Sharp, he turns for the door, toward his own lab. If she wants to argue with him, she can argue with his back, but she'll need to follow him to do it. ]

[indissection]

[ Sidony is well aware that she is clinging to her bitterness like a suit of armour; there's no reason for her to try and be anything less than aloof with him when he had broken her academic heart. She had been so desperate to learn from someone so close to her own dream - she had always wanted to be a Mortalitasi, had always wanted to wrap herself in the rituals of the dead, but with no magic... She had been denied, thoroughly, and had turned to medicine instead. When her brother had shown himself as a mage...

She had given up rather a lot. She had given up on him, on her parents and their desire for her to marry, on her studies and her tutors and her languages. She had given up on Nevarra, not that her parents are aware yet. Fleeing in the night has its advantages. ]

You have an excellent way of showing your affection, then. Dismissing me and years of silence - I should have known you were deeply in love with me.

[ Clearly, she has not quite forgiven him, and she has no reason to. She had been spurned and it shows in the viciousness of her glare. ]

You do not command me, Ilias.

[ But, for goodness sake, she is as curious now as she had been when they had first met, and she chases him, shoes making soft noises along the ground. ]

[libratus]

[ Ilias's head tips back while he walks — Andraste give me strength — but he doesn't turn to answer her. The door to his work area snaps open with a whine of protest, and he rounds the table within. ]

If you would have my confidence in your skills — or my silence about their absence — I would ask this of you.

[ Deal? He starts pulling items from his trunk and setting them on the work table in front of her, one by one: starting with something long, leathery and misshapen. ]

This is Avelus. He is a twenty-year-old stablehand from Starkhaven.

[ It's a mummified weasel with a hide ripped near in half. ... Just work with him. ]

He loves bawdy tavern songs, and sea shells that won't open, and his best friend, who he followed to the Inquisition six weeks ago. [ As he speaks, Ilias pulls more from his trunk: a spool of thin black thread, a needle. ] Which is coincidentally all the training he got with a sword before riding out with a scouting party and catching an Ander axe in the leg. He was lucky; it was at the end of the battle, they turned back right away. It only took them a few minutes to reach you.

So, you have thirty seconds before you lose him.

[ Go. ]

[indissection]

[ It's not the first time Sidony has seen someone react to her in this way and there's something oddly familiar about it, almost refreshing, settling on her shoulders for a moment. It makes her think of home and, specifically, her brother, her father. Never her mother, who was always a touch more vocal in her disapproval. ]

I do not see how you have any right to judge my skills.

[ She supposes, in the end, he would know better than anyone how best to judge her. He had been her tutor for a short time, and it must come as a surprise to him to bear witness to her actually having skill. She's not a young girl anymore and while her training might have been more intimate than public...

She scoffs, frowning as she looks down at the weasel. ]

Avelus. Truly, I cannot believe you are making me do this, Ilias, really -

[ All the same, Sidony takes the tools with a clear huff in the set of her shoulders, taking the needle and the thread. Actually threading the needle is something she has done hundreds of times - not just because of the practice she has done but because of all the embroidery and stitching her mother had her do in her spare time. Sewing is second nature to her, even when it comes to bodies.

The sour looks she gives Ilias doesn't dissipate. ]

I am not going to talk to him, considering he is a weasel and not a man from Starkhaven, no matter how much we might play pretend. Avelus, though, is a fine name. However did you think of it?

[ Thirty seconds. She scoffs again, her stitching secure and careful, bringing the two pieces back together. They're neat, almost fanciful stitches; good enough for an operation where she has the time to do it, and she's well aware of it, but hardly the work of someone with real time battle practice. She can do this, but she has a little more that she needs to learn.

She knows that and now Ilias will know it too. ]

What was the point of this? Do you truly believe so little of me that I would come here, offering aid, and cause only trouble? Is that what you think when you see me?

[ Snip. She cuts off the end of the thread. ]

[libratus]

[ He doesn't know so much about being a surgeon. How to put a corpse back together again, yes, but not a living body. This is the test in part because it's the thing he is qualified to test: the speed of her stitches, the security of them, the placement, and the degree to which her anger at him for this indignity interferes with her work. But that is not the only thing he is testing, because what he does know better than her is not healing; it's death. It's the ease with which the simplest mistake can tip a scale you hadn't known needed balancing. ]

No, [ he answers, pulling the weasel back to examine the stitching. It is good work. Not perfect, but much better than he'd been afraid of. That she considered talking to the 'patient' at all is a favorable sign, too. But, ]

I think that you are very dedicated to your work. I think you have an incredible drive to learn and to be acknowledged for what you have learned. And I think if you are more concerned with being taken seriously than accurately representing your capabilities to your colleagues, you will get someone killed.

