WHO: Fitcher + Wysteria + Flint & You WHAT: Catch-all WHEN: Firstfall-ish WHERE: Kirkwall and stuff. NOTES: Will update if necessary. Feel free to grab me if you want a specific starter/wildcard me, baby.
( oftentimes, it does feel as if every moment is a moment potentially lost—she had set herself the task of doing better in this life, and at every turn she has thus far seemed to believe that that needs must mean doing everything. there is a moment where she looks up from a half-completed thought with faint and not feigned irritation, the sort he might find blankly looking back at him from a mirror some too-occupied days.
but he is right. this will not leave with the tide, and they have been making less and less progress, and his announcement lacks the emphasis of a closing door. she regards her own ink-stained hands, and the dimming light from her window that will soon require lit lamps to counteract, and sighs. )
I had better fetch a shawl, then.
( —not from far. there is a small assortment of shawls and wraps and a full cloak hanging in the corner of her office, most of which have probably at some point been carelessly discarded and then simply not taken back to her quarters. )
[Once she's wrapped against the murky late autumn air, it's not far to find their way out of doors either. A brief walk, a shorter staircase, and they find themselves climbing out into dusky early evening on the Gallows' middle battlements. The air cuts chill here, though the wall is high enough that if they trend toward to the inside the sea air cuts up up and overhead (considerably over, in her case). But the smell is distinctly crisp and sharpening thing: a forewarning of things to come. Winter on the Waking Sea is a strange creature even here, tucked among the narrow passages which have allowed Kirkwall to make itself into such a dominant trading force.
(If they were to look, the harbor mouth is a clear cut out shape in the gloaming. The Twins with their hideous sea chain however are largely invisible from where they walk now.)
His stride falls naturally short to accommodate her as they progress.]
Once the code is finalized, it will need to be communicated to the Orlesian force. Not work I'd trust to a raven.
( more directly. it is agreement, but more for form's sake than of necessity; they both know this.
for the wind's sake, she tucks her hands together at his elbow, their pace a sort of compromise between his longer and her shorter strides when she is as accustomed to quickening to keep up as he is to accommodating. it is a presumption,
but a small one in the scheme of things that they have presumed of one another, thus far. )
Have you someone in mind?
( or are they discussing work because neither of them are very good at discussing anything else. )
[His pauses are sometimes such measuring things - moments in which he is giving a question or thought real consideration. After the hours they've spent in her office today, to say nothing of other hours preceding them with their heads bent together over other work, they must by now be familiar sign posts.
But sometimes they are just placeholders over things he has no answer for.]
No. [His elbow shifts, a small point of restlessness.] But I trust someone will occur to me.
( her grip shifts with the adjustment he makes, like water rippling. she tilts a glance up toward him, only sidelong by necessity and not the shape of it precisely, and thinks if he had not wished for her company when he excused himself from her office then he would have said so. in the company of another man, she might weigh if it would be good manners on her part to graciously disentangle herself; in his...he is not a man much beholden to good manners when they do not suit or serve him.
so it is not that. )
Perhaps the fresh air will help. I'm not certain anything has occurred to me for several hours that had not done so already.
[It is perfectly acceptable to walk quietly in a place where the hum of the wind catching over stone strikes a rising whistle, and so the silence into which he lapses can hardly be described simply as inconsiderate. But there is a density to it, a closed door quality, which must imply it all the same.
He is thinking of distance - to Val Royeaux by sea, and the necessity of skirting Val Chevin to get there. He is thinking signal towers in Jader and near Halamshiral and Lydes and the ruin of the Imperial Highway which turns the western end of the Waking Sea into a trap for all ships without well verse navigators. He is thinking of the great chain here in Kirkwall, and the Viscount with his pliable spine, and Antiva's profits, and the long route north to Minrathous.
His frown is a slight thing.]
It occurs to me that I know very little of the place you came from.
