wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast

[dashing]

WHO: Herian & others; starters to be added
WHAT: An injured Knight-Enchanter returns to Kirkwall after close to two years up in Skyhold with the Inquisition.
WHEN: the next couple weeks, maybe longer?
WHERE: Infirmary
NOTES: Gross injury stuff, Herian's eternal angst bucket existence
I am starting off with a couple of closed starters at the moment, and I'll add open ones once I am less of a lost baby lamb. (Or if you'd like a custom starter totally pm me and we can figure that one out!)

Comments

GWEN;

[dashing]

To be in the Infirmary is not especially restful. Granted, it is somewhat familiar, but it is not the comfort of one's own place. She is well-used to adapting, the need to evolve and survive-- perhaps that is part of the discomfort. To have returned to Kirkwall could be a homecoming, or it could be a regression. It is a place of joyous memories and of loss, tangled together.

As the reality of that settles back into her mind as she awakens, Herian's brow creases as she opens her eyes, and then she starts at the sight of a familiar face already present. Suffice to say, she was not prepared, and the unexpected surprise makes her grimace slightly as her injuries protest the jarring tensing of her muscles.

"I should have anticipated that you would not await an invitation." And that Herian's efforts to enter Kirkwall discretely were, perhaps, useless.

[elegiaque]

“Since you couldn't have slipped in a little, oh, by the way, I'm on my way back to Kirkwall in your last letter—”

Gwenaëlle, sat in the chair at the side of Herian's sickbed where she has been cleaning and oiling several blades, sets aside the work now that Herian is actually awake to be scolded. It is slightly incongruous with both their surroundings and the fine black velvet dress she's wearing, tightly corseted and layered with petticoats to stave off the chill in the air; some things change, some stay the same.

“As if I wouldn't hear. Did you hear your girl was back and just drop everything?” She hadn't ever paid Cosima that much mind, previously, but that doesn't mean she wasn't aware of the connection or that she hadn't thought of it when she heard that voice over the crystals again.

[dashing]

Herian looks baffled, but in all fairness to her, she also looks like she lost a fight with a landslide. She has her left shoulder and upper arm bandaged, and what bare skin of her torso and arm is visible above the blankets looks, in medical terms, bruised to fuckery. The bruises cease before reaching her neck which is a mercy that might be part of how she survived at all.

One thing at a time.

“My departing from Skyhold hinged upon the completion of an assignment, and agreement with my superiors that the service to the Divine was not best suited.”

Her tone is quiet. For so long she had declared herself a Loyalist, a Knight-Enchanter, and what purpose did a Knight-Enchanter hold if not service to the Divine? “To disclose such matters over letters would have been ill-considered.”
Reckless or idiotic, she’s sure. Her gaze is caught on the daggers, and the way the light seems hazy over true crinkled in the velvet.

It takes a second for her to master her focus. “Saoirse is returned, then?” Her or Sabine, seems, to her, the most likely conclusion.

[elegiaque]

“Who?” —seems like an honest question. Maybe Herian had mentioned her in letters, but Gwenaëlle is Orlesian and the way she might guess that name to be pronounced is almost certainly not correct, so, regardless: “If you had some tart on the side, you should probably sort that out before you see Niehaus again. Do I need to pay someone off for you?”

This is a joke in that she's relatively certain that's not what's going on and that Herian wouldn't want her to pay off her sidebitch, but it's not as if she couldn't or wouldn't in the incredibly unlikely scenario where all of those things were actually true.

[dashing]

To say she’s bewildered would be an understatement, and Cosima’s name dropped into the conversation strikes her visibly. Her mouth works silently for long moments. Letters with Gwenaëlle never had the same impact as in person conversation, and she’d almost forgotten what it was like.

“Saoirse is a friend who departed Kirkwall some months before I did,” she says quietly. Her head is spinning, but protecting her friend’s honour seems a decent place to start. “Neither would she suffer the insult of being a ‘tart on the side,’ nor would I act with such a wanton disregard for someone as to let them believe they alone held my heart, while handing it to another.”

A breath. She looks shaken. Is shaken, actually. Or maybe just shaky.

“Cosima is returned?”

[elegiaque]

If Gwenaëlle's face looks a little bit like she's just tolerantly letting Herian get through that speech so they can move this along more than actually listening to it,

that's because her face is very good at expressing what's going on in her head. Yes, yes, yes, Herian is very good and honorable and has almost no sense of humor, she knows, back to the point. The point being:

“Recently, so she probably hasn't been swept off her feet by any other tarts either.”

[dashing]

Herian would slump back against the pillows, were she not already slumped. “Does she remember?”

As for not knowing about Cosima and any other tarts, (Gwenaëlle, please) Herian sighs. “ Mhà dealanach bualadh orm.”

May lightning strike me is melodramatic, yes, but does it also apply? Yes. She’s been languishing for over eighteen months, how dare—

[elegiaque]

Severely: “I hope that means 'thank you, Gwenaëlle',” with the sparkling air of one who is certain that it doesn't. She sits down on the edge of the bed (carefully), adding, “Well, she certainly seemed to remember everything else. I suppose 'and has anyone seen my woman' would have been a bit tactless as an opener, she was talking more about catching up on work. But I think I'd probably lead much the same way, in her position.”

You know, feelings private, give me a task.

[dashing]

With the even tone of someone resigned to it, “You are a menace.”

Herian is quiet, but that isn’t dissimilar to saying the sky is blue.

“No word of her return was sent to Skyhold.” Or, at least, none before she departed, who knows what she might have missed with the timing being as it was. Cosima or anyone else might have sought to notify her and she’d be none-the-wiser. It’s tempting to sink into something indulgent and self-pitying, though, so in this instance she allows it.

“How do you fare?”

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle solemnly hands Herian—

a letter. “It would have been,” she says, dry, “but I heard you were in town before I sent my packet of mail.” And news simply doesn't travel that fast through most of Thedas; the Inquisition and Riftwatch crystal networks aren't the same, presumably, and it takes time for a bird or a messenger to get anywhere. Gwenaëlle isn't typically in the habit of sending each letter simply as she writes it but with packets of other mail and business.

Most of the time that's fine.

“You can read all about how I've been for the past few weeks while you're moping.”

[dashing]

“From you, aye, but not Cosima.”

That hurts, it hurts in a way that she hadn’t anticipated feeling today. Overlong she has been resigned to a weight and resignation of realising her cause with the Inquisition would not make the difference she’d hoped for. This is something fresh, new, to know that someone she adored so completely had returned and— what? Not thought to contact her? Pass on some pressing, urgent message?

(In the impulse of the moment and her exhaustion it is easy to give on to despair. Had that not been her weakness in Salzklippe, those years ago?) She takes the letter, holding it on her fingertips but making no move to open it.

“I do not mope.” She does, competitively.

[elegiaque]

The withering look Gwenaëlle gives her speaks, in Gwenaëlle's opinion, volumes. “Yes, that's why you just said that idiocy that just came out of your mouth, because you don't mope.”

Presuming her point to be well made (it's incredible that she's still surprised when, frequently, it turns out not to have been), she says,

“And what happened to you, anyway?”

[dashing]

Shockingly, Herian frowns. She keeps her hand from going to the pendent hung about her neck, just barely, and doesn’t offer comment to that first point.

Easier to move on to the question.
“I was injured on an assignment before departing, but I thought the wound would hold through the trip to Kirkwall.”

A little tilt of her head. “I failed to fully account for blood mages, those well-qualified in the propulsion of boulders—“ You know, that old thing. Herian, it seems, was a key ingredient in a theoretical mage jelly.