CLOSED | a shadow crossed the sky,

[poleaxed]

WHO: scarlett johansson poleaxed & chris evans archademode
WHAT: Dirty jobs done dirt cheap.
WHEN: Mid-Cloudreach.
WHERE: Denerim.
NOTES: Discussions of past child abuse are highly likely.

Long travel after long travel, Jone only wants rest; unfortunately, there is none for wickedness. Taoran Hawkwind always struck Jone as a small minded mercenary. She's never met the man, of course, but they've mutual friends. He always sounded a little thick, and his camp, just outside Denerim's walls, proves it. Jone talks shop with him anyway, joking that her 'armed guard' is actually a qunari, and this far south? Everybody believes it.

Taoran is doing grunt work, trying to get a rich merchant out of taxes. Not terribly clever, especially since he's going through the Brecilian to do it. Then again, Jone's always had a bias against Gwaren and Amaranthine and does she just hate Fereldan nobles? No, not interrogating that night now.

She agrees to go with him, lying that they could use the cash. Half pay up front is bargained for, and Jone immediately uses it getting them a respectable room at a respectable inn. Within the walls of Denerim, a thatch-roofed city stacked with as many pickpockets as rich men (and more that like to slum, besides) The Wailing Willow doesn't double as a brothel, as far as Jone can tell, so she hopes Gabranth won't pitch too much of a fit.

They can only afford one room with the coin Jone's scraped together, though Jone requests a divider, explaining in her poshest accent that they're not yet married.

The innkeeper rolls her eyes, but gets the divider.

As soon as the door is closed, Jone collapses on the bed nearest the window, luxuriating in sleeping on tightly bound rope and straw mattress. She's slept on better. She doesn't care.

"Ah, this is the life, innit. Going off to do something pointlessly dangerous on the morrow, but after sleeping on a bed."

No one they've encountered in Denerim has Jone's accent, because they've steered clear of the part of the city Jone's from. She hopes Gabranth hasn't noticed.

"What d'you think of Hawkwind, Gab? Besides that bloody name. It ain't his fault; his Da picked it out of a hat."

Comments

[archademode]

She cannot know it, he’s said too little of his homeland for her to grasp at in this moment, but— though it remains true that Judge Magister Gabranth has never held a heart for empathy, it isn’t Gabranth that speaks.

His hands lingering for too long across the helm held before him, as if he cannot bring himself to put it on.

“Trust I would not do that to you.”

It’s better— should they be seen— that he does wear it. Something to shield them both from prying eyes, should she find naught but misery set before her tonight. Should she need the buffer of a Magister's silhouette positioned between herself and the world in which she remains mired.

So he does. And so he moves to stand at her back, ready to depart.

[poleaxed]

Jone doesn't cry anymore, not unless someone's died, so she doesn't cry now. Maybe, though, if she'd been a different person, she would have. The rush of painful kinship ensnares her all at once, her breath sharp in her throat, her teeth itching, a body betraying itself.

She takes a deep breath. She takes another deep breath. She manages not to tell Gabranth he's better than she deserves. She can't imagine it'd do them any good.

She just reaches up, putting her hand on his breastplate, over where his heart is hidden by metal, bone and flesh. "Then I can get us through this."

The inn is quiet, and the night watchman at the doorway doesn't pay them mind beyond respectfully acknowledging their presence. Instinct takes over, after that; Jone's feet still know how to take her home.

"It's on the outskirts," Jone says, "'cos the smell."

She doesn't know anything about his past. She doesn't know if he's highborn enough to have no clue how hides are tanned.

[archademode]

Hardly highborn, though his own childhood was spent in the narrower corridors of Landis’ inner workings; the worst smells to be found there were ever overwritten by freshly baked bread and chocobo down. Or perhaps that’s his own lost longing promising as such.

All he offers her is a nod, a low humming breath as he moves to keep pace with her strides.

“Should you need rest, I will stop at your behest.”

A polite way of saying take it slow if you need to.

[poleaxed]

"Thinking we ought to sleep in tomorrow," Jone answers, expression trying to smile under the pall of worry that is slowly overtaking her.

