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

[inkindled]

[His nose wrinkles up at my lady--had a lifetime's worth of that sort of deferential respect, thanks--and then his expression changes to a nose-wrinkle grin instead, again.]

Gigi?

[Holy shit. There's a demonic delight in it. Permission from a posh my lady to call her Gigi, all familiar like. Imagine.]

Yeah, all right. I mean, I've proved I can say it. S'ppose I've earned that. And if anyone laughs at me for it-- [don't ask, it could happen] --I'll let 'em know it's a genuine dispensation.

[And probably kick them. He doesn't articulate it, but the threat is present.]

And you've got mine right. Obviously. S' an easy one.

[elegiaque]

( yngvi is probably the only person who can still call her my lady without gwenaëlle making matthias's exact, wrinkled expression, so while the books might be written in different languages they are on more or less the equivalent page—

and she's still smiling in a way that'd theoretically be quite nice to look at if she didn't look like half-thawed death, a bit. she'd been momentarily concerned he was going to think her condescending (which she is, but she prefers to do it on purpose wherever possible) so the glee is certainly preferable as well as being the outcome she'd been aiming for. boom. nailed it. )

Well, I appreciate the effort. ( she says it so lightly, but only because there's a difference between being direct and being sincere and earnestness is probably genuinely physically difficult for her. ) I'm quite good with names, myself. Seems only reasonable.

( she's not asking for anything she's not prepared to give in turn. it's very fair. )

This, ( with a hand light on her hound's neck, where he tilts his head and yawns, all great lolling tongue and alarming teeth, ) is Hardie. Do you mind letting him smell your hand?

( occasionally thranduil despairs that gwenaëlle spends so much time teaching her guard dog to be friendly to people, but it's specific people, it's fine. just because he didn't like cullen rutherford. )

[inkindled]

[Some part of Matthias withers away at the request. He pushes his hands into his pockets, entirely without meaning to, and balances himself on the balls of his feet, a man prepared to do a runner.

Entirely at odds with this behavior--]

Don't mind, no.

[--while as his body language suggests, correctly, he very much does mind, thanks ever so, but he's determined to master the stupid little boy renegade mage part of him that would rather crawl up a tree than face down a dog. That's only for vicious dogs, isn't it. Turned on your scent, ready to drag you back to its master in pieces if need be. This one? Docile. Like one of those horrible lady's lap dogs, with their faces like someone left them laying on their fronts when they were small. Only much, much larger, some traitorous part of his brain reminds him, teeth as big as your hand--

Yeah, and fuck all that for a fish kettle, he counters, mentally. Screws up his courage.]

So he can get used to me, is it? [See? He knows dogs. Knows them enough not to like them. But, here, all right, yes; Matthias pulls his hands free and closes the distance between himself and the half-drowned half-dead noble bint with the massive big fuck-off hound sitting lamb-like at her probably pretty feet. Walks right up with his hand very much outstretched, brandished like a peace flag that might at any point be snatched back, revoked, or used for a weapon.] Here, have at with that nose, then. Hardie. This smell belongs to me.

[No tremor to his hand, no waver to his voice. Matthias is stubbornly ready to meet this threat. Probably he smells a little more like sausage than normal. He's been feeding griffons, is all.]

[elegiaque]

( despite his immense size and general, sedate air of could be menace at any moment, punk, hardie is a good boy with the delicacy required of an animal whose usual companions are small enough to literally ride on his back and whose mistress is...gwenaëlle. he sniffs, obediently, and she's already trying to work out how to gently extricate him without making it too obvious that she's trying to be sensitive to the reaction matthias is clearly doing his level best to appear not to be having when having nudged his large head briefly under matthias's hand, hardie turns his large gold gaze expectantly upon her.

abruptly, )

Oh, fuck,

( again, which is even less comforting the second time.

hardie is very well-trained, and one of the things that he has been taught is that when he is a good boy who allows himself to be introduced to a stranger without either threatening them or getting suddenly and intimately acquainted with their genitals, he gets a treat. she has absolutely nothing on her. there's a fleeting moment of really sincere haven't thought this through across her face, but gwenaëlle is nothing if not prepared to improvise, and she's pretty sure she's earned some leeway for what she's about to do—

there's a plant feature in the courtyard. she snaps a small branch, and hardie sits up on his back legs, interested in where this is going. maybe that's why mages don't have dogs, really. she wonders if she can train him to take staves. anyway, )

Bon-papa, catch—

( has matthias ever wanted to see an orlesian duke above the age of seventy and above the height of six foot powerfully not make an expression when he catches a stick in his hand and sees two hundred and twenty pounds of anderfels shepherd bounding joyously after it?

gwenaëlle watches for a moment.

conversationally, )

You think he'll let me get away with that because I've just died?

