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WHO: Alistair or Bastien or Kostos & Other People
WHAT: A Rather Blustery Day. Or rainy. Or both.
WHEN: Mid to late Drakonis
WHERE: Kirkwall & Surroundings
NOTES: Feel free to wildcard me instead, or hit me up if you would like something different and specific.

i. alistair in the project office with the dog statues

Alistair hasn't yet made good on his threats to decorate the Project Sashamiri office with dog paraphernalia. But he has brought in a half-dozen little wooden mabari carvings, reminiscent of the statues littered across Ferelden, to hide in drawers or behind frequently-used books or on top of the door frame, to see if it's possible to make Enchanter Julius crack.

It's possible to catch him at it, standing up on his toes to try to put one on top of a shelf where it can stare at Julius while he works. Equally likely to catch him frowning at his desk, though, holding a dagger to candle light and turning it this way and that, or with his chin down on his folded arms to glare at a book that he definitely can't read at that angle.

Regardless, someone will only have to pause in the doorway for him to beckon them closer and say, "You. Come here."

ii. alistair in the mountains with the mud bath

"You'd think the darkspawn would mind the rain," Alistair says, squelching through mud. "Wouldn't you? They spend so much time underground, they should be like the dwarves. Scary sky water, oooh."

It hasn't stopped raining since they left the Gallows--so several hours ago, at this point. But waiting for better weather is only a viable option when better weather seems like it might happen at some point. And the darkspawn, who do not mind the rain, are apparently sneaking in and out of a crevice newly opened by a mudslide in the Vinmarks.

So here they are. Alistair and whoever. He's been dealing with the rain pretty well, himself, despite what it's doing to his hair. But, maybe as comeuppance for teasing dwarvenkind, that's the moment where he loses his footing on a slick incline and splats flat on his back in the mud.

iii. bastien in the courtyard with the crushing sense of futility

If Bastien were telling a story about someone else, he'd have them crack and cry all over somebody, or spend so many days in bed that someone decided they ought to do something, or take some sort of dramatic lifelong vow, or clean out their room and disappear in the middle of the night and never be heard from again.

He comes closest to that last one. He packs a bag. Then he puts it under his bed, leaves it there, and goes about his business, mostly as usual. His smiles are just as quick but a little more muted, the cello sounds from his room become short and irregular and confined to rote scales, he's harder to find, and he lets small talk die small. But he's fine, right up until the point a gust of wind funnels through the Gallows' walls and smacks his armful of letters and notes out of his arms to scatter across the courtyard.

In another mood he'd take it in stride and run to catch them. In this one, he sits down heavy on the stairs and watches a few sweep out of sight down a stone corridor. Maybe they're important. He should probably be more worried about the possibility they'll end up puddles.

iv. bastien by the canal with the naked antivan

The problem with how Bastien works is that so much of it rests on letting people have their way and arranging the scene around them to make it useful. So when he's meant to be charming a wealthy visitor whose inclination is to get utterly smashed and a bit high, because what happens in Kirkwall stays in Kirkwall and can Bastien even imagine how dull life becomes once one is married with children--that's what he does.

Meo Fiesi, not Bastien.

And when he--Meo Fiesi--is then inclined to strip off all of his clothes and jump into a Lowtown canal because he's never been swimming naked, in the rain, on a public street, and apparently that specific combination is a personal dream, that's, you know. Great.

Bastien has called for back-up. Just in case the man starts to drown. Back-up can find him sitting in the drizzle with a pile of Antivan Merchant Clothing beside him, his feet dangling over the dirty canal, while someone in it says, with an Antivan accent, "This one is called the Butterfly!"

v. kostos in a cave with the incomplete deck of cards

A partial list of things Kostos hates and/or is bad at: Being stuck in a small space for a long period of time. The outdoors. People. Cold weather.

So having a sleepover in this cold, shallow mountain cave Northwest of Kirkwall, to monitor the reported potentially-suspicious comings and goings through the mountain pass that forms the shortest route from Nevarra City--he's handling it really well.

