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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Her remark pulls Darras' attention now to her, like resurfacing. Under the water, the deeper you go, the darker it gets, until everything is dark around you. And you forget what light looks like. Not the dull glow of the door or the undersea light that shimmers on the faces of the ghost-pale specters. A true light, like. It's whatever moonlight manages to push through the thick grown storm clouds. It's Yseult, sitting beside him.

"What happened next, is--" His usual prompt is like a thread to follow home, like in the story she'd read to him, once. Out of that box of books he'd brought her. A child's tale. A string tied to a bedpost, and through the mirror, the other land, but as long as the string stayed, there was always a way back. Darras squeezes her hand back, and a little warmth bleeds back in. More like the cottage in the sunshine. Less like the hole.

"It was only a day and we'd worked out an escape. We thought it was an escape. One of Masud's men, bribed, and then double-crossed us, and Masud knew about it, the whole time. He let it all play out just t' make a point. We were caught and-- So we were to be punished, then, as if there was anything worse than being sold. Not killed or beaten, no more'n we'd already been, for daring to escape. Masud was a sadistic bastard. There was this--island, sort of. Not a proper island. All flinty rock, and a hole in it. A cave, more like. The tide would come in and swell in it, from the bottom, fill it nearly up. Waves, crashing down from the top. Then the tide would go out again. Regular, natural. All manner of creatures would come in with it, too, and that's where Masud left us. Bane and Donal and Morton and Jerrick and me. Down there, no food or water, chained and bound. He'd come back for us, he said. When we were done fighting. Only he never did. We told each other he was dead and felt a little warmer for it, but it didn't last. And he wasn't dead. I knew he wasn't dead. Twisted fucking snake. They're the ones who died."

Donal, then Morton, then Jerrick and an hour later, Bane. The clank of their chains is this far-off sound, an echo like they're deep down in that hole and Darras is stood outside. But that's true, isn't it. In a way. He's here and they aren't. They've rotted now, their flesh gone fish-belly white, and swollen, hair and beard like dead grass. White, and then green and black and rotting, and then nothing, bones and dust with living eyes.

"And I escaped. And Masud bought himself a prince's crown. Turned merchant, became this honest man. Think I'd have seem the Dawn before that day, but it's a big fucking world out there."

Yseult's gaze sharpens, jaw worked side to side once and back, filing that away. She could say we'll find him and kill him and it would probably be right, but acting on instinct is what got him here. It's no time to alter her approach.

"It is," she agrees mildly, hands still clasped around one of Darras's, pressing it into his knee like a paperweight. "And then you did see it," she prompts, adding after a beat, "I know you've just told me. But tell me again, so you've the whole of it straight through from beginning to end." Maybe it will see off the lingering spirits.

Defiance is like bile. Why bother. It doesn't matter. She weighed him against what she saw, what she'd heard. But she's here. There's more to tell, and here's the time to tell it in. Darras sinks in to the feeling of her hand pressed to his, pressed to his knee.

"We were faster. Better armed. We took her, easy. I killed the captain myself. Used to be he was the bosun, that first time. Like I said. I knew him, and he wasn't Masud, but I wanted him dead anyways. There was at least two others that had been on the Dawn, before. I killed one. The other I only saw dead. Most of them fought anyways, and in the end, it was just three that would have surrendered, but I couldn't let them. I knew, it wasn't-- the right thing, or the thing I would do, I'd at least have let them try to swim for it, but I couldn't. Not on that ship. So I killed them, too, and burned the Dawn, and-- The rest, they were Masud's, too, but by then I didn't care. None of it had done a damn thing for me. Not the killing, not burning his ship, stripping it of everything, it didn't do anything, I didn't feel better, and I kept thinking of that hole."

The spirits are just bones by now, rags and dust and nothing at all. The door has cooled. The cold, like being under water, the deepest parts of the water. Darras swallows.