She is quieter, more careful, more deliberate. The brusquely confident woman, self-assertive and loud, is replaced by a cautious figure filled with second-guesses. She stops at every street corner, inspects every house, and ultimately? It doesn't matter.

The stench hits first, even at night. A stray dog watches them in moonlight, eyes reflecting the moon. It's no mabari, but a lean and starved creature, and it disappears quickly into the narrow spaces between cheap housing. Buildings are little more than bracketed thatch and mud. The ground shifts under them, winding into trenches, the tanning pits.

In a bleak whisper, Jone murmurs, "all the houses're wrong..."

[archademode]

It is a dismal place. Perhaps more miserable in its timeworn decay than she remembers, judging by the discomfort in her voice— or perhaps just as miserable, only differently rearranged. He cannot say for certain, it is too far removed from his own understanding.

“Does enough remain for you to track?”

If not, he wonders if it would be best to surrender their efforts for the night. Returning in daylight might, at the very least, come with the benefit of gathered information by way of local interrogation.

[poleaxed]

Local interrogation runs too high a risk of discovering relatives still clinging to life. There are things she'll do for Bede, but facing Mattieu and Marec again?

It isn't worth it.

Jone trudges on, knowing eyes watch them from the houses they slide between, and knowing every single watcher has deemed them too dangerous to bother with. This is what she meant, a place with no judgement. These people have nothing, and that includes choices. How can their desperation be held to law?

There's a pole between two of the pits, a long wooden structure that used to be a tree, before it died. Somehow, the message tree survived the Blight. Jone squares her shoulders, and begins to climb it with a deft familiarity; this is something she's done a thousand times.

"There's enough," she says as she hefts herself up. "If I fall, don't let me land in shite."

[archademode]

It’s a mercy granted at her request, of course. The lawless are often starved, often desperate, often grasping for whatever opportunity finds them— but that, in the eyes of Archadia’s Magistrate principles, excuses nothing. Gabranth would so keenly, were he asked, bring to bear the full weight of the law upon each of these houses.

But these are not his laws, and this is neither his world nor his home. Instead it is Jone’s mandate he dutifully maintains within these bounds, as devotedly as if spoken by Emperor Gramis himself.

“Then do not fall.” He chides, moving a step closer to the edge as if measuring whether or not he can truly grant her that request.

[poleaxed]

What would normally be an exuberant boast comes out as a murmur, "I've not fallen from the Bloomingtide Pole since I were..."

She reaches the top, and her hand goes in a knobbly crevice in the wood. Her whole arm disappears into it, and sensitive ears will hear a small gasp. She retrieves something, a small flat object. Climbing down, she keeps it carefully gripped in hand, even as it slightly staggers her mobility on the descent.

Which is, of course, why she slips, falling right above Gabranth.

[archademode]

He has little time. Enough only to exhale a tightened snarl as he braces his footing against poor leverage and muddy earth, arms extended to catch her at the height of her descent— and oh, he feels it then, at that moment of impact when his body swears it cannot, will not endure both her momentum and the weight of his armor.

But there is something to be said of fon Ronsenburg stubbornness.

His knees buckle, mud gives way beneath his heels, and yet with a decidedly livid sounding growl in his throat, he wills himself to go no further: locking his balance in place— her clutched fast against his plated chest— and neither of them lost to pit or mucked soil.

“Did I not say to use caution-“

[poleaxed]

"Fuck," Jone whispers, trying to squirm out of his arms as quickly as she can. She won't put any more pressure on this man. She's asked too much already. Still, she has that strip of wood in hand, a grimy thing that's survived too many rainfalls. She worries her lip, holding it close as she tries to ignore the smell now surely covering both of them.

"Maker, I didn't- I weren't-" She shakes her head. Excuses never matter. "Let's get back," and there is the hint of fear in her voice.

Every second they're here, they inch closer to finding surviving family. Bede was a mage, he wouldn't have stayed in this pit, even as he might have crossed by it. But her oldest brothers, her cousins?

Redheads are always bad luck.

"I'll never do this t'you again."

[archademode]

He needs a moment to let febrile fury ebb; it isn’t aimed at her, of course, (and particularly not when she seems so deeply distressed, squirming like an oversized cat within his grasp) but the heady rush of adrenaline always inspires a sort of practiced irritation, and quick as he is to rush headlong into battle, he isn’t nearly as precise in undoing it in turn.

