faderift | open; left to the wind and rain

Entry tags:

open; left to the wind and rain

WHO: Raleigh Samson + a star-studded cast
WHAT: a prisoner is brought from Skyhold to Kirkwall
WHEN: first half of Harvestmere, some early evening
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: General warnings TBD, if any.
Inquisition authority figures: I am a slave to your whims; summon this character to meetings etc as you see fit.
Everyone: got an idea not hinted at in this post? Hit me up.

Right, then. Here he is. The one place he was sure he'd never see again, except maybe on its way to ruin, smouldering, the Reds marching through. But that's Kirkwall for you: the rest of the world could be in flames and through the smoke you'd still see the shape of the Gallows. That horrible, wonderful silhouette, getting bigger as the boat bears you across the bay. Your heart thumping you from the inside to remind you, as if you need any reminding, that this is where you belong.

This is where I'll die, Samson thinks, as his feet finally alight on the wood of the dock. It's where I was always meant to die.

While he's being hauled along under a serious guard of five armed templar soldiers, for once it's done without the hood of his prison togs buckled around his head, nor with a heavy hand pushing forward the back of his neck to alter his silhouette. Propelled by giddy dread, he keeps up with them easily despite the chains. He's not smiling or anything so foolish, nor does he particularly feel like smiling, but all the same, he probably doesn't look as penitent as he should...
Oh well.

The group travels up the docks to the stronghold entrance, through forbidding gates and guarded archways to the cobbled yard of Templar Hall, up those long stairs, and inside, no doubt on some official business. From there the prisoner—still under heavy guard—is escorted to the Mage Tower, through the common areas of the lower floor, up to the main residences above, and beyond them.

The group moves efficiently, but not at a hurried pace. Should they pass anyone who wishes to address the prisoner, the retinue will tolerate verbal exchanges—get too close, however, and gloves will reach for sword-belts in warning. These particular templars are not fooling around.

The ultimate destination is a floor occupied by no one else: there Samson will be allowed to dwell, in a room of his own, without black bars, without vermin, where he may easily walk to a window and look through it and see the sky. There, with both fists clutching at the bedding—of modest quality, but immeasurably more comfortable than where he was—he cries himself to sleep like a child.

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Unfortunately, perhaps, for Samson, this is Kitty Jones. He meets her gaze, and she takes a moment to feel a little prickle of unease at his sunken darkened eyes and sallow skin - and then she stands up, and moves over, and flashes a little smile at his guard before sitting down across from him.

"Hullo," she greets, leaning forward to look at his work. "Are you doing needlepoint?"

And then she lifts her head and gives him her winningest smile.

This girl, whoever she is, or thinks she is—this girl leans almost into Samson's space, and, rather than sitting back to maintain a polite distance between strangers, he remains just where he is, unfazed. His eyes, unsettling as they might be from a distance, are truly strange: heavy-lidded, bloodshot, pupils wide, pale hazel irises rimmed in a colour not unlike drying blood.

After several long and heavy seconds of deliberation, he answers with an affirmative grunt: "Mm." The work itself, if it can even be called such at this stage, amounts to a few stitches and more than a few holes where stitches used to be. "Found it slipped under my door last night. Not as easy as it looks."

The hand holding the threaded needle is shaking faintly, minuscule misfires brought on by the pinch of his fingers. He has yet to stop watching her face.

(The guard, meanwhile, observes the pair of them steadily.)

It really is unsettling, his face and his eyes. They're - honestly, they're revolting, up close - there's something about the red rings around his eyes that just turns her stomach. But she's seen as bad or worse before, hasn't she? The opium-fiends and the drunkards on the street, she's watched them and spoken with them and bartered with them, used them as look-outs and spies. They're not always wicked men.

And, well, criminals aren't always wicked, either, are they. She's a criminal, and she's all right, after all.

"I bloody hate doing it," she responds easily. "I'm dreadful at it. It takes such awful patience, I hate it. But then - I've never had much patience. My name's Kitty Jones, by the way. It's nice to meet you."

Is it? Is it really, you little sneak? ...is what he does not say aloud. But take heart: he may yet be inspired to share his thoughts. (And if he could snatch those unsavoury comparisons from her mind, he would definitely think them appropriate.)

"Kitty Jones," he repeats, and finally looks back down to the materials in his hands. After considering them a moment, he pokes the needle's tip idly in and out of a few of the tiny spaces between the fabric's woven threads. Thoughtful, like. "You ought to spend some time in prison. That'll teach you patience enough."

