WHO: Flint, Coupe, Yseult WHAT: Spirited intellectual debate WHEN: Some time between death announcement and the memorial WHERE: Central tower NOTES: Violence
Not in the swollen, wooly way of tears unshed, or the spike of impact — but a steady pressure upon her temples, drumming dull against the heat. Summer’s warmth is only beginning to rise, but here and now it’s stifling. The enormous map is strewn with marker pieces,
Fewer than before.
"While I defer to your judgment," She doesn't. They wouldn't still be arguing if either was willing to budge an inch. A cloth over her eyes will be ages yet. "I do not see a viable alternative to Vane."
Unless he's pulled another able seaman-slash-swordsman out of his ass. The courteous distance of the past hour (two) has worn sharper; hands curled bare and tense against the table's edge.
And her head hurts, and she’s hungry, and she sort of needs to piss; but it’d be a hell of a thing to duck out just now, when they're all shorthanded, and the work needs doing, and Flint's so determined to fuck it up.
An hour ago, he'd thought to open a window. Only the day is all still and stale, and so the only marked effect on the proceedings has been the addition of the of gulls screaming as they wheel ceaselessly about the tower's upper levels. If little else is a common denominator in the room, a headache must be one.
"With all due respect," Which, given the hour, is very little. "I don't see how you don't see why that would be all the more reason to finding virtually anyone else who could be taught left from right."
This is just the latest in a long line of seemingly endless sticking points - about personnel, about the approach, about the timing and the weather and the outfitting and virtually everything but the compatibility of their birth stars -, and his patience has cycled from carefully tempered to frayed to outright sullenness. Across the table from her, Flint is somehow managing to appear both slouching and jagged all at once.
"There is no question in my mind that Vane is the most capable available hand. That is, as it has always been regardless of our current circumstances, the exact point for his continued presence in Kirkwall. There is no telling what may arise in our absence."
Half an hour ago, Yseult excused herself for a moment and came back with a slender silver case of neatly-rolled cigarettes in the Antivan style. The open window does little to dissipate the cloud that has been forming gradually above her since, nor has she made any effort to prevent it--the dry scent of burning leaves and some faint spice and sweetness--from pervading the room, hanging in the humid air.
"As someone mentioned earlier," it was her, she mentioned it, because there is no ground here that they have not tread three times already. She uses all her craft to keep her tone even, head turned aside to watch as she knocks ash into a little dish with a precise flick of her fingers, "This mission will require at minimum two people capable of piloting the boats. Unless you would prefer to revisit those aspects of the plan."
An eye to Yseult. As though the room needed further imitation of a pyre. Two against one hasn't helped this far; may truly hurt, but that doesn't mean she won't press. She readies to speak —
A bird slams against the stony sill, ricochets free. Frustration twists loose into gesture; voice rising.
"What is it that you expect?" She stands. "The Qunari to sail into harbour?"
It's happened, but his own men seem the sharper guess for trouble. She shoves up her shirtsleeves, turns to pace (coat and decorum shed some time ago).
"If we are imperiled here, one man will not save us. Afield, he might ensure your return."
A narrow berth: The table's some great ironwood fuck of a thing, impractically large; perhaps dragged out of the offices with her predecessor. One might move to Flint, or the door, and little between.
"You do not require some sacrificial goat."
Edited (don't murder me cass i'm getting rid of parentheses) 2019-05-24 00:29 (UTC)
"Oh, peace," he says, and it's amazing how it can sound like 'For fuck's sake' before he forces some shadow of moderation back into his voice. Divided between them: "Any fool can be taught to tie a knot and pull a line. Attend to any ship in that harbor and you'll find half its crew can only count to twenty. Byerly Rutyer could be trusted to do it."
(Handy with a catamaran, he'd said, though the dubious reality of the statement is beside the point.)
"But by all means. Why don't we all go? Myself, Vane, our Scoutmaster, Enchanter Amsel, you, the Seneschal, the head cook. I'm certain the Provost is perfectly well suited to managing affairs here without."