For example, the deck he brought along is apparently missing three cards, and he's decided the solution to that is to throw the remaining forty-odd cards off the edge of the cliff and into the distant river below, one at a time, while he silently watches the dark road for any bit of firelight.

vi. kostos in the market with the teddy bears

Mummies probably don't care about stuffed bears--at least not more than the wisps residing in their bodies care about anything novel. But the wisps probably don't care about enormous underground crypt-mansions, either, and they have those. Kostos has already told several imaginary people passing imaginary judgment to fuck off, in his head, while he picks through the contents of a stall in Hightown.

He could have gone to Lowtown. Even if mummies care a little bit about stuffed bears, they certainly don't need them to be newly made and neatly stitched.

It's for his own sake that he's tossing aside the ones with loose button eyes or frayed stitching. He's perfectly aware.

"Please stop touching everything," the seller says when his sifting knocks a few plaidweave tuskets out of their pyramid formation.

Kostos doesn't look up to counter, "Stop selling garbage," which is maybe not the best thing to say to someone you want to give you a good price.

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There are times when Bastien's mood runs to melancholic or to whimsical. The man shifts with the winds, taking up personas and moods and trying them on like a richer man might try neckerchiefs. So the little burst of let's run away, which is a bit melancholic and a bit whimsical, doesn't raise any alarm bells for Byerly. Why, they've talked of running away many times before.

So Byerly nods sagely, and answers, "Yes, good old Gworn. That's the little country out across the sea populated by those nubile bird-women, right? I could take a trip out there, no question of it."

Bastien smiles a little. But it's a smile of patient indulgence more than amusement, and he doesn't take nubile bird-women and run. He gestures instead—backwards, for Byerly's benefit, but otherwise following an invisible map on an invisible wall.

"Amaranthine, Denerim, terrifying forest," he says, with a little finger swirl for that while region, and then a neater finger circle where the city he's thinking of is meant to be.

Oh. "Gwaren," he says, then gives a little laugh. Gworn. Truly.

Well. He gives a little gesture of his hand. "If they haven't a theater, we could certainly start one," he says amicably. "I think the two of us would make fine players. Failing all else, you could put on one-man shows, and I could be your audience. That sounds rather lovely, actually."

He snaps quietly at the correction—Gwaren, that’s the one—and settles his arms over his knees, hands dangling, while Byerly paints that picture. Charming, tempting. Not much less fanciful than the bird women.

“We could hardly eat that way,” Bastien says. “But I could get a day job, and you—” There was never much steam to begin with, and he loses it there, smile twisting crooked. “You would never really go.”

That does make By feel a little uneasy. Typically, their way is to float unrealistic plans and never acknowledge how unrealistic they are. The fact that Bastien is bringing them back to reality so quickly -

"You're right about that." He tries to right their course with a droll smile and a little gesture of his fingers. "You have no idea how bloody dull Gwaren seems. Just think of the people who've come out of there - Loghain, the Queen - and as admirable as the Queen is, she really has no sense of humor to speak of. No, if we're going anywhere, we're going to Denerim."

Bastien looks thoughtful for a moment, but he's considering Byerly more than the relative merits of Denerim. Obviously Denerim would be better, if quicker to become embroiled in conflict once Corypheus had dealt with Orlais.

“Mm. I do not think you would go to Denerim either. Not right now,” Bastien decides, and unfolds one of his bent legs to flop it over Byerly’s lap—to discourage escape, or to soften the edges of what he’ll say next, or to leech some comfort out of contact, or all three. “I think la bonne chose à faire has you like a dog on a leash. If you tried to plant your feet you would choke.”

The rules of their game are flexible. It is not easy to earn a foul. But that is most certainly, utterly, against their rules. By twitches bodily under the weight of Bastien's legs, and looks over, his gaze dark and his lips thin.

"Poor me." The playfulness is gone now from his tone, even if it's still there in his words. "A terrible thing, to be a tamed creature." Then, because it is clear that there is no redirecting his dark thoughts: "What has brought all of this on, Bastien?"

