Just when I think I find the trick

[keenly]

WHO: Colin + you
WHAT: Recent events catch up to him. In the worst way.
WHEN: Present, early morning.
WHERE: The apothecary in the Gallows.
NOTES: Warning: PTSD. Like, a lot of it. No holds barred. Specific triggers will include claustrophobia, agoraphobia, sleeping panic attacks, emotional flashbacks, mostly battle- and Uldred-related but may include mentions of past sexual abuse because ultimately it isn't divided into little boxes. Since it's a public space, it's not closed to existing CR or anything, but strangers may find this a lot to take on.

Of all his dreams, none are worse than the ones where he is found.

He snaps awake in the morning, shaking, sheets cold and drenched in sweat. His eyes look up and shadows shape into shades, folds of cloth into demons.

Not again not again not again not again--

He can't do this here. Audra isn't in the room at the moment but she can be, she can come back at any time and he can't be seen, he can't be found again even by someone who never hurt him, can't can't can't can't cant.

Colin races down the hallway like a flash, barefoot and unkempt, the world overexposed around him. The only things he can really focus on are things he needs to run away from. The apothecary door slams open--the store is not open yet, it is too early, but despite being a technically public place it is unlikely to be populated and there is a closet that locks and he needs dark and quiet and private. The closet door hits the wall as he flings it open and slips inside, slamming it behind him and locking it before collapsing on the floor and wailing into his hands.

He hates it, hates how loud and impossible this is, hates that it seizes on him and possesses like a demon, hates that he isn't strong enough to lock it in his body and needs a closet to contain it. With the muffled cries, he strikes his face repeatedly with one hand, stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

But at least in this small, dark space, he is safe. He is hidden. He can't be reached by the shapes that warp around him in the light. But he is also trapped. The walls are too close, the darkness is closer, and if he opens the door, he leaves himself exposed. There is nowhere left to go. If that lock opens, he will die.

Comments

[coquettish_trees]

It is, she finds, a bit like mixing paints. If most of the paints looked the same. Alexandrie imagines that just as she can tell the difference between true white, eggshell, chalk, and ivory, Colin can tell the difference between all the things he gives her to mix together.

Yeast is... well. The idea of something living going into bread is disconcerting, and her face says as much.

She wipes her hands gently on a cloth, attempting out of habit to keep the apron he'd lent her as pristine as she might any other article of clothing she wears, and thinks about his question.

"No. Or at least, I did not. I imagine the Empress and her advisers may have, especially Madame de Fer. Her witch," said casually, "although I know not if such a woman was overmuch concerned with the fates of the mages in Circles. Our spheres hardly overlapped." She pours the water, sinks her fingers into the dough with some trepidation, although the sensation is quickly an appealing one. She giggles quietly at the stickiness of it, stretches it simply because she can, and wiggles her fingers at him.

"But no. Until I became fond of—" Loki. "—you, I had no cause to think on mages at all. I had no family in the Circles to care for the fate of, nor were there any within the ranks of the peerage to consider." Alexandrie lifts her shoulders slightly with a light look of apology, sprinkles the flour over the dough as directed. "I suppose if I had been asked, my first thought should have been puzzlement as to the question, and my second... I should have said study. Of magic, of the casting of it, of the history. Mages of the past, perhaps. How to be responsible with the double-edged gift of the Maker. I would have thought the Templar there for protection of both mages from the less pleasant populace and the populace from the less pleasant mages, and thought nothing of what sort of environment that might produce. They were a thing entirely apart."

[keenly]

It's what he figured, and yet he doesn't find himself especially angered by it. Tired, maybe. He thinks it's typical, exactly what the Chantry would want, and he should have expected nothing more.

"I'm impressed you were told it's a gift," he says casually. "We were told it's a curse. Sort of like darkspawn, I suppose. A sign of the Maker's judgment. A lot of people I knew wished the Maker would forgive them for...whatever it was they did to earn it. And the Templars..."

He starts to rotate the dough into a ball before setting it on the floured table and kneading it a couple of times.

"Watch me while I do this. See? We've got to do this for as long as it takes for the dough to get quite stretchy without breaking."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie copies the motion awkwardly, but settles into its repetitive nature soon enough. "No-one told me anything, save that what cast you out of the ranks of the nobility in the South gained you entry in the North. I suppose it is a curse, here. But not in and of itself, I think. It seems to me it is made so." And in the Imperium, made a blessing.

"Do you think you would have been happier," she asks after a short pause, "were you born in Tevinter?"

The Imperium is hardly avoidable in a conversation on magic. What she'd learned from Loki was near all of what she knew, and watching him cast so freely had been like watching a bird fly. She'd told Thor near as much. That she had never thought of what a panther might be outside of a menagerie until she'd seen one wild. It had made her hate the cage. Even now, even after being quite literally burned by flame pulled from the Fade and made real, the idea that mages were born and pinioned and taught to hate their wings... that those born without them were taught the same...