"Norrington has sailed." That is in no way a serious suggestion. Something in her jaw stiffens for the list: you, the Seneschal. Unhinges, "They need hold their tongues well as rope."
Unless it's the goat, again. The stones grit underfoot, a persistent little scrape in her circular path. She doesn't glance back to Yseult, now. She hardly strays from Flint at all.
(It isn't that the signs aren't there, though small and still. Others cut greater figures, more quarrelsome, but it isn't that one couldn't see it,
One would need to care to look.)
Edited (word repetition my mortal foe) 2019-05-24 02:35 (UTC)
He doesn't have an answer, either because there simply isn't one or because it has been two hours in a stifling room and he is tired of first beating every point of this operation into slush before any decision can be made. Or because he's annoyed with Coupe now prowling about the table like a mabari in search of a bone worth chewing. Or because he has fallen out of practice with saying things in such a way that they sound agreeable. Or because he was never good at it in the first place, but has forgotten what it's like to need to try.
('What he means is,' said Mr. Silver--)
He fixes the Commander with a flat challenging look, smoke from Yseult's Antivan cigarettes eddying listlessly about their heads.
"I've sailed more than Norrington." In case Coupe was serious. And Yseult's pretty sure she wasn't, but she's also pretty sure that Coupe isn't about to actually throw a punch at Flint, for all that the signs are there. Feeling the impulse is understandable, and it's not as if she'll act on it beyond the pacing and the grumbling.
"We will still need another sword-arm even if we forego a true sailor," she points out, an attempt to at least modify the issue if not resolve it. "One of the new rifters?"
It will not be the first time Yseult wildly overestimates the professionalism of the people who make up this nameless and increasingly pointless organization, but it may finally be the last.
"The woman is capable, and the other eager. It might do, if you are confident enough. I am glad that we could come to an accommodation."
Is not what she says. Doesn't say anything at all.
Dirt scrapes. Gulls keen. And it's that hammer again; knowing before you even know you've done it.
(How many times has she done it? Not like this, but Darton. That rifter. Ashlock. Gwenaelle,)
Force splits beneath her knuckles before Yseult's finished speaking, sends old hurts cracking into fresh life. Before she knows the blow she knows it's a loss. To break first. To give him the satisfaction.
He hears the crack before he does anything else. It swallows up whatever reasonable thing Yseult is saying, devouring the pretense in the room along with it. The pain of the impact - hot and radiating - follows, though the breadth of it doesn't fully register and won't for some minutes. What does occur to him immediately: the wooden marked placed on the table and identified as some Orlesian infantry division under his fingers now from where he'd staggered against the table to catch himself, and--
(How many months have he and John Silver talked the Walrus' crew around in circles to manage what was nothing if not a powder keg anxious to set fire to something? The way forward now is to be seen as reasonable men. As long as that's true, we can make it understood that it is valuable to keep us content. What we sacrifice now will be paid back in kind.)
--'fuck this.'
Flint closes his fingers and whips the Orlesian infantry division around for her face.
The sound she makes is involuntary; the give of knees, arm thrown up over a nose that if it isn't broken will be having one hell of a day —
('Forgive me'. Does that hurt a little bit, in your mouth? Or is it just so foreign you don't even feel it?)
She charges low, slams them back against that table, lips peeled back to spit the blood streaming down her throat. He's quicker, she's stronger; has seen enough of his shape in the steps taught a dead girl. That there aren't any blades now,
There's one at her side. Another discarded by the map, where it proved a useless stake. She doesn't reach for them, grappling still for the advantage, for a hand on his neck.
A snarl goes flat under the shape of her fingers in the same beat that he'd drive his hip and knee into her if she hadn't thrown him far enough onto the broad slab of the table that his heel can't quite find purchase--
She's stronger, he's quicker. And he's been here before: tasting someone else's blood and spit and being driven down, down, down. It hasn't ever stopped him before. He slams a fist into whatever part is convenient. With his other hand, he yanks the first thing he finds from his belt to beat her across the ribs with. Or to slash her open. Or, or, or.
