open: lol never mind.

[cozen]

WHO: Open!
WHAT: A memorial that doesn’t go as planned.
WHEN: Justinian 1
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Nah.

The ceremony takes place in one of the side courtyards that’s been converted into a garden, where the oppressive architecture is offset with flowers and trees. There’s a small pyre, for those whose traditions call for pyres, but no bodies to burn. Instead there are tokens, flowers, favorite foods, treasured possessions—not yet lit.

(For the others, the Dalish and Nevarrans and anyone else with a different wish, their friends and family will have made different arrangements alongside the pyre, probably, if they aren’t universally reviled.)

Anyone who wants to speak, whether it’s a prepared speech or a single spontaneous sentence, can do so. The tone is respectful but only so solemn. It’s been more than a week. For many, the worst of the shock has passed, and the sun has continued to rise and set, and there’s room between bouts of misery for fond memories and occasionally laughter. The memorial is a door that’s closing—slowly, kindly—and tomorrow, on the other side of it, the war will continue.

Today, on this side, the only people judging anyone else for crying are the assholes.

***

Across the harbor, more than a dozen filthy and tired people come to a stop on the docks, and the loitering ferryman pauses to take stock of them, then starts laughing. There isn’t even any local mythology about ferrymen and the dead. It’s just that funny to him on its own, that he’s been rowing miserable people around all week, and here’s the source of all that misery, dirty and tired but significantly less dead than believed.

When he stops laughing, he offers to dunk everyone in the harbor before rowing them over. For the smell, you know. No one is going to be happy to see them if their eyes are watering too much to actually see them. Then he laughs some more at his hilarious joke.

But he does eventually load up his boat—and maybe there isn’t room for everyone all at once, maybe some dramatic reunions will be delayed, maybe some people will be even more fashionably late to their funeral than the others—and carries everyone across the bay, still chuckling intermittently.

***

In the courtyard, the speeches and anecdotes (and singing, perhaps) wind down to long silences peppered with murmurs or sniffling. Someone is preparing to light the pyre. And then the gate creaks open.

Comments

[wythersake]

You know, [ Quietly, to his spine, ] You're meant to be the dead one.

[ There are a lot of things he'd like to do, and for a moment he indulges that; palming his head, tangling his hair. For a moment it can be alright. Uncomplicated. He's warm, he's solid; he smells like a gurn.

He folds around him. Unplanned: ]

I had your teeth.

[ Someone's. He doesn't doubt what this would have cost Livia, what it clearly cost another dozen bodies. The words mumble, lilt. His breath smells like the wine he never drinks.

He shouldn't be doing this. It is complicated. It isn't alright. He's still upstairs. ]

[libratus]

I will try to leave a body next time.

[ Words that might be lighter if he didn't mean them. They can't both have a talent for ill-timed jokes. He allows himself a deep breath of the other man instead, in and out, but its sillage — bottles he'd brought to share that hadn't been — lodges strangely in his chest. Wrong.

The angle of stubble shifts. Words worry warm at a jawline. ]

You weren't supposed to miss me.

[ As if they'd had an agreement. Yours, bones folding together neat as envelopes, and yet somehow, a connection meant to be cleanly severed. Inevitable, that it would be. (Terrifying, that it might not.) ]

[wythersake]

[ Did he? The liquid swell of softness parts speech, pauses on a tongue, mouth quite refusing to open or shut. Did he miss this?

His grip shifts; something flickers. He pulls back. ]

Ilias, [ Not too far — hands catch at his elbows. He sounds like someone trying too hard to sound level. ] We should talk.

[ Not here. The thick of this distraction is good as any, it's still too public. A glance over the bedraggled crowd; Ilias should also bathe and eat and rest. He shouldn't do any of those things in his own room. ]

Come on. Let's find you some clothes, you can tell me of it.

[libratus]

[ We should talk isn't how anything resembling good news has ever started, but the very specific fear of a moment before is quick to twist beneath his sternum again. A subject that cannot be discussed, even here. Eyes flick from face to hands, to the odd cold of the space newly opened between them.

A nod; a last squeeze of cloth before he relents to being separated further. Of course. ]

There is not so much to tell, [ he says with the thin, forced warmth of one talking just to be talking, kneading at a distraction while they move out of earshot. Steps swifter than his muscles appreciate; not as swift as he'd like. ] We fell asleep at a campfire and woke up in chains in the middle of the Silent Plains. Some of the others managed to overpower a few of the guards, and then we were — like this, [ practically naked, ] in the middle of the Silent Plains.

It is a long walk. —Though not, I suspect, quite as long as the next six flights of stairs.

[wythersake]

Four.