[inkindled]

[Oh fuck what, oh fuck what, is Matthias' first response. He swings his gaze round to Gwenaëlle, all wide-eyed--what is the dog doing, what is he going to do why are you looking like that, all with a rising swell of panic. After all, that is a very not good response and a very not good look on Gwenaëlle's face.

To control himself, Matthias bites down, hard, at his lower lip, contorting his own expression into something horrible and gargoylish, fighting down the feeling of fear and the reactionary itch that has swelled up under his skin. Setting everything on fire, preemptively, will do him no good at all, and he is better than that besides, he has got more control or else he ought to have; just because he was allowed to be a weapon in the war doesn't mean he is a weapon now, it's just a dog, what is the worst that could happen--

Paralyzed, he watches the business with the stick. Watches the posh old coot catch the stick. Watches the dog go bounding off and--limply, at first, disbelieving--laughs. And then he laughs again, more present in it, as Hardie catches up with the stick.]

Are you saying you'd not be allowed to get away with that sort of thing as a living woman? Bet you would. Bon-papa, [he repeats, exaggerated Orlesian accent,] must be nice. Whereas if I threw a stick at a fellow like that, I'd get strung up by my toes. And if some great stonking dog followed that stick? Oof. Goner, me.

Yeah, [conversational now, too,] I'd say you've got it pretty well, even for a dead woman.

[elegiaque]

He's a miserable old cunt, ( but she says it very fondly, because it turns out love doesn't actually have to be blind. she loves her dreadful grandfather just the way he is, which is in fairness 'probably responsible for the deaths of many people rather like matthias'. thedas be like that.

enormous dog thus occupied, she lets her attention shift back to who she has apparently decided is definitely her new friend. )

Though you're probably right. He let me get away with not being blood-related to him, in the end, a stick is probably nothing.

Have you been here, long?

( in riftwatch. gwenaëlle harbors suspicion that their schism from mother inquisition is just alexandrie's elaborate master plan to finally be permitted to rename, at least colloquially, the gallows—

all right, no, but she thinks accusing her of it might warm her to the development, and has made a note to do so in the foreseeable future. )

[inkindled]

Is he?

[Oh he's one of those grandfathers, Matthias is thinking. The unrelated sort, the sort that posh people are allowed to have. A world of relations who aren't relations on top of their real relations, and Matthias without a single one. Not that they'd be likely to claim him if he did have, and the same in reverse.

He's still got to grin a little. Cunt. Yeah. That's all right.]

Came here after Ghislain. So not terribly long, I s'ppose, and I had a bit of time to enjoying being part of the Inquisition proper before we, y'know. Split off.

[He's got to add, as a declaration of where he stands:] For the better.

[--and manages, just barely, not to undercut that with a self-conscious, Right? He knows it's right, no matter what. Even if he's wondering what she thinks of it, even if he wants to ask. Maybe she's the sort that will volunteer her opinion and save him the embarrassment of asking it.]

[elegiaque]

( being as gwenaëlle has an opinion on fucking everything and absolutely doesn't care whether or not people want to hear it— )

Better for them, better for us.

( —she doesn't wait to be asked, no. )

This place would have fucking rioted if we were expected to join an exalted march. On anything.

[inkindled]

[Matthias, feeling the inner glow that comes of having one's opinion resolutely justified, nearly falls over himself to say--]

Yeah.

[--all eager and emphatic. It might remind of a puppy, but a puppy who has some very sharp teeth and some very dangerous opinions and maybe a tattered ear; a puppy who has Seen Some Shit.]

That's why I came here in the first place. 'Cause that's what everyone ought to be like. Ready to stand up for everything, y'know, everything that matters, no matter what. Ready to tell things like the Chantry to shove it if they try to impose some stupid bloody march on us. And if the normal Inquisition's too great a load of couchers for that, then we're well rid of them. Still might work with them, but we can't be bound to them.