faderift | open | then in the pounding of my heart

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open | then in the pounding of my heart

WHO: Myr & you!
WHAT: new eyes who dis
WHEN: Throughout Harvestmere, backdated to the team's return from the Abbey on the White Cliffs.
WHERE: The Gallows & Kirkwall
NOTES: potential cautionary cw for trauma & gore mentions

Their return was no triumphant one. What had started hopeful for alliance and aid from the Abbey on the White Cliffs had collapsed under the weight of the horror there and taken so many lives with it. One of the Inquisition's own is dead. A potential ally is lost. And a power from beyond the rifts has warped the world past bearing, making plain once more the awful danger rifters themselves could be.

As for Myr, subject to a miracle hidden in the heart of the whole thing--

He doesn't hide from his friends in the Inquisition, exactly. Doesn't shirk his duty or vanish into his quarters. But while he's often there in body there's some part of him missing in spirit, curled in on itself to reflect on what had happened.

i.

He spends his first full day back in the Gallows undoing his locator glyphs, one by one.

They could simply be unsnarled all at once without him walking the halls; he could have done it the moment he set foot on the Gallows' docks. But he has not seen the ugly place in person but for flashes granted by the Provost; he doesn't know the look of the halls, only how the glyphs stand in relation to one another and the sound of their chiming. Their removal, but for a handful, is a chance to learn his home of the past year by sight.

He pauses often, especially by inhabited rooms; he listens to echoes and sometimes stares concerningly long at a doorframe or a wall or a bit of tapestry. Sometimes it's with a look of puzzlement; sometimes with no look at all, his mind occupied with other troubles. He's surely run into someone in all that distraction.

ii. a.

The commission to head up the Chantry Relations project had been waiting for him on his return, piled up among his other correspondence. He'd not ever seen the seal on it before but it was different from the others in the pile and so he broke it open to read, in a halting way.

It took him three re-readings to fully comprehend the letter and set it gently back down atop the pile of its fellows.

"So that's why," he remarks to the air (or anyone outside the open door). "That's why You put me there."

From the first to the very awful last of it, miracle included. He makes a small helpless noise that might be a laugh or a sob.

b. (for Cade)

Of course, he began packing immediately--what there was to pack; much of what he'd kept in the Rifts and the Veil office was proper to that project and not his at all. There are Procedures and Forms to these things, though for the life of him they're all out of order in his head right now and all that remains is he needs to occupy the space allotted him.

He did remember at least to send a message to Cade--that he was back in the Gallows, that they'd be in a new office now--though somehow it slipped his mind to mention he didn't need help urgently for the move, being quite able to find his way between rooms with laden arms now.

iii.

It isn't all for sorrow. Whatever the cost of it, he'd been given a gift he couldn't not use; and slowly, as Harvestmere wears on, he grows into the joy of seeing again.

One morning is better than the others: He rises before dawn and goes for a run about the Gallows, flat out in a way he's not been able to for years. In no fit shape for it but game to push himself, he manages a lap at that pace and a second at a slower, before settling on the stairs down to the docks to watch the light break over the windless water.

"Good morning," he greets the first person who walks near him, smile bright. "D'you know, I didn't think the sea could be that still. It never feels it, riding across."

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"Oh, welcome back!" The cheerful exclamation comes from down the hall, accompanied by the close of the door, Nari's voice getting louder as she approaches. "Putting something new into the glyphs?"

Myr doesn't seem to hear her, at first; all his attention is on the glyph in front of him. Or appears to be--he's been standing like that for nearly a minute, fingers outstretched over it but nothing apparently happening to alter its glow or chiming.

Only when she's nearly upon him does he snap out of it, letting his hand fall and looking--looking--her way. (He realizes he'd imagined her looking more like Sina, somehow, as he does.) "Thank you--removing them," he says, absently, without thinking to explain that.

Though it's probably obvious why.

And he hasn't thought to explain that either, nor that he should--nor won't until the rest of his mind catches up with him.

Nari stops suddenly, mid-step, seeing the green of them. Eyes. Myr's eyes. She notices the lack of the blindfold second, and is amused in some distant separate way that that was the order the realizations had come in, although that amusement doesn't make it to her face, which has a rather spellshocked expression slapped onto it instead. Processing.