[ He amends. The territoriality of reunion, maybe, save for the look he turns — belated — against potential objection. Trying too hard. Promising an explanation.

Four. But it’s a long walk, all the same. His steps linger a pace or so behind Ilias’, the better to catch a stumble. He could offer assistance, some brief restoration, but there's a certain decorum to these things. Not to be so casually invoked; not before the coming conversation.

(He filters the story: sympathy and concern smooth under the slosh of concentration. How terrible the fear must have been. Not the same fear, he thinks, between the dozen.)

Ilias knows the way. The other door stands still, momentarily silent. The pull of his chin drags past it. Isaac's own room is little-changed: Tidy, sparse. For the day's heat, the fireplace has seen recent use. The wine, still open by inkwell, mug. He offers the cup. The latter may spell its own small trouble, but far too late to stop the raven. ]

[libratus]

[ Gratitude, is what the offered room invokes, as does the absence of undue assistance. Ilias isn't an especially proud creature by nature, but the opposite results in the same determined steps, the same aversion to certain kindnesses. A dozen of them who hadn't planned for their own deaths, and him, who should have planned better.

Cup reflexively accepted, Ilias drums his fingers on it in lieu of drinking. There should be comfort in so familiar a room, so familiar a face; instead the differences only stand in sharper relief, pieces of a puzzle whose whole he isn't sure he wants to see. His spine straightens all the same. ]

Isaac, has he— hurt someone?

[ 'Hurt' isn't what he's bracing for. ]

[wythersake]

[ How much easier that would be.

The question ought to be surprising, but they're well past that, aren't they? The story is right there, if he reaches for it. Blood magic. I don't know what he was trying to do. But Leander's alive to dispute it, and Ilias is alive to,

What, precisely? Isaac remembers his look; months prior. He didn't keep Leander from death to bid someone else finish the job. He crosses to the bed, sits on its edge and props his arms on his knees, and does not reach for the fireplace poker. Hands brace at the side of his nose, a breath through it. The room is a little dull. ]

He wanted to. Whoever took you.

[ But they all wanted that. ]

He'd read the letters. Before he took the lock off your door. He kept, [ A gesture comes up empty. Goading. Being a creepy little shit. Making a threat Isaac has always been equipped to return. ] Pushing.

[ Guilt hangs like a shit joke. Leander had crossed a line — he hadn't crossed that one. A man grabs you, you don't up and stab him. ]

I didn't think it would be so bad. [ Is only half true. He'd seen the neck. He'd seen the ghost. He thought enough to think it would be pretty fucking terrible. ] I fixed what I could. But he's lost a lot of blood.

[libratus]

[ That's

not what he was braced for either. The story comes out in pieces; understanding solidifies on his face just the same, in flickers of his brow, a flex of the jaw on behalf of their privacy, before the color begins to drain.

Is this what he should have been afraid of? He knows Leander, knows the deftness with which he can apply pressure when so inclined — would not have expected Isaac to have enough vulnerabilities exposed to press upon. Burned that damned letter to be sure of it. You weren't supposed to miss me, as if anything were that simple.

The heel of a hand presses to temple. But it's brief, eyes pressed shut against this only for one blessed beat before he moves to step into the other man's line of sight. Look at him. Talk to him. ]

What exactly did you do?

[ The details matter. The confession of it. As ever: complicated truths. ]

[wythersake]

There's a spell,

[ As though it's written in any book, and not some private invention. He used to think it so ridiculous, transparent, the occasional reports of confession: Certainly, ser, he told you he'd been consorting with demons by the light of the moon —

Convenient. This doesn't feel convenient. Convenient would've been walking out the door, shutting it behind him, shocked as anyone when Leander was found. This has never been an acceptable level of stupid, but it was less with one fewer to keep it. ]

To undo old healing.

[ Kinda. ]

[libratus]

[ Another day, after another much shorter trek between waking and reaching this familiar room, he might be better at tempering his reaction. Smoothing himself over, the way he does. A hint of the instinct tugs at his movements still: a flutter of hand over mouth, turned askance; a miserable breath expelled from chest, balked from. If there was ever any doubt how intimately familiar he is Leander's injuries, well, ]

And you didn't know how badly he'd-- [ been hurt. He swallows the words, sick with them; Issac isn't feeding him euphemisms. ] How badly I'd hurt him.

[ If they're baring truths.

It's not a question; that doesn't mean his eyes don't lift in search of answer. ]

Will he live?

[wythersake]

[That pitiful ghost, gurgling in the dirt. He knew enough. If you try that again, I will leave you here, ]

You didn't cut his wrists.

