faderift | OPEN: Kirkwail

OPEN: Kirkwail

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: Ghosts
WHEN: Wintermarch 20
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: OOC post. More content warnings than you can shake a stick at, probably, including allusions to slavery and violence in the body of the log post. Please use appropriate warnings in the subject lines for your own threads.

The storm sweeps in like an assassin: unexpected, in the dark, and throwing sharp pricks of sleet at exposed eyes and noses with expert aim and enough force to almost draw blood if the angle is right. Half an hour after the clouds crest the cliffs is all it takes for the city to retract indoors and huddle around fireplaces, settling in for a long night that will, unforeseen, turn into a long two days.

The Gallows, too, is pelted with ice; the walls of the cliffs and the fortress protect much of it from the worst of the wind, but when it can find a path over or through the walls, it slams through windows or doors to scatter papers and snuff out fires.

In the dark, in the rain, hurrying between towers or already accustomed to jumping firelight casting strange shadows and the wind howling like a wounded animal, people might be forgiven if they don't notice at first. But there's a hanging in the courtyard, a dozen translucent wisps of bodies dangling from the idea of nooses, and there's a girl's voice in the basement of the templar tower screaming for her mother, and there's a ghostly man in the library holding the blade of a knife to his palm and whispering this is it, this is it—or maybe there isn't, actually, when you lift your head to pay closer attention.

But as the night wears on they multiply, and they brighten, and even if you haven't noticed them, they begin to notice you.

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What is this? What's - What's this wrinkle in the game? There have been some who have seemed to suffer illusions of things they wished for. So perhaps this is that. Perhaps some perverse, deranged part of his soul has dreamed up a fantasy in which Alexandrie cried for him. He's thought of it lately - as he's watched her with red eyes, weeping for her Vint - so perhaps that's what summoned this up. But -

But. No. This isn't something strange for Lexie. She recognizes it. She knows it intimately. This is hers. Maybe real - maybe not - maybe a true memory, maybe just something she wished for - but regardless. There's some part of her that mourns it all. Everything that happened between them. And he feels -

Revulsion. Or maybe that's not the right word. She doesn't disgust him, exactly - that's not really it - But in the midst of all that self-pity, wondering why didn't she cry for me?, he never considered the consequences of her having done so. And the consequences are that it is revolting that he did that to her. It is revolting that she was brought down to that debased level.

Maybe. Or maybe it's none of that at all. Maybe he feels sick for other reasons. He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything. Why did he survive Ghislain?

"So," he says. And nothing else.

And she says nothing at all. Dry-eyed, with the vestiges of the requested smile on her face, Alexandrie says nothing. Emile would know what to do, but Emile was gone every bit as much as her form was, her spirit actor dissolving away to pull at the emotions of someone less deadened nearby. Emile was gone, and they held things that belonged to each other that they hadn't wanted to give.

What does she say? What can she? How long is it before silence is an answer in and of itself?

The wind turns again; sends sleet in a hard patter against the outside wall in a sudden cacophony that makes her startle. Enough of a shake so that when it shifts again, she manages a few words.

"I should... not have. Stayed," she says, sounding thin and brittle and far away to herself. "Were I not so..." so what? Curious? Stricken? Taken by him? She lets it remain empty. "I might have spared the both of us."

If only there were a ghost that would pop up now. Something lewd or absurd, to distract from all of this. Why not a memory of the disgraceful party at the Delancey house after the official end of the Fifth Blight? Why not that time he almost drowned as a young man? But the ghosts remain perversely unmoved, leaving them with only one another.

"Are you making reference to this specifically?" His voice is still flat. Indifferent. "Watching this little pantomime? Or are you speaking more broadly?" Do you wish you were elsewhere, Lexie? Do you wish to leave the Inquisition? How incautious of her, that she's given him the power to drive her off. How foolish, that she's given him the power to make her cry. He's told her that he's a wicked man; does she truly believe he won't use that power to wicked ends?

It had taken her by surprise the first time she'd seen him flatten out like that, if only because on him it was new. He had not been that way before, even in anger. Something very large had happened, or someone had taught him to wash himself of the depiction of emotion, but if the latter, they had neglected the finest part of the art. One cannot simply remove emotion to be truly unreadable, one must replace it with something manufactured.

