faderift | [open] far from my mother's home

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[open] far from my mother's home

WHO: Benedict and you
WHAT: October catch-all
WHEN: throughout Harvestmere
WHERE: Kirkwall dungeon/gay baby jail
NOTES: will add if necessary

For Riftwatch members in good standing, there's a built-in captive audience residing in a cell below the Kirkwall mage tower. One barred window peeks out onto the dreary courtyard, and on the opposite wall an interior door opens onto a dark, torchlit hallway, a bench placed on the wall facing in for the comfort of guests and interrogators.

Inside the cell, every day is the same. Sometimes Benedict is sleeping on the little bed supported by chains from the wall, sometimes he's pacing, sometimes he's standing on his toes to rest his chin on the windowsill, hands gripping the bars to keep himself upright, starved for any form of stimulation whatsoever.

Increasingly, he can be found sitting or lying on the floor of his cell, staring at the ceiling or fiddling with the straw scattered on the floor, bending and twisting it in such a way that, on closer inspection, he might be trying to figure out how to weave it.

Visitors will find him quite receptive, even excited to see them. Unless they're Flint.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Benedict is still asleep when she arrives, or trying to be. There's nothing preventing the wind from coming straight through the open window, and as the year grows later, it grows colder.
Which means sleep becomes more difficult, for want of warmth and basic comfort.

After fighting it for a while, he recognizes that the smell is not going away, and his stomach gives a growl of desire that results in him lifting his head to see Athessa. She's not who he expected.

"Mornin', you absolute Nugget. It's me, back again." Which of course he can see, but that's not the point. Using a small knife she slices a boule of turtle bread^* in half.

"I brought plenty to share if you're in the mood to answer a question."

"Morning," comes the sleepy reply, and Benedict huddles into more of a ball, pulling the blanket around himself. He's gotten used to people seeing him like this: hair a mess, face stubbly, clothes rumpled from his punitive inability to groom.
That doesn't mean he doesn't hate it, but sometimes one has to pick one's battles.

"What question," he murmurs, pushing his hair out of his face and resting his mouth against his arms, which he curls around his drawn-up knees.

The steam rises from the inside of the bread, the sweet topping on the rounded, cracked top chipping off onto the stone floor. A treat for any little critters that come sniffing around.

"A very important, life-changing, fate-of-the-world type question," she's saying, looking at the halves and deciding that they're too equal to offer him the smaller piece. So she picks one arbitrarily to extend through the bars, the other going straight to her mouth.

"Hwm d'yh uff dh hhka?"

It smells delicious, and once the bread is offered forward, Benedict slinks down from his bench to pick up the half Athessa pushed in. It's amazing: it's warm, for one thing, and has flavor for another, and he almost can't believe how lucky he is.
He almost misses her question, but then realizes he just couldn't understand it.

"What?"

"Hmmf--" Athessa rolls her eyes at herself, finishes chewing, and tries again without a mouth full of bread:

"The hookah. How does it work?" Fate-of-the-world indeed.

Now it's Benedict who has a mouthful of bread, and it takes him a moment to catch her meaning. When he does, there's a frankly poetic breakdown in his expression from Enjoying the Bread to What Does She Mean to She Said Hookah, I Know What That Is to She Means My Hookah, The Hookah That Was Sold to All My Things Were Sold And I Live In A Cage.

His chewing slows, and he watches her for a moment, then looks down as he swallows. He wasn't ready for this, not first thing in the morning.

She's slow on the uptake, but she can read his expression fairly well. And it's not like she's a stranger to the concept of having personal belongings wrenched away unwillingly.

So she can guess at how shitty he must feel about it.

Digging a cinnamon twist from her parcel of goodies, she tears it in half and offers one side--the bigger one this time--to him through the bars. "Here."

He takes it with a voiceless 'thanks', the bread already ash in his mouth with this newest revelation. He just holds the cinnamon twist, turning it between his fingers and trying very hard not to express anything that would get him sneered or laughed at. Sometimes it's better to stay silent until circumstance stops allowing it.

When the silence gets to be too boring for her, Athessa rewraps the remaining few goodies so they won't go cold in this drafty dungeon. "You'll get it back," she starts, over the crinkling of the paper. "When you get out of here. And I figure since they got your stuff when it wasn't clear that you'd be coming back, your other stuff will follow soon after. Nobody around here is that heartless."

She takes a bite of her half of the cinnamon twist. "I don't have anywhere to keep the hookah anyway."

