closed.

[cozen]

WHO: Bastien, Athessa, Alexandrie, Darras, John, Marcoulf, Petrana, Yseult
WHAT: A small apology tour slash charm offensive.
WHEN: Vaguely Drakonis
WHERE: Val Royeaux
NOTES: OOC post.

Background: Riftwatch is in Val Royeaux to make it very clear that they support the Orlesian military and Exalted March and definitely do not condone desertion or harbor deserters. This is necessary because someone in Riftwatch (Bastien) helped someone in Orlais (Vincent Suchet) who was harboring deserters, including, nearly, the son of the Baron and Baronness Auvray. They take a lot of pride in their family's history of valiant military feats and were on the verge of being horribly embarrassed by the whole ordeal before they managed to turn it around and paint it as an insurrectionist conspiracy that tried and failed to lure their son away from his duty. Enough circumstantial connections to Riftwatch came up during Suchet's quick and dramatic trial that the rumor mill went a little wild, so now everyone is here to tame it!

Except Bastien, who's here to put his fake printer name back on and tell some solid lies to the Chancellor's office when they ask him what the deal is, to ensure there's no real non-gossip trouble, and then to have a little bit of a meltdown. 👉👉

Comments

[sulahnan]

Louder than actually necessary turns out to be loud enough to cover the click-clacking of Athessa's stupid shoes as she catches up. Every time she thinks she's gotten the hang of how to walk in heels, she steps wrong and rolls her ankle, or she loses her balance and stumbles into some well-to-do Orlesian to mixed response.

This time, she starts to lose her balance just as she's reaching the double doors to this room, one of which is already open to admit John, the other closed because why on earth would anyone need to open two doors that are each as wide as three Johns just to enter a room? And as she catches herself on that closed three-Johns-wide door, it swings in and pulls her with it until she slides to a stop on her knees, both hands gripping the door handle.

"Yes, enough," she giggles, making the split-second decision to lean into her clumsiness. Nobody's going to see a giggly, clumsy, supposedly-drunk elf as anyone to pay much mind to. At least, they won't if she can pull it off. "Put. Put those things away and come back to th'party. S'almost over and I--" At this point she staggers to her feet and none of the staggering needs much acting to seem genuine. "--I bet someone that I knew someone with a better mustache than someone else."

[cozen]

The civilized response would be to stop. To cooperate for as long as necessary to keep this a private conflict, or else to vie for the position of victim acting in self-defense—the sort of competition that Bastien, with his unweaponlike weapons and sweet-natured face, usually wins. But this time he doesn't try. Through the momentary gap in her defenses, while she's looking toward the authoritative man and drunk elf, ready to lower her blades to feign as much innocence as they'll allow, he whips the fire poker at her hand sharply enough to fracture bone and send the knife skittering across the floor.

It leaves a dark smudge of ash on the back of her pale gloves. And it probably, you know. Hurts. And her look toward the door has given her plenty of time to realize the onlookers are with him. Her patient goodwill evaporates, and when he pushes forward, trying to jam the other end of the poker into her sternum, she sidesteps, grabs firm despite her injured hand, and takes him to the floor in a flurry of skirt. When the material settles she's straddling his chest, knee holding down the fire poker that in turn holds down one of his arms, dagger near enough to his throat to keep him still.

She holds up her visibly smudged, invisibly-fractured hand toward the door.

"Behave, please, and I will not hurt him," she says, voice raised toward their observers, then dropping to a confiding tone for him: "She said to try my very hardest not to."

"Ah ouais? What else did she say?"

He sounds casual. But beneath her skirt and her thighs the muscles in his torso are twitching, straining to escape the grip of his self-control, and instead of an answer she gives him a self-satisfied smile.

As she turns her face toward the door again, the smile turns sweeter. Not too sweet. She isn't trying to fool anyone.

"I like your dress," she tells Athessa.

[hornswoggle]

"You can't be serious," John says. It's less directed at a particular individual than at the room as a whole, lethal Orlesian, imperiled Bastien, potentially intoxicated Athessa.

There is a moment where John inevitably considers whether or not the situation is dire enough and whether or not he cares enough for Bastien's life to attempt a bit of magic. At present the answer to both: No.

"Did I not say our plan was to be charming?" John complains, listing to the right and letting the movement carry him further inside. Perhaps also to a better angle, even if John hasn't entirely committed to the idea of responding with violence. He studies Bastien, then glances back at Athessa before addressing the woman holding their teammate at knifepoint.

"If you get off him, you can have her dress."

[sulahnan]

"No she can't," Athessa says, appropriately scandalized at the thought. She might like to keep the dress, or at least keep it on. "She can have the shoes, though."

Let's attribute the skill with which Athessa performs this next action to her willingness to risk anything for Bastien. It's not that she isn't skilled enough on her own to pull this off, but she's still working on the disciplinary aspect of it so it's mostly down to luck that when she says the word shoes and kicks her feet out one at a time, the shoes fly off in a very precise trajectory towards the woman.

The first hits her hand hard enough to knock the dagger away from Bastien's throat, and the second hits her in the face. The heel might be to blame for the scratch just below her eyebrow, but the strike is more distraction than damaging.

[cozen]

Bastien doesn't show any sign of hearing John. But the bard on top of him smiles wider at the offer, charmed and contemplative. She's opened her mouth to respond when Athessa cuts her short with her well-aimed shoes. Bastien doesn't waste the opportunity to flip her over. His forearm gets sliced in the process, before he manages to pin down her dagger arm, but he doesn't show any sign of noticing that, either.

Beneath him—with genuinely baffled offense creeping into the edges of her voice, or perhaps that's from the knee Bastien has planted in her gut—she says, "You are taking this so personally!"

Free of the blade at his neck, Bastien spares a measuring glance toward John and Athessa before he lowers his voice and asks again: "What else did she say?"

“Nothing I will repeat while you are having a tantrum,” the girl says, gathering her dignity despite the wheezing. Beneath her increasingly smeared makeup, she’s young. Early twenties at best. She turns her head to John, the only reasonable person here. “Monsieur, I have no quarrel with any of you. My master had one with him, but it's been settled."

"Settled," Bastien echoes with contemptuous calm. He's working on freeing the fire poker between them.

She doesn't pause. "And you have handled it so neatly! There is hardly any harm done, unless he kills me—" with a pointed look at Bastien, like you are acting insane "—and makes it much worse."

Bastien doesn't get off of her, at that, but something does visibly change. His posture shifts back. He takes a deeper breath, then another, while the pieces that didn't quite fit before, during the last hour Bastien spent trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out where he gave himself away, turn and snap into position. She thinks a death would be upping the ante. She doesn't even know what she's done. The answer to how did Ines know about him is she didn't.

[hornswoggle]

John glances at Athessa. He's aware something is amiss here, something fractured between them beyond the obvious violence.

"Bastien," John says, making what may very well be a futile play for his attention as he takes a few steps forward. "Perhaps we'll be able to get a better understanding of what's happening here if you let her up."

Of course, there's the risk she could flee. John still recalls how fast their contact in Nevarra had vanished. He turns back to look at Athessa again, eyebrows raising. There's no real worry that she'll do her level best to keep this woman in the room, but John's hoping for Athessa to keep from throwing anything else at her, including knives she may or may not have on her person.

And there's no way to tell Bastien John isn't really putting murder off the table, he just wants some more information before they get there.