"Maybe," she answers, but she sounds a little dubious. She'd almost gone to prison twice - the first when she was a girl, after she'd brought suit against the magician Tallow and received fines for her effrontery in return, when she'd almost gone to debtor's prison. And, sure, hard labour for the rest of her life would have given her patience. Maybe. The second, more recent occasion was when Mandrake had captured her. But then she wouldn't have had an opportunity to learn patience at all, because it almost undoubtedly would have been a few days' torture and then a perfunctory execution for her. Or a lingering one. It was treason she committed, after all -

A little shake of her head banishes those memories. And she fixes her smile back on her face, endeavoring to look sweet and genuine and not remotely treasonous at all.

"Is that where you're coming from? And why you're under guard? You're coming from prison? Why's that? Have you got a Rift shard?"

Edited 2018-10-24 23:49 (UTC)

"Hmmm." What his face is doing when he lifts it to meet her gaze again—squinting eyes, lips pressed flat above his teeth—it looks like it's thinking about becoming a smile but hasn't quite decided whether it wants to be friendly or hostile. "You've been watching me all this time, and you haven't found the answer to even one of those questions? None of them's even a secret. Some spy you are."

"That's 'cause I'm not a spy." She narrows her eyes; her own expression hasn't quite decided whether it wants to be exasperated or offended. "I'm just curious, that's all."

She could leave it there, but after a slight hesitation, she continues on - "And anyway, even if I did find out the answers to some of those questions, maybe I wanna hear the answers from your mouth instead of someone else's. Most of the time, stories people tell about each other are of no use at all, while stories people tell about themselves are quite a bit closer to the truth."

"True enough," he allows, his head tilted in consideration. Suspicion—of the playful sort, it seems, perhaps inspired by her own youthful emoting—has firmly entrenched itself in the lines of his face. The more his manner opens up, bit by tiny bit, the more it seems he might once have been a regular person.

"Most people are eager to share their stories to anyone who'll spare an ear. But you've yet to give me a good reason to share mine. You know how many times I've had to tell the same tale in the last year and... however many months. How long's it been now?" This he asks of the guard assigned to be his temporary escort, leaning back in his chair and twisting to see him. The guard gives him a sour look, clearly meant to indicate how much he cares, i.e. not at all. Samson waves a hand at him and turns back around. "Aah. Don't know why I bother with you." Over his shoulder, he adds, "Derry would know." The guard who is apparently not Derry rolls his eyes.

As he grows less remote and more human, she relaxes. Kitty won't ever pass as anything more than a kid, and she won't pass as intimidating, but there's a sort of hardness in her default manner and expression. The hardness had already begun to fade when they'd started talking embroidery. Now, as Samson heckles his guard, the tension drops away enough that she actually smiles in a way that reaches her eyes.

Then she reaches up and pushes her hair from her face. "Well," she responds, her manner somewhere between self-confident and bossy, "there's an easy solution to that, isn't there. Tell me a story you haven't told others."

Edited 2018-10-30 03:44 (UTC)

Samson hasn't completely grown past that ever-so-boyish quality of wanting to show off a little when meeting someone new, so the softening of edges in their exchange is encouraging. If it were pointed out to him, he'd likely grow sour, but for now...

"Tell you a— you cheeky girl." And yet, he doesn't look very displeased. "I'll ask you again: why should I?"

The craft hoop now rests on the table, needle stuck in it at a careless angle, for the moment forgotten. He's grateful for the excuse to give up, actually; the tremor in his hands isn't exactly beneficial to such fine work.

And that makes her grin openly, smug - perhaps justifiably - over the fact that she's charming him. He looks scary, red eyes and armed guards and all that, but at the end of the day, it seems, he can be charmed like any other.

"To start with, you haven't got any reason not to," she answers. "You can pick the story you want to tell me, so you won't be giving up any secrets you don't want to. What's more, you'll enjoy telling the story - it'll make you happy - because telling stories always makes people happy. That's why we do it. It helps the world make sense. Third, it'll make me happy, too, because I'll have learned something. And fourth, if you do, I'll make you something nice. I bake very good iced buns."

"Hmmm... now that's tempting. I do like an iced bun." People always seem to want to feed him, Maker knows why. Not that he's complaining. "But I do have a reason. I've had a lot of time to think, lately, to reflect on the things I've seen and done, and a lot of what's come up out of the depths isn't pleasant." Watching her evenly while he speaks. "Most of it's still floating there on the surface, clogging up all my thoughts. The only stories I can think to tell aren't happy ones. So no, Kitty Jones, telling a story wouldn't make me very happy at all."

Susceptibility to a person's charm, one might argue, is why Samson's life has gone this way in the first place: it's why he was kicked out of the Order, why he smuggled those mages out of Kirkwall, why he agreed to bring the Red Templars into being, why he now makes the effort to... to make an effort at all. A whole assortment of charms, of charismatic people. He's a sucker for it, is how it all boils down.
That and a habitual maker of total bonehead decisions.

