open. you believe what you want to believe.

[justashotaway]

WHO: Aenor Din'adhal, Laura Kint
WHAT: Catchall with open and some closed starters
WHEN: Immediately post-dream through the end of Guardian
WHERE: The Gallows and Kirkwall proper
NOTES: If you'd like me to write you up something particular, please PM justashotaway or dinadhal, PP , or disco dove#9906. Starters in comments.

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[justashotaway]

Laura isn't sure how long they stay there. She forgets to listen for sounds at the door or think more than a moment or two ahead of each breath she takes in. Until her teeth no longer threaten to chatter if she unclenches her jaw, she lives in their scents as they mingle and the familiar weight of Matthias' arms.

It takes time.

When she thinks she can tolerate it (at any time she could have, if she'd had to, but with Matthias she doesn't have to, he will not make her), she lifts her head enough to peer up at his face. Her cheeks are dry, her eyes tearless, but some tension still lingers in the angles of her face. "Before that...it was not a bad dream."

Which is to say, I do not wish to talk about this anymore.

[inkindled]

He had needed that moment very badly--maybe not as much as Laura, how can he know that--but still, very badly. Holding onto her feels like touching ground after being too far out in the middle of a lake. It's solid, it makes sense.

So Matthias even manages to give her a little bit of a smile when she pulls away. "It was a good dream," he agrees. He lifts one hand, carefully--and if she permits it, he will brush his thumb just beside her mouth, like he might work out some of that tension from her. "It felt--real. In a good way."

[justashotaway]

"Yes." She lets him touch her, not quite relaxing, but not shying back from him. "I do not want us to lose the war. But--"

But even if they seemed very, very close to losing the war, there still was joy to be had. Hard work, quiet moments, waking a sleeping man and kissing him in the middle of the night. Living like people live, others looking at her and seeing a person capable of blending into society for more than a few minutes at a time.

She can't quite bring herself to say those things aloud. The not-quite-a-memory, lying next to him beneath piles of furs and blankets, feels fragile. Mentally, she's shelved it with her best recollections of her mother, things to be remembered and guarded carefully. Instead, she tries to summon her I am teasing voice--not entirely successfully--and finishes the sentence with, "--you were very handsome."

[inkindled]

Wherever Matthias thought she was going to go, it wasn't there. He's caught off-guard, enough so that a smile jumps to his face. He smooths his thumb back again. She isn't smiling, but he hears that note in her voice. It helps, hearing it. Something to cleave to.

"Couldn't grow a beard, still." He remembers that much. "Probably won't ever be able to. I hope that's all right with you."

You know, for the forever they promised each other in the dark of their shared tent, years from now. It feels fragile to Matthias as well, but very real at the same time. He wants to ask about it, and opens his mouth to say something before he thinks, no, hang on, wait, not yet, not after you were just talking of blood magic. Keep them separate.

"You were beautiful. Still are. Don't think any war could have changed that."

[justashotaway]

Matthias smiling was, at that moment, the objective--she realizes it when it happens, his entire face shifting. If he's handsome always (and he is), he's especially so when he looks at her like she said something worth hearing.

"Beards do not interest me." A beard would only obscure his face, and she's grown fond of seeing all of it. She reaches up, fingers alighting at his jaw, letting herself feel the plane of skin, muscle and bone beneath. Some part of her still feels like it's disconnected from the world around her, shut up someplace inside her own skull, but it's smaller than the rest of her. "And I think you are biased."

Still teasing, still not quite making herself sound teasing enough, but with a certain softness around her eyes that means a smile as much as the curve of her lips might.

[inkindled]

His grin shifts his face again, changing the angles that her fingertips are pressed to. It's a small grin on the Matthias scale--he has a variety, usually wider than not--but it's still a grin. And things move one notch closer to better.

"No, that's not it. 'Cause you are, and you don't need me to say it. Like I will say it, 'course, but it's also true on its own." He shifts his hand, pushes back to carefully tuck some of her hair back behind her ear. And here's her face, close to his, perfect and pretty. "I reckon I could look at you forever. You really don't like beards at all?"

[justashotaway]

She doesn't strictly disagree. However she might feel about the scars blanketing her limbs, Laura's aware that she's generally not unpleasant to look at. And Matthias is the only person in the world from whom she likes hearing opinions, when it comes to the subject of her appearance. But she has yet to find a way to accept the compliment easily.

So instead, shrugging at his answer--but with the corner of her mouth twitching up slightly, something shy coming into her face--she tells him, "I would see less of your face."