"The weather. The fucking architecture."

The imposing grey walls rising in every direction and the equally grey sky certainly aren't helping. But it's still a lie, delivered with the same unconcerned tone and unwavering eye contact that accompany plenty of obvious Orlesian lies. You know and I know, the unspoken challenge would go, but call me a liar out loud and you won't like what happens.

"Brother Genitivi says that Tevinter designed this fortress to feel oppressive, you know. To break spirits. They did a good job, n'est-ce pas? And I'm tired—"

Bastien's voice cracks there, like a knee buckling under strain, and he shuts his mouth. Swaps the nonchalance for a smile that's openly strained, aware that he's losing his hold on the truth. It'll get out in a minute. But first:

"I'm sorry." It isn't insincere. He can't quite nudge Byerly with his foot, the way he's arranged, but he turns his ankle in a way that suggests the intention. "Would it be better if I said I thought you were a good man, or just as bad?"

Edited 2020-03-14 22:46 (UTC)

Just as bad, it seems. Maybe even worse. The line of his mouth thins even further, and his eyes narrow and his head tilts very slightly away, like a dog in pain - And then he closes his eyes, and lets out a breath, and opens them again. There is no use in lingering on that. Bastien - Bastien is the one who needs attention, not Byerly and his raw nerves and his thin skin.

So. "We could arrange for a mission elsewhere." By's voice isn't playful now, but nor is it morose; it's steadfast. A man suggestion solutions. "It would allow us to escape the architecture for a while. The weather, too."

Bastien narrows his eyes, too. Not out of pain or annoyance. More like he's looking at an inscription he can't quite make out. It only lasts until Byerly beats him to filling the silence. Then: "Vraiment?"

His head tilts a few degrees—surprised, one of the few tics never successfully wrung out of him—and if he isn't completely distracted or completely stabilized, his eyes unnarrow and his tired little smile shifts brighter without getting any bigger.

"Such misuse of power," he says, with warmth, like an offer of truce. "You beast."

"There is no point to having power if it cannot be used for things like this," By returns. Which isn't entirely true, perhaps; there are certainly other points to having power. Some are even virtuous. La bonne chose à faire and all that. But it is also the right thing to do to help those you trust, those who trust you - there is no virtue in a leader without loyalty. Anyone who wouldn't do something like this for a friend, who's so focused on using power appropriately, is likely the equal of an Anders zealot, mad-eyed and uncompromising.

And yet. Byerly suspects, in spite of that warm smile, that it won't be enough. Even if Bastien is being altogether truthful (hah), more work elsewhere wouldn't be enough to solve the problem of being tired.

So By doesn't accept the truce. He doesn't meet Bastien's smile. Instead, he looks at him, and asks, "Where would you need to go to escape your exhaustion?"

Bastien hums and tilts his head back to look at the sky instead of Byerly. Instinct wants to withdraw from that serious attention, so Bastien does the opposite: adds his second leg to the first one over Byerly's lap, lets his arms fall to either side instead of crossing them, uncurled as an unthreatened hedgehog.

He tries to think about where he might like to go. The answer has always been home—but home has the market square, and the gallows, small-g, and then instead he's thinking about what happens to a feeling when it leaves no mark and everyone who knew it existed is dead, and he's opening his mouth.

“My friend, the one they hung in Val Royeaux." My friend is not how Bastien described him before, when he was explaining how Riftwatch's good name had wound up woven into gossip about deserters and sedition in Orlais. His acquaintance, then. A man he used to work with sometimes. Just misunderstanding, now, and simple enough to clean up. "He was not a good man. Most of the lives I took, after it became my choice—most of them I took on his behalf. Alors ç’est comme ça. When you play, you agree to the possibility that you will lose. And even if you don’t, a hundred more innocent men die every day, and the world does not pause for them.”

Sketching boundaries. He's never been able to stomach anyone feeling sorry for him.

“But I was in love with him for a long time. Where does someone go to escape that?" He raises his eyebrows and smiles again, looking back down from the swirl of grey clouds. "Antiva?”