"Oh. You... Huh. I... always thought they'd be blue." What kind of a thing is that to say? What do you say?

"...How?"

Somehow, the uncomposed guileless innocence of I always thought they'd be blue cracks through the shell around Myr better than anything else Nari could've chosen to say. "It goes better with blond," he says, aware it's inane and not caring. "I s'pose."

He lays his hand over the glyph to silence it, this time, the incessant chiming finally become annoying. "A miracle," he says once he has. "Or that's the only name I have for it."

Because even knowing it wasn't the Maker's raw power flowing through the world, it was a miracle yet.

Perhaps bizarrely, she wants to reassure him about it.

"No, no, green is nice with—" Nari squints slightly. Are they green? They're very pretty, either way. Lighter than hers. Have they got little flecks of gold?

Aren't eyes lovely?

She's staring isn't she. Suddenly she looks self-conscious, running her hand back through the little braids of her hair. (That's what the clicking's been, those little beads of carved wood and bone scattered throughout).

"—they're nice." Nari finishes lamely. And because she, like Myr himself, has something deep inside her that burns for reasons no matter the circumstance, "A miracle like magic we don't know? Or like ...something else?" And then finally registering his sort of absence, she gestures back towards the room she shares with Cade. "Um. D'you want some tea?"

Is it rude if the one you're staring at is staring back in turn? Because Myr surely is, now that he's shaken off enough of the fog to wake his curiosity. The braids and beads have his attention first, puzzling to his eyes like anything else intricate and begging a much longer look at them to sort out the mazing patterns--

He realizes what he's doing the same instant she does, averting his gaze back to the glyph with a matching air of self-consciousness. "--Thank you," he manages, as a spinal reflex, though it's the weight of his meaning it all the same. "Like--both of those, I think." There'd been a report, or would be a report, and he'd argued half-heartedly that full disclosure be made though there were very, very wise reasons not to do it, and--

He isn't sure how much he can say, or how much his heart will bear his saying; certainly not out here in the halls where anything might be overheard. Besides-- "Tea would be lovely. I don't know," and there's faint chagrin in his tone as he realizes how truthful that is, "when I last took a break."

Which is bad, for his self-regard to slip so far; he knows better when he's in his right mind. But nothing's seemed quite right since the abbey, the whole world tiled out of place and put to question.

Not remembering the last time one had taken a break and being sorry for it when reminded is something Nari identifies with on such a deep level that she breaks into a wide grin in response and takes a few steps back down the hall, gesturing for Myr to wait there.

"You're in luck, then. Along with the tea, I happen to know where Cade squirrels away pastries. I steal one or two sometimes; replace them with something else. He pretends to not know it's me." Her grin spreads wider. "Badly. Almost as badly as I pretend it isn't."

Apparently things have become easy enough between the two of them in the sharing of that space that sometimes, a little, they can play.

"If you heat some water, I'll bring over the orange spice mix I've been tinkering with and some of whatever it is I find?"

Despite Myr's mood, the easy joking--and the revelation behind it, slow as he is to grasp it--wins a small smile out of him. Life goes on beyond the edges of the darkness; it's out there waiting to grab onto, if he'd but reach for it. It's the knowing how that's hard (and the knowing if he deserves to rejoin it, marked out as he is).

"So that's where all the extras have been going from our office." It's flatter than he'd like it to sound, but...he's trying. At least. "--But you've a deal. Simon's out," on patrol, he thinks, "and he's never minded you visiting anyhow."

There's a laugh and Nari's head peeks back out just after she enters the room, "Is that where they're coming from?" She disappears again, and there are some quiet sounds of rummaging. It takes her a bit, but she returns with a wooden canister in one hand and plate in the other containing two little fruit tarts and a summer sausage.

"They're fruit tarts; apple and winter berry, I think. Seem familiar?" She grins. "And I've got a sausage too, which I know came from the market rather than the office. I know that's an odd addition to tarts but I've found it goes well with forgetting to eat and... huh." She'd scratch her head, but she can't, hands full as they are.

"I s'pose I don't have to tell you anymore, do I?"

"I might be," Myr admits, "disappearing some of them myself." His smile's a little wider for the moment she's out of the room to see it, then fades of its own accord once she's not. His attention drifts back over to the wall and the glyph before, at last, he reaches out to unravel it in a shower of sparks.

