008 | open

[shri]

WHO: Lakshmi & You
WHAT: If Lakshmi was a room, she would be a very neatly organised library with expensive parchments and a series of precariously placed oil lamps on the edges of tables. Aka, someone just knocked them all over.
WHEN: The Answer Lies At The Bottom of the Bottle
WHERE: A shady bar in Kirkwall.
NOTES: cw: probably some brutal talk about sieges and battles, people getting eaten by monsters, swearing in multiple languages, drinking in the sense that Lakshmi is a light weight and probably can't make it through five drinks total. She's in a wonderfully bad place, it'll be great fun. also: punching.

I ) drinkin'

It has a comfortable sort of inevitably, finding herself in the back wall, a table by herself. A place where she can be comfortable no one, and she wonders if this was the sort of spiral Galahad had felt staring himself down. Maybe it's that she's looking for him as if, if she applied the rules of what had transpired in the Fade, of places that were the same, but reflected differently. If she found this place if she found the same miserable shithole of a place, she would find them there by that same virtue she saw in the fade. Close enough and not, and at least - at least that would be something to stave it off. Galahad's dry voice quipping an observation, Devi's exasperation in just a shift of her stance, Tesla's quick and clever eyes.

But it does not come, but she is left with another close enough but not. Of stupid, stupid choices. Of shouting herself hoarse and no one listening save where it was not enough, too little to make a difference.

It's paralysing, more so than realising she could not go home. What was losing that? She has done it more than once, now.

But knowing, so surely, and completely, knowing what will come of this.

It numbs her mindless all the way down. Oh what was all this fighting for, Sir Bors?

And what else was there to do with it? Take a leaf from Galahad's book. She sits hunched over, soundless, drinking the piss-water tasting ale in steady mouthfuls. Foul as it comes. One, and then another. Silent, unmoving as a block of stone and as minimal in her movements. At least - until some poor unfortunate wretch bumps her. Her eyes redlined, stares him down. Or rather, he stares back and mutters something about the strange folk in Kirkwall.

Any other time, she would wave it off, but this evening? This evening in particular? Didn't matter what the man said. "Strange? Ha? Khar too kharé! Is that clearer? Nothing I say seems to matter - Na, baba! Ekach bhasha kadhich pureshi nasate, so let me say it again, waat lag gayi! - this Inquisition is done."

Whatever sense she's making to herself, she isn't to the man, and he's desperately looking for a way out.

II ) fightin'

There was an inevitably to Lakshmi, of course, especially Lakshmi who couldn't make it through two drinks without being affected very soundly, Lakshmi who had twice that and not a drop of Blackwater who does not bother to curb her tongue even slightly. ( The difference being she lectured an absent Commander Coupe in Hindi to herself, was that when she was trying, she gave space for another to speak, not that she held her tongue. )

The unfortunate another end of that was eventually someone was going to get sick of listening to her. Muttering darkly to herself in the corner, when she stands, gets another drink, and she's bumped into, spilling her drink. That the other man looks at her, where he stares down his nose at her from a decent foot on her, and she stares straight back. It has an almost practised pattern of two people looking for a fight.

"Replace it."

"Fuck you I will - "

It really wasn't his fault that of all colours, he was wearing an old, red stained coat.

She doesn't have to do a proper measure of the shot this close, when she drops her tankard, and grabs him by the collar and in one fierce shout, smashes their foreheads together. Hard enough to split their skin, and to send him reeling as she jumps, to drag him down so she could lay into him, and - Thank God - him to hit her right back.

It's all hands for themselves to get out of the way, after that. There is nothing glamorous or powerful being partaken in. It is fist against flesh. Teeth that cut the inside of cheek as whoever happens to get caught in the crossfire of blows cut themselves on blunt forces. People who know better than to punch someone in the face because of how it hurts, forgoing that it is satisfying to split a lip, bruise a cheek. Since she cannot be spoken and listen to, since she must wallow in her own mistakes, she finds that the only thing that will do. Finding whoever is fighting and dragging them down to the floor with her on top of them, smashing down with her elbow, and paying for it in the return of a knee to her stomach. Hard enough to spit up a mouthful of blood.

Comments

II

[doneisdone]

Teren is That Shady Figure in every pub after a large political revelation has come, sitting hooded in the corner and nursing a drink, listening, holding her silence. She's kept an eye on Lakshmi for a time now, smirking faintly to herself in a mixture of admiration and pity-- the poor thing is wallowing in pity, thinks herself capable of changing the very fabric of Thedas that keeps it spinning endlessly into the void.
Not that nihilism is the answer, but the truth has always been behind every rebellion. The bad ones always win, it just takes time.

