faderift | closed | i'm crooked, but upright

"Do they let you operate on the rest of the body?"

Head surgeon. Isaac glances up from — whatever it is he's doing with that beetle — eyebrows sketched into the shit-eating picture of innocence. A wave of tweezers, he brushes the expression off as easily.

"We ought to celebrate. The title."

The room's otherwise still and quiet; cots unoccupied, supplies prepared and overprepared. No one's been in all night. (No one's in most nights.)

Edited 2019-03-10 08:37 (UTC)

Say what you will for being locked in a tower: There's usually a view.

Better than a basement, or a barrow, or. Breadbox? Well. There's a view from the Gallows, at least, and a rather good one — if Isaac doesn't expect the previous residents got much of it.

Kirkwall tumbles at impossible scale (anything's possible with enough locks), off high cliffs and into human stain; roofs and boats and invisible figures industrious as mold. You could disappear. Pull the dirt above your eyes, and never leave.

But you'd miss it, the sight of the harbor at dawn. The way that sea and birdshit lifts for but a moment into beauty, into the swell of something true. You'd miss it, if you probably wouldn't miss the birds themselves, screaming already for the morning's kitchen scrap.

"Piss off," In something a bit like French, swatting at the gull by his side, shear-beaked and intent on his sleeve. "Find a fish."

Edited 2019-03-10 09:12 (UTC)

"I imagine they might let me operate on anything I want now."

Sidony gives him a snide little look from under her lashes as she turns a page in her notebook, sketching absently as she settles down, crossing her legs and leaning against the table. It might come across as very quietly seductive, but she doesn't care; she doesn't actually want Isaac to be interested in her.

Pausing, she hesitates, quill in hand before she hums.

"How?"

He makes a pretense of consideration, separates the joint of a leg.

"A party's right out," The empty beds, the general unsuitability of a sick ward. "And I'm perilously short of medals. How about a game?"

She wouldn't be mistaken to imagine he's one in mind.

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.

The gull steadfastly ignores his suggestion, as if to insist that No, he's just fine where he is thank you very much. The most consideration Isaac gets (as opposed to Isaac's sleeve, which is very entertaining indeed) is a few lackluster hops and a lazy flap of wings. How about you piss of, mate, eh? He was here first, you know. And really - what's the point in working for breakfast when he could get just as far by screaming about it? Why, look at that chap out there and all the work he's doing.

That chap being a far more industrious seagull, breaking away now from its wheeling counterparts to rocket with rare predatory instinct at the wine dark sea. Gulls aren't graceful hunters. Not really. But this one seems to know what its doing. It skims the harbor water, snatches a heavy silvered fish from it, and then rises on labored wing beats again. Higher, higher, higher it climbs as the fish in its grip thrashes.

From the vantage of the Gallows ramparts, it's difficult to say exactly what goes wrong for the gull's work ethic at first. One second it has its catch clenched firmly in its beak, and it the next its catch has its beak firmly clenched. The flapping becomes wild and irregular. A series of tentacles constrict and wave, beating on the gull which sends it zig zagging in a haphazard panic across the gold brushed dawn touched sky. Other birds scatter to avoid it. The gull beside Isaac gives him a flat look, then takes off with a scream of protest as the overpowered bird comes writhing through the air toward them.

With a squawk, a flurry of loose feathers, and a final wet slap, the octopus abandons its stranglehold on the gull and drops to the ramparts. It lays there in a motionless pile at Isaac's feet. One of its inert limbs pulses with a sickly green light, seawater and black ink and bird spit oozing all about the creature. In a small voice, it says, "Take that, you overgrown pigeon."

This already feels a little bit like a game, like something has been unfurling in his mind and he's been waiting for the chance. She frowns, watching him for a long moment.

"What sort of game did you have in mind?"

It's clear that he has her curiosity now.

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.

Some people focus by frowning; else purse their lips, or scowl when they ought to smile. It matters less whether they've chosen to fake it (a glass half-empty), than which.

It's a bit foreign, that need to look more serious — but sex and station alter one's options, and if the paramount goal is to disguise inexperience,

"Two truths and a lie." A light shrug. "Or two lies and a truth. We can guess the composition as we go."

Her eyes don't seem to flick too far from his face; she trusts Anders, and she finds most of the people in the infirmary agreeable, but she doesn't extend Isaac the same amount of faith that she might the people she has spoken to a little longer. Still, her smile seems nice enough and she nods.

"It's like we're children, Isaac." A tease, if anything else. Her fingers smooth against her dress again, an idle, comforting motion, before she speaks once more.

"Two truths, then. Will you go first?"

"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.

He doesn't squeal.

It's not at all near that volume — in the taxonomy of surprised noises it's more of a strangled yelp, and the instinctive reel of surprise that precedes a hard kick forward.

Only about halfway through does he realize it's spoken. Really, this only solidifies the decision; really, it ought to. Still catches him off-balance, sends him diving for the barrier that separates stone from sky.

It's all extremely dignified.

"If you'd have me so crass," Faux-scandalized: Ladies first, and all. "I suppose I must oblige."

"I read Tevene," He'd be a lot more useful if that were true. "I've a surname I don't use, and I am deathly afraid of heights."