( she is never so green as to outright miss a step, but he catches her off-guard and for a moment it is apparent; she glances up at the shape of his frown, and her gaze holds there when it might not have.
most people, she nearly says, know little of that place. it is by design.
she says, )
Do you wish it otherwise?
( open to the possibility he may say, no, and carry on.
unsure what she will do, exactly, if he does not. )
[There is a kind way to answer her apprehension. It goes like, 'Would you rather I didn't?' and would be akin to feeding slack into a line. She has put a space between herself and the subject already. He could let that distance lengthen.]
she considers, for a moment, if she ought to have considered this inevitable. decides against; so much of what they recognize in one another has never needed the minutiae, the details. that they recognize it has been enough, might have been enough. she wonders, instead, what it signifies that it is no longer.
if this is,
no, what vulnerability does he feel, that he wishes to prise her open now? he had said something similar to her once, when they knew each other less well and both wished to persuade the other on side, and she had spoken a little then—the broadest strokes. he has heard her titles and her epithets, and snatches of half of a story. triumph in the shape of it outlined, and regret in the object lesson she had made of it instead: that it served to her as a warning against the persuasion of men like james flint.
I have seen the mortal and moral cost of believing what I wished to be told of how a great man might change the world.)
I left it greatly changed, ( she says, at length. ) The Lamorre that built me was not the Lamorre over which I reigned. It is a bloody history, and there is little left in it I can rightly call myself proud of.
( a few things that she clings to. less than she would like. it is the sturdy place that she stands when she sets her feet to insist that she will not be the one to move; she has bent before, and broken for it. the price was too high to pay twice. )
[Upon reflection, what does his list of facts consist of? A husband; children; exile, and war, and a return gone sour. That she spoke once of mistakes, and here again that shape rises like a cautionary flag: Careful. This way danger lies.
His eyeline carries high across the ramparts as she speaks. The sky is a flat, featureless grey in every direction.
What does he wish to know?]
To begin with, [he says, turning possibility in the mind like a coin in a restless hand. 'Tell me what it's like, being there. How it looks in summertime. The smells,' Leander had asked.] I might hope for better weather than what we have here.
there is a pause that follows this. it is particular, and weighted, and flint might think it containing the absence where another woman might have sharply remonstrated with him— )
The day that I was flung from the highest palace tower to my death,( she says, the merest edge of incredulity infusing her voice, ) was remarkably clear. James.
( come now. what in god's name are you playing at, man. )
[Were there no point of connection between them, his reaction might be less obvious. But her hand is still hooked near his arm and the shift of his elbow is notable - balking, coming up hard against the shape of that and then stilling. James, she says, like a punctuation mark. He hardly registers the sound, but that doesn't minimize the effect of the clamping jaw.
(At his other side, flint's hand moves at the edge of his coat pocket. His thumb casts restlessly against the waxed fabric; there is, for a brief moment, a palpable urge to unwind from her side that must live in the stiff angle of his elbow as much as it is stuck behind his ribs.)
Forgive me. I meant nothing by it, waits behind his teeth. We can walk in silence if you prefer.]
Did you ever consider it your home? And do you still.
( a punctuation mark, a puncture mark, what's the difference. her fingers do not loosen but curl tighter at his elbow. he began. let him see it through, if he would. )
It had not been for a long time before Thedas, ( she says, more measured. ) Distance from it has not made my heart fonder. I have,
( she considers. then: )
I remember two versions of Sulleciel, of my world; the one that I left, dozing off in a carriage and waking beneath a rift. The fade, one night perhaps two years past, gave me the memories of the life led by Petrana de Lamorraine who never left Sulleciel at all, who lived and reigned and died there. It is difficult for me, still, to walk the stairs up the central tower.
( she says it plainly, without affect or any apparent desire for pity; she does it constantly. )
I grieved her, that I might have been. That she never left. That she never knew any life but that one. It is something to be mourned.
