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

iorveth | ota

[aenseidhe]

[ iorveth never wants to see another nug again in his life. fuck kidnapping, fuck the desert, fuck the deep roads. when they make it back into the gallows, the thin, light cotton underclothes he'd been in are stained and dirty, the only new addition from when they'd burst forth from the wagon being a ratty pair of trousers he'd stolen off a clothes line, and a rope tied tight to keep them from falling off his skinny elf ass. there's not even the scarf on his head that usually covers the vicious scar taking up one side of his face, and the ugly lack of a right eye.

he shuffles in with gwenaelle on his arm, a hand on her waist, probably carrying her at this point more than supporting her. they were glued together during the trip, and once it's time for her to meet with her family and husband, iorveth's loathe to let her go. watching her fall into thranduil's arms, he smiles softly, and turns to face the rest of those gathered for the memorial, eyes skimming over the pyre and other ceremonial nonsense. ]

No no. My wishes were that seven human virgins be burned as sacrifice to honor my demise. I only see five here.

[ which of you humans is he calling a virgin? you will never know. ]

closed to kostos;

[ once the groups have all folded together to mingle and clutch at each other and weep in sweet relief, iorveth sinks back, watching them all from a distance after passing gwen off to her husband, giving him a silent nod, because emotions are for tools. despite what thranduil's grief pulls at in his chest.

he's frowning down at the grime on his person, clinging to his clothes, his arms, probably his neck and cheeks, and worst of all on his hands - dark dirt from the disgusting deep roads, iorveth wanting to cringe again at the thought of the black fungus that seemed to take the place down there. thankfully, none of that is on his hands, as iorveth refused to go anywhere near it, but there is still dirt and mud and nastiness there.

he's about to head to the baths, in the templar tower, when kostos crosses his path, and fuckery ensues.

pacing over, iorveth's palms splat soundly against each of kostos' cheeks, rubbing at his face in circular motions that also squish his cheeks together ridiculously, as iorveth grins at him like a half starved, douchebag fox. ] Miss me?

[rowancrowned]

[ there is, sadly, another nug, in one of thranduil's hands much like you'd hold a hot dog- firmly, by the belly, held slightly in front to protect him from jostling via thranduil's wide shoulders. at least it's a familiar nug. he's probably seen iorveth naked, at least. the kitten has been deposited with gwen and romain, but thranduil still has leviathan, for his own safety.

he reaches out. they are in public, so the touch to the edge of iorveth's shift is so light as to be nothing, but they are both attentive men, and so it can carry the weight of more. ]

Ah, I thought to myself, [ he says, soft. ] He was right. It is a terrible pain, to lose him during this war.

[aenseidhe]

[ at the first sight of him, something in iorveth's chest tightens up, a lot of somethings, and he swallows back against the lump in his throat, watching the king's features for a long few seconds after he speaks. ]

Thranduil. [ lifting a hand, it touches his shoulder, giving a brief squeezes before fading away. ] Squaess'me. I hate that you suffered this grief.

[ to not lose just him, but the woman who completes him too. it was on his mind the entire route back to Kirkwall, with Gwenaelle tucked in at his side, most particularly when they were making their way out of the deep roads and down the mountains, and gwen could hardly walk on her own any longer. he'd have brought her the rest of the way crawling if he had to. ]

[rowancrowned]

I suffered. [ he shrugs, for lack of a better verb to describe the way he shakes the concern off his shoulders. ] I would have survived. There is work to do.

[ he looks at gwen. his jaw tightens. ]

Thank you for bringing my wife home. And for bringing yourself home.

[ he hopes, like a fool, for some chance at reconciliation. he wants nothing more than to find somewhere to secret gwen away. he'll have it, with emeric's help, but he won't be able to persuade iorveth into it. ]

[aenseidhe]

[ as much as iorveth would like to reach out for him properly, he doesn't, and as much as he'd like to go with the two of them, hidden away and soothing what wounds remain from survival and needless mourning, he won't. there's too much in that to unpack now, and rather than complicate it, best to let husband and wife rejoin in peace. ]

Your wife was hellbent to bring herself home just as well. [ said with a fond smile, iorveth looking down at his hands, skin dry and cracked and still covered in the muck and grime from the mountains and the deep roads. ] All the same, I'd never have left her.

[ not on his fucking life, regardless of thranduil being attached or his history with either. gwenaelle has ever been a treasured friend and fond confidant before anything else. ]

[exequy]

Not a fucking bit, [ Kostos says with all the tattered remnants of his dignity he can gather, pushing at Iorveth's forearms to free his face, just as soon as he's over the surprise of having his face squished—and that's before he fully realizes there's grime involved.

Emotions are for tools, and Kostos, fortunate enough not to have any of the very small handful of people he'd become a reckless revenge-murdering monster for among the missing, had had quite enough of dealing with them well before the dead returned and all of the springs he'd hoped were drying up had welled up again.

But he has work to do. He'd only gone up to his room to change, first, and now this: ]

You asshole.

[ Now he's realized that there's grime involved. He touches his own face to confirm the transference, then gives Iorveth one of those darting half-slap shoulder shoves, meant more as a jolting fuck you than to knock anyone down.

He did miss him a little. ]

[aenseidhe]

[ iorveth leans with the shove, pacing back a couple steps as he laughs, cracked and dry lips grinning wide at kostos's unfortunate dirt to face issue. ]

Are you sure? [ he starts, voice teasing as he bends down to snatch up a handful of dirt and gravel, sifting it out for some pebbles that he starts to throw at the mage's chest, because he is a grown ass man and he can. ] Not even a single tear?

[ plink, there's a pebble. plonk, there's another one. ]

Should I have died more violently? Maybe left behind an arm gruesomely? [ because what do we do when we barely dodge an untimely demise? crack some jokes about it. laugh like everyone who believed it is a sucker. ] Please, I value your critique.

[exequy]

[ Kostos is in the middle of trying to rub his cheek clean, without success, when the first pebble hits, and for the second he’s raised a hand to try to block it, also without success. But before there can be a third, he’s made a clean two-handed gesture and been enveloped by a barrier of force that wouldn’t let a sword touch him, and definitely not a pebble.

He doesn’t trot out magic lightly. Not in bar fights, even when he has cracked ribs and a bloody nose. Definitely not during practice. That would be cheating. But this is important. He’s had his face squished and his cheeks grimed and his decision—recommendation, at least—to stop searching suddenly shown to be stupid, and in a way he can’t rightly be angry about, since being angry that everyone’s proven him wrong by surviving would obviously be ridiculous—he’s glad, really, it’s just—

The pebbles aren’t touching him anymore, is the point. ]

There’s still time.

[ To die violently. To lose an arm. He doesn’t mean it. ]

[aenseidhe]

[ the magic barrier that erects around kostos gets a lame pbbbft sound from the recently rumored dead man(elf). boo, you whore.

but, he does take the appearance of actual magic as a 'you can stop now' and iorveth drops the rest of his pebbles back onto the dirty street from whence they came, pacing lazily up to the edge of kostos's barrier instead and linger there. ]

Lend us some assistance then, would you? [ iorveth holds an arm out, giving it a shake towards Kostos, like he's expecting the man to pull out a machete and hack it off for him. ] Here, the left one. I'd hate for my corpse to look unbalanced.

[ because missing the right eye and right arm would just be tacky, too aesthetically heavy on the one side, and violate some kind of corpse feng shui. we can't have that.

the point of this nonsense being: he just survived the desert and the mountains and the deep roads hell in practically just his pajamas, let him preen a little. morbidly. ]