A slight absent flicker of his fingers for candles while he read, an unnecessarily grand gesture entirely for her delight to set the hearth ablaze. Blankets pulled around them when they lay curled together, far too exhausted to fetch them. Waking up giggling helplessly with the flickering tickle of a forked tongue on her nose.

Alexandrie releases the dough of a sudden to turn and place her hands hard on the counter behind her. Stares determinedly at the splay of her flour-dusted fingers on it and pretends not to notice the uneven wet circle that appears alongside them. She sniffs decisively, then turns back and resumes the work she'd left with a small apologetic smile.

"Forgive me. You were saying?"

[keenly]

Colin winces slightly, feeling a bit awkward. The class issue is a whole other conversation, but he tries to hit the basics quickly.

"I'd still be the poor son of poor parents," he says gently. "Even if they'd risen me to a noble rank--which wouldn't be the case, nobles don't like adding to their competition--I'd be so ill-prepared for all of that, I doubt I'd make it very long. I might be treated as badly up there as I was in the Circle. Despite promises."

He turns back to the bread, taking it from her hands and working it again, showing her the right way.

"I was told the Circle was an equalizer, that I'd be the same as the children of nobles and I would never worry again about all of that. I was also told how everything would be clean, that I would have three meals a day and a bathtub and a lice comb, which I found to be completely insulting--is that what people really think we live like? We were poor, but we were clean, and my parents worked hard and brought in enough food, as far as I knew. Some people are much poorer than we were. That we all lived in one room, that wasn't anything. I certainly didn't know I was poor. But I, I meant to talk about the Circle.

"It wasn't what I'd been led to believe. This crystal palace, it was just a cold old tower. Noble mages were treated better, though everyone denied it. Everyone also said the Templars protect us as well as the people--first time I heard I wasn't a person--but I never saw any of that. And there were a lot of chances for me to see it."

He passes the loaf back to her.

"I'd...I'd been there a year, and we started hearing screaming upstairs. Apprentices are kept on the lower levels, see. Some ran toward the stairs to see what happened, and I never saw them again. After a while, some Templars came down the stairs and started running for the Great Doors. They're, they're those doors you see at the lowest level, they're designed to shut tight, and they're armored so nothing can get through. Someone was shouting that there were abominations. The Templars, they retreated through the doors, and they shut them."

The last two words have a different sound to the rest, a wobble and a groan. Colin is clearly getting upset again, and quickly. He leans back against the table, hands clutching the edge.

[coquettish_trees]

To work hard for food so that one could live another day in which one would then work hard for food and on and on and then pass the same to ones children as inheritance is enough to crease Alexandrie's forehead with distress—at least until she notices and smooths the expression. It will come back, as he speaks, until her mouth falls open to hear the last of his words.

The breath is in her lungs, ready to rip from her in anger that the one thing, the one thing the Templar were meant to do, and they fled from it and left their charges to deal with... with that.

(She can still hear it. She'll always hear it.)

But she keeps it pressed inside her until she can let it slowly deflate through her nose. What use now, the tight energy of her anger? Instead, she places her hand over one of his, tries to encourage it away from its grip on the table so she can hold it between her own.

[keenly]

Two. Two things the Templars are meant to do, and they only seemed concerned with the one--protecting everyone besides mages. Not that Colin is exactly an unbiased source. As it is, he's describing a memory rather than telling a story. He can't say what happened on the other side of those doors, or what happened upstairs beforehand, beyond what he'd been told after the fact. But describing the memory means reliving it, and that is the worst part of this. He has never done this before, not in detail, and never had to. Maybe people like Inessa have had it a little easier because of pure denial; they never tried to narrate this horror that happened. A number of children like her were protected by Wynne, Petra, and Kinnon. Colin had been stupid enough to let his legs make his decisions for him.

At the touch of her hand, he starts to breathe, gripping back like a vise and prying his eyes open to peek at the reality he has around him now. He is not there. Whatever his brain tells him, he is not there. He blinks, breathes deep, forges on.

"I hid in a wall. I just knew, I knew no one was going to save me, so I hid. I think it was...it was days or weeks before it was over. They told me when my fever broke that they found me still in the wall, fighting and screaming when they tried to take me out."

[coquettish_trees]

It's not the same in the slightest, but she remembers what it felt like to be in a hostile place with no-one but herself, betrayed by those she'd thought to care for her. Can imagine what it might have been, had she gone back to court without Emile. Can imagine what it might have been had she not been to lunch with the Asgards when Corypheus attacked.