[Never mind the cast of the wind humming through the notched ramparts, or the silent progression of shipping across the harbor distantly visible through them, or even the exact line of his attention fixed at some point before them toward which they are mutually progressing. He listens carefully, head cocked by just the faintest degree as if to bend any farther toward it would suggest more pliability than he, a point made driving by practice, possess in this moment.
(It might have been better to take this walk alone; to simply pause their meeting and reconvene at some later hour once his patience had recovered. Finding the length of his fuse since returning to Kirkwall is very like a guessing game - lit while blindfolded; a pleasure when he achieves the distance required to avoid being littered by debris.)]
Were you, by some vagary of the fade, to be returned there as you originally left it. Have you considered what you might do differently?
( her answer, bleak and glib and probably correct, comes without great pause: )
Die all the sooner, I expect.
( it would be a lie to say she's never thought of it; only that it had never been a welcome contemplation. the idea of returning to the world that made her is at best fraught, and at worst a nightmare of proportions she cannot bring herself to reckon with. )
I arrived in Thedas terrified that I was pregnant, and the first thing anyone told me was that a Spirit of Mercy would see fit to force me to endure it. A thing I could not have done, but thought I must; that I thought would be my only protection against the death sentence of being set aside by the man who had ensured I was known up and down the empire as a witch and a whore.
If I had known of a certainty that it was only my own life I risked, if I had had someone who might help me ensure as much,
( it unravels very quickly, the ifs. she thinks she has proven to herself, in thedas, that she might have done more than she did—that she might have achieved more than just a swift death if she'd tried—but it relies on so many moving parts that it's difficult to imagine what it would look like.
she would have needed allies, at a time when she had none. she thinks she could have found them, perhaps, but what would she have done? created a war on three fronts? )
Does it satisfy this impulse of yours to hear me speak on such things?
[They had hired a packet out of Minrathous in the dead of night. That ship had seem them to Carastes and they had made a choice there, he knows - to refute the prospect of traveling yet further East to a future as an apostate and her companion; to cross instead North toward a dark and more wild place where they might look forward rather than over their shoulders.
Carastes is a strange half pattern of details, poorly arranged in his memory: a small let room; the pawning of a ceremonial sword he had been given as a gift by a man who would claim to no longer recognize him; a small window turned in the wrong direction to receive any measure of true daylight. Is this your wife?, someone had asked, and he thinks he had struggled to answer in either direction then.
Does it satisfy him?
He stops. The point of his attention shifts down to Petrana, sharp like a fixing pin, and his spare hand moves up to touch the back of her hand. The pad of his thumb is work and weather rough yet.]
It wasn't by choice that I left Tevinter. And when I went, I wasn't turned out alone.
[Yes. In a way, he supposes he is satisfied. There is a kind of privilege in this, rewarding like the crunch of bone between teeth is.]
( how much of petrana's life, lives, has been swallowing what she must endure. how much. there is a moment, as he speaks, where a part of her rebels and she wishes not to hear the echo of familiar things. she wishes not to hear the voice of someone to whom she will extend her empathy; she wishes to be unkind to him, as this moment has felt unkind to her, and when her fingers curl around his hand it is so deliberate.
it is a choice that she makes, not to dig her fingernails in. )
But no longer.
( a compromise. she wishes to know, and she cares, and there are kinder ways she could have prompted him. )
[His hand doesn't resist hers, though as she turns her fingers to do it there is something in his face that moves to shut against it. It's a telling thing, in the way that a door off its track sometimes is—significant for how it is crooked in its hanging, for the gaps which show around it and how the thing doesn't quite close flush. In the intermittent catch of the air up here on the walk, the corner of Flint's mouth folds down in reply to the set of her fingers.
Though it would be easy to escape her, he submits to the wound of this small measure of cutting tenderness.]
She's dead. Murdered by the same people who drove us from Tevinter in the first place because she'd been willing to extend them her forgiveness and they mangled it.