One more down. One more part of life before erased and remitted.

His attention snaps back to Nari, a little laggardly, as she reappears; he listens to her description rather than actually looking to see what she's brought because--that's how it's always been, hasn't it? "No," he says, then: "I mean--yes, they do, but I don't s'pose you do have to tell me--but I'd--"

He trails off, expression puzzled and a little sad as he cards through the snarl of thoughts between his ears. At last, firmly: "I don't mind hearing it from you even so. You've always been so kind about it." And the world is out of joint to think she doesn't need to; to realize the fabric of caring, signs and tokens, built up between them over months of friendship has been shorn apart.

Not for the worse. But it's strange to find himself missing it even so. "Let's get those out of sight before Cade notices they're gone," and this time the joke comes off a little better, as he beckons her two doors down the hall.

The room's--much changed, with Simon's moving in, the two separate beds pushed together (covered over with an extra blanket) and a tidy workspace set up with Simon's creations on what had been Nari's desk. The Comtesse has not changed and sticks her snout out from beneath the bed to peer at Nari with suspicious inkdrop eyes.

"Should be a clear spot on my desk," Myr remarks, taking his staff down from off his back and hanging it up with only a little feeling around for the peg. Old habits.

It's hard to see him like this; worn, distracted, absent. It's unlike her friend to be any of those things. In fact, it's usually quite the opposite. No matter how much he has on his plate, he's at it with a kind of dogged vivacity that makes her smile, the kind of intense focus that she's always felt meant whatever it was he was doing was in good hands.

The last time, it had been during the lyrium fever, when he'd been so worried about Simon he'd gone sleepless for days. Had visited and revisited theories until the words had stopped meaning things and had become just sounds. Whatever this magic was, this miracle, it had come with something as big as the idea of losing the man he loved. She smiles, though, as he jokes, and makes to cover the pastries with her hand and look around before speeding her steps into the room they'd used to share.

That smile can't help but broaden to see Simon's presence all over the room, so very obvious even when he's out. The sausage and most of the pastry ends up on the indicated spot, although a small pinch off one of the tarts is offered ceremoniously to the Comtesse with a formal apology for abandoning her and a fervent wish that Simon's woodshavings are acceptable replacement snacks.

"Speaking of Simon's woodshavings," Nari says as she gets back up from her respectful kneel, "It's nice to see the contents of that desk haven't changed too much." She leans in to peer at a half-finished something rather than picking it up, not wanting to disturb the workspace, then straightens and offers out the two cheesecloth bags she'd brought to Myr. "Bigger one's the tea proper, smaller's extra spices, in case you feel like..." she scratches her head and grins. "Well. 'Cleaning out your nose a little,' says Anders, but I like it."

There's another moment of strangeness, that littlest unreal disconnection, as Myr turns to watch Nari offer the Comtesse her due and the nug gravely accept it: All a variation on something he'd heard before, but to see it in more than his imagination changes the whole tenor of the thing. His gaze lingers overlong on little details of it: The exact shape of a nug's hand, how delicately Nari extends the crumb of pastry and how the Comtesse tucks it against her body before vanishing beneath the bed again.

Maker, let all of it never stop seeming like a miracle--even once he's got his wits about him once again. He gives that characteristic shake of his head to clear the cobwebs (though it never seems to last for long, lately) as she gets to her feet. "He knows a good workbench when he sees one; after you'd given it your blessing, there wasn't a fitter one in all the Gallows." So of course he had to move in, an unspoken joke pulled lightly over what they both knew brought the templar to the room.

He holds out his hands to accept the bags from her as she offers; tea, at least, gives him something to do, with hands and with magic, and if he's focused on a task he can't drift away-- "Ah," he voices without meaning it at Anders' name. "Anders--said that, did he?"

It shouldn't be something worth stumbling over; he knows well enough that the other mage is friends with as much of the Gallows as Myr himself is. It's never been a problem before-- But then before they'd almost achieved some sort of truce and that's dead as the abbeyfolk now. Move on, don't fix on it. "S'pose I'll give it a try; it's the time of year to need it." The words come out with a version of his cheer that's decidedly forced, and he'd wince to hear it if he had it in him.

