faderift | MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

"I dunno, probably on the roof. Maybe in the garden. Where do you want me to be?"

"The garden. I promise I'll be there, no later than an hour."

True to his word, he's there about forty-five minutes later. His hair is still wet from washing the sweat out of it, but he is clean and dressed. That's the important thing. When he sees her, he stretches out his hands.

"Hug?"

By the time he gets there, she's stopped needing to move so much, the adrenaline all but gone. Her hair is messily piled atop her head, she's wearing the same loose fitting clothes and jumper that she slept in, and she's almost through with the gently smoldering herb.

Seeing him makes her eyes well up again, but she offers as much of a smile as she can muster before running to him and throwing her arms around his shoulders. He's like a lifeline that she clings to, balling her fists in the fabric of his shirt and letting out a shaky breath as if she can only just now breathe fully.

Colin squeezes her tightly, his cheek pressed to her hair, hand rubbing up and down her back. "Just breathe. That was a lot."

She buries her face in the crook of his neck, but she does breathe. In for a count of four, and out for the same, like Ciara taught her. It works to slow her heart down a bit more, but only time--or more herb--will put an end to her shaking. She knows that from experience.

And as she breathes, she feels like she might understand something more about what Laura told her about scent. Colin smells like the soap he used, of course, and the earthy, woody ingredients that he works with, but there's also something indescribable that is just him. It's...comforting.

After what simultaneously feels like hours and like no time at all, she pulls back and uselessly brushes at his shirt where she's left fresh tears. This time, her attempt at a smile is a little more successful, despite it all. "Sorry, got your shirt all wet."

"It'll dry," Colin says with a little smile. His gaze drops for a moment. "Was, um. Did any of that really happen?"

Some dreams are oddly literal, these ones more so than most, and if any real-life event is going to cause nightmares, it's going to be sexual slavery.

She starts to nod, then seems to hedge on it.

"It...s-sort of? I...Devigny didn't...buy me," It's a hard thing to talk about, even to someone who saw something very much like what really happened. She sighs and turns, walking back to where she'd been when Colin arrived, and sitting on the ground. There's a bench, of course, but she'd rather sit in front of it, on the grass, than on something hard and unforgiving.

"I was unlucky enough to get nabbed by the wrong guards for stealing and they took me to him instead of arresting me. I only ever saw the foyer and that room, and he..." Her face reflects the disgust she feels, the churning of her stomach and she fetches up her nearly-spent joint again and takes a drag. Around a lungful of smoke, she continues: "He wanted to test out the goods first. Dumped me at The Maiden Tower after." A brothel, where she was probably meant to stay, locked up where she couldn't implicate him in anything if she had the gall to try. But she was more trouble than she was worth, and nobody would care about an elf being used and discarded when the alternative is trying a wealthy resident in Hightown.

Colin sits down beside her and reaches for the joint in her hand without asking. If permitted, he'll take a drag of his own, his hands still shaking slightly. He sputters a bit, losing about half of it to a cough, and the rest is exhaled through his nostrils. He passes the rest of it back to her.

Now he understands how his friends felt when they learned about Lutair. It's a completely different feeling that rears up when it's a friend and not yourself who was hurt. It reminds him of what happened to him, certainly, brings back those haunting memories always lurking in the back of his mind, but he also just wants to kill Devigny. More than he ever wanted to kill Lutair, even at his most desperate. It's almost understandable for someone to hurt him. Hurting a friend? That goes too far.

He rubs his hands together and rests his elbows on his knees. "Sounds like we knew the same kinds of people," he sighs.

The joint is passed without comment or protest; she's happy to share. She prefers smoking with friends than smoking alone, anyway, though there's not as much opportunity for that lately. How awful would it be for smoking with friends to become something unpleasant, associated always with coping with their pasts?

But she lets out a hollow, humorless laugh at what he says.

"Fucking assholes," she agrees, then sniffs and rubs her face with her sleeve. "Not that I ever knew more than his name and where he lived. I was just...some stupid kid living on the streets, no friends, no clan, no luck. The girls at that fucking brothel treated me more like a person than anyone else in Kirkwall ever did."

"Monsters," Colin corrects her gently. "Fucking monsters." He goes silent for the rest of what she says. At the end of it, he is left taking it all in. It's a lot to learn about someone, weighty and dark. Then he speaks again.

"You're Dalish?" he asks a little more loudly, clearly surprised.

This time when she laughs, it's genuine, surprised that he's surprised, and amused by it.

"Yeah. I mean now I've been on my own longer than I was with my clan but..." She shrugs. It's not like most people would know by looking, or would recognize her clan name. They're gone.

A small chuckle. "Same way as I'm a kid from Denerim, then." He glances at her, then reaches for whatever is left of the joint. "What happened to them?"

She lets him have the last of the herb, plenty high enough to cope now.

"Gone. Probably dead, maybe scattered and enslaved. I guess there's a chance they're fine, but I don't... wanna think about the possibility that they abandoned me willingly."

"We keep having things in common," Colin says before taking the last drag.

