open; strike up the tinderbox

[sarcophage]

WHO: Leander + a cast of thousands
WHAT: various things
WHEN: Wintermarch
WHERE: the Gallows and also not the Gallows
NOTES: none yet

open i;

"Do you like it here?"

A question he's bound to ask more than once, of more than one person, should they share with him the relative quiet of the ramparts or the baths, or the library, or happen to walk alongside him in a staircase or corridor, going the same way. All will be at some late hour, when most are asleep.

---

open ii;

In the twilight hours he may be found on a path in the Gallows medicinal garden, surrounded by the husks of useful things, frozen reed stalks and little stems curled like match heads, just

staring

like he's seeing through the world and into the space beyond it. Like he's listening to a voice from far away. Across the allotment are some evergreen plants, juniper berries and such things happy to carry on through the unfriendly island winter. Eventually, he walks across to meet them.

---

open iii;

Or, late some afternoons one may discover him in the stable, leaning on a door in the back in the fashion of a boy, bent with his head resting on his arm while his other hand hangs inside the stall. Murmuring low, either to himself or to the horse inside—the reanimated corpse thereof. No precious paper or wooden sketching slab today, only himself, touching the beast while it appears to doze, grazing the shoulder or neck, curling his hand around an ear and rubbing the dead fur inside.

---

open iv;

For those who tend, like most, to sleep during the night and conduct their business during the day, it may seem like Leander has abandoned his office, for he's been keeping nocturnal hours for over a month—but now, apropos of nothing made public, that's changed, and things have gone back to normal. Catch him coming after breakfast or going before dinner, unlocking or locking his office door.

It's likely he will try to brush most people off with a bland smile and polite good morning or good night, but should they both happen to be headed in the same direction... or perhaps one might share with him an intentionally well-timed walk to the ferry, to minimize waiting...

---

open v;

Or chance upon him while he stands there at street's edge, passively observing a two-man brawl outside a tavern not very far from the Kirkwall docks, the participants looking about ready to escalate beyond fists...

---

etc;

...anything can happen.

Comments

[sarcophage]

Salrocka? Charming. Fairly safe to assume it's a positive word, or at least spoken positively. She doesn't seem the type to do otherwise. (But then, at a glance, neither does he.)

Leander's been a regular visitor to the chapel since his arrival in Kirkwall, though at times less regular than others. His observances are always conducted when the space is otherwise empty—often at odd hours—and those times when he lingers, rather than the image of Andraste, it's the glass he contemplates. Passing through, his eyes can't help but be drawn.

—and you feel a pain in your heart for how beautiful it is and how lucky you are to behold it.

He is quiet until the sickroom surrounds them.

"Where shall I put these?"

[okayimin]

"Here," she says, hefting her basket up onto a table that's too tall for her with relative ease. It's organized chaos of scattered books and field journals left open to the needed pages, nubs of pencils and broken quills scattered about. Sawbones ignores all of it to move back to the grate and set a dented kettle on.

"They'll need a good soaking and then time to dry before they're ready to use. Are you hungry?"

[sarcophage]

He should be hungry—must look like he's hungry to anyone with a shred of maternal instinct—and yet, "Not particularly."

Bundle deposited as instructed, Leander stays just there and observes the clutter with a nonjudgmental and curious eye. He's never snooped around the side rooms before, though he's thought of it; now he's pleased to have waited.

"But if by some divine miracle you've got a stash of tea back here, I'd gladly have a cup."

[okayimin]

It's difficult to say whether it's maternal instinct that drives Sawbones or the sense of duty that had been impressed upon her by Old Sawbones. She drags out a tin of biscuits anyway. She's hungry.

"Not surface stuff, but I got some Duster tea left still if you're desperate." She leaves him to snoop as he pleases. There's nothing particularly breakable, all the alchemic tools she prefers made from sturdy, dented metals, the journals and books all medical, though one journal is clearly for anatomical studies. For her part, she digs around in a cupboard that smells strongly of mint and elfroot, through various carefully sorted and stored tinctures and potions, "Should be safe enough for you to drink."

[sarcophage]

Well, if there's biscuits, he might wander over and peer into the tin. Because he is a grown man with a grown man's food preferences.

"Duster tea. Is it made from mushrooms?" He's guessing. He doesn't sound upset by the idea. He's moving vaguely in the tin's direction during his observational tour of the room.

[okayimin]

Good, her plan to feed this frail looking smudge of a man is working.

She busies herself with the tea and helping herself to the biscuits. "Of course. Some folks use tools they dig up from the lyrium refineries to make it, but this don't have the same kind of zing to it that the lyrium tainted shit does."

Because really, there was only so much that run off water and slim bars of nugsoap could do for cleaning things found in trash bins.