It's better than the other answers at hand: sometimes they smell bad, they can be unpleasantly bristly, they remind her of other people she'd rather forget.

[inkindled]

"Yeah, true. Might not always be a bad thing."

He rubs at his chin, thinking--then, spurred to sudden action, reaches for some of her hair. It's long enough that he can get a bit of it and lean in as he pulls it closer--and holds it over his upper lip, making a long and droopy moustache of it.

"But just look at this," he says through her hair.

[justashotaway]

Hers is the startled laugh of someone who didn't realize a moustache made of her hair was even an option. Laura shakes her head--minutely, careful not to disrupt his attempt at facial hair.

"You look like Bastien." (He doesn't, really. The only point of comparison is some dark hair over his upper lip. But for their purposes, that's enough, and it's the first thing Laura thinks of, anyway.) "I couldn't kiss Bastien."

[inkindled]

"He is old," Matthias concedes, and, trying out a very bad Orlesian accent, repeats, "old."

But he doesn't take her hair away from his face just yet. Instead he curls it around so it makes a loop, and holds that to his lip to make a very bad pseudo beard. "Less Bastieny," he guesses, though he can't see for himself. "Maybe the trouble is that it doesn't match my hair, yeah? When I was small we said it was demons that had hair that didn't match their beards. Stupid."

[justashotaway]

"Ancien," she agrees, with only a little Nevarran colouring her Orlesian, a hand going to her mouth as she tries not to laugh more at the sight of her hair wrapping about Matthias' chin. Why it's so amusing, she wouldn't be able say if asked. A lifetime spent mostly without small moments of silliness, perhaps, and the continuing surprise at being able to sit with someone and have moments like these. "Beards are always darker. That would make every man a demon."

[inkindled]

"Ancien," he repeats dutifully, and sticks his nose up in the air. This is in part to balance the hair and in part to be posh and Orlesian--not Bastien-Orlesian, whatever else might be said of Bastien (not much by Matthias, Bastien confuses him), he isn't posh.

"Beards might be a bit darker, but I mean like if I really had a beard what grew in as black as your hair, but I had my hair along with it. That's too much a difference, yeah? I ought to have at least a brown beard to go with brown hair. And if I hadn't, then," he clicks his tongue against his teeth, "demon, obviously."

[justashotaway]

"You are a mage," she points out, leaning in a little to help him with the extremely important matter of keeping his facial hair on his face. "You could make your beard any colour."

Of course, a child like he was might see a mage and think one step from a demon. Laura wouldn't be able to blame them. She doesn't say it, just aware enough to realize they likely shouldn't return to the subject of all the ways Matthias' magic might endanger others. Instead, she tells him, "Brown hair and a green beard."

[inkindled]

He laughs, and some of her hair falls into his mouth. Gross, mostly for her, but also not great for him. Carefully he tries to push it out, maybe wipe it off.

"Tell you what, when I've learnt the spell for hair coloring, I'll grow a beard then. Or I'll try. At least for a bit, only so I can change the color around. Brown hair and a red beard, but proper red. Like crimson red. Not ginger."

[justashotaway]

"I would like your with a red beard." Her hair falling into his mouth is, for her, the end of this particular bit of entertainment. It's nowhere close to the least pleasant place her hair has been, and yet--she takes the locks he borrowed carefully from his grasp, letting them fall back against her shoulder again. Still smiling, lips and all now, though, and touching his jaw again lightly. "But then I would like shaving it off again."

[inkindled]

"All right, then." He turns his head just a little, leans in to her touch with a grin. "That's what I'll be working on. I'll let Enchanter Leander know, all other work has got to stop for a bit so's I can learn to grow a beard and color it red."

[justashotaway]

Under other circumstances, she might draw her hand away a moment later--but he seems to like it, in the same way their cat appreciates being petted, and there's a sort of relief that comes from being able to touch his face and know the things he's promised. So her fingertips rest idle, there at his jaw, a little longer.

"Good." There's a pause, as she wonders what to say--unlike Matthias, she hasn't jokes at the ready. After a moment, she settles on, "What kind of work will have to stop?"

It's conciliatory--tell me about your magic, the kind I'm trying to understand--and it's a test of sorts. His enchanter hasn't been teaching him blood magic, surely, but.

[inkindled]

"Oh, y'know--"

No, she doesn't, obviously. Pleased to tell her more, Matthias sits back a little--not too far--and that means he moves his face out from under her hand but he reaches for it to hold it instead. It feels natural. When she'd walked in the room, things had been horrible. This is better.

