[closed] if you're here and I'm here then who's flying the plane

[katabasis]

WHO: Flint & Yseult
WHAT: Trust exercises
WHEN: Immediately pre-hasmal invasion
WHERE: Near Hasmal
NOTES: will include content warning in subject lines if applicable

It's almost guaranteed that their contact has utilized the flow of refugees across the border and toward Hasmal as a cover to pass into the South, though they aren't meant to meet them in that. Doubtless every breed of intelligencier currently peddles their trade there, for if an agent of one secret network might slip in that direction then why not agents of all?

Rather, after crossing the broad width of the Minanter on one of the point-nosed ferries (in the company of a pilot with a near supernatural skill for weaseling extra coin out of pocket, but who tactfully neglects to intervene in the debate his passengers are engaged in), they hire a pair of horses and turn west toward what is allegedly an all but forgotten trading post by the name of Drake's Landing which is said to boast such luxuries as a nearly empty inn and the cheapest drink in the political tri-corner.

At some point—perhaps after the fourth or fifth narrow bridge that they have to coax the horses across, for the landscape is threaded through with twisting offshoots of the Minanter—Flint remarks, "If we come this way again, it would be faster to row in."

Maybe that's how the Venatori beat them to the Landing. Or maybe the ferry pilot had a raven in the little cabin at the back of his boat who had carried word of a certain notable captain of Riftwatch swiftly North.

Regardless—

Comments

[katabasis]

"Right in this moment? Possibly."

Although there are plenty of ways to be miserable on a ship, particularly one which has fallen off the edge of the world. Certainly they're all more romantically imagined than sitting on a floor in a dark room with a shattered knee, but what practical difference does that make?

"But ordinarily, no. Not really."

Bold words from the man who'd all but told her and Byerly that he'd given defecting from Riftwatch serious consideration.

[hassaran]

Who hasn't? They didn't have all those dreams for nothing.

Yseult is both generally uninterested in philosophizing and ill-equipped for the sort of abstraction it requires. And impending death isn't about to increase her patience. But the sound she makes--the second one, after a little hum of agreement that being elsewhere might be preferable--is sort of musing, both on what he's said and on what she might say next, which ends up being:

"Are you sure you're not already? The double meaning of the gift was intended more as warning than suggestion."

[katabasis]

"I'm not sure the Viscount would be entirely pleased to hear that you consider Kirkwall the equivalent of disappearing from the map."

No, her intended meaning hadn't gone entirely over his head then any more than it does now. But he's had his proverbial knuckles slapped for pontificating once already. Why press some broad point when she's plenty miserable all without his assistance?

[hassaran]

"He might be relieved if it did," might not quite make sense grammatically, but anyone who's seen Bran knows he was already tired when he took over the job ten? fifteen? years ago.

"I don't know how long I'll remain lucid," she says after a moment or two, with some of that deliberate matter-of-factness that is so often irritating in meetings. "If you should escape, I would appreciate it if you told Darras that I said I'm sorry."

[katabasis]

There are men who would, given the extent of their current circumstances, take this as license to reassure. Tell him yourself, he might say. Or that he isn't leaving without her. Or some nonsense about how ridiculously overdramatic she will feel when, in a few hours' time, she has been seen and tended to. It's a natural impulse, isn't it? To dismiss the sort of concern she's speaking to when there's so little that can actually be done to alleviate the cause.

More dismally, equally unspoken: if she dies, it seems highly unlikely that he would return to Riftwatch any time soon to make those apologies for her.

But if either thought occurs to Flint in the dark (and they must; this isn't the first time he has sat in a cage, and he has argued similar points to himself before), neither shows. His ready answer, without preamble—

"I will. I'll see that he hears it."

[hassaran]

"Thank you." Yseult can at least be relied on not to make it any more dramatic than anything so near to death inevitably, inherently is. If it can't be done, it can't; if it can, it will. That's as much certainty as anyone can reasonably ask for.

"I've been nearly killed a number of times," she says, in the same tone in which someone might comment on a town they've visited before, "Several in ways that felt quite stupid. I confess I'd rather thought if I survived all that, it would be for something. Not storybook heroics," to head off mockery, "but this is a bit of a waste, isn't it."

[katabasis]

In the dark, it's difficult to say whether he looks at her or not. But maybe he does, fetching out the vague outlines of her shape from the gloom and measuring them. After she falls silent, he's quiet for a beat after which must indicate the turning over and examining of a thought, not that he doesn't have one or twelve. It's the shadow of a checked impulse. Then—

"In this room, yes. It is." Has he ever seen a death that wasn't a waste? That wasn't both more and less brutal or consequential than it was meant to be?

"But if we're right and Tevinter goes in the direction we imagine, then Riftwatch will need to be moved to be effective. You and I may not be particularly popular members of that company"—has the brittle curve of dry humor to it, though it lands less effectively than it might without a look to punctuate it—"But it's a good story. And someone will find a way of turning it to their advantage."

[hassaran]

Yseult's thinking less of deaths she's seen than those she hasn't, deaths avoided or imagined. Blades she's stepped in front of, people she would not have minded dying to shield or dying beside, some it might even have been worth dying to kill. If she'd met her end on the field at Ghislain, or in Taviano's cabin, or on the side of a road twenty-five years ago, would that have been better somehow? Maybe it's just pride that's soured this, sucked any sense of purpose out of it. They could at least be killing her for who she is. That's too stupid a thought to say aloud.