The hard cylinder of the spyglass and the crack it makes upon contact is as senselessly satisfying as anything else might be.
They've both completely forgotten Yseult, which perhaps they will realize around the time that she slaps the back of Coupe's skull hard enough to knock it into Flint's forehead with a brain-rattling clunk.
"STOP," is loud only by her standards but somehow ear-splitting in its way, sharp and sudden as ice cracking, the snap of a load-bearing line. The same tension strings her voice low, half a whisper but crisp as it's ever been: "This is ridiculous. You're behaving like children. I have sat here and listened to you two bicker for a full hour about who should replace my dead husband on this mission and I have done it without complaint even though-- because I have a job to do. And so do you, so you will get up and you will retake your seats and we will finish this work like the professionals we are meant to be, or Maker help me I will knock you both unconscious so I can at least get on with it myself."
Glass shatters on the blow, catches breathless in her side. Her grip slips from his windpipe, but she still has elbows, and the motion carries him up into,
( clunk )
Everything goes a bit black.
Light streaks. Sense stretches like taffy, conscious of Yseult's voice and the flesh beneath her; comprehension somewhere behind. She slumps, stumbles half-off him. Lists against the table and listens for words that won't yet render speech: Mission, husband. Dead. Of course -- the signs were there, if one knew to look. If they cared to. Does she?
Of course, Yseult is right. Of course she is. It's just that Flint's trachea is more or less the same shape as when they began, and at the moment that seems a pressing injustice. Mission, husband. Dead.
A hand lifts, and this time it's empty (can't focus to curl); accedes. Retaking her seat might take a moment.
"I did not, "
Heaved, nasal. She cuts off to cough a clot into sleeve. Know you'd wed? Know they'd wed? What would that change? No widow was born of a ring.
"I am," And Gwen was right, it fucking hurts, or maybe that's only where she bit her tongue, "My apologies."
He nearly follows the rise of her hand with another blow from the spyglass-turned-cudgel. It's a jerking motion - a snarling dog primed to snap after any hand shaped shadow -, but the half collapse of her weight sideways either triggers the slump of his arm or throws her far enough out of the immediate arc of the blow's trajectory that there's no impact. He doesn't loosen his grip though, just lies rigid and braced for something explosive for a moment, for two.
The broken end of the glass jams hard against the worn surface of the table. He uses it to lever himself up, sliding hard on his heels. Dead husband should inspire a flash of guilt or a shock of shame under the hurt radiating high on the left side of his face, but the sound of it sits like oil on water. It's the broken lens scattered in the folds of his coat and under it sits some hard edge thing that he can't quite unwind his fingers from.
Or maybe that's just the telescope still, clenched in his hand.
Coupe makes a raw noise. Still half staggered against the ironwood's edge, Flint touches his neck and wipes his face; he ignores the metal taste and the smeared flecks of blood on his palm and he doesn't look at Yseult, though he does tip his face roughly in her direction. A tender clearing of the throat.
"Quite," is for them both, accompanied by a hard look and refusal to step back and create space to continue or to acknowledge the secret she's just spit out like Coupe's clot from the back of her throat. She's not about to offer the benefit of the doubt or to spare them the indignity of supervision: she'll stand there ready to intervene again until they return to their corners.
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Not in the swollen, wooly way of tears unshed, or the spike of impact — but a steady pressure upon her temples, drumming dull against the heat. Summer’s warmth is only beginning to rise, but here and now it’s stifling. The enormous map is strewn with marker pieces,
Fewer than before.
"While I defer to your judgment," She doesn't. They wouldn't still be arguing if either was willing to budge an inch. A cloth over her eyes will be ages yet. "I do not see a viable alternative to Vane."
Unless he's pulled another able seaman-slash-swordsman out of his ass. The courteous distance of the past hour (two) has worn sharper; hands curled bare and tense against the table's edge.
