faderift | [closed]

WHO: Flint & Leander
WHAT: 2 Guys vs. Some conveniently placed misc Venatori informants; discussing mage business.
WHEN: Cloudreach
WHERE: The Wounded Coast
NOTES: Violence, definitely. Will update if necessary.

A week ago, a supposedly neutral ship flying an Antivan flag was seen leaving the waters near Val Chevin. Rumor has it, it carries a suspicious weight of goods possessed from the Orlesian countryside, some sum of raw coin, and Maker only knows what else in the way of occupation profits now en route Somewhere That is Almost Certainly Not Antiva. The trouble though, as is the trouble with most things here in the South, comes with legitimizing any assault on the ship either now or in the future.

And so here they are - attempting to legitimize themselves.

From their hiding place in the rocky hills along the coastline, Flint can just make out the smudge of the ship's masts hull down over the horizon through his glass. It is exactly where the lookout said it has been for hours, and now that dusk is falling it has become clear why the vessel has lingered so long. For the past hour, a small ship's boat has been creeping in to shore. Here, in the failing light, it finally runs up onto the rocky beach and disgorges four of its company with packs and traveling kit onto the sand.

In a matter of seconds, the boat is pulling away again. In a matter of seconds, they are two Riftwatch agents surveying the arrival of three men and a woman who can have no legitimate reason to be here, for is they did they might have landed in Kirkwall rather than here in some mysterious inlet no doubt meant to lie far from prying eyes.

Flint clicks the spyglass shut with a small rasp of metal. He looks to his partner in this.

"Ready?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Some can."

Leander's mussing his hair (curling aggressively as it dries), plucking at his shirt to reseat it on his shoulder (still damp), settling back down on mercifully dry ground not very far away. He could be further away—there's room for it—but chooses not to be.

"Well. They can try, at least."

With a little encouragement, the fire remains steady, and the smoke minimal despite the size of the flame. There are no rings on his fingers to throw any glints, only a few slim and simple bracelets fashioned of braided floss and softened leather encircling his wrist. They slip down the knob of bone to meet his hand as he gently fusses, brushing away sand and tiny pebbles to tidy up the glyph's edge.

"You must've grown up quickly."

"A boy of ten on his own in a ship full of men who have been at sea since they were boys of a similar age, and all of them committed to their due duty of harassing the Qun's force at sea?" He shoots Leander a sidelong look; the line of his mouth twitches behind the edge of his beard, though he manages to sound quite dry when he says, "Not at all."

It's more complicated than that, but all things are. And--

"I don't imagine you need it explained how living inside a box encourages growth in strange directions."

It does sound familiar. Were there any guards aboard? Some authority who'd kill a boy of ten for stepping out of line, and believe they were doing the Maker's work? It's a thing to wonder privately—to ask another time, perhaps.

"You seem normal enough to me."

On a delay, his mouth pulls crooked, too. Oh, yes—he's quite aware.

If you all don't already know that he's a pervert, you clearly haven't talked to him for more than a few sentences, Byerly had said.

Flint looks at him - all narrow and slim, hair all dark and curling from the rain. Not harmless, but here just as in that room with the other Division Heads, he would have trouble rationalizing why that's so bad a thing.

"I suspect most would prefer we thought otherwise," he says, hands spreading. And yet.

And yet.

"Oh, probably. Just a glimpse of this scene here would cause a great fuss, I'm sure." The close space, the thick air, humid as a shared breath.

His gaze slides away from the rings on Flint's hand (the hand, and the freckled wrist and forearm above it) to follow the turn of his head toward the weather. It's only chance that times it with a flash from outside—lightning, diffused by distance. He waits for the thunder before going on.

"The simplicity of it."

Lately, it is like having broken ribs again. If he breathes too deeply - pushes the matter with Jones and her connections in the North, refuses to answer questions from people who hardly have the right to ask them much less to expect the answers, or tries to take some measure of John Silver's fear and balance it against every other thing he is struggling to keep in hand - he becomes aware of the flexion in some cracked bone, and it winds him. He's tired, straight down to the marrow, and there is relief in being still.

It doesn't have to be such a trial.

With the world past him reduced to a flickering sheet of weather, he studies the turned away line of Leander's profile in the glyphlight. How straightforward might anyone be, he thinks distantly, if they all lived in places like this one.

"Recognizing the familiar in a dangerous thing has a way of stripping the fear from it. There is a risk of replacing it with reason."

Places like this cave have something in common with their respective boxes: there is little privacy but what you keep inside. You grow inward, in strange ways, to keep some of yourself for yourself. You recede to escape. Then you do escape, and all that unavoidable nearness becomes nostalgic.

It needn't be spoken aloud. Privately, Leander wonders if their thoughts are following the same current.

"There's danger in the familiar, too—and fear is just as often a herald of splendid things."

Aware of the study, he turns his eyes down and to the side towards it. A glance to test the limit of provocation, a stillness to keep it where it is.

"I'd call it a reasonable risk."

Why do sailors love the sea? Because it is dangerous, and the mastery of it is a conditional and temporary thing. It runs through the fingers. No one can hold or live on or know it indefinitely, but it runs and sometimes the animal visible in the shape it makes is one you know.

He laughs. It's a low pleasant thing, warm like the glyph glow in the narrow context of this triangle of shelter. When his hand shifts, it's to touch his own face - to run the pads of his fingers across his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose, to draw a hand across his beard as if to smooth its bristles and the gentle humor behind them away.

"Yes," he says, the corner of his mouth still pulling toward something he is fond of as he turns his face more directly to Leander. Nevermind an eye for the weather. "I think you're right."

[closed]

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