faderift | MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

"Then you better get started," Bastien says, though he does give the knot in question a little due-diligence tug to make sure it's at least secure, if not any tighter, before going into his own pockets for a handkerchief. "Someone will be here for you soon."

He wrenches the cloth around his blood-sticky fingers until they're passingly clean, then sits on the floor in front of Byerly's chair and unfurls one of the documents—hard-won, by Riftwatch, through negotiation and blackmail—that this is apparently mostly about. Half about, at least. The other half is tied to a chair. The dim light makes it difficult to make out the symbols and notes on the schematics, but even in daylight, they wouldn't mean anything to Bastien. Or be any more his business. He's only curious.

"All this fuss," he says.

"A dreadful amount of it," Byerly agrees, again with a passing imitation of ease and unconcern. Then, in the tone of someone asking a dinner companion to pass the wine, he inquires, "If it's not too much trouble to say, who will be coming for me, exactly?"

It's all a bit absurd, perhaps. All these niceties. Truthfully, if Byerly gets his hands free, and subdues Bastien, the temptation to draw a knife across his traitor throat will be quite strong. It shan't be one he'll give into, of course - one does not dispose of a valuable source of intelligence in such a way - but there's something here that goes beyond professional embarrassment. Something deeper than the usual respect due from a spy to the spy who bested him. Something that makes him want to bellow.

But he doesn't. Instead, he cracks his eyes open and offers Bastien a friendly, rather wry smile. Just business, that smile says. No hard feelings.

"Fleurent," Bastien says, with the skeptical emphasis an obviously fake name deserves. "He is an idiot. And an intermediary. I could not tell you who he works for, but we can guess, ouais?"

He looks up from the diagrams to find Byerly smiling, and he smiles back out of amiable instinct, but it's a fleeting thing. He rolls the paper back up and sets it aside. The light isn't any better for reading Byerly than it was for reading paper, but his eyes seem sharp enough. He probably isn't going to pass back out and die.

"I know it is not worth anything to you now, but I would not have agreed to this if I had known it would be you. I thought about trying to put something in your food so you would have to send someone else in your place, but..." He shrugs and leans back on his hands. "Risky and unprofessional."

Liar. If Byerly's presence would have been enough to make Bastien decline the job, then Bastien wouldn't be here now, doing this. The lying, the way his face stays so soft and sympathetic, is nearly enough to break through Byerly's calm. It flickers in his face for just a moment, a tiny drop of venom before the smile takes over again.

"That means quite a lot to me," he says, voice ruefully warm. "Truly, it does. Of course, if you would regret it so much, you could let me go. We could leave that correspondence behind and scurry out of here."

It would be nice if loss happened all at once and was done, but there is the moment you agree to sell a beloved horse, and there is the moment they take her away—Bastien imagines, at least, having never owned a horse.

Which is to say: it’s already settled, all the doors to worlds where Byerly might have thought well of him locked and bolted, but that flash of venom still feels like the end of something. For a moment his smile is small, sad, and crooked.

Then it’s wide, fake, and cheerful, and he’s stretching his legs out and crossing his ankles, looking up at Byerly from the floor like he’s waiting on the rest of a fairy tale.

“And then what?”

"And then we find a bit of pleasure." It's flirtatious, if not explicitly a come-on. He can see the look of sadness in Bastien's eyes, and knows that this means that his fate is properly sealed. Not getting out of this. But he's got to dance, and keep dancing - because he has survived this damned long in this damned war, and he will not permit a friend to be what takes him out.

"A gamble, a romp, somewhere in the city. Easy to find that. We're quite good at finding good times, aren't we?"

"The best."

All warmth. Perhaps that is part of his success—not being able to lie so much as being able to say to someone I wish you well and truly mean it, no lie required, even with the means to ruin their lives already secreted away in his coat.

"I would need to leave Orlais, but I have heard Wycome knows how to enjoy itself." Outside there's a distant clatter. Hooves and carriage wheels on stone. Bastien angles his ear toward the window to better catch the sound but otherwise doesn't move. "We might have a few months."

That sound sends a wave of fear through Byerly. Paradoxically, that fear steadies him, grounds him, as it has ever done. He feels sharper for it.

"Don't underestimate me, Bastien," he says with a rakish grin. "We'll have far more than that. Years of bad behavior and mortal sin. And it won't be the Vints who catch us - " It is the Venatori, right? Not Orlais? That's the problem with serving two masters, the enemies multiply - "but the Maker himself."

“Terribly ever after. Tempting.”

He could stand to spend a few more minutes entertaining the thought. But the clattering stops outside the house.

“If I did underestimate you. But I do not, and I would do very poorly in a dungeon, and not much better dead.”

Heavy boots, the front door. Bastien twists nimbly back up onto his feet.

“I hope you survive this, By,” he says, with sincerity that easily bleeds into something higher-spirited while he straightens his clothes. “And I hope you come after me, when you can. I am sure I will never catch you on your back foot again. It might be fun.”

Maker. The world seems even stiller, the lights even crisper, the sounds even sharper, as pure terror courses through Byerly. Because - but Bastien is right; he estimated Byerly truly. After all, Byerly was not ever a true bard, was he? He was just a Fereldan knock-off. A cheaper model, formed after the Blight on the model of the Orlesian artist. Bastien is the real thing.

And he played Byerly with all a bard's skill. And now By is here. I hope you come after me, he says, and again he's a liar, because the chances of Byerly emerging from this alive are essentially zero.

And so. So. As the footsteps approach, By asks one last question, his voice low. No veil of insincerity now. He means this one.

"Were you ever really my friend?"

If there were more time, he might wonder about the line between cultivating resources and cultivating relationships. About the value he could have imagined a disinherited Fereldan scandal would eventually have. About what greater purpose might have been served by lying on the floor of his room in Val Royeaux, draped in stolen jewelry and drunk off stolen wine, and laughing so hard at Byerly’s commentary on their mutual acquaintances that he choked.

If there were more time, he might indulge the sudden wild urge to hide a blade in Byerly’s jacket. For luck.

But there isn’t time for that. Just for a look (maybe regret, maybe pity, too subtle for there to be much of a difference in the dark) and, “Once,” before the door swings open for Fleurent the Idiot, who is hulking and bearded and flanked by smaller men with less Orlesian styling, and whose presence causes any feeling on Bastien’s face to recede.

He doesn’t move, just passes the papers into an open hand.

“Byerly Rutyer,” he says without being asked. “He’s a fool—“ It’s not a hidden dagger, but it might lower a guard or give him a turned back. “—but he is worth something. Do not waste him.”

“Shut up,” Fleurent says, and Bastien raises his eyebrows but doesn’t open his mouth while they close in to examine the catch.

MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

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