(closedish openish) keep you like an oath

[byblow]

WHO: Alistair & Others
WHAT: Some sulking, some snark.
WHEN: Third week of Haring + bonus first week of Wintermarch.
WHERE: Skyhold.
NOTES: No open starters, but if you want something PM me or hit me up on Plurk! Or drop a starter of your own on me and I'll roll with it.

Comments

[fleurdesel]

Compassion's prickling at her while Alistair hesitates. While he dithers for some reason or another outside her tent. True she is currently preoccupied with measuring out what looks to be a fairly complicated series of powders and liquids in phials with a cauldron bubbling off to one side, but the lantern she uses to signify she is available for those that need her is lit, up, and her tent is otherwise empty. Though if she does take a moment to think back to their last exchange, a friendly barb tossed by he and an frigid, formal remark from she- perhaps it is not so strange that he had lost his footing.

It'd been something she would do to someone she truly disliked. Not that she likes him at all- but it is a tolerable dislike. A mildly annoyed dislike that comes less from loathing him as a person and more with finding him insufferable and nowhere near charming enough to make up for it.

He steps forward, she doesn't bother looking up from where she's grating a hard nut into her pestle.

"That depends- how much are you suffering right now? 'Someone called me a mean name' or 'Someone poured molten lyrium on my genitals?' One of those I'm happy to let linger." Which it is she'll leave to him.

[byblow]

It's just as well she isn't looking at him. If she were he would have to try to hide the way he brightens--to the extent he's able to brighten without actually smiling, and also while being a little paler than normal--when she sounds like herself. Her horrible, haughty, impatient self. "Those are my only two options?" he asks. "Not 'one of the recruits got overzealous and sliced my arm open'? That would round it out, I think. Some middle ground."

He wiggles his fingers, experimentally, and shakes some drops loose into the grass. Four hundred years of royal breeding, an ancient mouthful of a great dragon's magic, neutered taint and a pinch of archdemon, but it's still only blood, the same color as anyone's.

"I can't actually feel it," he decides, honestly, and goes on with less honesty and more delighted sarcasm: "It doesn't sting nearly as much as your disdain."

[fleurdesel]

"...You can't feel it, so how is it you are suffering?" That is enough to warrant her head swinging around, eyes narrowing on the wrapped and injured arm. Sliced open, bleeding quite a bit- training accident. The details file together into a conclusive whole along with the possible treatments flittering through the back of her mind before she ever bothers glancing up to his face. He seems...pleased.

Which only serves to have her scowl all the harder. He shouldn't be pleased to stand before her while bleeding and offering his injured arm much as a child with a favored muddy stick or creature fresh from the bog.

She sighs. Flicks her fingers to the chair next to her. "Sit. Do not bleed on anything or I will charge you double." Of nothing, which is nothing, but they're mutually ignoring that.

[byblow]

"I thought keeping me from bleeding on anything was your job," Alistair says, settling into the chair, but he doesn't bleed on anything but his own pants, holding his arm over his lap. "If I faint--"

He isn't going to faint. He's had worse. He isn't much paler than normal, and the numbness is only from adrenaline and normal nerve damage and a high pain tolerance perfected by years and years of sticking his feet directly into traps. He begins tentatively unwrapping the burlap.

He doesn't look up when he adds, "You seem to be feeling better."

[fleurdesel]

"Only if I am paid for it." She rolls her sleeves back so as to not get his blood all over her- though it would likely happen all the same as soon as he unwound the burlap holding his arm together. For all her harsh words and narrowed eyes, the hands she rests upon his elbow and wrist to pull his injured limb closer to her are gentle.

Even if she is tempted to pinch him for his commentary.

"If you faint I leave you where you lie and charge two silvers for each hour you sleep in my tent." Not that he'll faint. Carefully she peels away the fabric to look to the wound, eyes and fingers already glowing with Compassion's power. "Better than what?"

[byblow]

"Than before."

Helpful. Give him a moment: he can feel the burlap peel away from the wound, and also there's always something a little disconcerting about the glowy eyes no matter how many spirit healers one goes to begging for help. Both at once is enough to pinch his eyebrows together, while the gash on his forearm begins streaming anew, but a couple blinks and his face clears.

"Before your meeting. I said hello—" He did not say hello. He more likely said you're looking especially intimidating today. But no one was listening, there are no witnesses, she can't prove anything. "—and you looked at me like you didn't like me even a little."

As opposed to how she looks at him the rest of the time. Clearly.

[fleurdesel]

"How terribly specific." He'd get there eventually- he usually does whether she wants him to or not. For the moment she focuses on that trickle of blood and the depth of the cut, pouring her power into it in slow, warm pulses.

Flesh and skin knit back together little by little, an impeccably precise line that'll heal in a barely there scar- if that. Much as she doesn't care for him work is work. They can poke and snipe and glower at one another till they're blue in the face but she'll still tend to him with all the care she gives anyone else.

"Perhaps because I do not like you, stable boy. Not even a little." Maybe a little. In her own way- he is someone to poke at that pokes back. "It was simply more difficult to hide my distaste."

[byblow]

"I was actually a stable boy, you know," Alistair says, watching his skin rearrange. It's interesting. Weird, always, but interesting. "I'm not ashamed of it. You'll have to try a little harder than that to find something that a bunch of half-wit nobles' sons didn't call me when I was ten—ow." That would be the nerves repairing themselves. He squirms but mostly (mostly) manages to keep his arm still. "But you seem pretty smart. I believe in you."

[fleurdesel]

"Do not twitch-" She mutters, pinching his elbow with one hand. "Keep still or it will mend improperly."

Of course he's a squirmer. How a man his size and age acts like such a child- she'll never know. "I use small words around you for a reason. Anything more elaborate will go right over your head."

[byblow]

"I've heard that one, too," Alistair says. "Probably as many times as you've heard condescending and—" He doesn't say ow again, but there's a pause while he thinks it and holds very carefully and perfectly still, as told. "—imperious."

[fleurdesel]

"Clearly you've kept sensible company." Her eyes narrow, the glow intensifying in her eyes and on her skin. "Exacting. Precise. Impossible, on more than one occasion. How dare I hold people to a higher standard than the rest of the world."