But perhaps Lakshmi doesn't have to die so immediately.

She's scruffed from behind by a bony hand, dragging her back as an empty bottle shatters over the head of her current assailant-- stunned, they crumple to the floor, and Teren tosses the remaining broken bottle neck to one side.
She's prepared for the possibility of Lakshmi turning on her next, but a good scrap never went astray in her experience.

[villieldr]

Rani was like the sun. She always burned, though whether or not people saw it or let the illusion of clouds and the landscape mask that for a time. The fire was always rooted in passion, but it could be a joyous brightness, or something vicious that might devastate all that lay before it. Sometimes it was herself that Lakshmi's fire seemed bent on destroying. There might be new growth in the wake of it, but the scars would linger long before that recovery could begin. Horrors clung to Lakshmi that Magni could not imagine, much as she might guess at them. The sight of the ghosts that haunted Lakshmi, and the memory of her city with mouth fallen open in a desperate, hungry scream sometimes came to Magni late at night.

What could it be like to be enshrouded in that grief, and what must it be like to fear horrors like it unfolding here?

So her Rani needed to burn, and Magni would sooner see her set herself upon the fight-ready wretches of Kirkwall than on someone within the Inquisition who would see her suffer for it. Grief could cloud the judgment, made it harder to stay her fists, and she doubted that the Commander would take to the fight with the merry volatility that the men here offered. No, let Lakshmi fight the sell-swords and sailors, the labourers and the drunks, so long as they were keen for the fight, and so long as Lakshmi's wildness didn't lead her fists to strike too viciously for those others to recover from.

A circle has formed near the docks, watching two men trying to duke it out with the rifter. Others are making bets, as Magni sits on a crate, moonlight making her hair bright, and dancing on the surface of the water. She watches the brawl, and when Lakshmi's fist comes back bloody (dark and shining in the moonlight) and the man is holding himself up against the wall, she tosses a coin purse so it hits Lakshmi's back, and thuds to the ground.

There was another man who was stepping back into the fray to fight Lakshmi, and Magni knocks him aside. Better to play a part, maybe. She's not wholly sure.

"Wild woman. Ten gold says you can't best me." A growl, to spare the sailor losing his teeth, as one of his friends steps in to help him up, and to spare Lakshmi losing her pride, as she challenges her.

[reshapes]

He's beginning to think that bars do nothing for him. Sure, with the shard making his guise so heavy and tangible, the drinking is almost worthwhile. And yes, it's true that he fancies a game of cards on th regular if it's to be had, but the rest? It's all thoroughly ruined by the uncomfortable press of humanity in every direction, all of them fleshy and secreting things from their abundance of pores. The novelty has, he thinks, simply worn off.

What's the point? It's not as if he's flouting any charge by bumming around in some Lowtown bar, which he'll admit really takes the shine of the thing on certain days. Not that he wants anyone telling him what to do - no thank you, he's quite pleased with the fact that Nathaniel has been so cautious on the day to day; that might almost be characterized as personal if he squints very hard -, it's only just that it strips back a certain layer of general outrage and pessimism that he's grown rather attached to.

But hey, at least the cards are good!

Bartimaeus, wearing the guise of a dashing rogue type with an eyepatch and a considerable bosom (exactly the sort of ne'er do well you'd expect to find playing wicked grace in a lowtown pub), lays his hand out face up with a flourish and a sultry grin. "Looks like that's me again lads."

Her arm is intercepted from sweeping the pot of coins to her side of the table by a burly sailor who gestures to his own hand with a stab of the finger.

"Oh very well," Bartimaeus snaps, retracting his arm.

As the cards are reshuffled, his attention drifts sullenly out across the bar. What an absolute pit this is - this coming from someone who once spent a decade at the bottom of one. Furthermore--

Hold on.

The busty woman turns slightly in her seat, frowning as if pinched. She flips up her eyepatch, squinting with both eyes across the length of the public house. He could have sworn...

And there it comes again! It's obvious now that he's listening for it: the dulcet tones of a language he knows and is simultaneously certain that no one else here should.

Isn't that fascinating?

He flips down the woman's eye patch. "Deal me out," he says and with a rap of knuckles on the tabletop, and rises.

Somewhere in the general hubbub of the room, the busty woman with the eyepatch disappears. It's easy to lose people in a crowd. The dark eyed youth that reaches the far side of the pub and slides easily between the drunkard and her victim bears no resemblance to that jaunty woman from the card table whatsoever.

"My, someone's upset." This in marathi. And oh, isn't that a a bit of nostalgia for you?