"We swore, if any of us got out, we'd make sure the others were remembered. And I was the one who survived, and I couldn't hardly talk of them. Every time, I'd start thinking of Masud, and I'd choke on how much I hated him. How much I wanted him to pay for what he'd done. We weren't the only ones he'd tricked and sold. We weren't the only ones he'd thrown down in that hole. There were bones when we got there. The rest of them are bones there now. I don't even know where it is. Some beast had come along eaten away at half of Donal the day I escaped. So they're dead, Masud's still alive, living pious and righteous in some palace, and no one's out to punish him for what he did. Instead I'm the wicked one. For living. But an honest merchant gets a pass, and no one looking twice at how he came by that wealth."

Now is not the time to argue. That it's not living that's wicked, or that no one can rightly punish Masud if no one knows, or that none of it excuses the rest of the life Darras has chosen to live, the other crimes he's chosen to commit. That giving them a chance to swim for it in the middle of the ocean isn't much of a mercy. Conversations they've had before and will have again, no doubt, since she can't seem to keep away for good.

None of that's useful right now to accomplishing the present goals, which are to calm Darras down, find out the truth, and see if the vividly disturbing reenactments of his past might be made to fuck off. There will be time for the rest after.

For now, she wriggles one hand out of his grip, but only to put her arm around him, the thick weave of her sweater brushing the back of his neck where her hand settles on his nape beneath his hair. "Tell me a story about your friends, when you worked together on the Aliss. What were they like?"

Darras' gaze snaps over to Yseult again, sidelong, and for a moment it looks like he might refuse, or ask why, or some other useless question to answer what seems like it might be a useless request from her. What good would it do, and what would it matter.

But he ought to trust Yseult. She's all that he has, in this moment or in any other, really. So he lets himself sink into the touch of her hand, and the warm weight of her arm, lets himself fit to her, easy.

"I knew Bane the longest," he says, after a moment. "Knew him before the Aliss, even. I liked Jerrick best. Didn't take anything seriously. Morton was older than all of us, sharper and cleverer. Not enough. But cleverer, still. And Donal was big and broad and pretended at being dour. Deadpan. They were good men, honest in their way. Jerrick would swindle a Chantry sister if he thought he could get away with it, but he'd leave coin at whatever Chantry he saw next, like as if to make up for what he'd done. Not that many of them where we were, usually, so he wasn't hurt too badly for his peculiarity."

It does lift some of the weight, saying aloud these things. Not all of it, but some. The bones on the floor are turning to dust anyways, age and time stripping them of their familiar shapes. And the door looks duller, somehow. Still got that glow. Not as bad.

"Bane had a son in Antiva City. Used to bring him round when we'd put in to port there. I thought of finding him, but I don't know what I'd say. He was just a boy anyways, and like as to forgot Bane quick when he stopped coming by. Morton was best on watch. Climbed like a bloody monkey. He was older, but he wasn't old. Didn't let anything at all slow him. Donal did his fishing with a spear. A neat trick. He'd learned it off his mother, he told us. They'd lived in some wild spar of land. I don't know," and he breaks off suddenly, leaning forward with a hunch of his shoulders, not quite enough to shake off her hand, "what else is there to say? It's all just pieces of them."

Edited (oops) 2019-02-09 22:16 (UTC)

"What do you think they wanted you to remember?" Yseult arches a brow at him, but fondly. "These things. Not that." She gestures at the wall across where they stood, rotting away. She rubs his back, palm brisk over the curve of his spine as he curls forward, and sighs. "You can't allow what happened to poison everything."

Her hand slows as she hesitates, thinking of leaving it there. It all seems too obvious to bear speaking aloud, and she's never had his ease with words. It all comes out simple and childish when she says it, almost insulting. But it must need saying or he wouldn't still be this tense beneath her hand, still watching the spectral dust pile across the room, the fading glow around the door frame.