Her feet touch the earth, his level best done to ensure she has her bearings before he withdraws— brushing gloved palms against the front of his chest plating to swat away dust and a thin layer of airborne muck.

“It is fine, Jone.” His words are a touch too firm. They lack the calmness of reassurance, but he might argue that in the full depths of unsurety something unyielding to cling to might well make for a better lifeline.

“Did you find what you needed?”

Asked as he begins to dig his heels out of their own sunken, muddy bonds— turning to begin their journey back towards the inn, and no doubt looking a touch worse than they’d set out for it.

[poleaxed]

"I think so," she whispers, and while she does not quite sound unsure, the prospect of her success seems not to have heartened her. She begins her way back where they came from, as though each stride taxes her.

Jone has forgotten Gabranth's discomfort-- an unforgivable thing, by her own personal rubric-- and is lost entirely in her own contemplation. She doesn't say much more, only hurries away, effort seemingly locked in keeping her from a full gallop.

"Fuck this place," she whispers to herself. "Couldn't it stay burnt down?"

[archademode]

“You despise it so...”

Yet she would ask for mercy for these people. For their ragged existence, and the sunken pit of their meager means. He keeps pace with her as much as can be managed, though her strides are naturally longer, and her mind distracted with the drag of the past that surrounds them in altered form.

[poleaxed]

"It's fucking despicable." She realizes she's shouted when someone in some dark corner of this cursed city tells her to shove it. She can't see who, doesn't care. All her energy is being spent on not shouting obscenities back. Under her breath, she hisses, "makes monsters."

Even Bede was not a kind man, that was evident even at twelve. He may be kinder now. She doubts it. She may one day find out, and that makes her feel a deep unease.

With her walking as she is, shoulders stiff and eyes downcast, it's a miracle they don't turn the wrong corner and end up lost. Somehow, the layout of this city is engraved in her mind, after twenty years absence.

The inn is not far away.

[archademode]

He might ask her if she wants it gone. Scrubbed clean by a cruel hand, were he he man of his own past misdeeds. Instead, so endlessly pained and yet so taken with the worry of his own twin’s wellbeing, he knows better than to offer. Understands what it is to despise some part of yourself, and want to preserve the wounded fragility of it all the same.

Yet instead, trapped between a desire to ask after her, and the knowledge it would be too much an intrusion, he only follows.

“Tell me what it is you uncovered.”

[poleaxed]

Jone stops, steels herself for his judgement. The prospect is encouraging, the tantalizing possibility of being scoured in disapproval. It will hurt, being mocked for such a small, stupid thing, but pain has only ever made her stronger.

She stops, and holds out a flimsy piece of wood and bark, clearly carved from the dead tree it was found inside. Squinting, it's possible to see something carved into the wood, or are those just careworn cracks born of age?

"I can't tell, it's too dark, but-" she holds it up to him, cradling the old wood carefully, "Bede and I used to leave messages this way."

[archademode]

Whatever she remains braced for does not come. Only the sight of that helm narrowing its given focal point in moonlight, before:

“It must be dried with care. A day or two of treatment might lend legibility.”

That and a little light, of course— but the wood looks to be in poor condition, and he worries it may not last if they do nothing to preserve its state.

[poleaxed]

Jone nods, cradling the message close. It leaves a stain on her clothes to be discovered in daylight, something she looks forward to. It will be their job to fight, stand tall, and render the world simple in the tones of implied violence. When you're the one with the sword, everything flattens out.

She hasn't got a sword now, or any weapon, and her wit's never been any good. She looks nervously over at Gabranth-- at the metal face he wears for others-- and wonders if she'd be more comfortable with a steel plate between her and the world.

"Maybe," she says, heading toward the inn. "We'd best sleep. Nothing to be done for it, now, is there."

[archademode]

“On your way, then.”

The words are softer as he trudges onward in her shadow, laced with a mild temperament compared to all his usual brusqueness. She isn’t hurried along for his sake, only for her own: the greater the distance between her and those mired pits, the better she’ll rest tonight, he hopes.

If nothing else, she has a trophy to sleep by now.