Instead he sets himself about the business of brewing water (kettle on the brazier, coals stirred to life with a snapped spark of fire pulled from the Fade) and arranging their cups beside the plate of food. "How much of these d'you want?" Probably not the healthy teaspoon of the second bag he's putting in his own; a Hasmali's never met something too spicy to eat. Or drink, as the case may be. "Or shall I let you do your own?"

Edited 2018-11-11 06:58 (UTC)

"About half of what you've got, if you don't mind," Nari replies with a bit of a stretch as she watches him, "Too much more and it makes me sneeze." She can hear the strain in the lightheartedness he wears as easily as his robes—A brief prayer: let this be temporary—and thins her lips in concern. She'll wait for Myr to come to the table with the tea and have a moment to sit before she looks at him with the open watchful way she has, a conscientiousness he'll recognize from her tone, and gently asks, "What happened?"

"Half it is."

The tea doesn't take long to fix once Myr applies his usual dutiful concentration to the task. In short order he joins Nari with the cups--takes a moment to rub his thumb across an irregularity in the glaze on one before presenting it to her. Then he sits and wraps his hands around his own cup for the warmth of it, looking down into it a moment as if some kind of consolation lurked at the bottom.

Barring that, some way to frame the answer to what she'd asked--to present it all neatly as a story rather than a disconnected jagged-edged jumble of events. It had not come out right when he poured it into Simon's ear the night prior, disjointed and sometimes through tears; it hadn't all made sense and there were lost-tooth holes in it he kept worrying at.

Even now. He breathes out--a sigh on a pretext of blowing on his tea--before looking up to meet her gaze. His voice is passing even but he's four years out of practice at keeping hurt from his eyes. "There was something precious there and we destroyed it."

She can little help but make the same movement he had once she's handed the cup, her thumb finding the imperfection in it in the absent way an artisan searches any work with their hands.

Something precious destroyed. That seemed to be the way of the Inquisition, sometimes. It made a better hammer than fine chisel, something that was undoubtedly necessary in the fight against such an overbearing immensity of destruction, but not everything was immensity. But who could tell about any situation? Would the work they were sent to do be rough or fine?

Nari sighs as well, although she makes no pretext for it, her lips thinning at the end of it with sympathy. Myr's hands, with the intricate spells they wove like a spider makes a web, weren't suited to broad strokes. How much would it ache to be part of one?

Saying nothing, she sips her tea and watches. Waits.

The silence she gives him stretches out into seconds, into a minute; it's at least not uncomfortable, smoothed by all the practice they've got in sitting and listening to the other think. His gaze is on her all through it but his focus isn't, his eyes clouded and distant as he musters his resolve to speak of the abbey as it was.

It's a tender memory even now--fragile and warm with hope. That tenderness colors his voice even where the words would seem to bely it: "The abbey was an awful place." Or awe-full, for both were true. "It got the worst of Ferelden's weather--wet, and cold, and I don't know the sun ever broke through the clouds in all the time we were there. The whole thing was sorely in need of repairs and they couldn't keep a fire lit to save their lives for the drafts. And they'd so many wounded--and dying--they didn't have the skill to care for, piled to the rafters waiting for their miracles."

And how suspicious that had seemed to those with a mind for healing; how awful, how exploitative, how obviously evidence of the Chantry's perfidy wherever it spread. Not a charitable thought spared that people with divine power come on them all unexpected might not know what they'd muddled into, might be overwhelmed by all of it to the loss of their good sense. Not a shred of willingness to look at what was there instead of what was imagined--

He's gripping his cup too hard, paused halfway to another drink. He completes the gesture--gets his mouthful exactly wrong and has to swallow it painfully against the sudden urge to choke. Sets his tea down roughly to free his hands and one little misstep follows another until he's sitting there with both elbows in sloshed tea and his face in his hands, making noises between wheezing and expletives.

"Maker fff--Maker damn it. They--deserved--better." Which doesn't explain a damned thing but it's an effort right now to, well, anything coherently.

She's up when the tea spills for a cloth that is quickly ascertained as being kept in the same place it had been when they'd shared the room, returning to the table to set it to absorbing the heat of the tea, her arm wrapping around his shoulders at the same time.