"There's nothing wrong with being a little crass sometimes." Her smile is soft and careful. There's no hesitation as she watches him carefully, considering for a moment as she tries to decide what to pick, lips twitching.

"Do I have to guess, or would you like mine first?"

"The Inquisition is full of rakes," The distinction between 'rake', and 'thug', and 'roving two-legged disaster' doesn't bear close examination. "Perhaps I intend to stand from the crowd."

"So let's approach it from an even footing, trade for trade. Name your own nebulous falsehoods first."

"Every place has its fair share of rakes. I imagine the Inquisition has somewhat of a balance of both rakish and romantic." A shrug of her shoulder. She hasn't come into too much contact - but she is close friends with Byerly, so perhaps there is that.

"Hm. Some falsehoods." A flex of her fingers before she speaks. "I have been proposed to, I am well studied and I have a sister."

It could be worse.

--For Bartimaeus, anyway. For the man on the ramparts, it's all a rather embarrassing display. But in the grand scheme of shocked reactions, Bartimaeus personally will take witnessing a person leaping around and making absurd squawking noises over getting punted like a football any day. The human fight or flight response is a hell of thing, isn't it?

Never mind all that though. Give him a second and he'll be over the far side of the wall, suction cupping his way merrily down into the Gallows courtyard below. Ol' Squealer will be left up here wondering whether he'd had a particularly lucid half-awake daydream in this nice brisk morning, and this will fade as an unimportant happenstance in both their minds. The end.

He gathers himself. With great effort--

Slap. The octopus flops one of its tentacles with mortifying weakness against the stone.

"If I didn't know better," He does. There's an education, and then there's experience. "I might think you were fishing for a compliment."

Of course she's educated, and beautiful, and etcetera.

"But I'll venture that you don't have a sister."

"I don't need to fish for compliments, Isaac." Her lips curl into a smile. Hers seem a little more obvious than his, but she's not got all that much to lie about that might be safe enough to put forward.

Leaning back, she crosses her arms, head tilting.

"You might not be wrong. I've never heard someone give you a surname, you know, so I would imagine that to be true. Now I must consider if you are afraid of heights or pretending to be more worldly."

"Is the Imperium truly a part of the world?" A show of consideration. "I suppose if you end the rest of it."

He's lied twice, of course.

"Your distaste would make me think that you cannot read Tevene, then. Consider that my choice."

She can read a little, of course. She is an educated woman.

"Stupid as an owl for language," Cheerfully, and in Orlesian, because he is being a bit facetious — "Or so Enchanter Rigal always said."

A small smirk.

"Your lie was reading, not speaking, dear Isaac."

"That ought to make the next round easy. Whose hearts have you broken, then?"

The proposals.

"My own, of course. I doubt many were truly devastated to have been rejected - but my mother has the control of those. I am at her mercy, so to speak."

No need to discuss anything to do with the specifics; that might be incriminating.

Isaac braces for impact; at length unpeels an eye, and then an arm from rock.

The octopus squelches. He stoops over it to squint. If it's a hallucination, he's done better — as some leftover of the Gallows' latest ghostly infestation, it's not a terribly impressive one. An eye over his shoulder, but they're temporarily alone,

"And what do you think you're doing?"

— Spoken to himself, and not the octopus, gripped at the tail end of a tentacle and lifted aloft. This isn't the greatest idea he's ever had, but a bruised ego demands some satisfaction. A certain inner six year old poking things with sticks does.

If his heart doesn't exactly bleed for the plight of lovelorn nobility, he's perfectly capable of pretending sympathy —

"Do so few pass her muster?"

One of the tentacles writhes, slithering up to wrap around the man's hand and arm. It's a slippery, suction cup-y sort of affair from the jello sack splattered on the ramparts. It's punctuated with:

"Didn't your mother ever tell you to keep your hands to yourself?"

"Very few indeed. She is a hard woman to please, I'm afraid."

All the more reason for Sidony to have run away to the dangers of the Inquisition, at least as far as she's concerned.

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."

"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?"

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."

"And what pleases the younger Lady Venaras?"

Truths, lies, and otherwise.

Disgusting.

"Disgusting," Mused. Bartimaeus is welcome for that very important thought. He shakes the hand experimentally, considers winging it the rest of the way over the rail. Instead, heat ripples brief along his skin, not quite enough to catch to flame. Enough, maybe, to see what it does. "You don't have much of a mouth for this."

Backtalk is a hell of a thing coming from a — beak? Do fish have beaks?

"Oh, many things. Reading, my studies, flowers, wine. I am easily won, I think."

Her smile is coy, soft, fond.

"Excuse you-- Ouch!" The tentacle recoils from the flush of heat, repulsed backward. The octopus, all limp twisting limbs, squirms feebly in the man's grip even as the voice that responds is very sharp indeed. "It's better than the one you've got, if those noises you were making earlier are any indication. Now put me down, or I''ll show you exactly how disgusting I can be."

As if to punctuate the claim, a selection of the creature's tentacles have begun to melt improbably, sticky limbs growing slowly more slimy and dripping the longer it's held aloft. Which isn't actually what he was going for - no, he was thinking about something showy like reforming his essence to add a few extra eyes in unsettling places or maybe just spitting on him -, but fine. Whatever. Lean into it.

closed | i'm crooked, but upright

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