[He has told Rutyer this in different words. It isn't really the point he means.]
I asked because I wanted a better sense of what you might see preserved now that you have the opportunity. She was very like my wife, and everything she kept is gone now.
( and of old, ugly hurts that she knows too well from another angle; mistakes that she might have made herself, and paid dearly for, )
then so shall I. I will not claim to be other than what I am—I cannot pretend that I was not shaped by the world that made me, that I do not carry it in my ways and my habits. But I do not see anything in it worth preserving. I see an opportunity before us to do something better than clutching old mistakes because they are familiar.
Mlle Bonaventura, ( a name she has not had cause to dredge up for some time, but of whom she remains fond, a woman whose lack of understanding showed her youth in a way that petrana might have wished to preserve in a kinder world— ) spoke to me once of preserving my traditions. I regret that I was sharp with her, then, but if Lamorre had remained as it was when I first came to Thedas then the only place for me was on a pyre. That was the tradition that we preserved.
If it remains as my husband has made it, after that, that is all Lamorre is good for, too.
( when petrana speaks of burning everything to the ground, it is not idle talk, and it is not without the awareness that something must be rebuilt in its place. it is with the sense that she feels, keenly, the responsibility to do both things. )
Edited (anyway im good at writing) 2021-01-03 06:00 (UTC)
[There is a metronome click to this—a rhythm which feels by some measure inevitable. That it is easy to mistake the tak of flint and steel sparking a fire in the dark for a similar sound as one which might accompany the practice of music in finely appointed drawing rooms seems
relevant.]
And here, [he presses] as you are in Thedas? What do you imagine this place is fit for?
Change. It is on the cusp of it; it teeters between it and between a comforting return to status quo, a well-intentioned path paved with the bones of who would have resisted.
( a good deal franker than most of what she might say on the subject, elsewhere, and she shrugs, elegantly— )
An answer I think not greatly changed from the last time I gave it to you. I do not presume to know, solely, precisely what Thedas should look like when the dust settles. But I think it is apparent that those who have decided its fate previously have done a terrible job and ought not have it handed back to them easily.
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no subject
but he is right. this will not leave with the tide, and they have been making less and less progress, and his announcement lacks the emphasis of a closing door. she regards her own ink-stained hands, and the dimming light from her window that will soon require lit lamps to counteract, and sighs. )
I had better fetch a shawl, then.
( —not from far. there is a small assortment of shawls and wraps and a full cloak hanging in the corner of her office, most of which have probably at some point been carelessly discarded and then simply not taken back to her quarters. )
no subject
(If they were to look, the harbor mouth is a clear cut out shape in the gloaming. The Twins with their hideous sea chain however are largely invisible from where they walk now.)
His stride falls naturally short to accommodate her as they progress.]
Once the code is finalized, it will need to be communicated to the Orlesian force. Not work I'd trust to a raven.
[They both know this.]
no subject
( more directly. it is agreement, but more for form's sake than of necessity; they both know this.
for the wind's sake, she tucks her hands together at his elbow, their pace a sort of compromise between his longer and her shorter strides when she is as accustomed to quickening to keep up as he is to accommodating. it is a presumption,
but a small one in the scheme of things that they have presumed of one another, thus far. )
Have you someone in mind?
( or are they discussing work because neither of them are very good at discussing anything else. )
no subject
But sometimes they are just placeholders over things he has no answer for.]
No. [His elbow shifts, a small point of restlessness.] But I trust someone will occur to me.
no subject
so it is not that. )
Perhaps the fresh air will help. I'm not certain anything has occurred to me for several hours that had not done so already.
no subject
[It is perfectly acceptable to walk quietly in a place where the hum of the wind catching over stone strikes a rising whistle, and so the silence into which he lapses can hardly be described simply as inconsiderate. But there is a density to it, a closed door quality, which must imply it all the same.