She may not know what he feels, but she knows that he does, and that would be enough for her to begin to cast her nets. A cast to see if the heart of it is about her or himself, offensive or defensive, guilt or anger or fear, her delicate blood-trained nose seeking the tang of the smallest droplets.

Oh, he could hurt her. Oh, how he could. If he had not known before, he knows now. But she could hurt him. He had left Ferelden, he had left Orlais, his road had always been leaving, always being driven before something, none of his steps his own. They forge themselves, pin after pin after pin, a thousand slender barbs wearing the face of his father, his sister, his own. Hers. A more delicate work, to be sure, but she could do it. Such was her inheritance as much as any gown or jewel or parcel of land.

But she had stopped wanting to hunt him the first time she'd heard him play.

"Will you bite me, as I bit you?" Alexandrie says quietly with a slight lift of her chin, the emblematic bare of her throat, "Do so."

"Is that what you desire, Alexandrie?" Voice still flat. Clipped. He wishes he had a drink in hand; he wishes that he might be drunk, to dull all of the confused feelings within him. Because all inside is a miserable tangle, a mess of humiliation and grief and - and frustration, because if she'd just been honest instead of being a blasted Orlesian everything would have been different. Everything would have been different. Not all for the better, but all for the easier; his life would have been less lean, less hard, less cold, less bitter. And she wouldn't have ended up with her fucking Vint - maybe wouldn't be here at all, wouldn't be scarred and hurt and battle-worn. But she had to be a fucking Orlesian.

Why would you ever cry for me?

"You know me. I live to serve. If you want me to hurt you, I'll hurt you."

But there's satisfaction in it, in the cruelty of his indifferent stance. No doubt she wants passion; he knows that what will sting most of all is nothing.

"No." She looks sad as she shakes her head slightly. Sad and tired. "That would hardly be you hurting me. It would be me hurting myself, with you as the knife, and that is no new thing." After all, she has walked on the broken glass of him time and again ever since he came to Kirkwall.

"But no, you will not. Someone taught you to store them and keep them as I do, I think, but you will not, not any more than I will." Another slower shake of her head, a small sorrowful self-aware smile. "Not again."

No. She has gathered them all like wildflowers: every flaw she could find in his armor, every quick change of glance, every tense of his graceful fingers, change in his stance; every subject he deflected from, every time he smoothed his face and body like she might her skirt upon rising... but they will sit ever-after in the vast chateau of collected knowledge she had built in her mind. Battle-ready weapons made ornaments to be lifted, oiled, sharpened carefully, and replaced, never knowing blood.

Perhaps because it is the only way she knows how to hold him now.

Edited (ugh tenses, forgive me) 2019-01-15 05:05 (UTC)

She's not entirely correct, he reflects. A knife cannot feel or think; it cannot hurt when it hurts others. But Orlesians have always conceived of humans as things, haven't they. The occupiers looked upon Fereldan freemen and saw tools, to be worked to breaking like hoes and picks. The Empress looks upon the Inquisition and sees in them swords and shields to be employed in her struggles for power, her base ambition. Even his Orlesian mother had looked upon her children and seen nothing but a bit of diversion -

The ghosts emerge once more. This time, a woman - voice faintly slurred with drink - speaking the twittering high Orlesian of a certain generation of ladies. Speaking to two children, the boy with a violin and the girl with a lap-harp, instructing them in music. When they play, she sings with them, her voice a pleasing soprano that's just starting to thicken and decay due to the effects of less-than-pleasing habits. Still, it's a charming scene, domestic and sweet.

And oddly, the anger on Byerly's face is far more apparent here than it was with the prior memory. For some reason he feels so much angrier. And for some reason he feels doubly ashamed - for some reason, it was less humiliating to watch the scene of his abject humiliation than it is to see this quietly intimate one. He turns his back on it, shoulders hunched, jaw set.

"You will," he answers. "Of course you will. By the mere fact of your existence, you will hurt me. And I will hurt you. The Maker created us as a grand joke, you see - giving us the desire for love but granting us only the capacity for destruction. The moment that Maferath first spoke to Andraste was the moment he began tearing her to shreds." He shakes his head, tight and jerky. "A kindly intention cannot undo the Maker's curse upon us."

