so look alive, it's much cheaper | closed

[wythersake]

WHO: Isaac + Joselyn, Betrys, others
WHAT: Thread catchall
WHEN: Not in a jungle
WHERE: Not in a jungle
NOTES: Editing these in as I go. HMU if you want a starter.

Comments

[wythersake]

"They do,"

Blanket agreement. The Inquisition, the Chantry; these things have a way — and it wasn't so different then as now. There was a window with fewer eyes upon them (us), but there have always been windows. There's always been a cost to the view.

"What is she like?" It's she that answer truly stuttered on. "Your sister?"

Collateral in blood.

[obdurata]

“Braver,” she says, wry. “She's the battle-mage—when people can tell us apart, that's usually how.”

Because otherwise they're identical, yes. (It always would have been how.)

“This is the longest we've ever been apart,” she notes, after a moment. “A few months, when we were children; her magic manifested before mine.” Joselyn has told this lie so many times it's effortless now. It almost feels true.

[wythersake]

The pause as he props cigarette in teeth might be only that.

Lucky. Of course she'll have heard that before: Lucky it was both of them, lucky to not be separated still.

"Did you want it, back then?"

The magic — he supposes, the sister.

Was there a time when Isaac ever wished it? Some apprentices got letters, and the excitement of it; something else. How he'd wanted one, the way they made it look, and never a thought for the names inside. It wasn't as if the Kellars could read.

[obdurata]

It would be difficult to express in so many words just how much,

“I don't remember the rest of our family,” is what she says, eventually. “Not very well, you know. Anecdotes. Moments. The house where we lived, but not the street it was on. I only really thought of being with my sister.”

For a long time after, too, for the Smythes to slip so. She thinks of them now, sometimes, but mostly in how peculiar it is how easy it was to let go—a pang of something that she doesn't quite identify as guilt. That doesn't quite feel like guilt, just an oddness. Like a gap in her teeth where she presses her tongue sometimes to feel its shape.

[wythersake]

It would be unkind to ask whether the sister thought of her.

"I suppose," He ventures, and it's uncertain territory. Traipsed down some blind turn — "If you think of something enough, you begin to think less of it."

"Only, no. I don't mean it like that. Enough trees make a forest," Condense: A filtered pattern. "But we only recognize a few."

"Landmarks."