[ Just saying. ]

What I do not know is whether that work is more important to you than the people. [ And that is the critical difference — the distinction he hadn't trusted himself to make when last she'd studied with him, the question he hadn't been willing to leave unanswered again. ] If this boy had died, if you had done everything right and he had died anyway, do you know who you would have told first? What would you have said to them?

[indissection]

[ There's a quiet part of her, below all the bluster and the arrogance and the hideous pride, that knows that she has much to learn, that is desperate to be tutored, that wants to prove herself. She wishes to overcome the misfortune of not being a mage - and even now it's a struggle to look at Ilias without some envy - and she recognises that she has some bumps to smooth.

She simply does not like it being made so obvious, especially by someone who had slighted her so surely in Nevarra. ]

I do not intend to get anyone killed. I know what I'm doing, no matter what your judgements of me might be.

[ It's clear from her look what she thinks of his idea of her needing to learn. There's a dozen things she could say to him on that front and not very many of them would be anything close to pleasant.

Her gaze is sharp, soured by him, and the stiffness of her shoulders shows the hurt and anger that colours the flush of her cheeks. He might be right but that doesn't mean he has to say it and she's determined not to give in to his foolishness. How dare he, she thinks, how dare he come here and lecture her when he had been the one to shun her in the first place.

Bastard. ]

It would depend on who was present, wasn't it? I imagine his friend would've wished to know, and a letter must be sent to whoever was waiting for him in Starkhaven. Apologies, of course. I am not entirely brainless, no matter what you might think of me. [ There's a prickle, then - something like hurt. She's tired and she's far too used to being second best. It feels almost like being home. ] I do not see what right you have to judge me, to test me. You gave up on me a long time ago, Ilias Fabria.

crawls determinedly back here

[libratus]

[ There may have been a point, moments or years ago, when it might have mattered more that the brittleness of her shoulders finally cracks through the image he's built up of her in his mind, the shadow labeled danger only because it took on a familiar shape. The details are different; she is something different, a young woman he knows in pieces and assumptions more than wholes. It might have mattered more sooner, that it occurs to him he is holding her to the standards he holds himself to, instead of other people — the ones born from mistakes she hasn't made. Maybe if he'd realized that before he'd pushed her away, if he had tried harder to know her as she is instead of what he's afraid she'll become, she wouldn't have so much to prove now.

But for what it's worth, his eyes do soften. Shoulders shrink. ]

Sidony.

[ What can he say? Years after it would have made a difference, he's sorry? ]

I gave up on many things. It was not any fault of yours.

I do not want to be your judge, I want— [ To undo the last 10 years of his life, maybe? He presses his lips together, trying to center himself. (This is a mistake.) ] Perhaps I was too hasty in ending our meetings. If there are things you need to practice or learn that I can help with, I would rather you have that opportunity than not.

[ It isn't a guarantee. There are things he may still not show her, if he has reason to doubt. But it's an offer, at least. ]

grips ur hands

[indissection]

[ There is no regret in her for the sharpness of her words or the immediate urge to raise her voice and scold him. She learned a long time ago that she won't get what she wants from Ilias by flattering her lashes and smiling sweetly; he prefers, she thinks, to see her at her most wise, at her most intelligent, for her to use her words and her good education to prove a point. She's more than happy to do it, a sourness making her purse her lips and draw her hands away from the dead animal, moving immediately to find some kind of washcloth to clean herself with.

Touching dead things, for all that she loves it, does leave a rather rotting smell.

The problem is, of course, that these are all words that she would have liked to have heard years before now. She had been a dedicated student, there was no one in Nevarra that could deny that, for all her faults. She may have been more than a little vocal in her frustrations with Chantry limitations on study and medicine, but most chalked that up to a childish curiosity that would die with age, when she found herself wedded and bedded and baring child. Clearly, that was not the route she intended to take. ]

If you did not intend to be my judge then what was this?

[ She motions to the animal on the table between them. ]

Did you even spare the thought, for a moment, to imagine that I might be genuine in my study? That after you had turned your attention away from me I might have found someone else to fill in the gaps? I did not come here to kill people, Ilias. I did not come here to do harm. The very fact that your first instinct upon seeing me here, a welcomed member of the Inquisition, was to make sure that I was up to your standards says more than enough about your view of me. Do you know how very cruel that is? How demeaning? Do you not think I have heard enough of it?

[ She swallows, shaking her head. ]

If I wish to further my education then the Inquisition has many healers I can speak with, all of whom will not find it a trial to spend their time with me. I would not want to waste your time as I have so clearly done before. [ Hands somewhat cleaner and tears gathering in her eyes, she blinks them back, standing up as tall as she can manage, face set in as much measure of composure as she can muster.

It could be better, but, well. Ilias knows her. It makes it harder to pretend. ]

Are we done with your tests? Might I return to my station now?