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

[poleaxed]

She's not sure what that quality in Gabranth's voice means, but she can tell it means something. It's a simple request, too. She doesn't quite feel bad-- it's the normal manner of breaking people, not meaning to but watching the cracks scatter. This is just how she is.

"Right, mate," she says, "no more nicknames."

('Gab', of course, doesn't count.)

[archademode]

“There is nothing left of my home.”

The words are threaded through with the slow exhale of unsteady breath. As quiet a divulgence as given to any kiltias within sacred halls. He does not want to confess this— but he cannot expect her to understand the nature of his demand if she doesn’t know. It isn’t, after all, so simple as the matter of ‘no more nicknames’.

“I’d told you my brother fled when our homeland was destroyed, when we were hardly more than children— but I failed to mention the extent of that damage.” His own fault and folly, and he keeps his focused fixed on the rough-cleft beams slung just overhead, breathing slow and even. An effort. One to be calm. “There is nothing, Jone. So little in land and living spared the very name itself was forgotten, erased completely from all aggregate knowledge. And in the wake of that destruction then did I join the ranks of the Empire that took everything from me, to become a Judge Magister. A hound to the very Emperor who had ordered us scattered as dust.”

“I am a Son of Nowhere, as you so suggest.

...But I cannot stand to hear it.”

[poleaxed]

So Jone sits in the flickering darkness as the candle sputters out, unwilling to move and somehow spook whatever aspect of fate has given her this moment. It isn't that she savors it, hearing Gabranth's pain. She's just not enough of a fool to miss the unspoken tenderness of that moment, and distrusts her ability to allow it without breaking it.

Hearing that he joined the empire that buckled his home lends her thoughts to drift of haunted dreams, when she was a Venatori lapdog, when she was a toothless Orlesian wife. Both were horrors and crimes, in their own way. She just wasn't comitted.

It isn't, she knows now, in Gabranth's nature to do anything in half measures.

But what does she say to that? And the answer is nothing. No one wants her paltry comforts. None but a lad who isn't here, who makes her bones itch when he asks for such kindness from a monster.

"You won't hear it again," is all she can promise. "That's..." terrible, horrible, would make her rage if Gabranth wasn't clearly trying so hard to be calm... "not something even I can joke at."

[archademode]

“...thank you.”

For not rushing to comfort him in the dark, for not saying much beyond simply avoiding those fractured pieces of his past as if they were scattered bits of broken glass on the floor between them; likely and more than willing to cut.

He shifts, then, rolling onto his side to set his own back to her. A sign he’ll say no more.