OPEN

[sulahnan]

WHO: Athessa and YOU!
WHAT: Catch-all because I need to stop exclusively inboxing
WHEN: Whenever but mostly now-ish, post-dream meme
WHERE: Around, Kirkwall and the Gallows, maybe in the field who knows
NOTES: NSFW threads will be marked and/or moved to my NSFW inbox, CW as needed, blah blah blah

Specific starters in the comments!

Comments

Light Reading - Closed to Kostos

[sulahnan]

Athessa's reading has been getting better of late, having been forced to practice with greater frequency over the winter, but it still isn't good. As such it takes her some time to locate one specific book, and even longer to actually begin to read it.

Admirably, she makes it through the first two chapters before falling asleep with her cheek smushed against arms crossed over the pages.

[exequy]

A wisp finds her before Kostos does, but he isn't far behind. He is more disruptive: while the wisp hovers silently over her head, fascinated by her curls, Kostos grabs the edge of her book and slides it out from under her. It's not quite fast enough to be a jerk, but still too fast to be subtle or have any chance of gently avoiding waking her up.

[sulahnan]

It's not the sudden lack of a book that wakes her up, but rather the chain reaction of Kostos pulling the book, the book pulling her arms, and her head falling off her arms to thud against the table. At that, she sits upright suddenly, looking around like a student caught sleeping in class.

"Hey, what the fuck?" Athessa grabs for the book, trying to get it back before Kostos can see what it is.

[exequy]

Nice try. But he pulls it off the table altogether—suddenly interested in the contents, rather than just waking her up, given that reaction—and holds it open at eye level, where it can easily be held higher if she stands up to make another try for it. Maybe he's not an enormous fucking Qunari, but he is still seven inches taller than her.

Plus the wisp is predisposed to protect him. It doesn't hurt her, but it does get into her face, humming like an irritated insect.

"That is a good question," Kostos says as his eyes adjust to the words on the page.

[sulahnan]

She gives the wisp an incredulous look, as if it's betraying her by being irritated when clearly, he's in the wrong.

"That hurt, you know," she lies, putting on a pout and rubbing her forehead. It doesn't hurt, didn't hurt at all, not for one minute. It was only enough to startle her and really, she should've woken up the second he started pulling the book away.

[exequy]

“You will live.”

He does glance at her, though, to measure how serious she might be. The wisp doesn’t calm itself down so much as it forgets what it was doing, a moment ago, and begins bobbing back and forth at her with a somewhat more musical twrring noise.

It’s ridiculous, but Kostos doesn’t seem to notice. He turns the book’s open face around to show Athessa, in case she forgot what she was reading.

“What is this for?”

[sulahnan]

"For reading. It's a book." Her play for sympathy failing, as she should have expected it to, she switches tactics to being snarky and willfully obtuse. She doesn't even look directly at him, or at the wisp, just crosses her arms and looks at the floor.

[exequy]

“There is that Kirkwall education,” Kostos says, because he is, really, sometimes genuinely the worst.

[sulahnan]

She grits her teeth and uselessly snatches at the book, being confronted by the wisp any time she gets too close, or whatever it thinks of as too close.

"Yeah, well--" You can hear the pout. "How else am I gonna learn to ward off blood magic, huh?!"

[exequy]

“Any method other than reading Enchanter Huguet would be better,” Kostos says, giving the book a disdainful little shake. “His entropy studies melted his brain. And you do not ward off blood magic, anyway—not really.”

He puts the book down on the table. Calls off the wisp, too, with a gesture that invites it to hover over his cupped palm instead.

“Why do you need to?”

[sulahnan]

Well that takes the wind out of her sails. She rubs her arm idly, remembering the tug on her veins.

"At Castle Ezoire, a while back, there was a blood mage," And, noticing that she's rubbing her arm, she forces herself to cross them to keep from fidgeting. "He was gonna make it look like Riftwatch assassinated some guy who was already dead, by...controlling me."

Athessa gestures, flipping through the book where it lays on the table. "I was completely helpless against it, and if Fitcher wasn't there--" But the book is useless, right? So she flips it shut again.

[exequy]

Well.

Fuck.

He pulls out a chair and sits down across from her, and still needs a few minutes after that to absorb the information and ask, "How long did he have you?"

[sulahnan]

She doesn't know if she would prefer him poking fun at her, or whatever this is. Idly poking at the leather binding of the book on the table, sitting again because he is and being taller than him is weird, she lifts one shoulder in a shrug.

"Long enough? I..." There isn't really an adequate answer. She remembers what happened, the facts as detailed by Fitcher in the report, what it felt like to have someone else hold sway over her blood and to be able to do nothing against it, but she wasn't exactly counting the seconds. Minutes? Hours? How long does it take to kill an already-dead Duke in front of a planted audience? How long did it take to escape?

She shrugs again. "Long enough."

[exequy]

“Are you all right?”

It’s not a question he frequently asks—because he considers it most people’s responsibilities to be fine, whether they want to be or not, and if they can’t manage to be fine they can at least manage not to make it anyone else’s problem. But most people haven’t been subjected to blood magic. Especially that sort.

[sulahnan]

It takes a moment for her to parse that question, looking at him in muted surprise that he'd even ask, then looking down at the table as if she might see the answer written there.

"Not really," she admits, matter-of-factly. She's pretty confident that she's patently not fine and not at all confident that she even knows what fine feels like anymore, but she just doesn't have the energy to get worked up about it right now. "But thanks for asking. I just really don't want it to happen again, ya know?"