He is thinking of distance - to Val Royeaux by sea, and the necessity of skirting Val Chevin to get there. He is thinking signal towers in Jader and near Halamshiral and Lydes and the ruin of the Imperial Highway which turns the western end of the Waking Sea into a trap for all ships without well verse navigators. He is thinking of the great chain here in Kirkwall, and the Viscount with his pliable spine, and Antiva's profits, and the long route north to Minrathous.
His frown is a slight thing.]
It occurs to me that I know very little of the place you came from.
no subject
most people, she nearly says, know little of that place. it is by design.
she says, )
Do you wish it otherwise?
( open to the possibility he may say, no, and carry on.
unsure what she will do, exactly, if he does not. )
no subject
Yes.
no subject
she considers, for a moment, if she ought to have considered this inevitable. decides against; so much of what they recognize in one another has never needed the minutiae, the details. that they recognize it has been enough, might have been enough. she wonders, instead, what it signifies that it is no longer.
if this is,
no, what vulnerability does he feel, that he wishes to prise her open now? he had said something similar to her once, when they knew each other less well and both wished to persuade the other on side, and she had spoken a little then—the broadest strokes. he has heard her titles and her epithets, and snatches of half of a story. triumph in the shape of it outlined, and regret in the object lesson she had made of it instead: that it served to her as a warning against the persuasion of men like james flint.
I have seen the mortal and moral cost of believing what I wished to be told of how a great man might change the world. )
I left it greatly changed, ( she says, at length. ) The Lamorre that built me was not the Lamorre over which I reigned. It is a bloody history, and there is little left in it I can rightly call myself proud of.
( a few things that she clings to. less than she would like. it is the sturdy place that she stands when she sets her feet to insist that she will not be the one to move; she has bent before, and broken for it. the price was too high to pay twice. )
What do you wish to know?
no subject
His eyeline carries high across the ramparts as she speaks. The sky is a flat, featureless grey in every direction.
What does he wish to know?]
To begin with, [he says, turning possibility in the mind like a coin in a restless hand. 'Tell me what it's like, being there. How it looks in summertime. The smells,' Leander had asked.] I might hope for better weather than what we have here.
no subject
there is a pause that follows this. it is particular, and weighted, and flint might think it containing the absence where another woman might have sharply remonstrated with him— )
The day that I was flung from the highest palace tower to my death,( she says, the merest edge of incredulity infusing her voice, ) was remarkably clear. James.
( come now. what in god's name are you playing at, man. )
no subject
(At his other side, flint's hand moves at the edge of his coat pocket. His thumb casts restlessly against the waxed fabric; there is, for a brief moment, a palpable urge to unwind from her side that must live in the stiff angle of his elbow as much as it is stuck behind his ribs.)
Forgive me. I meant nothing by it, waits behind his teeth. We can walk in silence if you prefer.]
Did you ever consider it your home? And do you still.
no subject
It had not been for a long time before Thedas, ( she says, more measured. ) Distance from it has not made my heart fonder. I have,
( she considers. then: )
I remember two versions of Sulleciel, of my world; the one that I left, dozing off in a carriage and waking beneath a rift. The fade, one night perhaps two years past, gave me the memories of the life led by Petrana de Lamorraine who never left Sulleciel at all, who lived and reigned and died there. It is difficult for me, still, to walk the stairs up the central tower.
( she says it plainly, without affect or any apparent desire for pity; she does it constantly. )
I grieved her, that I might have been. That she never left. That she never knew any life but that one. It is something to be mourned.
no subject
(It might have been better to take this walk alone; to simply pause their meeting and reconvene at some later hour once his patience had recovered. Finding the length of his fuse since returning to Kirkwall is very like a guessing game - lit while blindfolded; a pleasure when he achieves the distance required to avoid being littered by debris.)]
Were you, by some vagary of the fade, to be returned there as you originally left it. Have you considered what you might do differently?
cw: discussion of abortion, misogyny, abuse.