And her head hurts, and she’s hungry, and she sort of needs to piss; but it’d be a hell of a thing to duck out just now, when they're all shorthanded, and the work needs doing, and Flint's so determined to fuck it up.
no subject
"With all due respect," Which, given the hour, is very little. "I don't see how you don't see why that would be all the more reason to finding virtually anyone else who could be taught left from right."
This is just the latest in a long line of seemingly endless sticking points - about personnel, about the approach, about the timing and the weather and the outfitting and virtually everything but the compatibility of their birth stars -, and his patience has cycled from carefully tempered to frayed to outright sullenness. Across the table from her, Flint is somehow managing to appear both slouching and jagged all at once.
"There is no question in my mind that Vane is the most capable available hand. That is, as it has always been regardless of our current circumstances, the exact point for his continued presence in Kirkwall. There is no telling what may arise in our absence."
no subject
"As someone mentioned earlier," it was her, she mentioned it, because there is no ground here that they have not tread three times already. She uses all her craft to keep her tone even, head turned aside to watch as she knocks ash into a little dish with a precise flick of her fingers, "This mission will require at minimum two people capable of piloting the boats. Unless you would prefer to revisit those aspects of the plan."
no subject
A bird slams against the stony sill, ricochets free. Frustration twists loose into gesture; voice rising.
"What is it that you expect?" She stands. "The Qunari to sail into harbour?"
It's happened, but his own men seem the sharper guess for trouble. She shoves up her shirtsleeves, turns to pace (coat and decorum shed some time ago).
"If we are imperiled here, one man will not save us. Afield, he might ensure your return."
A narrow berth: The table's some great ironwood fuck of a thing, impractically large; perhaps dragged out of the offices with her predecessor. One might move to Flint, or the door, and little between.
"You do not require some sacrificial goat."
no subject
(Handy with a catamaran, he'd said, though the dubious reality of the statement is beside the point.)
"But by all means. Why don't we all go? Myself, Vane, our Scoutmaster, Enchanter Amsel, you, the Seneschal, the head cook. I'm certain the Provost is perfectly well suited to managing affairs here without."
no subject
"I would not trust the Seneschal to make it of the ferry without fainting, but otherwise." Dry, but not really joking.
She exhales a lungful of smoke slowly toward the ceiling, somehow without accompanying sigh.
"We have to take someone, or abandon the op altogether. If not Vane, who?"
no subject
Unless it's the goat, again. The stones grit underfoot, a persistent little scrape in her circular path. She doesn't glance back to Yseult, now. She hardly strays from Flint at all.
(It isn't that the signs aren't there, though small and still. Others cut greater figures, more quarrelsome, but it isn't that one couldn't see it,
One would need to care to look.)
no subject
He doesn't have an answer, either because there simply isn't one or because it has been two hours in a stifling room and he is tired of first beating every point of this operation into slush before any decision can be made. Or because he's annoyed with Coupe now prowling about the table like a mabari in search of a bone worth chewing. Or because he has fallen out of practice with saying things in such a way that they sound agreeable. Or because he was never good at it in the first place, but has forgotten what it's like to need to try.
('What he means is,' said Mr. Silver--)
He fixes the Commander with a flat challenging look, smoke from Yseult's Antivan cigarettes eddying listlessly about their heads.
"It certainly wouldn't hurt."
no subject
"We will still need another sword-arm even if we forego a true sailor," she points out, an attempt to at least modify the issue if not resolve it. "One of the new rifters?"
It will not be the first time Yseult wildly overestimates the professionalism of the people who make up this nameless and increasingly pointless organization, but it may finally be the last.
no subject
Is not what she says. Doesn't say anything at all.
Dirt scrapes. Gulls keen. And it's that hammer again; knowing before you even know you've done it.
(How many times has she done it? Not like this, but Darton. That rifter. Ashlock. Gwenaelle,)
Force splits beneath her knuckles before Yseult's finished speaking, sends old hurts cracking into fresh life. Before she knows the blow she knows it's a loss. To break first. To give him the satisfaction.
