closed | i'm crooked, but upright

[wythersake]

WHO: Isaac, Coupe, Casimir, Jenin + Others
WHAT: Catchall for the month
WHEN: Waves my hands
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: Addddding starters to the comments as I go. If you want a prompt hmu.

Comments

bastien

[triamour]

Édouard Almary is the finest printer in the Gallows —

He's the only printer in the Gallows, which may have something to do with it. Jenin appears hand-first: Five pale fingers about the crook of the door, and the rest comes tumbling after, bobbing up between golden strands and the flush of skin. She drags her skirts free of some invisible snag, to move within.

(It's difficult to imagine what she tripped over.)

"Oh," The quick laugh of certain embarrassment. "What an introduction."

It's not that. A few days' gossip has granted certainty; a gift, to share it now. She hasn't shut the door.

[cozen]

He lifts his head from his book—not work, because he's a printer with very little to print at the moment—and it only takes a moment of disorientation for him to know her. Another moment to wonder how much trouble he is in, to make a decision, and his default pleasant-merchant-who-would-like-to-make-some-money-today expression side-steps into the territory of a smirk.

"How utterly and instantly charming," he says. "May I buy you a necklace?"

—how long has she been here, he's wondering while he asks, and then remembering a charming (genuinely) Orlesian voice from before, and then wondering instead if he's lost his edge.

[triamour]

"Is that what you think of young women?" Young's a stretch. Her lips purse, "So distractible by decoration."

She lifts a Q (dusty), and considers how expensive the necklace would need to be. Kirkwall has good pearls. But extortion's a lost game: She's already decided to forgive him, or at least, enough to give him warning. That's really all that matters.

Friendship, then. A flounce of fabric, a perch upon the table.

"I've decided to see a bit of the world. I thought myself so original,"

She's not here for him.

[cozen]

No relief makes it onto his face, but it's there. No knife fights in the Gallows, today, in this specific room, probably, even if he might sort of deserve one. Still, as he moves close enough to the door to pull it shut, he does it without turning his back on her. It's at least semi-plausibly just because he's pleased to see her, or at least interested to see her, and searching her face to catalog changes.

"I have only really seen the inside of this fortress," he says in the meantime, "so if you are not the first, there is still time to be the best."

He's thought of her—of all of them—with great frequency, if not in great detail, in a glancing way, guilt-tinged and brief, papered over with surely they're fine. It had the effect of freezing them in time. He wouldn't have quite expected her to be any older.

The door clicks shut.

"It is good to see you, Jenin. Alive and so on."

[triamour]

"Alone." She corrects (and some awful poet cries: what else is living), with a slip of a frown. Forgiven, and friends, and a hole in her shoulder the same. "The sound, it is all wrong after you go. And Ines,"

Ines. The flutter of a hand, the lilt of eyes skyward. If Bastien's forgiven it's for a reason — not the mustache.

"I see no chains on your press," And no excuses to avoid town, save maybe that before him, twiddling a letter in hand. "Have you taken up magic?"

[cozen]

Ines, and his smile is understanding and vestigially fond at once. He'd loved her like a sister, despite everything that went wrong in so many small ways, and then left her like one, and is approximately as likely to seek her out again as he is Leila or little Nadia.

He comes closer. The hand he passes over his tray of tiles on the way isn't subtle, but if he'd bothered with misdirection—and with another audience, perhaps, less familiar with tricks—the transition of the J from his palm to roll with a bit of flourish between his fingers, extended in offer of trade, might have looked a little magic.

"Honest work is a lot of reading," he says. "I am not sure I recommend it."