How did By not know this? My friend turning so quickly into I was in love with him. I took lives on his behalf. How was he not aware of what this man meant to Bastien? By, who knows half a dozen secrets about each member of Riftwatch, utterly blind to Bastien's entanglements. When Bastien is his friend.

So he's silent for a moment, staring, utterly unprepared to provide any sort of comfort here. It's really that I was in love with him that leaves Byerly helpless. He dabbles so easily and so lightly in matters of lust, infatuation, but love - Where does one go to escape the death of love?

Slowly, slowly, he gathers his wits back to himself. "Well," he says, slowly, "Antiva is where I went. After Alexandrie." It is a strange and uncomfortable thing to admit that what he'd had for her was love, even though Bastien fucking well knows by now. "Ended up hooked into a wicked woman's plot to murder her husband. I really can't recommend Antiva, on the whole."

He reaches out and rubs his lips, uncomfortable. Finally, he ventures, "You - did not mention any of this before."

"Are we telling one another everything now?" Bastien asks. It's good-humored, genuinely, despite his looking worn around the eyes. He's teasing as much for his own benefit as to try to wipe that discomfort off of Byerly's face. "Let me see. When I was small, someone told me that if I ate enough ants, I would be able to climb walls. I could not eat for two days—" He sticks out the tip of his tongue to tap it, demonstrating. "—because of the bites. The first girl I ever kissed sneezed in my face just afterwards. It was a wet one, too. And, ah..."

He chews on his lip and tries to think of a third thing. Normally it wouldn't be so difficult. But he's stretched thin, and when the pause threatens to become a genuine silence, he shrugs instead, releases his lip with a tsk, and resettles his back against the railing so the iron bars dig in somewhere new.

"A wicked woman with a murder plot does sound very Antivan. Did she succeed?"

"Yes," Byerly answers, and holds out his hand, palm-up. He ought to say this with light irony - under another circumstance, he'd say this with light irony, like it's amusing - but instead it comes out thuddingly heavy, shot through with the guilt and grief he feels. "It was the first life I ever took."

But - heaviness upon heaviness. Misery upon misery. All Byerly wants is to make things better, somehow - To turn back the hands of time, so that he might abuse his power and misuse his resources to send in Riftwatch forces to stage a daring rescue of Bastien's love. This man who clearly didn't deserve that sort of rescue. A foolish impulse - one that even Bastien himself didn't seek.

He doesn't feel any lightness in his heart. He doesn't feel even the slightest potential for lightness. But he still mouths the words to the jolly song, asking, "Was it a wet kiss or a wet sneeze?"

“Both, I suppose,” Bastien says, with a wry little smile that fades quickly, without segueing into a demonstration of the sort of damp, tongueless kiss he was distributing before puberty.

That Byerly has killed someone, or multiple someones, isn’t that surprising. But being an unwitting, unwilling tool in someone else’s game—at least Bastien always knew what he was doing and chose not to care whether or not it was the right thing. For By, it must have been like the eager little dogs he’s seen in the city, thinking they were clear to run ahead, snapped back with bruising force when they reach the end of the leash. Which isn’t an insult, for the record. Bastien loves dogs.

“I’m sorry,” he says again—feeling clumsy, all elbows, and hating it. He’s never been good at being sad. “You stopped to pull me out, and I pulled you in with me.”

But that’s a gift, in its way: it gives him something he can try to fix. He takes his legs back, one after the other, so he can stand up and hold a hand down to Byerly.

“On y va.” No smile, now. Decisive. “We are stealing some wine from the kitchen. I know we could just have some, but we are stealing it. And then we are breaking into one of those fancy rooms for visitors at the tops of the towers. I know you could just retrieve the key, Monsieur Ambassador, but we are breaking in. Then if we still want to wallow, we can do it draped on chaises, like the Maker intended.”

There's a pang of guilt. Bastien isn't supposed to be comforting him. Maker, he's supposed to be indulging Bastien's sorrow, rubbing his back, telling him there there - Bastien isn't supposed to be inviting him for a drink and telling him to buck up. What a dreadful friend he is.