With his back turned to her, without his gaze on her, she can move. And she does, through the dissipating spirits, the cloth of her skirts whispering like wind over tall grasses, ending in gentle pressure against the back of his calves. The gentle pressure of her cheek turned to rest between his shoulder blades against the tension there, one arm curving around his waist, the other angled to rest its hand spread and flat on his chest.

For a moment, Alexandrie breathes, the light swell of it rising against his back. Falling away.

"If it is so unavoidable, this curse," she says, low and quiet, "why do we not have done? To what end, the thousand cuts, when a single heart-thrust might do? Why play to the desires of an absent Maker? Why, flayed so, did Andraste still sing?" She stares off, her focus soft, seeing only the shapes of light and grey.

"Perhaps because part of the tearing is that sometimes we touch it. We stay, and bleed, and peel strips from ourselves and those we love because sometimes..." The echo of laughter, then. The murmur of conversation, and lively music; violin, cello, piano, and beneath it her voice. "Because sometimes it is good."

"A trap is not a trap if it is not baited."

He's tense against her, under her hand. He'd been so much softer when they'd been together; loose and languid and playful, like an eel in his lankiness. Now, he's hard and brittle - sticklike, rigid. Because there's too much history - but he needs to remember, needs to keep in mind, that she is a danger to him now. Even if the past could be undone, he cannot afford her any trust. He is in the employ of Queen Anora; such a position does not allow for the possibility of intimacy, especially not with an age-old enemy.

"If there were nothing good, then it'd be easy to slip free. But these lures keep us here. And keep us suffering."

For all her building terror of it, what it might mean, for all that he is in her arms it's like she isn't touching him at all. He will neither turn to her nor break loose from her, she can feel it where her fingers lay against him, and it is this nothing that hurts what words could not.

Perhaps he is gone. Perhaps she had painted him over himself: older, tired, roughened, hard, but somehow still waiting for her. How deeply, how foolishly she had wanted him to be still waiting for her, grasping after such a thing even as she held him at arm's length for fear of gaining it. She had wanted it since she'd heard him, the naive little girl in her furiously spinning a tale of redemption. To set right what she had wronged. To make the blighted garden grow.

"Perhaps you are right."

She lets him go. Turns away, stepping as she does, and breathes to collect herself. What reason is there to say more. What reason to show him any more of her witless softness than she has.

"There there, pet," soothes Rolant de Ezoire, the Fade's answer to the hope she crumples in her hands. "We'll find you another dog."

He does not exactly dread Rolant's voice. By's Orlesian fifth-or-sixth-or-something-of-that-order cousin was (and doubtless still is) a sadist, no question of it, but not one whose cruelty was often turned on Byerly. Rolant showed him contempt, and mockery, and made him the butt of any number of japes about Ferelden, but he was no Cousin Richars with his childhood propensity for mock-drownings nor Cousin Anton with his delight at finding out about Byerly's acrophobia. No; Rolant's joy never really came from inflicting pain upon the cowardly, toadying fools who licked his boots so they could partake of his wine. His joy came from hurting women. A long string of women. A long string of undeserving, unsuspecting women whom Byerly did nothing to help.

So Byerly doesn't dread Rolant's voice. At least not for his own sake. But it puts up the hairs on the back of his neck nevertheless, twists like a knife in the guts. Reminds him: look at you, playing at patriotism, when you stood idly by and watched him hurt women. It's easy, when you hate yourself, to allow yourself to feel like a martyr. There can be something satisfyingly righteous about self-loathing. His self-hatred over his sister - there, at least, there's a vindication to it, to knowing that he was never guilty, that he never acted with anything but honor and decency. But then you remember the very real consequences of your weakness. The times you were indecent.

By turns slightly. His face is controlled, tightly controlled, as he looks at this ghost.

"How kind of you to appear and provide one," is the reply, managing to be clipped and overly saccharine at the same time.

Rolant has been languidly striding along beside Alexandrie all day. It is no longer any strange thing to hear his voice, but something small tenses between her shoulders all the same. He laughs, now, although it is the delighted laugh one might hear given to a scruffed kitten's first hiss.

