006 | CLOSED

[shri]

WHO: Lakshmibai & Byerly Rutyer
WHAT: Lakshmi has a plan, and is roping in some help.
WHEN: An Evening Dreary.
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Lakshmi and Byerly are probably the warnings required, on top of ruthless nobles and honour code politics.

She's waiting leant against the barrel of wine in the back corner of dark cellar when he comes down here. Half-blended in the dark with her clothes like she's cut herself out of her own shadow. Her hip lent against it, balancing a cup left here in one hand to sip from the keg. One foot kicked up to balance on her toes, waiting. The hood over her face to obscure her, mottling her to shadows.

Holding very still, there, in a way that is against her usual motions, that even when she hears him shifting and talking to himself from the front of the room, and she whistles. Quick, a birds trill, to call him deeper and out of the light, she does not move much. God knows how long she's been there, as the time ticked over a little after midnight. Enough time to have thought this plan through over and over again to a point of ridiculousness.

Just that the longer she stayed here, Gwen's words in the back of her mind, the more it became true.

But when he steps into view, she pushes the hood back, revealing nothing untoward, but simply her. "Hello, Rutyer. Fancy meeting you here." It's dry, fully aware of who else would she be meeting down here?

Comments

[shri]

"Would you have me any other way?" It ticks a smile at the corner of her mouth. Oh, she knows, this probably wouldn't work if she wasn't. About to laugh something -

"My heathen swordplay," she chokes on the words. "How is it heathen? I am not even using my urumi."

[bouchonne]

"Dear lady," he says, pressing a hand to his chest, mock-scandalized, "I'll beg you not to speak of your urumi in polite company. I'm an innocent young maid; you'll make me blush."

[shri]

"I will give you a reason to blush." She bites back, barely keeping her laughter to herself. "But I take it he uses those slow long swords?"

[bouchonne]

"Not in duels." A shrug. "But - in battle, yes."

[shri]

A hum. Well, pistols were out of the question. "What does he use?"

[bouchonne]

"A longsword. He detests all things Orlesian, so his fighting style is altogether unlike that of the chevaliers you might induce to train with you - It's quite Fereldan." A dry quirk of his eyebrow. "The Rutyers are, if nothing else, loyal."

[shri]

"As it happens, so do I." A hum, whether that means the swords she prefers, or disliking Orlais.

Probably both. "You are, aren't you? You are fine with this? It will serve the rest of your family well to knock him down?" She trusted Byerly, in ways she didn't quite do others, a brutal honesty given backwards and forwards. That he knew what he was doing when he gave her a name, he had considered it carefully.

But she didn't want to see him hurt when the blood was up.

[bouchonne]

"Not in the least," he says, cheerily. He firmly prevents his mind from going to what their reactions will be, focusing instead in on the pleasure he'll derive from all this. Which will be considerable.

"They'll be utterly bereft over it. A disgrace to our noble warrior clan. Which is precisely why I will take enormous pleasure from the incident. I shall like to see my noble clan humiliated."

He smiles at her beatifically.

[shri]

That makes her surprised. It shows, strike her down, but for once Byerly surprises her. How they had fought, over Fereldon, where he felt she might even inadvertently hurt his homeland through simple ignorance, how vehement he'd been about it. As passionate as she was over her own. Granted, he spoke foul of his mother. But that happened between parents and children, especially amongst nobles. She'd avoided it, but she would be blind to not have known had things were between Gangadhar and his brothers and mother and step-mother.

But... this?

"You despise your family, so much?"

[bouchonne]

He, in turn, is surprised by her surprise. Perhaps he's been too long amongst the bohemian crowd, where hating your relations is very much in vogue, but it seems so odd that she doesn't expect this. His forehead wrinkles just a bit as he responds -

"Well, in my defense, they despised me first." A pause, and then a tilt of his head - "Or at the very least, despised me simultaneously. I know this is going to be somewhat shocking to hear, but there are actually people out there who wouldn't be well pleased to have a louche, rakish libertine as part of their family."

[shri]

It confuses her utterly, obviously so. She had loved her family, it was true. They had loved her in turn. But then, when everything was taken off people, love was what they had left. She had been her father's pride and joy, her husband's strength.

"I regret to inform you, as much as you might wish it so, no child is born that way, and it would take parents more monstrous than I can imagine looking at their child, their own, that way."

Because it is not as a sister or daughter, she thinks as in that moment. She thinks of her own little boy. Small, so slight in her hands, the first time he held onto her fingers. The agony she went through, to have him, how worth it was, how she saw a whole sunrise and with it, hope, in his eyes when they first opened.

[bouchonne]

"Then expand your imagination, my dear Lakshmi Bai, because it is clearly too limited." His smile is casual and confident and droll - a smile that has been much practiced. "Don't get me wrong, of course - their hatred grew when they got to know me better. But it started from the very first breath I drew."

A roll of his shoulders, an indifferent shrug. He doesn't feel anything about this. He hasn't felt anything about this for years. "We're all mad, we Rutyers. Every birth in our family is simply the continuation of the stain of our existence. Why wouldn't they detest their spawn?"

[shri]

But it remains, and always would be - something she would never accept. Perhaps at odds with how she loathes lycans and thought so very little of them, but by contrast, there would be no forgiveness for those that could not love their children.

"No, yours is. If you cannot imagine a life, within your own family, where love is what it should be: boundless. Love is a prayer that God hears in the body of mankind, every act of it worship. It is strong enough to stop the sun rising and the moon setting, and in a child, to the eyes of their mother, it is love itself given physical form. No less than that." She might like not much of their faith, but that - that love was the same. And if he cannot see it in himself, I will do it for him.

[bouchonne]

His smile turns harder and harder with every word. When he speaks, his voice is dry and clipped. "And yet the sun rises, dear lady, and the moon sets. Your words are quite pretty, but pretty words cannot change the fact of what is. And what is, is this: sometimes people hate other people, even when those people happen to have been squirted out of their cocks or squeezed out of their cunts once upon a time."

He shakes his head. "If I may be plain, I am genuinely shocked to hear a queen underestimate the human capacity for hatred. That is what is strong enough to stop the sun in its tracks. Not love, but hatred. Love cannot be forced, love is rare, but hatred can grow anywhere. It is as vibrant and vital as wildflowers, pushing out from the cracks in cliff-sides, springing up in dry deserts. Hatred can find its soil in any heart."