There's less coughing this time, but it's clear he isn't used to smoking. For situations like this, though? It's definitely better to get a little high. He drops the last bit of paper to the ground and stamps it out.

"My family died when the darkspawn invaded the city. Back during the Blight."

"You'll cough less if you breathe in through your nose while you inhale the smoke," she says, but he's already tamping out the dregs. Oh well. She'll show him how to do it better later.

"Sorry. About your family." It's hard to offer condolences that don't sound hollow, but at least they both know that the other understands uncannily well what the other feels. Has felt. All of it.

"Sorry about yours." There. Now they sound equally hollow, while still understanding. He reaches out an arm and pulls her into a half-hug. "I never met anyone else who went through that. I don't mean losing people, I mean the other thing."

That he knows of, anyway. Except for Lexie, but she doesn't remember it.

Her lips compress into a tight smile.

"You probably have," she says, quietly, and leans into the hug. "I mean it took all of this bullshit for me to tell anyone what happened."

And for Laura, and now for Colin. She can't know who else knows about Colin's experience, but until that first nightmare, neither she nor Laura had told a single soul. Any given person might be carrying this weight alone, telling no-one, never given cause to lay themselves bare.

She never told anyone. He remembers that feeling.

"My secret lasted all the way up until I was here, and I tried to go to bed with someone." A small shrug. "Not a very easy secret to keep when one minute is foreplay and the next you're sobbing in their arms. Thing is, after that, she and I actually became friends. Telling people got easier. Not easy, just easier. When I tell someone now, it's me letting them in. And it's not easy. But I went seven or eight years without letting anyone in, and I was safe-ish, but friendless and completely miserable, so this is better."

Athessa nods slowly. It makes sense, but she's not sure she's ready to let anyone in on that part of her unless it's absolutely necessary. No matter how cathartic it might be to have two other friends who know what she went through and understand, the idea of telling someone who can't relate, who doesn't know how it feels, who then must be burdened unwillingly with something that is so uncomfortable to bear...it frightens her.

Another moment, another cold-induced sniffle, and she shuffles her feet in the grass, working out how to word the question she wants to ask.

"On the subject of going to bed with people," she starts, "What um...how do you deal with...when you're present and into it one minute and then suddenly you're back when that happened and--" Unsure what word to assign to the feeling of panicked and hit with the urge to run away, she gestures vaguely, curling her fingers as if gripping some invisible object in her hands.

Colin smiles to himself. This is what he's glad for. Finally, there's someone who gets it.

"My experience is pretty limited. I've had one time where it didn't work out, and another time when it did. I wouldn't have expected either partner to understand. I absolutely thought they'd both judge me or find me somehow ruined. Like now they knew this about me, I wasn't sexy anymore. But the first one, the one that found out the wrong way, was so kind. After thinking about it, I went ahead and told the other one beforehand. Not immediately beforehand, just when we knew we were both interested. And he didn't care. I mean, he wasn't happy it happened, but he was fine. And we actually had a good time together.

"And that's all to say, it's going to happen. Your partner is going to be better-equipped, and feel better-equipped, if they know about it beforehand. And if they're not equipped for it at all, you need to know before you start. The last thing you need is a panic with someone there who won't support you."

Well, shit. She was hoping for something a bit more internalized, a bit less...vulnerable than that. She could see telling Derrica, maybe, though she's never had an issue getting set off by sex with women. But sometimes a man she takes to bed will do something, say something, taste a certain way or whatever and she'll fall to pieces.

The thought of trying to explain any of this to Deimos? She lets out a scoff through her nose.

"Well that's not a daunting proposition at all."

"I did say I've only successfully done this once, right?" An apologetic wince. "What about you? Any tips?"

She exhales, the breath puffing her cheeks as she considers.

"Well, for me specifically the sure-fire methods is: only fuck women. But I don't want to be limited, ya know? Sometimes--" Don't say sometimes you just want some good dick, Athessa, you can be a little more tactful than that. "Sometimes I wanna fuck men. So."

Shrugging, Athessa thinks back to the Maiden Tower, about Ciara and the other girls.

"The girls at the brothel told me that I needed to take control over what was done to me. That if I could... reenact it from a position of power over the other person and I guess feel more myself again, enough to... enjoy myself instead of dreading every touch and having every man remind me of him.

"It doesn't always work, and I don't uh... being the one in control isn't..." She's not usually bashful about sex, indeed quite the opposite, but for some reason trying to tell Colin that she likes to be the submissive one in bed is very embarrassing. "But anyway I do manage to enjoy myself, and until all this dream shit the bad times were rare. So it must've... worked a bit."

Colin squints. "I mean, my abuser was a Templar, and they have skirts, so it's a bit less clear for me, I guess. Men or women. The one it didn't work out with was a woman, and the one it did work with was a man. Not like next time it won't be the complete opposite."

He lets out a breath. "You know the, the announcement Ilias made about the, um, the mage and Templar in Ferelden, and them going through the court there?"

"Yyyyes?" It's her turn to squint, waiting for him to connect the dots.

MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

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