"I've told you stories about my family," she says, hand settling but fingers picking at his collar, smoothing wrinkles that may or may not exist. "My aunts and uncles and cousins. All killed. Faster than your friends but just as cruelly. I haven't forgotten. But if I never thought about my aunt Sorcha and her box full of beads, or the stray cat she took in, or how she taught me to read palms--. If I only thought about the last time I saw her, when she was lying in the road with her throat cut so deeply they almost took her head off, that would be like forgetting her. Forgetting everything that mattered about her and replacing it all with her killer and what he did. He doesn't deserve to steal her place in my mind that way."

Edited 2019-02-10 06:17 (UTC)

He stays quiet as she talks, with her hand on his back and her fingers only a gentle push of pressure against the back of his neck. She's seen her horrors, too. Not as if he's forgotten that. They live with her, quiet. And she's not wrong. He knows that, too.

In the silence, Darras reaches over his own back to find her hand again. The pressure of his grip is gentler this time.

Across the room, without either of them looking, an invisible wind picks up and sifts through the dust of the bones, stirring them until, with a sudden gust, the dust blows away. A puff, and then all of it, gone.

"Can you still?" There's a thickness in his voice still. Darras doesn't bother to try to swallow it. "Read palms."

Tell me a story she'd asked, as the wagon rattled its way south through Orlais. She gives his hand a squeeze and then lets go, to rub across the back of his shoulder, and then slip her arm between them, turning his other hand palm up on his knee.

"Only a little," she says, "The basics. This is your life line," she traces a fingertip down his palm, "A long line means a long life. This break here means that there was a sudden, significant change early in your life. A turning point. Since then, there have been changes for the worse--these downward branches--and for the better," she traces an upward-pointing offshoot, "Some more significant than others, like this deeper line. You see how this part of the line here looks more like a chain, or two lines entwined? That can mean you will have several different paths open to you that you must choose between, or that you will lead a double life."

He gives his hand over to her. The push of her finger makes his skin prickle, here and there. He bears it without saying anything, watching where her finger grazes against the lines and creases of his hand.

Anything he might say would sound stupid in this moment. Was she the turning point? Perhaps. Or he might say that fate should be unwritten, a story that you make for yourself. Turn around and erase what came before if it suits you. Rewrite it, better and bolder. For once he just listens, imagining if it was all so clear as this.

For once, instead of saying anything, Darras closes his hand, twists his fingers up to grip at her hand and pulls at her, until he can lean in and press a kiss to the back of her hand. Her skin smells the same. Soap, something else, inexplicable and clear. He turns her hand around and kisses her palm, too. The life line, where it runs long. The upturned line, a course leading up. There's other lines, too, undefined, fainter, unclear. The dust from the skeletons is gone now. The door is just a door. The room is just a room, and the cold is cold.He kisses her palm again, a little to the left of the last kiss.

Yseult lets out a soft breath and lifts her other hand to his head where it's bowed, strokes once over his hair before she bends to rest her forehead against his crown, his temple if he'll tip his face up a bit. His mouth is warm against her palm and she curls her fingertips into his beard, then slips away to cup his jaw and drag her thumb across his cheek.

She holds them there for a moment, until she can hear his breathing in time with hers. The room is silent otherwise, just them and the sleet striking the window and the waves striking the rocks below. With her eyes closed they might be beside a different window above a different cliffside, and she lets that linger a while before drawing slowly but inexorably back.

"I have to go," she says, a kiss pressed to his cheek in parting, a squeeze of his shoulder as she rises, "You'll be all right."

Peaceful silence had settled in, slow. Which makes her interruption all the more jarring. Darras permits the shoulder squeeze, makes unconscious room for the cheek kiss, just as it all begins to dawn on him.

"What?" The thickness in his voice this time is more from disuse. He swallows, quickly. "What d'you m-- Go where? Where is there t' be going right now, with--"

He doesn't even mean it selfishly. Or, well. It's selfish in that he is thinking of Yseult when he says it. What's best for her, which ought to be anything but wading through the mass of spirits crowding the halls. But of course that's where she'd be going. He tries to catch at her hand anyways. Not to hold her to the room, but to have her hand in his a moment longer. The closest they've been since returning from Ghislain, and it's over before he'd known to appreciate it properly.