What a circle of stupid, pointless guilt that is.

So By swallows his misery, and grips Bastien's hand, and uses it to haul himself up. Wine is the way of it, yes, and a little light mayhem. Better than exchanging sad glances until they both drown in this rainstorm.

"Shall we wreck anything on the way?"

“Everything,” Bastien says.

He transitions his grip on Byerly’s hand into something that isn’t quite a hug—crowding against his arm, briefly pressing his cheek against his shoulder—but then he sets him free and daringly stomps on the closest of his lost letters where it’s stuck to the stone walkway. A twist of his foot leaves it wrinkled and torn as well as wet.

Distracted and busy, it’s easier to add, tone even and conversational: “I don’t want to leave you with the wrong idea. We were never together. He was my friend, and I was—“ What’s a good word. “—pathetic. An embarrassment to my profession and my people. I wish now I had told you when you were in Val Royeaux, so you could have shoved me into the sea like I deserved.”

Or—he pauses his hunt for something else easy and consequence-free to destroy to look back at Byerly.

“But I suppose you were not in the position to be shoving anyone else into anything.”

How far they've come, Byerly thinks to himself. They'd adored each other, in their own ways, back when they were little more than boys in Val Royeaux. But they didn't trust each other, did they? Bastien told Byerly nothing of his Bard's path, nothing of this deep love of his, nothing of the lives he'd taken. Byerly told Bastien nothing of his family, nothing of his sister, nothing of what he'd seen during the Blight - nothing of the pain and dishonor that had driven him from Ferelden. They'd cracked locks and shared drinks and elbowed one another, and that was it.

It's easy to feel nostalgic for those days. Things were so simple back then. Their friendship was light, frothy, like a northern wheat ale or a watered wine from west Orlais - an easy, giggly sort of thing. There's much more pain in their relationship now, much more weight. The Bastien and Byerly of back then would be dismayed at the intimacy between the two of them now.

And yet. Byerly wouldn't sell what they have now, not for all the gems of Tevinter.

"No," he agrees, and even though there's pain in it there's also some rueful good humor. "I suspect I would have found it romantic, rather than shameful, given my own state of affairs. If anything, I'd have encouraged it."

“A terrible influence,” Bastien says, while he turns over an empty bucket with his foot. Wrecked. “I have always thought so. It is good you left when you did.”

He doesn’t mean it. He also doesn’t not mean it. If it’s even possible to decide what would likely have happened, if Byerly stayed in Orlais, Bastien isn’t going to devote any significant time to trying. Eyes ahead. On the horizon, ideally. When it isn’t hidden by stupid grey walls.

He tries to flatten his hair with his hand—rain makes it curl, just one more reason this is the worst month of his life—and gives Byerly a sideways look and a mouth-twist that wouldn’t really qualify as a smile, if his eyes weren’t friendly (and tired, still, but friendly-tired) above it, but does dimple his cheek. Habit.

“Are things all right with her now?”

"What a question, dear Bastien," Byerly murmurs. Under normal circumstances, he'd demur, give some indirect pleasantry that Bastien would understand perfectly well as a don't ask, and then they'd both agreeably move to a safer topic. But: for some reason, in this circumstance, it would be unacceptable to fail to answer. And Byerly cannot lie. Not right now.

So he takes a moment to draw in a breath, and then says, "Things are stable, at least. I pretend to forget about the fact that she's married to her little monster, she pretends that I'm civil on the subject. Every once in a while she goes vicious at me, and I've no damned idea why. Perhaps someday before I'm laying on my death-bed I'll understand what it is that I do that gets her back up, but I don't know if I'd wager money on the prospect." A moment, then - "She wants something from me. We agreed verbally that that something would be friendship, but it does not seem to be just that."

A moment, then he looks over at Bastien with a crooked smile. "Can you interpret her for me? I have the Orlesian tongue, but I was never able to fully understand the Orlesian character, I think."