[ Colder than it deserves. Defensive wounds. Gareth has those, too. He's seen Nell dig fingers into her own flesh, and Isaac isn't an idiot. It's a dismissive sort of absolution — he doesn't expect it to stick. Doesn't entirely want it to, grateful for how readily Ilias implicates himself, that he needn't lean upon affection for insurance. Ilias has the reputation, connections to shrug an accusation; he has the guilt such that it wouldn't matter.

(He has, once more, that fucking phylactery. Physical evidence.) ]

He's recovering. It'll be slow.

[ Isaac stands to find the bottle again. Nurses it, a worry stone, the base of his skull in that courtyard. Circling a decision that he's already made, that he'd thought the desert to make for him. ]

I can't keep doing this.

[libratus]

[ It's a lifeline Ilias sees and doesn't so much as reach after. Didn't cut his wrists, no; let him live long enough to learn where to cut, though, how to use it. There's guilt to be found on every side of this if you're looking, and of course Ilias is, fitting himself back into self-loathing like an old coat. Simpler, to turn a thing inward than sort out the blame. (Simpler, to keep hating what you hate already.)

Simpler. Doesn't feel great. The wine in his cup might almost seem a blessing, if he weren't watching a man who never drinks try to drown in it. ]

Which part?

[ Opening bottles, or veins, or cleaning up after?

(He's starting to sound as tired as he is.) ]

[wythersake]

This.

[ Repeated, gesture and words dull. It settles thick against his tongue, which is good: Flattens anything sharper. The face in his shoulder was more fang than Livia's incisors. Isaac has spent too many years inuring himself not to recognize it now, the way his veins stir; pulse animates. Influence.

One falls under it. ]

All of this. Ilias, he could have died. And for what?

[ Maybe one of them wishes that. Maybe two — but Isaac doesn't want to. Ilias must be exhausted. Looks it. He crumples, and Isaac can guess the angle. (Inward, where else does venom travel?) ]

You want choices, then here we are,

[ Free. Full of potential. And: ]

Making bloody stupid ones.

[libratus]

The only choice I have made today is coming back here.

[ And yes, it is beginning to look like a bloody stupid one. Like, apparently, letting either of them learn half a truth about the other, and then leaving them unsupervised.

(Like ignoring the beat in the back of his mind, steady as their footfalls from the Fields of Ghislain, of how fucking selfish it is to let anyone put down roots on a cliff's edge.

Stupid, to imagine this time he'd hold on.) ]

Yes, he could have died. You could have killed him for fucking nothing.

[ (Clinging, all the same.) ]

Is that a mistake you expect to make more than once?

[wythersake]

A mistake. [ Flattened, but not enough to quiet: ] Listen to yourself.

[ There are areas in which Isaac is prepared to concede the Chantry are right, he hadn't thought this one. A personal failing to be so easily led.

He abandons the bottle at last, closes the distance to lay hand over hand over untouched cup. Tries to find his eyes. ]

Don't lose yourself for this.

[libratus]

[ What composure frustration had afforded him buckles in proximity; fingers balk under the touch. He hadn't meant—

But only because it was a given, of course. That he would excuse this. Has excused it already, quick to invent an answer he could live with, ready to believe it a manageable accident of temper even if that isn't true. Ever reaching for the easy lie.

(If Isaac had killed him, would he forgive that too? Hasn't he forgiven worse?) ]

Is the alternative any better?

[ Blame. Separation. Being alone again. ]

[wythersake]

Remaining Ilias Fabria?

Well, [ A show of consideration, and there's something a touch more settled in the lilt of his brow. Briefly normal. ] I happen to be fond.

[ It falls away. He shifts the little mug free, sets it back upon the desk. It's more complicated than that. He knows. He just can't allow himself to care. ]

You can stay here long as you need. I'll, [ Take an inn. Take a walk. Something. ] Find a place.

[ He hasn't mentioned the state of the room. That's its own statement. ]

[libratus]

[ Fond. But not fond enough.

A wince; air pushed bitterly from lungs. ] I will not be here long.

[ He'd take the Silent Plains over this, staying in the shell of a place he'd just begun to know and now will not. Even in a crypt, you separate living from dead.

Luckily Isaac's isn't the only room within hobbling distance. He'll allow them both the dignity of an exit, though, first. Resists the urge to so much as turn to watch him go.

(The room, whenever Isaac returns to it, will be more or less as it was. A set of night clothes, ones he's never seen Isaac wear, are borrowed and returned in a day's time, laundered and pressed. The mug is cleaned and put back in its usual place. Nothing else of his is missing. Nothing is left for him.

If any of Ilias's letters were kept in this room, however, they are no longer. Not even the pressed plants. As near as can make it to having never been here at all.) ]