Die all the sooner, I expect.
( it would be a lie to say she's never thought of it; only that it had never been a welcome contemplation. the idea of returning to the world that made her is at best fraught, and at worst a nightmare of proportions she cannot bring herself to reckon with. )
I arrived in Thedas terrified that I was pregnant, and the first thing anyone told me was that a Spirit of Mercy would see fit to force me to endure it. A thing I could not have done, but thought I must; that I thought would be my only protection against the death sentence of being set aside by the man who had ensured I was known up and down the empire as a witch and a whore.
If I had known of a certainty that it was only my own life I risked, if I had had someone who might help me ensure as much,
( it unravels very quickly, the ifs. she thinks she has proven to herself, in thedas, that she might have done more than she did—that she might have achieved more than just a swift death if she'd tried—but it relies on so many moving parts that it's difficult to imagine what it would look like.
she would have needed allies, at a time when she had none. she thinks she could have found them, perhaps, but what would she have done? created a war on three fronts? )
Does it satisfy this impulse of yours to hear me speak on such things?
no subject
Carastes is a strange half pattern of details, poorly arranged in his memory: a small let room; the pawning of a ceremonial sword he had been given as a gift by a man who would claim to no longer recognize him; a small window turned in the wrong direction to receive any measure of true daylight. Is this your wife?, someone had asked, and he thinks he had struggled to answer in either direction then.
Does it satisfy him?
He stops. The point of his attention shifts down to Petrana, sharp like a fixing pin, and his spare hand moves up to touch the back of her hand. The pad of his thumb is work and weather rough yet.]
It wasn't by choice that I left Tevinter. And when I went, I wasn't turned out alone.
[Yes. In a way, he supposes he is satisfied. There is a kind of privilege in this, rewarding like the crunch of bone between teeth is.]
We were partners, she and I.
no subject
it is a choice that she makes, not to dig her fingernails in. )
But no longer.
( a compromise. she wishes to know, and she cares, and there are kinder ways she could have prompted him. )
no subject
Though it would be easy to escape her, he submits to the wound of this small measure of cutting tenderness.]
She's dead. Murdered by the same people who drove us from Tevinter in the first place because she'd been willing to extend them her forgiveness and they mangled it.
[He has told Rutyer this in different words. It isn't really the point he means.]
I asked because I wanted a better sense of what you might see preserved now that you have the opportunity. She was very like my wife, and everything she kept is gone now.
no subject
( and of old, ugly hurts that she knows too well from another angle; mistakes that she might have made herself, and paid dearly for, )
then so shall I. I will not claim to be other than what I am—I cannot pretend that I was not shaped by the world that made me, that I do not carry it in my ways and my habits. But I do not see anything in it worth preserving. I see an opportunity before us to do something better than clutching old mistakes because they are familiar.
Mlle Bonaventura, ( a name she has not had cause to dredge up for some time, but of whom she remains fond, a woman whose lack of understanding showed her youth in a way that petrana might have wished to preserve in a kinder world— ) spoke to me once of preserving my traditions. I regret that I was sharp with her, then, but if Lamorre had remained as it was when I first came to Thedas then the only place for me was on a pyre. That was the tradition that we preserved.
If it remains as my husband has made it, after that, that is all Lamorre is good for, too.
( when petrana speaks of burning everything to the ground, it is not idle talk, and it is not without the awareness that something must be rebuilt in its place. it is with the sense that she feels, keenly, the responsibility to do both things. )
no subject
relevant.]
And here, [he presses] as you are in Thedas? What do you imagine this place is fit for?
no subject
( a good deal franker than most of what she might say on the subject, elsewhere, and she shrugs, elegantly— )
An answer I think not greatly changed from the last time I gave it to you. I do not presume to know, solely, precisely what Thedas should look like when the dust settles. But I think it is apparent that those who have decided its fate previously have done a terrible job and ought not have it handed back to them easily.