"She grew teeth!" He can't touch her, not really, but he makes a movement to lift her lip with a finger and tilts his head as if examining them before looking back over his shoulder to favor Byerly with the effortless charm of his smile. "Why Rutyer, you were worth something after all. Good whetstones are so hard to find."

A small, stiff bow answers this backhanded praise. Keeping Rolant's company - He was hungry back then. In a very literal sense, he was hungry - Donna had sent him money here and there, and he'd charmed a few of his Orlesian aunts into supporting him now and again, but the tantes' patience had been limited, and Donna could only do so much. Rolant's patronage had kept him alive in a very real sense. Even if it had meant just getting him into parties to fill his pockets with amuses bouches - It had kept him alive.

But he must wonder, truly: was it worth it? To associate with a dog like that had besmirched his honor. At the time, he'd thought he had none, which was why he'd been so reckless about the company he kept, but he can recognize it now. Would it not be better to have perished? Even in a foreign land, surrounded by strangers and enemies -

Stop thinking about yourself, idiot. Lexie is there, and her pain is far more important than his petty self-pitying nonsense.

"What a pleasure to see you again." By smiles, broad and a bit foolish, his posture adjusting quite unconsciously to adopt a rather fey slouch. His only defense now, just when he was a child: make a target of himself. "How handsome you're looking, Rolant."

"Ah, oui! Death becomes you," adds Alexandrie, although she will not turn back around. That is what makes these visits tolerable; knowing that she still walks the earth while Rolant's perfect shell has rotted away to finally match his soul. She hopes the Chantry is right, and the putrefaction of it vanished to nothing. She hopes the Chantry is wrong, and that he wanders the Fade tormented by demons. "You truly ought to have tried it earlier."

"And a little growl from him as well!" Exclaims Rolant, ignoring Alexandrie's rejoinder and slinging a casually proprietary arm around her shoulders. He rests his chin on the top of her head as a vantage point from which to continue to regard Byerly. Raises his eyebrows and affects thoughtfulness, "You've never so much as raised hackles to defend yourself in your life. Well. Save the once. But even then it was all for that lovely little sister of yours, wasn't it?" He pauses, and then gasps with dramatic realization, shifting his eyes to look briefly down towards Alexandrie and then back up. "Can it be? My darling! He still comes to your defense even after everything you've done!" The man looks approving, gleeful in a way that stops just before it becomes truly vicious. "You really ought to keep your obscene desire for debasement in bed where it belongs, my good man." He quirks a brow languidly, his smile widening as if the two of them are the best of friends sharing a joke. "Unless, of course, it pleases you better to have us all watch. In which case, you really ought to have stayed with her."

Now her shoulders raise, despite herself, hands fisting in her skirts. Rolant chuckles indulgently and turns his face to kiss her head. "You're awful at this, mon petite. Love makes you weak." He sighs with terrible sadness and turns back towards Byerly, his cheek resting partway in her curls without disturbing them at all. "I thought I taught you a better lesson than that."

Edited (edits forever. foreeeeeever.) 2019-01-20 19:51 (UTC)

The blows cause pain, but - Well. Byerly would not be a Rutyer if he didn't know how to take pain without flinching. Still, there is something quite difficult in this, because - this is not Rolant in truth. This is Alexandrie's imagining of him. Or possibly his own, but he suspect that this ghost is Alexandrie's. So these are not the thoughts of that foul man; these are the thoughts of Lexie herself, given voice through his cruel mouth.

Maybe. Who knows. This might really be Rolant's ghost. Who can say, truly.

"You always did overestimate your capabilities, dearest Ezoire." Byerly's smile is as it ever was with Rolant: mocking without being overly so, wry with a little tiny soupcon of kicked dog slinking back to its master. "Maker, I remember your pride over the size of your cock. I hadn't the heart to tell you that that was only impressive for an Orlesian. In Ferelden, it would have gotten you laughed out of the bathhouse. You'd have been mistaken for a woman. Andraste's mercy." He sighs fondly, shakes his head. "What a pity you've gone, dear man. I do miss our little jokes. How did you die, anyway? Was it syphilis after all?"

