[closed] you can't open your eyes for a while

[faithlikeaseed]

WHO: Myrobalan Shivana, Vandelin Elris
WHAT: a homecoming
WHEN: backdated to [waves hands]
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: potential cw for character death & injury

He'd told Simon about what had happened in the abbey before he'd come home; he had not told Van, and for that he feels strangely remiss as he stands before his cousin's door and works himself up to knocking.

There are any number of reasons he can lay out for why he hadn't: The crystals only worked so often and there was so much else to do in those last frantic hours; he didn't know how to explain it that his fervidly agnostic cousin would believe; that grief and guilt and other things lay so thick on his tongue he'd not wanted to speak at all after a point. They are all true but also excuses--

In the end, it came down to this: He didn't know how to say part of this was so you won't bear the guilt of it anymore, and so he hadn't said a word even when the crystals worked again and he had all those idle hours to curl in on himself on the boat back from Ferelden. (A creature of the crowds, the Circle and the family, the retreat hadn't been good for him when he needed people the most. Yet there was no one he trusted wholly there, and no one in the Gallows could spare the hours he needed of their time.)

But here he is now and he'll have to come up with a way to say it in short order, and words for an apology as well if the rumors have run so far ahead of him that Van already knows of what transpired-- And so because they won't come any faster for all his dithering, because he thinks much better--when he thinks at all--on his feet, he lifts his hand and knocks.

"Van? It's me."