"I'm trying to get better at healing, mainly. I'm getting quite good. Derrica reckons I could help with it, official-like--she said that ages ago but I dunno, I don't want to cock it up in some way. Spirit blade--Knight Enchanter Voss is helping me with that. And control, in general. I can write my whole name with fire but with everything else I'm crap."

[justashotaway]

"I remember the spirit blade." That, she still likes the idea of: weapons matching, fighting together, one more thing they're both capable of. Her other hand comes and covers his, enclosing it loosely between her palms. Healing, too, is good, and being able to control the things he does. All of it useful, all of it manageable by people without magic, only more quickly.

It's thinking of that--only more quickly--that leads her to add, "You want people to be better. That means you would be a good healer."

[inkindled]

"I hope so." He looks down at where her hand is laid, covering his. The spaces between her knuckles, where her claws appear, are smooth. There's no sign of them. There never is, not until she needs them.

"I think--I want to help people, y'know? I always have." Saying that after doing blood magic in a dream might seem counter to that statement. Matthias puts that thought--and his immediate defensiveness--to one side. "Healing is the most straightforward, like. And I'd be glad to learn it, and be good at it. I'd always want to be on the front lines, though."

[justashotaway]

Her knuckles are smooth, the backs of her hands only faintly lined--old wounds, not self-inflicted, places that were neatly pinned open for lyrium experiments and then closed again. Her fingers and knuckles, compared to everything above them, and particulary everything behind her wrists, aren't marked much at all.

"Other healers couldn't," she points out. Matthias has this on the others she's encountered: he can fight as well as heal, can fight better. That makes him more useful than anyone scrambling along the edges of a battle. "So you would be more helpful. No--you will be more helpful."

[inkindled]

"I will be," he repeats. Her affirmation means more than his. As ever, Matthias puts more stock in the opinions of others than he does in his own--and more, still, in Laura's opinion. She's numbered among those most important. Of course what she thinks counts for more.

He turns his hand so that his is now covering hers, so that he can run his thumb over her knuckles, raised like tiny mountains, the smooth valleys in between. Back and forth, almost meditative. In some future, he could be a healer and a fighter, both at once. In some future, he could still do blood magic--but he won't, he swore it. In some future, they could be in a tent together in a swamp, and the world could be horrible outside, but they'd be together.

"D'you think," he starts, then stops himself. "Sorry. I was thinking-- It doesn't matter. Or, I mean, it does matter, quite a lot, but I dunno if... Just, there's a lot of time between now and the point in time we were dreaming about. Right?"

[justashotaway]

"Yes." Five years, or around that long--though he likely doesn't need the exact number supplied. He remembers the dream as clearly as she. "Enough time to learn the things you want to."

It doesn't occur to her that he's not still talking of magic, in bringing up the numbers. Even with his thumb idly rubbing her skin, the new stumbling in his question. Matthias is confident, but he isn't always confident; this is something it's taken her time to figure out about him. And magic is important to him.

So it must be about magic.

[inkindled]

"Right, yeah. Or-- you know, do the things I want to. Or the things I think I want to."

He looks at her, properly like. They're quite close still. It wasn't long ago--minutes, maybe--that the space between them felt like a gulf that couldn't be crossed. No, yeah--it's too recent, he can't say what he's thinking. If he told her that he would marry her, still, that he might want that--and might is such a stupid word here, a word he might use as a space between himself and the real truth--but if he told her now, with all that fear and all that she has lived, blood magic, and him with blood on his hands (in a dream, of course, it was a dream), all of it so close, still--well, saying it now would spoil it. It must be better to wait.

So instead, Matthias says, "I like you."

Which is stupid, really. But he means it, and he means the weight that it really has, which maybe she won't know--but she will know, of course she will know, because Laura is much cleverer than he is and can pick up even the littlest of things.

[justashotaway]

Laura understands, after a moment or two, what it is he means. There's a gap between the things Matthias wants to do and the words I like you, and inside it is everything they haven't talked about: all the parts of the dream that still feel like a dream, everything possible that she hasn't told anyone in the waking world.

"I asked Commander Flint what is required for a wedding," she informs him. Her voice is its usual flat, steady thing, made softer by the topic at hand. I like you, too, she means, dressed up in knowledge gained--like the taste of oranges and the rules to card games--later than most. It's easier, somehow, to explain what she's done than it is to explain what she feels.

And here, her eyes are on their hands, a lock of hair falling before her face. "It is not complicated, and it may not be legal. But he is capable of marrying people. If it becomes...relevant."