closed.

[byblow]

WHO: Alistair & Sabine
WHAT: SHE
WHEN: Kingsway
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: n/a

This is not his beautiful horse. But it is a beautiful horse, shiny-coated and chestnut with white socks, and becoming prettier by the second while Alistair works a knot out of its mane with his fingers and a brush.

“I bet you don’t appreciate this at all,” he tells her. His sleeves are rolled up. He pauses to brush the back of his forearm to see what the bristles feel like, just once back and forth. “Aside from that feeling nice. But we could just shave it off and save everyone a lot of trouble, and you wouldn’t feel ugly at all. Even though you would be. People would be embarrassed to be seen with you.”

The mare does not speak Trade; the mare is busy with her bucket of oats. The rest of Riftwatch’s menagerie is fussing quietly, and outside the stables sailors and dockhands are shouting, periodically dropping something heavy somewhere it shouldn’t be dropped, and shouting louder about that.

Across the harbor, there’s a desk and a stack of books and papers. But there are also a lot of hours left in the day to spend feeling that particular terrible mix of tedium and helplessness in the face of overwhelming odds.

So: horse knots. He’s standing outside the stall, at least—to maintain as long as possible the chance and the illusion that he’ll move on as soon as this knot is taken care of, instead of grooming somebody’s entire horse without permission just to procrastinate.

Comments

[byblow]

“Oh,” Alistair says, and his smile stretches wider.

No one has ever accused him of overconfidence. (Not credibly, anyway. Morrigan accusing him of being overconfident in his ability to read doesn’t count.) But there’s a limit to even the most ingrained uncertainty and self-doubt, and Sabine’s fingers shove him right over it, past stupid questions like are you seeing anyone or mayest I toucheth your bum a little.

He says: “Youuu missed me.”

And they’re doing necessary work here, and she has her anchor and her motives. All of that. He knows. If she were really the sort of person to put anything that important aside for him, she wouldn’t be the sort of person he’s going to kiss—and he is. He’s getting there. He’s releasing the brush without resistance so he can duck down and scoop her up (there’s the bum touchething) to eye-level in a laced-finger sling.

“You were crying yourself to sleep over my manly jawline and rustic Fereldan scent. Let the world burn,” in a reckless approximation of her accent, “I cannot live without that nose.”

[glandival]

Boot heels lift off the ground, and then a little more as Sabine hitches her legs against the outsides of his, hand and hand-holding-horse-brush landing on his shoulders. There's that flash of warning in her eye as he closes in on her, which isn't quite as believable when those same eyes have laugh wrinkles at the corners.

And her smile has blossomed into a full fangy grin, so she brings her hand up to splay across his face as if to cover both general handsomeness as well as his eyes, and obscure from him the fact he is making her laugh. It doesn't work too great.

On either count. "Don't you know," she says, "I have killed Corypheus myself. Saved Orlais. I have come for my prize."

Her hand has slipped back away from his face by now and is instead cradling his skull with her fingers slipped between the short waves of his hair. She grips a little as she stares confronting into his eyes, the edge of her expression softening, and then pulling in closer for her mouth to touch his mouth.