Edited (rewording) 2018-11-01 13:08 (UTC)

Admittedly, the less-than-happy stories are the ones Kitty's rather interested in. She'd like to know if the man's normal, or if he's a mad slasher who'll go on a killing spree and drink the blood of all the young ladies in the Gallows or something like that. - Though she supposes that if he were a mad slasher, he'd consider the memories of his murders to be happy, not unhappy. So that bit of moroseness is actually something of a relief, she reflects.

"Well," Kitty says a bit dubiously, "is it that you haven't got any happy stories, or is it that they just don't come to mind right now? Because those are two different problems."

For the length of a couple of shallow breaths, in and out again, Samson just looks at her. A slow blink finishes up the pause like punctuation.The full shape of his mouth twitches, and something like a laugh quivers through his voice as he says,

"You've got no idea who I am, have you."

Attempting subtlety, the guard now affixes them both with a sidelong stare, moving only his eyes, not his head. He is very adept at appearing only marginally interested.

"Why d'you think I've been asking?" she responds, wrinkling her nose at him. She wonders privately whether it's real notoriety or simple egoism that makes him so sure she ought to know about him. Looking at the expression on the guard's face...it seems like the first.

"I'm not from around here. Rifter and all." She shrugs, and then smiles at him - "So, you know, that means that I haven't got any assumptions or anything like that. No reasons to doubt your stories or to make what you say fit my narrative."

"Your narrative, eh." She doesn't seem to understand, he thinks, the more you try to convince a man he can trust you, the less he's likely to do it—but that's kids for you.

Ah, bugger it. It's not as though he's in a hurry to get back to the embroidery.

"All right, all right. If it'll get you to stop pestering me." Please don't stop pestering him, he's very lonely. "I suppose I can tell you about the last time I lived here. That's before all the," with a gesture to vaguely indicate the guard, and his plain prison issue clothes, "you know. This."

He takes a moment to cough into his hand, clear his throat and so on, then folds his arms on the table and leans over them a bit.

"Back then, before the uprising and the war, the Gallows didn't belong to the Inquisition, it belonged to the Templar Order. The Circle was here, too—where the mages were made to live, for their protection and for ours. Didn't turn out so well for anyone, that... but that's a story you could hear anywhere.

"I was a templar, myself. Still am, deep down, I like to think." Determined not to go down that road for once, he presses on. "Anyway, we all lived in shared accommodations, two or more to a room, much like they do now in those towers. One year, I was paired up with a young templar from Ferelden—an absolute wreck, he was, jumping at every sound, suspicious of every shadow. Had terrible nightmares, too. Would wake up in a panic most nights." Another laugh creeps into his voice, this time softer. "The first time I went over there to shake him out of his dream, he awoke to see my shape there in the dark over his bed and nearly hit the ceiling, and it was so sudden it gave me a fright, and I cursed out loud. There was all kinds of commotion in the barracks... a few men even came running up in their smallclothes with swords drawn. One of them had stopped to put on his helmet. Looked like a right tit."

Smiling crookedly, Samson goes to cup his chin in his palm—but glances into it, instead, and puts it back down where it was. That crease between his eyebrows has just reappeared. "Anyway, poor kid felt like a right tit. He could hardly look anyone in the eye for days. After that, if it seemed he could use some help to escape a dream, I made certain to crouch so he wouldn't think a demon had really come for him in the night."

Oh. She realizes, over the course of his story, exactly why he's here, and why he's under guard. He's one of the red templars. She hadn't really expected that the term would be so literal - that they'd truly have red in their eyes. She'd thought it'd be more metaphorical. But, well, there you were.

Is she horrified, talking to one of them? As he speaks, she takes a brief moment to absently probe her feelings. She knows some things about the red templars: they'd turned to red lyrium to give them particular powers, they'd allied with Corypheus because they'd thought that he'd help them. She's heard rumors that lyrium is beastly addictive. It's hard, therefore, not to feel some pity for a man who'd followed a leader who'd made him promises, who was struggling with a chemical need, who had been used by the people who ought to have been protecting him - No. She doesn't have any hatred or horror for him.

"Poor thing," she says, ostensibly about the templar from Ferelden. It is a sweet story, at the end of the day. Maybe not a happy one, not with all the talk of nightmares and demons, but it's sweet. So there's a little smile that touches her lips as she asks - "Did you become friends, then? The two of you?"

Samson nods at her assertion: yes, indeed, poor little thing. He hadn't any chance to ask if the nightmares still persist today—rather, he had many chances, but none of them seemed ideal. It's a bit hard not to second guess your own judgment when your track record resembles his.
Just a bit.