It is not, of course, Rolant’s ghost. It is worse. Rolant’s memory is incisive enough—he’d been well and truly born to play at the national pastime of Orlais—but the spirits haunting the Gallows have the sort of knowledge and ability that any noble, any spy, would kill to possess. Artifice is useless; true feelings are plucked as readily as children pluck blackberries, the flesh of them gripped and yanked at greedily for more.

And so the spirit ignores every piece of bait, and grips at the kernel that matters, swirls into Fade-stuff, faceless for a moment before it floats to him in diaphanous skirts, artful ringlets, a lovely smile, the point of her chin balanced coyly on the tip of her fan.

“Ah, mon cher, so clever.” says Alexandrie, looking as she does now, save for the slight translucence, the blur of her edges. The Alexandrie beyond her turns back sharply to stare at her own advance. “You know, I think you trust this face more on a spectre than in flesh. Expect more truth to issue from this mouth. Should you like to hear you are right to? After all, what need have I for lies when the truth is a much better blade? Ask me, and I will pull it from her like a milkmaid skims the cream that cannot help but rise.”

The sudden terror on the solid Alexandrie’s face suggests that despite its addressing, this hell may well be hers.

Edited 2019-01-20 22:53 (UTC)

"The truth?" he echoes in a murmur.

There is temptation there. Did you love me. Do you love me. But the answers to those questions are ones it would be better not to know; after all, no would hurt, and yes would hurt worse. Will you fall victim once more to that Vint - That's a question that cannot be answered, as it would consist of fortune-telling. For some, if their ghosts made this offer, it would be an unparalleled opportunity. But he wants no truths from her. He needs no truths from her. He already knows her, inside and out; even if she lies, he knows the color of her soul.

"The truth, my dearest, is nothing but a story we tell ourselves." He reaches out and offers a mimicry of a gesture of affection, cupping her illusory cheek. "You don't offer some trenchant insight into reality; you only offer a tale that exist in dearest Lexie's head which she does not want told. For you will not tell me any facts I don't know, dear ghost; you'll only offer me her interpretation of them."

It is not a patient thing, this spirit. Not when there are so many other ready sources of strong emotion trapped so close on the island, and so unexpectedly thwarted by both the wash of relief from the true Alexandrie and Byerly’s too-ready refusal to take its offer, it curls to nothing to chase other prey.

The remaining Alexandrie’s shoulders drop, and she turns away again, her arms folding across her.

“You should leave,” she says, hoping vainly that the slight quaver in it is less audible to him. “Or I should. It is only a matter of time before there are more, and I would not see any other memories you would not have me see.” Her arms tighten. “That is a kindness you will believe of me, is it not?”

Any other memories, is it? That sends a little shiver of tension through him, engages his defenses. "There's nothing you've seen here that I'm ashamed of, dear Lexie," he says - perfectly pleasant, even as a flare of desperation kindles in his stomach. But he will not let her go away thinking that Nadine is a weapon that can be used against him. He will not give her that power.

"But if you're afraid of me seeing more, then I won't stop you."

“You cannot help it any more than I can, can you,” she says sadly. The deception, the wariness, the curling around themselves and speaking as if they stood straight.

Louder then, and resigned. “We shall say it is for my sake, then. My shame, my secrets, my fears, as it has always been.” She releases her skirts and smooths the crumples there with her hands. “And your kindness.”

"Kindness?" His lips thin into a taut smile as he watches after her. "What kindness is that, pray tell?" Hardly any kindness in letting her purported weakness be the pretense. A coward now, as ever, it seems.

"Having spared me the continued embarrassment I might cause myself, of course."

Those words will, perhaps, smell of truth. And they are true, if not about memory. Rather, about her fear that she will continue to clutch to her chest the remains of some faded flower that had come out of the book she'd pressed it in, even after it had gone to dust in her hands.

Rolant, living and dead, had always been right about one thing. Love makes her weak. And it was no longer safe to be weak here. Hadn't been. And he'd let her be and watched, just as she'd done back then. Shouldn't she be grateful, to know? Even so, she can't bear to hear him say anything else. She can't. And so, without turning to look, she moves away down the hall in her practiced glide, her back held as straight and head held as high as she can manage.

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OPEN: Kirkwail

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