open

[keenly]

WHO: Colin + YOU
WHAT: Returning from the jungle
WHEN: Current
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES:

I. The Return

All Colin really wants at the moment is to flop down into his bed. Not because he's particularly tired, at the moment, but because he wants to be reassured that it still feels as good as he remembers. He drifts among the crowd at the docks, reunions happening all around as people greet their friends, but manages to stick closely to Athessa and limit his greetings to people he's close to. Not tired, but overwhelmed. There's an aching hollowness to him, and the pressing crowd only increases his discomfort.

II. Home

It is not Colin's presence anywhere in the Gallows that might be noted now, but his absence from it. His typical silence on the crystals and the journals now applies to his own life. For several days after returning, for as long as he can get away with claiming to be ill, he is closed up in his apartment in Hightown. If you want to speak with him, make him stop hiding, or get him to cook anything for you, you'll have to meet him here.

III. Wildcard

Comments

[keenly]

Colin's mouth opens, he looks at once uncomfortable and kind of gleeful. It eventually forms as a shy grin.

"I've never been bathed by anyone," he says. "Well. Not since I learned to bathe myself. It does present the advantage of not being away from you."

[coquettish_trees]

The quizzical look on Alexandrie’s face makes it obvious that having never been bathed by anyone is an entirely foreign concept to her—and then she looks delighted and begins playfully herding him toward the bath like a mother hen fluttering over a wayward chick. (One careful to always leave enough physical room for it to turn and say ‘no’.)

“Tell me you have at least been taking advantage of the oils I left!” she exclaims in mock horror, rather hoping he hasn’t, as that means she can fuss harder.

[keenly]

"Um, I haven't wanted to use them up," he admits sheepishly, "so I've only used them once or twice."

[coquettish_trees]

The look she gives him, or gives the back of his head at least, as she herds him into the room where the tub is steaming gently as promised is something akin to the look he might give someone in a bakery who said ‘I haven’t wanted to use up the flour, so I mostly bake using stones’. Really Colin, is it even a bath then?

“Then today shall be the third,” Alexandrie states in a tone that brooks no disagreement. “Are you injured at all, such that you need help undressing?”

[keenly]

"Fortunately no," Colin reports, starting to disrobe. He was able to bathe intermittently in the jungle, but that wasn't always very useful when he had only one set of clothes. It was easier on the ship. He already knew how to live aboard a ship, how to wash his clothes, how to find what he needed, but it was still only one set of clothes, and you don't do a great job of washing when you're trying to hurry it up so you're not half-naked in front of everyone all the time. At any rate, shedding these clothes is something he's wanted to do for a while. For all he cares, they can burn.

"Finally got used to being naked in front of other people," he informs her as he steps into the bath and sinks in. The sound he makes at the touch of the hot water, at the feeling of it closing about him as deep as his frame will allow, is one of pure bliss.

[coquettish_trees]

The temptation to have them burned is, in fact, shared by Alexandrie, and is only stayed because she knows how Colin dislikes things going to waste. They will, however, be very very washed. She hums in self-satisfaction to hear his obvious enjoyment and pulls a plushly cushioned stool to the head of the tub to seat herself on before reaching to loose his hair and set to the task of detangling it with nimble fingers.

“Necessity is an effective tutor,” she agrees, before changing her tone to one of playful suggestion “Unless the lesson was come by more... interestingly?”

[keenly]

"No," Colin sighs, relaxing at her treatment of his hair. "No sex. Though I made a new just-friend? Sonia Barra, she was one of the other people who was captured. We looked out for each other."

Meaning he looked out for her and doesn't want to say it.

[coquettish_trees]

A affectedly sympathetic cluck for 'no sex', although that line of inquiry is abandoned quickly enough with a delighted exclamation.

"Lady Barra! A delightful woman. I—" Ah. Captured. More softly then, "This was her first mission outside Kirkwall, no? That is... I am glad you were with her."

[keenly]

"She's going to teach me how to swim." A sigh as he relaxes further into the water. "It was a hard month and a half, so having her, having Athessa, it meant everything. I haven't really had time to process the kidnapping, somehow all I could think of was how it was a year since..."

[coquettish_trees]

She stays quiet, but doesn't pause in her work. The knots and snarls and places where the gentle wave of his hair grabs at itself are found and put to rights one by one until the run of her fingers through it catches nothing.

