closed | I'm never very good at getting what I need the most

[keenly]

WHO: Bastien and Colin
WHAT: Addressing a small problem with going rogue
WHEN: Current
WHERE: The apothecary in the Gallows
NOTES: tw: discussion of templar abuses.

On their departure from Denerim, Colin had assumed Alexandrie and Byerly had done impeccable work covering their tracks. And they did. They were perfect. But not everything was in their control.

Ser Lutair had been sent away with Ser Albert to face the Templars for sentencing, desertion and rape at the forefront of his charges. It left Colin waiting anxiously, not knowing whether this man who had tormented him would get more than a slap on the wrist. The Templars might simply tell him to get back in line. Ser Albert had made assurances, but it was never going to be Ser Albert's decision. Colin has been awaiting his letter ever since.

Business is slower during the summer, so the only person in the apothecary when Bastien enters is Colin. He looks up at him from the bundle of herbs he is tying together.

"Come in. What can I do for you?"

Comments

[cozen]

Bastien inclines his head very slightly to one side. It feels like—to draw on experience—approaching a vault with seventeen pieces of specialized equipment and a nine-step plan but instead finding it unlocked and unguarded. Only it’s filled with misery instead of money. And slightly less likely to be an intentional ploy to draw him inside and lock the door behind him.

It’s also, you know.

Sad.

Felise did her best to squeeze it out of him, like water from a cloth, or life from a bird’s neck, but by then she was feeble, and now beneath Bastien perfectly arranged expression of reserved but concerned sympathy, there’s a swell of the genuine article.

“I am not an expert,” he says after a moment, because he isn’t. He can say what people want to hear; saying what they need to hear is trickier business. “But I have never known any deep feeling to evaporate all at once. It takes time, and work, and even then sometimes you can only hope for it to fade instead of vanish.”