He looks up again, changed on a dime.
"You'd--" he stammers, and grips one of the bars, "--really?" Nobody around here is that heartless, she claims: he knows the opposite to be true, but perhaps he shouldn't push his luck.

She shrugs. "Of course. Circumstances changed, and all."

Sitting back on the heel of one hand, she gestures with the cinnamon twist in the other. "Believe it or not, I know how shitty it feels to lose...fuck, everything you care about."

He's reminded of the cinnamon twist, and brings it to his mouth to take a bite while Athessa talks. Now that he's less paralyzed by silent grief, he can sit a little more comfortably, the blanket still tucked around his shoulders.
"Really?"

The good thing about being high is how easy it is to parse emotions, compared to when you're sober and you can't help but think about how it feels, and in turn overthink about it, and shut down due to a tangled knot of nameless feelings culminating in nothing but anxiety, panic, and the inability to sit still.

So it doesn't take much contemplation for Athessa to know that she needs to first start with a question:

"How big is your family?"

Though he doesn't understand how it's relevant, Benedict shrugs and replies, "just my parents and me. And their parents." Then, after a pause, "unless you count the woman who raised me."

"If she raised you, she's family," Athessa affirms, as if it's the simplest fact in the world. "I figure you don't know...well, anything about Dalish clans, so I gotta put it in terms you understand."

She finishes off her confection, brushes the cinnamon-sugar from her hands, and leans back again, this time looking up at the ceiling as if the story is painted there for her to interpret.

"A clan is made up of different bloodlines, but every one of them is family by name. So the woman who raised you, your parents, their parents, that's your clan. Probably the servants, too, if you cared about them at all. So when I say clan, you can just imagine family. And know what I mean when I say my entire clan was..." Athessa has to pause, clear her throat before finishing that sentence. It doesn't help that she still doesn't know the details, just that it still hurts. A wound never healed.

She shrugs and looks anywhere but at Benedict's face. "Wiped out, taken from me, whatever you wanna call it."

This seems like a bunch of elf weirdness, but hardly being in any position to judge, Benedict nods. And... finds that he feels a small pull of sympathy at what comes next.
"They were killed?" he asks, possibly too casually, but it's for his own clarification. Taken from her could mean a variety of things, but wiped out is fairly clear.

If his question is too casual, then her answer to it is too ready, too quick to be voiced and unravel the last shred of hope she'd been clinging to until very recently. She looks at him without ire about his manner.

"Yeah. I went from having a family and a home to having neither all at once. So...yeah I think I can imagine how you feel."

It's a fairly new thing, emotional intimacy. Being told something in confidence is not part of Benedict's typical day, so it makes itself quite obvious when that's what happens, and he's smart enough to be careful with it.

She can imagine how he feels, and to a degree, that's returned. He nods quietly. Then, "I'm sorry."

The corner of her mouth quirks up in a sad shade of a smile. "Me too."

That moment, in all its earnest pain, lingers just too long for Athessa to bear, so she clears her throat again before the feeling of being vulnerable gets too intense. Her high must be wearing off already.

"So anyway, that's why I'm giving the hookah back. Not--not the--" Vague gesturing as she avoids repeating any part of the whole my family was killed when I was 13 thing. "--but ya know. Because I get it and I wouldn't wanna make someone else feel bad like that."

She's already said it, and so the context is there between them, and it's not going away. Benedict watches her, finishing the cinnamon twist and, for some strange reason, feeling quite a bit better about everything.

"I hear that..." he murmurs, lowering his head as though ashamed; he's never been party to it, but it's hardly a secret among the higher echelons of human society. "...that happens a lot. To elves."

"It does," she answers, after giving the execution of her defense mechanism a moment of silence. "The ones who aren't killed are enslaved."

And I'm not sure which ones are the lucky ones, she doesn't say.

Another harsh truth brought to light, and Benedict has no cloud of smoke in which to dampen his feelings. Most of his family's slaves were elves.
Are elves.

"Do you--" he begins, but quiets himself, shaking his head. It's a question that's going to make her angry, he can guarantee it, and he isn't sure he can handle more anger.

She looks at him, prompting him to go on with nothing more than an arch of her brow.

He hunches his shoulders, bracing for impact even before the question is asked. But it's a point of genuine curiosity, something he never really thought about until coming to Riftwatch, meeting elves, getting to know them as people for the first time.

"...do you think it... it would be awful, being a slave?"

They have shelter at least, vocations, purpose. Better than what he's heard of alienages.

[open] far from my mother's home

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*tortuga conchas i forgot to put the footnote in the actual tag whoops

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