But for days? For weeks? In constant terror with the sounds of it, any of them the last before whatever it was found you?

"How awful," she says with quiet gravity, presses his hand more tightly. His grip has begun to hurt, but it hardly matters.

[keenly]

He rests his cheek against her head, a tear rolling into her hair. The tightness in his chest is easing. Saying these things, taking the memories out of his head and spinning them into the story of his life, it's making something shift. He's not sure if it's a good shift or a bad one, or how long it will last, but for the moment, he feels a little calmer.

"When they retook the tower, they patched up the wall I'd hid in. Just as well. I couldn't hide in it again. Anyway, by the time a Templar started...targeting me, I was too tall to hide very well. I knew no one would save me then, either. So I started bribing the other Templars to protect me from him. First thing in the Circle I was good at, was getting myself out of trouble."

He glances down at her with a little smile, albeit a damp one.

"I'm sorry I hid. I'm just...scared of people, really. And wide spaces can always hold another person. A closet really can't."

[coquettish_trees]

"Do you fear still?" She asks, reaching up with the hand that isn't fully entangled with his to smooth an errant bit of hair away from his face. Smiles a little despite the weight of her words to see the trace of flour she leaves. "That no-one will come for you? Or that someone you do not wish to will?"

[keenly]

He lifts his head to nod, a flour-covered finger quietly wiping at a tear and leaving a white streak on his cheek.

"Yes. Mostly the first. Even beyond reason. I mean I...got in trouble again, recently, and people came to rescue me. And in battle, when I was wounded, you were there. Shouldn't that have healed it? Instead, I feel raw. Like the wound's been ripped open again."

He glances away.

"Maybe I don't want to be rescued. I want...I want that kid in the wall to be rescued. He's still there, and no one can do anything about it."

[coquettish_trees]

"But he is not," says Alexandrie, holding his chin between her thumb and forefinger and looking at him intently before pulling gently to tilt his head down and raising to her toes so she can kiss his forehead. "He came out, and grew up, and became a man who bakes bread and heals others and looks fine in green velvet. He survived, mon cher. More than that. He thrived."

[keenly]

"Then..." He's blinking tears away again, gently taking her hand to loosen her grip so he doesn't have to look at her. "Then why doesn't it feel different? Why is my head still in there? And don't say it's because I survived so much, because feeling sorry for myself hasn't done anything for me."

[coquettish_trees]

She lets him move her hand and look away. Sighs quietly and dusts her hand on the apron.

"I shall tell you whenever it is I know the answer if you promise to do the same if you discover the reason first. It may be that the both of us shall wake in terror sometimes when we are old and grey." Should they all live that long. "It may be that even though he grew to become old and grey, the boy shall always be in the wall." She squeezes his hand gently.

"But you have told me where he is, and I promise to always come looking for him."

[keenly]

He can't help it; a little chuckle whuffs out of him, as well as a little smile. His eyes are damp, but he finally looks somewhat cheered up. He goes in for a hug, giving her a loving squeeze to thank her for what she has said.

"I'll try to let you know when I need you," he agrees. "Maybe a code word over the crystals or something, with my location. You can do the same with me. Though it could be a bit tricky, with the ferry not running after midnight."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie purses her lips slightly.

"Must you persist in living in the Gallows?" she asks, a playful chiding that must have immediately reminded her of something. She squeezes him and then leans back, taking him by the shoulders excitedly. "Mon Créateur! Geneviève has received the summons she has waited for all her life, to join the personal guard of the Empress, and though I of course deeply mourn us being parted again... well!" She smiles brightly. "I shall then have a room, and you must come and stay in it."

[keenly]

Colin hesitates. His expression wavers between smiling and staring in horror. Him, living in Hightown? Near the best markets? Away from this horrorscape of a Circle? In a nicer bed than he has ever seen? Surrounded by judgy nobles and their judgy looks and...

You know, he can live with judgy people. He might, might, have more in common with them than he thinks. He knows how to foil cutpurses. And this isn't Orlais, or even Ferelden. It's possible to rise above one's station here, though maybe not for a mage. But if it's possible for a common person to rise up to, say, Champion of Kirkwall, it must be possible for him to live peacefully in Hightown with a good friend, far from the Great Doors of the Gallows.

His gaze, which ticked away at the suggestion, goes back to her, and his face decides to smile.

"I'd really like that."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie doesn't make a habit of being worried she's overstepped, but the feeling visits her briefly as Colin looks away, his face going through a rapidly shifting spectrum of emotion in reaction to her invitation.

But he smiles, and she smiles, and he agrees, and she claps her hands together lightly.

"Très bien! I shall inform you with alacrity once the space becomes available and we," by which of course she means her household staff, "shall move you in directly."