But fuck, this is pretty satisfying too
no subject
(How many months have he and John Silver talked the Walrus' crew around in circles to manage what was nothing if not a powder keg anxious to set fire to something? The way forward now is to be seen as reasonable men. As long as that's true, we can make it understood that it is valuable to keep us content. What we sacrifice now will be paid back in kind.)
--'fuck this.'
Flint closes his fingers and whips the Orlesian infantry division around for her face.
no subject
The sound she makes is involuntary; the give of knees, arm thrown up over a nose that if it isn't broken will be having one hell of a day —
('Forgive me'. Does that hurt a little bit, in your mouth? Or is it just so foreign you don't even feel it?)
She charges low, slams them back against that table, lips peeled back to spit the blood streaming down her throat. He's quicker, she's stronger; has seen enough of his shape in the steps taught a dead girl. That there aren't any blades now,
There's one at her side. Another discarded by the map, where it proved a useless stake. She doesn't reach for them, grappling still for the advantage, for a hand on his neck.
no subject
She's stronger, he's quicker. And he's been here before: tasting someone else's blood and spit and being driven down, down, down. It hasn't ever stopped him before. He slams a fist into whatever part is convenient. With his other hand, he yanks the first thing he finds from his belt to beat her across the ribs with. Or to slash her open. Or, or, or.
The hard cylinder of the spyglass and the crack it makes upon contact is as senselessly satisfying as anything else might be.
no subject
"STOP," is loud only by her standards but somehow ear-splitting in its way, sharp and sudden as ice cracking, the snap of a load-bearing line. The same tension strings her voice low, half a whisper but crisp as it's ever been: "This is ridiculous. You're behaving like children. I have sat here and listened to you two bicker for a full hour about who should replace my dead husband on this mission and I have done it without complaint even though-- because I have a job to do. And so do you, so you will get up and you will retake your seats and we will finish this work like the professionals we are meant to be, or Maker help me I will knock you both unconscious so I can at least get on with it myself."
no subject
( clunk )
Everything goes a bit black.
Light streaks. Sense stretches like taffy, conscious of Yseult's voice and the flesh beneath her; comprehension somewhere behind. She slumps, stumbles half-off him. Lists against the table and listens for words that won't yet render speech:
Mission, husband. Dead. Of course -- the signs were there, if one knew to look. If they cared to. Does she?
Of course, Yseult is right. Of course she is. It's just that Flint's trachea is more or less the same shape as when they began, and at the moment that seems a pressing injustice.
Mission, husband. Dead.
A hand lifts, and this time it's empty (can't focus to curl); accedes. Retaking her seat might take a moment.
"I did not, "
Heaved, nasal. She cuts off to cough a clot into sleeve. Know you'd wed? Know they'd wed? What would that change? No widow was born of a ring.
"I am," And Gwen was right, it fucking hurts, or maybe that's only where she bit her tongue, "My apologies."
And none for Flint, goodbye.
no subject
He nearly follows the rise of her hand with another blow from the spyglass-turned-cudgel. It's a jerking motion - a snarling dog primed to snap after any hand shaped shadow -, but the half collapse of her weight sideways either triggers the slump of his arm or throws her far enough out of the immediate arc of the blow's trajectory that there's no impact. He doesn't loosen his grip though, just lies rigid and braced for something explosive for a moment, for two.
The broken end of the glass jams hard against the worn surface of the table. He uses it to lever himself up, sliding hard on his heels. Dead husband should inspire a flash of guilt or a shock of shame under the hurt radiating high on the left side of his face, but the sound of it sits like oil on water. It's the broken lens scattered in the folds of his coat and under it sits some hard edge thing that he can't quite unwind his fingers from.
Or maybe that's just the telescope still, clenched in his hand.
Coupe makes a raw noise. Still half staggered against the ironwood's edge, Flint touches his neck and wipes his face; he ignores the metal taste and the smeared flecks of blood on his palm and he doesn't look at Yseult, though he does tip his face roughly in her direction. A tender clearing of the throat.
"So one of the new Rifters then."
no subject