And oh, that question gives him pause. What's the right way to answer this? Is there one? Finally, he decides, "I suppose you could say that. When I think back on it, I always find myself wishing there'd been more time." He falls silent, then, reflection in the lowering of his eyes and the cant of his head. It's not a silence asking to be filled.

"But," wow, that barely came out. Clearing his throat—there, better. "But, he went on to become Knight-Captain, and now he's the Commander of the Inquisition. That's right." Two smart raps of his knuckle on the tabletop. So there, demons.

"Oh - " Kitty doesn't pay a great deal of attention to the Inquisition hierarchy, especially the ones off in Skyhold, but certain names are unavoidable. So - "Cullen Rutherford? It was him you were friends with?"

That could explain why he's still alive, she supposes. If he had a friend in a high place, that might have been enough to preserve him. That's a slightly troubling thought - it oughtn't work like that, and mercy should be given equally to all - but it would explain a bit.

"When did you...split apart?"

"That's right," he answers, with a nod, satisfied that she guessed correctly—that she, a Rifter, pays attention enough to know the names of advisors. More so that she didn't dismiss it as a fabrication. Why in the world, after all, would someone like the Commander want to know someone like him?

Ah. Another question. His left hand, resting in a fist on the table, squeezes—knuckles stand out through his skin, creamy pale—and then relaxes. Whatever sentiment lives in that gesture does not appear anywhere else, least of all his face, where the full shape of his mouth goes crooked with something approaching fondness.

"Maker's balls, but you're nosy. Anyone ever tell you that?" He goes on, though, not giving her time to protest. "It was years back we went our separate ways. I left the Order, while he stayed on."

The guard, silent with patience until now, snorts aloud, and Samson preempts an interruption from either of them by raising his hand sharply. Stop.

"That'll do, Ser Brice."

Being neither under this traitor's command nor accustomed to taking orders from prisoners, Ser Brice rapidly achieves the ruddy appearance of a man who would love to beat the hell out of another man, but values his job over immediate satisfaction and so instead exercises a heroic degree of self-restraint.

Kitty's eyes flick over to observes Ser Brice's rather stuffed expression. On the one hand, he obviously left the templars to join the red templars, which is a wicked, awful organization. So she oughtn't like him, and she ought to feel sympathy for Ser Brice. But at the same time, Samson's a prisoner and doesn't allow that to cow him - he's just so bold and cheeky.

She lifts a hand to cover her smile, not wanting to frustrate Ser Brice further. A clearing of her throat, and she manages to banish the last traces of laughter from her face.

"Well," she says, because she senses that he's going to start digging in his heels soon enough, and she wants to smooth the path a bit. "Another nosy question. You're cooped up in the castle, right? Is there anything you want that I could get for you? I don't know, chocolate something?"

Ser Brice saw that, Kitty Jones!!! But he will not let his personal feelings direct his duty, and so resolves to stare straight ahead at nothing, like a pissed-off statue, until the prisoner's yard time comes to an end. Then he will have the satisfaction of slamming a door in Samson's face. Soon... soon.

Samson can't help chuckling, himself, and so treats Kitty to a glimpse of his crooked teeth. One of them, crowded among its brethren, rather resembles a fang. They are clean, though, just for the record. More or less. Anyway, it's not the guard's temper that amuses him so, but the offer she's made.

"Chocolate something, eh. Nah... never had much of a sweet tooth, honestly. You needn't trouble yourself." At last he sits up in his chair, looking like he might be ready to leave, but he's only making room to wipe his hand—his right hand—against his buckled prisoner's shirt before offering it to Kitty across the table. "Name's Samson, by the way."

It's a large hand, with long fingers, befitting a man of his stature. Pale and faintly trembling. The fingers are cold.

Even though she does find his appearance still a bit disconcerting, a bit off-putting, she takes his hand without reservation. And then immediately wrinkles her nose.

"Your hands are freezing," she says, and then declares, firmly - "Gloves, then. Good fleece-lined ones. You can't possibly turn that down. And perhaps a hat - it's chilly and getting chillier, after all. And I bet this awful old place gets drafts, doesn't it?"

Being well accustomed to such a reaction, Samson is neither offended nor ashamed, and in fact continues to look entertained as this cheeky little bird decides what's best for him.

"Got some gloves, actually—it's just that I've yet to wear them. Besides," wiggling his fingers briefly, "they're always like that. Comes with the lyrium, I'm afraid. Might be worth remembering for the next time you shake a hand."

"What do you mean?" The lecturing is paused for just a moment as it gives way to curiosity. Her head tilts very slightly to the side. "Lyrium makes you cold?"

Lyrium is, on the whole, a very strange-seeming and mysterious substance, and one she doesn't understand a bit of. Which naturally means that she wants to know everything about it, even though it seems rather horrifying, on the whole.

open; left to the wind and rain

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