And then she is running her fingers through it slowly just to do so.

It is a waiting quiet.

[keenly]

There's a long sigh. He doesn't have to name the ghost.

"I finally got Byerly to tell me why he's so angry with me. More for the sake of closure than anything."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie hums her inquiry as she bends to retrieve a cup to dip into the water beside Colin and pour it carefully over his head, her other hand set just above his forehead to keep it from cascading down his face.

cw: SI

[keenly]

"He said he would never forgive anyone who hurt me. Including me. And that's all right, I think. At least I got an explanation, and I feel like I've said goodbye."

[coquettish_trees]

The gesture is repeated—warm water sluicing down hair, across shoulders—and once more again before she trades the cup for a bar of fragrant soap to lather in her hands and massage across his scalp.

“I should call him hypocrite for hurting you,” she says softly, “but I do not think Byerly forgives himself anything either.”

[keenly]

"I agree," he sighs, eyes sliding shut as the warm water runs through his hair. "I don't want him to feel guilty. I don't want anyone's guilt or blame on anyone. I wish I could just...reach out, put my hand on the knot, and untangle the hurt that makes people do things that hurt themselves and others. Make it so we could all deal with each other honestly and keep the friendships we all clearly want to keep. He didn't want to lose a friend, either. I'm not going to make that more painful for him. I'm always too prepared to let people go; I may as well use that here."

[coquettish_trees]

“Ah, mon chou,” she sighs as well, idly patterning circles with her hands as she works the soap through his hair. “Honesty can be as sharp a knife as any other.

“And sometimes it hurts as much to keep as it does to let go.”

[keenly]

"For him, or for me?"

[coquettish_trees]

For me.

“For all.” She wipes her hands on a cloth, takes up the cup again to wash the bubbles away.

[keenly]

"I can't try to keep people who don't want to keep me," he murmurs. "Or who...can't."

There's silence as she rinses the soap from his hair.

"Why did you forgive me?"

[coquettish_trees]

“I did not need to,” she replies evenly over the sound of water. “I was never angry with you, cher. I was angry with all those who choked your mind with so much fear that you could not see a single path on this earth you could bear to tread.

“And I was angry with myself, for not making you feel safe enough.”

[keenly]

Colin reaches back to take her hand and give it a squeeze.

"You didn't do anything wrong," he says quietly, "or do anything less than you should. What you did that day made me realize I was no longer in a place where people would just let me die unmourned, unfought-for. I went into the darkness and you came after me. I can't tell you how that's changed me."

He releases her hand. "Maybe Byerly upset me so much because he was a mirror. He's the one person who blames me as much as I do. I didn't realize how much hurt and anger I still had for myself until I saw it in him. I don't know what to do with that information, but it feels...better, admitting that. I felt, I still feel, like I should be all right, like I owe that to all of you who saved my life. Now I've realized it...it's one of those things I'll have anniversaries for, have nightmares about, be afraid of going through again, just like Uldred or Lutair. Except it was my own hand. I did it to myself, and those are the consequences. It doesn't make any sense that I should have done it, but I can't promise myself it won't happen again, either. I don't know what to do about that. But I feel a bit less buried under it than I did, admitting it."

[coquettish_trees]

She squeezes back, will hold Colin's hand as long as he wishes her to before she reclaims it to take up a cloth and start on his shoulders.

"Can you not yet forgive yourself, then?"

[keenly]

"No." He shifts forward to give her more access. "But I'm finding my way toward it."

[coquettish_trees]

She hums an affirmative rather than nodding, as he cannot see her, and takes advantage of the shifting to get at his upper back as well. Alexandrie’s touch is gentle and firm; time and scented soap and hot water judged far superior to scrubbing.

“We are all on such a journey, I think. Not from the same places, but on our way to forgive ourselves.” She huffs something like a laugh, something like a sigh. “Once we believe we deserve to be forgiven, at least.”

[keenly]

"I'm not there yet." He sits back now, releasing a sigh as he melts back into the water. "But I'm ready to start towards it. Somehow that's..."

Terrifying.

"Um. How've you been? I know we talked on the road but really, I want to know. The version you didn't sugar-coat so you wouldn't worry me."