[open]

[heirring]

WHO: Flint, Wysteria, Miriam, Cassius & You
WHAT: Catch-All
WHEN: Post-dreams, nebulously Guardian-ish
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Warnings (if any) in subject lines.

((OOC NOTE: Anything in bold is closed to one thread, though group threads a-okay.
Feel free to turn this into action brackets if The Spirit Moves You.
Wildcards welcome, bespoke starters available upon request.))

Comments

[revise]

"My sister and I took a half dozen children out of Markham when we left it. I've the practiced eyes of a hawk."

She taps below one for emphasis. It's a cynical, dry breed of humor that she drinks down with her next sip of ale.

"And it helps that you've been telling on yourself. If the Inquisition's lack of order were the reason you left it, I can't imagine that you'd come to Kirkwall to pitch back into the fight instead of just answering the Divine's invitation."

A spread of the hands. Ta-da. What a good magic trick.

[wearyallalone]

He tilts his cup to her, conceding the point. "I do not ask or expect sympathy from those who don't know me," he says, "but I think the least I can do is to be honest when someone asks. It is not as if I don't understand where the questions come from."

He's noticed how few templars and ex-templars are here (and, not incidentally, how different his demeanor is from the existing examples of the latter). It would have been hard to miss.

"And if I ask fewer questions of others myself," quieter, "it is not because I am not interested so much as I feel ... a lack of grounds."

[revise]

"What grounds do you imagine the rest of the company has that you don't? Unless it's that they have the market on impropriety cornered already."

These are preferable questions compared to something like, 'Miriam, is there a reason you've chosen to needle a fellow newcomer instead of being prickly at some old hand of Riftwatch?' Nevermind that, and nevermind facts like how they hadn't been the only two agents of the Gallows tending to Kirkwall's streets or there is a card game in one of the fortress' dining halls tonight that she might have crashed if she just wanted easy company.

[wearyallalone]

It's a reasonable question, if one that gives him pause. "...longer records with the organization. Less complicated histories before it."

Being a templar is Neverra is, he has since learned, somewhat different from being a templar elsewhere in the south; by now, he expects non-Nevarrans to look at him and see templar in their local dialect.

"Do you think I should be bolder, then?" A bold question in its own right, under the circumstances.

[revise]

Danger, Smythe.

"Talking about only yourself is a poor way of making friends," she says, dry over the lip of the tankard. Then ammends to add, "—Is the advice I'd give anyone. I recall Little Kaja having trouble with the concept too."

[wearyallalone]

"Sound advice," he says, after only a moment. "I prefer other topics of conversation, left to my own devices. I suppose I simply do not wish to cause anyone pain with unwelcome overtures." Another brief pause, and: "I do not assume an invitation for a drink is permission."

Perhaps he should be a little bolder in the name of not coming off like an awkward hitching post. It's worth considering.

[revise]

"Anyone who wants to drink in silence takes themselves out for it," could sound sharp, a little bristly, but mostly doesn't. It's merely an observation--a simple, unvarnished statement of fact. Someone somewhere has probably described Miriam Smythe as cripplingly direct.

"And I doubt anyone who's already of a mind to tell you to fuck off on account of whatever oaths you took or renounced will much care about the particulars of what you say so much as the fact that you're saying them."

That's a fact too, fair or not.

[wearyallalone]

She keeps making these reasonable points. "I suppose. It's not that I hope to win anyone over so much as ... minimize further harm, I guess. It sounds a bit foolish, now that I say it out loud."

He considers her for a moment, then adds, "What brought you here? To Riftwatch, not to drinking with me specifically." While he's been invited to ask a question.

[revise]

"My sister has an anchor piece in her hand. I came with," is perhaps an obtusely consolidated representation of the timeline in question, but it isn't a lie.

"Joselyn. She's with the Research division. Similar to me in the face, better taste in clothes and jewelry. If you haven't met already, yoh will. She's apparently been making a nuisance of herself among your lot in the training yard in the mornings. Sword and shield humpers, I mean. Not—" Templars or ex-Templars or whatever.

[wearyallalone]

He tilts his hand to indicate he'd followed. "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting her yet, but I'll keep an eye out. I can't imagine she'll be hard to miss, under the circumstances."

It would be easy, then, to slide back into (companionable?) silence. Instead, though, he offers, "Is she looking for any particular sort of training, or just seeing what's on offer?"

[revise]

"You'd have to ask her," could be a full stop. But. "She's been at it with some Warden. Ellis something."

She lifts her tankard—and pauses.

"Why, are you offering?"

[wearyallalone]

He's not not offering: "I don't presume I'm the only available option, or even the only one apart from the Warden. But I have taught swordplay before. I wouldn't mind doing so again, if she'd like." A brief pause, and then, deadpan: "I do, in fact, have skills beyond shoveling."

[revise]

All of this is accepted as fact with a nod and a certain air of unflinching seriousness.

"Right," she says. "Overthinking too."

Her resolve holds right up until she tips her drink. When it happens, Miriam's laugh is an undignified and half-quashed snort across the lip of the tankard. It comes seemingly standard with a pacifying gesture from her spare hand--so automatic that the two things practically overlap.