“You know, she has never said a word to me about it,” Bastien says, as a disclaimer. He and Alexandrie get on well, but he wouldn’t claim she trusts him. “But the Orlesian character...”

He hums and gathers up his tattered good humor and flagging energy. The results are decent. He successfully sounds like a man musing carelessly over wine. Just a quiet one who hasn’t slept much.

“I am not well-traveled, but I think we might be Thedas’ great optimists. Our land is so beautiful and our sky is so bright, it is easy to believe that the world is always conspiring to make us happy. If we have our hearts set on a journey but the horizon is clouding, any little bird we see flying in that direction is a sign it will clear up before we get there.”

Fereldans, he would guess, only see the storm, and make grudging preparations for it to probably come their way and destroy their whole town. But like he said, he isn’t well-traveled.

“Add to this that we are used to people never saying what they mean, and you see? Fereldans can say they will never submit to our rule, and we think ah, they must put on their show, but there was less spitting that time. They are coming around. Or a man can put his hand on a friend’s shoulder and tell him that he could never have a relationship with a man—“ True story, while they’re being so horribly honest. It’s easier to deliver like a hypothetical example, and thinking not so much about Vincent as about Alexandrie and her sudden stillness when Byerly kissed her hand. “—and all the idiot will notice is that they are touching and the man is not saying he could never love one. So the little birds lead us into storms or bogs or off of cliffs, and then we feel betrayed.”

A generalized theory, of course, that does not fully account for the Marcoulfs and Sister Heloises of the country—every species has its outliers—and may not account for Alexandrie, either. He doesn’t know even a quarter of it.

“Except me,” Bastien adds in closing, with a little hand flourish that isn’t half-hearted, exactly, so much as muted by the circumstances. “Now that I am so old and wise, I know the birds can get fucked.”

Optimists? It's an odd way to think about them. Byerly had grown up with an Orlesian mother in a Bannorn that still remembered the blood and suffering of the Occupation. He still doesn't know, not entirely, what possessed his father to marry his mother - she'd come with a bit of wealth but no political advantage - save, perhaps, to curse his progeny with unfortunate circumstances as a sort of pre-revenge for the perceived crimes they would one day commit against him.

So By had grown up very, very aware of the Fereldan interpretation of the Orlesian character. Perfidious, cheating, scheming, power-hungry and grasping. A people whose circumstances had prevented them from ever suffering. They'd taken much from the Fereldan people, and sought always to still take more, with a smile on their face and a twinkle in their eye...Bastien's tale of a nation of wide-eyed naifs, swindling like it's a game rather than The Game, has a certain degree of appeal to it. It's a bizarre tale, make no mistake, but a rather charming one.

(Likely only charming because it's out of Bastien's mouth. Because despite his last disclaimer, optimism and sincerity still rolls off him in waves. A cynic might choose to believe that that optimism and sincerity is only an act, fabricated by a master Bard, but By thinks he knows better; and this sounds right for his friend. And that tale of the man who claims to never be able to love another man feels too honest. Too honest by far. And too familiar.)

"And so, what?" By pushes a hand into his pocket and smiles a crooked little smile. "I'm a little bird to her? Fluttering on and leading her into quicksand?"

"No, no, my friend," Bastien says. "In this metaphor, if I know what I am talking about at all, you are the journey she would like to take. The birds are a look that seems to last a second too long, or a kissed hand," a little more pointed there, "or gaps between your words where some persistent hope can slither through whether she would like it to or not. It is the sort of subtlety that is hard for Fereldans to pay attention to, I know, but for example—" with a sidelong look, as teasing as a jostling elbow to the ribs between those two younger men in Val Royeaux "—have you recently laid down on her and asked her to tell you how handsome you are?"

"Certainly not," he huffs, honestly. Mostly honestly. "She's married." And then, half an afterthought - "As am I." But Bastien isn't scolding him, just teasing, and so he oughtn't let himself get flustered. So he smooths down his shirtfront, and pushes past it, turning a very charming smile towards Bastien.

"Besides, is it so evil to ask someone to mark the truth?"

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