Apart from Cade and Korrin, Nari doesn't touch much. Not casually, not formally, stiff and stilted when it's initiated by anyone else. So when she does, it's with an intensity of singular purpose that is immediately perceptible in the hard strength of her arms, the pinpoint of a finework artisan's focus. She says nothing but is, unarguably, There.

With the tea dealt with and Nari's arm around his shoulders--and so, so quiet--it's easier for Myr to find the pace of his breathing again, to center himself and undo the talons anger's squeezed around his chest. (Imagine each inhalation being just deep enough to stretch that constricting band, leave it laxer as you exhale. Don't speak until you've mastered the swell of emotion; a mage without control is a danger.)

"Thank you," he manages at last, through splayed fingers. Goes groping for some joke at himself or the situation, some fragment of levity to unwind the tension and put them back to something easier to bear, something that doesn't leave his internal wounds quite so open to inspection.

There isn't anything he can lay hold of. There's probably a lesson in that but right now it escapes him and he lets it.

What did it matter in a world that rewarded faith, kindness, and hope with suspicion and death?

For something like this she goes far enough to lean her head down to rest against the top of his, the fineness of the hair that falls forward against his cheek light and slightly warm. She'll sit there for a long moment before giving the spilled tea on the table a final wipe and picking up his cup in the other hand to go fill it again, the soft sounds of liquid and the drop of a sachet of spices issuing from behind him before she reappears to place it down on the table and take her seat across from him again.

He'd said they'd deserved better. That the Inquisition had found something precious and destroyed it. Nari thins her lips again and takes a careful mouthful of her own tea, rolling the thoughts around in her head with the liquid.

"But someone got an idea in their head, and people got hurt." It's just a guess, but isn't that always how it goes? Greed, fear, righteousness, and the power to act on it? The Inquisition wasn't immune, especially with the strength of their lofty purpose, and was full of shem'len besides, thinking and deciding as fast as their lives had always gone.

He's grateful for all of it--the touch, the fresh tea, the fact she's able to put words to it with such succinct calm when he can't (not a bad guess at all).

"Yes." Quietly said, as Myr finally unfolds from himself; reaches to take the cloth and sponge a little more tea out of his sleeves. Maker be thanked it wasn't that much of a spill. "And I don't know how much-- I don't-- I don't know how much of it was my fault."

A pause stretches out after the admission, because that isn't the hard part, however much guilt stings. This is: "And I don't know how to forgive what wasn't."

That last is more than familiar. Nari breathes out slowly through her teeth.

"Maybe you don't," she says, finally. "Maybe you live with it, and hold it like a stone. Maybe you live around it, like a tree growing around an arrow stuck in it. Maybe it becomes part of you.

"I hate them sometimes. I hate the sound of their laughter. I hate the block of their frames. I hate what they did to me. My clan. The People." There's little room for doubt as to who she's talking about. "I thought I could drown it in blood." She shakes her head. "But I couldn't. And I was angrier because I couldn't. Hated more." Nari huffs a sigh through her nose and lifts her tea, although she only looks into it. "So maybe you let it be, and you feel the change of the weather in it sometimes, and maybe it gets smaller, and maybe it doesn't, but it doesn't get bigger." Her lips curl upward in a wan lopsided smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes.

"Maybe you don't," she says, and grief (and guilt and fury) have made enough of a hole in his boundless conviction that nothing in him rallies with I have to. There's space enough for her words to echo, for the idea to grow to fit: Maybe an absolute forgiveness wasn't possible, in a world the Maker had created to harbor precious little that was certain. Maybe he can admit this limitation with the grace he has some of his others and find another way to go on.

Maybe you grow around it, the little cherry-plum clinging to the rocks that choked its roots.

He looks up as she continues, pulled out of his own gloom; having heard her on the eve Sina's forest burned, there's no surprise in him for what she says. (The incongruity of her trying to drown anything in blood may register later.) For all the difference being raised in a Circle makes in seeing them as more of the Maker's own--every elf has a story, a reason, large or small to distrust.

He has a letter. The Dalish have chapters, volumes springing out of a fundamental betrayal. He reaches out a hand to her, palm up in silent offer; he's here, he hears.

"Then I will, and see where it takes me." She'd found Cade. Maybe something as miraculous would happen if he simply lets things be.

"It can hardly hurt worse than tearing at it does."

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