"Sorry, no. Don't offer; she won't appreciate it. I'll stop tugging the hook in your cheek."

[wearyallalone]

Her laugh gets a smile from him. It's a good smile, warm. (Underused.) "I appreciate you saving me the embarrassment of taking you at your word. If it helps, you are far from the first person to make a note of the overthinking. Temperamental hazard, I'm afraid." He has, at least, relaxed a fraction.

After a moment, he adds, "I would like to know more about you, if you would like to say. It's only ... it is hard for me to not worry about misstepping. Prodding a wound out of ignorance. I know it can make me seem stiff."

[revise]

He relaxes a fraction and as if in sympathy to it, her brief flash of humor and contrition both are smoothed away—made effectively invisible again in the span of her taking a drink.

"Are you accusing me of being wounded?" Is so reflexive that the beat which follows is visibly devoted to course correction in the name of stop tugging. So across the table from him, Miriam straightens. Squares her shoulders a little, both hands wrapping around the tankard.

"I know how to say no. Ask away."

[wearyallalone]

"Accusing is not the word I would have used," before she can correct too much. The smile fades, though he's less stiff than he was when the conversation started; two steps forward, one back. And he does, at least, ask:

"What were you and your sister doing, before she caught an anchor shard in the hand?"

[revise]

As reward, her answer comes readily. It's a simple question.

"We were with the Inquisition. She did alchemical work for their Research division. I mostly mucked around in Orlais. Helped recapture Montfort." A tip of the head is like a shrug, the curtain of her dark shifting. "Field work."

[wearyallalone]

He considers and immediately rejects the idea of asking whether she and Antosha had crossed paths; neither answer leads anywhere he's inclined to go. So, instead, he says, "I'm inclined to field work myself. And seeing your prowess against the snow, I'm hardly surprised."

It's not quite a tease (he's not sure he's allowed that), but it's firmer ground.

"I suppose it's not so surprising we did not encounter each other then," he adds. "Larger organization, plus both of us out on field assignments frequently."

[revise]

Prowess. The line of her mouth curves, a polite kind of smile. She neglects to mention his skill with a shovel and the countless ditches dug around northern Orlais, but she thinks it.

"Not surprising," Miriam agrees. "But a little strange to think that over the hill someone else was doing more or less the same thing."

More or less.

[wearyallalone]

"I do suppose that's often the way." It skirts a bit something that he's not eager to touch, regardless of how she feels about it. He doesn't entirely pivot, though, still touching on the Inquisition to say: "It made me feel very provincial. I'd mostly been in Nevarra, before deciding to join the Inquisition. It was ... an adjustment." He hadn't expected the culture shock to the degree it had existed, even if he's some years past it now.

[revise]

"Which Circle?" Has the shape of a well practiced, and therefore thoughtless question. It's only after she's said it that Miriam visibly hesitates, then gently revises: "Where in Nevarra?"

There's good sense in practicing that alternative.

[wearyallalone]

"Cumberland." To both. "I spent most of my life there, though I was born in Nevarra City. I was lucky, in that I got to travel a bit, but not outside Nevarra itself. I never felt any particular wanderlust, before, but I do think I'm probably the better for having seen more of the world." Maybe not happier, but at least in possession of greater context.

"What about you? Where, before the Inquisition?" He leaves it to her to determine how long before.

[revise]

Some line in her face goes crooked with amusement for Cumberland and slants more so for Nevarra City. Oh yes, very provincial indeed, she manages not to say.

(A shined shoe scuffs easily, says the distant voice of Enchanter Hennigar in her ear.)

"Between it and Markham—irregulars attached to an arm of the rebellion." Straightforward. As if this is a thing she has no reason to he cagey about. And why not? Surely this is the natural assumption.

"Scouting and small action fighting until we managed to get far enough to slip in under the wing of the Grand Enchanter's main force. Run and hide duty," she says, with the air of someone who has called it so before. What kind of fight can be put up with a half dozen children tethered on your apron strings?

(Enough of one.)

[wearyallalone]

The war is hardly a surprise, but it feels like it has a center of gravity that sucks their conversation toward it despite Vanya's effort to steer around it.

(He thinks, briefly, that maybe someday he truly won't care what anyone thinks of him, but this seems somehow unlikely.)

"To be perfectly honest with you," he says after a short pause. "I'm not sure how to talk about the war. People so often just assume and I let them, but. I have no idea what it was like here in the Marches." So why should anyone else know things they weren't there for? Or just an invitation to continue, perhaps.

[revise]

Miriam takes it as the latter. Further, she seems untroubled by aiming straight for the heart of the thing:

"More scattered than down south, I'm led to believe. Kirkwall was real and immediate to these people, and so was Dairsmuid. And with so many First Enchanters removed to White Spire and the bulk of the rebellion effort further south—" She tips her head, dismissive. "Up here it was just everyone jumping at everyone else's shadow from Hercinia to Tantervale."

She takes a drink, then adds, "Say what you like about the rest; at least now everyone more or less knows where everyone else stands and who's in charge of the decision, I suppose."