EVENT: TRUTH BOMB

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: TRUTH BOMB
WHEN: Bloomingtide 15-17
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: OOC information. Use appropriate content warnings in your subject lines, please.

It’s an ordinary day—so not a very pleasant one. The weather is dreary and muggy, and the day’s lunch is a soup that’s a little too watery and bland. The griffons are being their usual level of noisy and swoopy. The work is its usual level of urgent and difficult.

But in the storage rooms, something wiggles. Then it hums. Then it pops.

Outside of the storage room, there’s no actual sound, no shift in the wind, and no visible sign of a change. But the pop might be felt—like the moment something finally clicks, or two ideas suddenly fit together, except the opposite. In the heads of everyone in the fortress, something is suddenly not connected quite right.

The first sign of what’s gone wrong is that someone immediately stands up and tells the cook how bad the soup is.

A lot of people’s days are about to get exponentially worse.

Comments

[galvanising]

Nell tosses her crystal across the room toward Kostos rather than wait the split second it would've taken her to walk it to him, which is statement enough of how her day has gone. It's not been a subtle change, and all the more so because she's been unusually quiet these last few weeks, chewing on something any time she's given a moment to slip into distraction.

"Good," she says now, pacing around the small space, already restless, crawling out of her secret-filled skin, "Lock the drawer and the door. Hell, just knock me out until this is over, otherwise I'm going to tell someone that we killed the Grand Cleric and then we are all going to get hung and for fucking nothing."

[exequy]

Kostos catches it one-handed—deceptively athletic individual, etc.—and drops both crystals into a drawer, closes the drawer, and is two seconds into the process of looking for some sort of locking mechanism when Nell says killed the Grand Cleric.

It takes him the rest of that sentence to make sense of it, and a long pause after that to turn around to look at her. There's ambiguity. No name. No definition of we. Maybe they killed a Grand Cleric by accident, during the war, and he never knew. Maybe—

"We killed who?"

His voice is quiet. Not in a good way.

[galvanising]

"Grand Cleric Agathe," Nell says, spilling it all out in case he had any hope or doubt, and despite that fact that his face says quite clearly that it is almost as bad an idea to tell Kostos as anybody else. (But the almost, here, is important. Horseshoes, handgrenades, hangings.)

"Nikos, Caspar, Marisol and me. I got caught up. It sounded like a good idea. He had a whole plan how we would pin it on Benedetta, and then everyone who didn't want a moron or a prune would be convinced to vote for Elise and really change things instead of playing it safe. But then something went wrong with the team in Antiva and no one blamed Benedetta for more than a minute and it was all for nothing. And I feel fucking sick every time I think about it. Almost every time. Sometimes I feel proud for a minute, because fuck the Chantry, fuck all these people sitting up there on high holding court in their fine robes and pretending they care about anything but their own holy arses but Maker, Agathe might have done some good for mages even if it wasn't enough and wasn't fast enough, it might have been better than a fucking Exalted March and Nikos doesn't care, none of them do, they just get off on playing assassin for its own sake, rich kids playing revolution when they've got no idea what any of it really means and don't risk anything of their own and are so fucking proud of themselves and how hard they are for killing her like this did any good for anybody anywhere and please stop looking at me like that, I--."

She has to literally stick the first knuckle of her fist into her mouth and bite down to stop.

[exequy]

He’s looked at her like this before, in the smoldering remains of an encampment, in a grove beside a brook, with sunlight filtering through leaves and smoke. Pretty as a painting, save the smoldering debris and battered bodies. The blood. If she hadn’t been so much his focus he might never have noticed her using it. But she was, and he did, and he looked at her like this: furious, gutted, not even bothering with incredulity, because how the fuck had he expected this to end?

Kostos hadn’t said anything, at the time. They had more to do, before they were safe. Someone was still breathing, wet and raspy, and they had their own wounded, and the things he needed to pack were two miles away. But that was the moment it was over.

And this—

“You got caught up,” he repeats, quiet like a thing about to pounce, “with my fucking brother, and you thought it was such a good idea that you didn’t tell me anything about it.”

[galvanising]

"Why the fuck would I tell you about it?" is something Nell would say without any external compulsion at all, "You made it very clear you weren't interested in lifting a finger to do anything about the election. You wouldn't even work against Clorentine when Skyhold agreed she was a disaster that needed to be stopped. Of course nobody would tell you about this."

[exequy]

“Because—” he starts to say, but she keeps talking. And he hears her. But he also resumes well before she’s finished. “Because I have to live with it. I always have to live—do you think anyone is going to believe it if I say I didn’t know?” He no longer qualifies as quiet. Not loud, either, but his fists are balled. “Do you think anyone would believe I didn’t know about the blood magic? About fucking Nevarra? I am going to spend the rest of my life hiding your stupid fucking decisions.”

[galvanising]

"So, what," she says, the split-second comma-like pause key to converting this from the dismissive question to the prelude to a different dismissive question, "I'm supposed to live my life by your rules so you don't feel guilty by association? Sit by and twiddle my thumbs on the sidelines while everything stays shit so you can feel good about yourself in confession? You chose to work with me, Kostos. You chose during the war, and you chose to stay with me after, and you chose to start up again here. You chose to help me in Nevarra City. You chose to help me with the strike. You saddle yourself with my stupid fucking decisions, you're just too much of a coward to ever admit why."

[exequy]

Slipped in like a dagger, that coward, between armor panels, quick and sharp and barely felt at first—when you know something's cut, you know you're bleeding, but you think you might survive it if you keep fighting, and he lifts his chin like he's squaring off.

"Because I care about you," more spat than soothing, "and I keep thinking that we're some sort of fucking team, and when you veer off without warning and jump off the ledge into some stupid—bullshit—"

He doesn't let himself struggle for the words long enough to leave space for her to elbow back in. He'd rather just sound stupid. But he switches to Nevarran, in the process, because it's easier, and because he means it.

"—thing that's going to make everything worse, I can pull you back, and all of the damage and the murder was just a mistake. But it's not. It's what you are. I don't know if you're stupid, or it's revenge, or if something's broken in your head—I don't care. I'm done."