"I have a meeting," she says, simple and only faintly apologetic. But she lets him catch at her hand, and uses her grip to pull instead of circling back. On second thought, leaving him alone up here to brood in the cold seems like a bad idea. "Come on. I'm going past your tower. Walk with me."

It's so absurd that Darras laughs. Not a big, full laugh, but a laugh. What else is there to do? Same reason goes for why he gets to his feet when she pulls at him. There's no point in being here if she's not. There's nothing for him to stay for.

"Who the hell d'you have a meeting with," he says, in challenge to her claim. "That's a lie. If you want to be rid of me, you only need to say."

Her brows draw together, a quick look of surprise turned back toward Darras. But he doesn't seem angry, at least, so she lets it pass once the weird sharp echo of it has faded.

"It's not a lie," she says, a little incredulous herself at his disbelief. "There's still work to be done. Ghosts or no." Work she's not meant to be talking about, which will surely go over well. She takes her time on the way across the room toward the door and the stairs beyond, lingering in private in case her vague answer goes over poorly. "I'm running a new operation. I have to meet with a few of the people who will be working on it so I can give them their assignments."

"You're," he starts, but there's no way to finish that with anything that won't end in some argument, and instead Darras looks at the floor as they walk, sinking back toward some vaguely unsettled mood, one he doesn't have a word for.

"Impossible," he finishes, after a moment. He doesn't mean it as an insult. He doesn't know how he means it. They're just inside the tower room, still, with the rest of the Gallows on the other side of the door. The moonlight is the brightest illumination they've got. Darras looks at Yseult in it, searching her face.

"Go on," he says, after another short delay. "I'll be all right."

Her face is confused because he was perfectly happy to keep her hand and come along when he thought she was lying; why is the truth reason to stay behind? Or can he really not tell the difference anymore?

Her shoulders drop with her hand, but her sigh is lost under the scratch of the wind around the stones.

"So are you," she replies. She looks at him for another moment or so, and then gives her head a little shake and turns to leave.

Would he leave her behind, if there was a need? Work, duty, obligation--less honest, still important. A crew and a ship, keeping up morale, keeping a flow of coin. Or else sinking into obscurity, losing them all to promises more glorious and better seas, and if word came to Darras that he was at risk of that--

It's not quite the same. It's dramatic, acting as if it is. Feels more final, is all, with the Gallows full of bloody spirits, which is why Darras thinks better of what he's said, and how he's ended it, and steps quick to take Yseult by the hand once more.

"Can I come to you, after."

Yseult's bafflement is complete, and obvious enough that even someone not extraordinarily well-versed in reading her could see it. She looks at Darras for a long moment, though not as long as the last, and then shrugs and nods at the same time.

"Yes. Alright. If you'd like." If he'd still like, maybe she should say. Who knows what he'll want in an hour's time, at this rate. "I should be finished in an hour or two. You can meet me at my room."

"So what's that look for," Darras says, because sure and he can see that look on her face, and read it. "Is it that strange for me to ask that of you?"

Especially after everything that he's told her, and everything she's seen. And all of it within a few hours. It's enough that he feels wrong-footed. Adrift, like. He looks down at their hands, the interlacing of their fingers.

"You're something constant," he tells her. "Even with--everything that's between us, even if you're running off to some meeting that can't wait--and that's not even so surprising, when I think of it, I should have guessed it. That's why I asked."

"A moment ago you didn't even want to walk with me," Yseult points out. So, yes. It is that strange.

And after everything that he's told her and everything she's seen, she'd like some time to herself to decide what to make of it. But it was her choice to reach out and try to help; there's nothing to be gained by stepping back now while he still needs her. There will be time after to sort through it all.

She lets her mouth tilt into a fond half-smile and she reaches up with her other hand to touch his cheek. "Don't sit here alone and brood while I'm gone. Go for a walk, get something to eat."

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