"Silver and Bastien will manage it, I'm sure. Between them they might even convince the others they liked us after all. Perhaps that's best for everyone. Riftwatch gets a unifying tragedy and more pleasant leaders, and we don't have to bother with it anymore."

[katabasis]

He has some sense of it—the indignity of the thing. Not just here in this room, but in what he's posed. There is a certain lack of satisfaction in seeing some post by the roadway to which some burden must be carried and then being made to set it down before passing it. Fine. Someone else will be as capable of carrying it. That's true. But it's a long fucking way to have come for no discernable—What? Reward? Had that been the point in picking the thing up to begin with?

(No. But yes.)

"Who said anything about being unpleasant?"

[hassaran]

"You said unpopular." Close enough. "Do you know, before I joined I thought about putting on a charming act, but decided it would be better to simply be professional, treat the Inquisition as I had my previous employer. The honest approach full time, for a change. A very foolish mistake, in hindsight."

[katabasis]

He doesn't laugh, but there's something to the timbre of his breath in the dark which suggests the impulse.

"I'd considered the same."

And reached a similar conclusion, clearly.

[hassaran]

"It's not even that much less tiring this way," she says, with a similar tinge to her voice, like she might laugh if it weren't for the gut wound. "Perhaps if we survive, we could claim a change of heart. Or head wounds so severe they've altered our personalities."

starts chess clock (but also no pressure sad lmf @ my own damn self)

[katabasis]

"Byerly would accuse us of being brainwashed by blood mages before we'd gotten halfway up the tower. Luckily, he'd keep it between us for a year. So it might still work with the general company."

Is it reassuring that even in a dark room leagues removed from the Kirkwall's war table and every possible ulterior motive that Flint will still opt to take the cheap shot at the Ambassador? Probably not. But—

"Your being honest wasn't a mistake. I might have benefitted from a similar tack."

[hassaran]

"You might. Or at least from more convincing dishonesty. This middle path you've chosen was the worst of both worlds."

She still sounds more dryly amused than anything, like his secret agenda--its existence an open secret since the Nevarran Papers even if its details remain obscure--is a sort of almost-charming eccentricity. It's difficult to be too concerned with its potential for future complications just at the moment.

"I can live with mismatched priorities." A beat. Even drier: "I very literally do. It's knowing there's something I might trip over in the dark but not what or where that I can't abide. Blood magic might at least provide some refreshing certainty."

[katabasis]

In a different place, it might rankle against the suspicious instinct that he has been honest enough. That half certainties must be adequate, and that anything more is a dangerous luxury, and fuck whoever demands a debt of him.

Here in the dark, Flint snorts.

"Is that all? I'll see if I can't conjure any if by some miracle we do leave here."

Of their own volition. If it's under the power of the Venatori and she isn't just left as a corpse on the floor of this store room, he expects they'll have little choice on becoming better acquainted with the practice.

[hassaran]

"After twenty years a spy," is a verbal shrug of explanation, "Dangers don't trouble me half as much as unknowns."

Several months from now when Byerly demands the identity of her (former-ish) employer and laments the lack of trust her refusal inspires, perhaps she ought to feel some pang of hypocrisy. Perhaps the effect of fever on the memory can be blamed for the fact that she doesn't.

"You might tell me now. There's little to lose with the chance I'll remember slimming by the moment."

[katabasis]

He might.

Beyond the heavy door that he knows to be at the end of the storage room, the corridor is quiet. It's hard to say how long it's been since the elven woman left them, and at what rate Yseult is bleeding through her fingers, and how much longer they can sit here in the dark before it won't matter anymore. She's still putting sentences together; if left to their own devices, there will likely be more hours where she's feverish and insensible than not. Maybe in the aftermath of that, this narrow slice of time between two states will seem strangely manufactured.

Flint huffs out another breath through his nose, loud in the still room. This one's humorless. A sound of frustration or surrender or that of a winded runner.

"We came to Kirkwall with the intention of engaging the Inquisition to help rid my island of the Venatori and close the rift there. But I wanted it done in such a way that no one would dare try to follow after them. That would mean doing more than just driving Corypheus' agents off it. It would have required empowering an island of pirates and heretics at the edge of the Qun who might have been easily posed to make themselves a threat to northern trade.

"When we arrived at the Gallows, it was to find the Inquisition sending a contingent of diplomats to Minrathous and leadership unwilling to cut the very head off the snake. It become apparent to me then that the Inquisition would have little interest in meaningfully assisting Nascere if it meant making themselves unpopular in the south. Any safety secured for my home would have been temporary at best, and I dislike being required to live with a sword in reach."

[hassaran]

Yseult is silent for a minute or two. It's difficult to say how much of the trouble she has parsing this information is due to the combination of blood loss and rising fever versus Flint's habit of talking around his central point and assuming it's as obvious to others from the outline as it is to him versus her own fundamental inability to conceive of a plan like his. The result is puzzlement regardless.

She doesn't mean it to sound as flippant as it might when she replies, "An island of pirates and heretics poised to threaten the Qun and northern trade isn't a place where you'd live with a sword in reach?"

[katabasis]

In the dark, those are long minutes. His answer comes readily enough, though.

"It could have been."

[hassaran]

The minutes stretch longer still. To no avail.

"How?"

[katabasis]

How. He can feel the line of his mouth flex; maybe the grim humor of it's audible.

"The way all nations are formed. Eventually the arm behind a sword becomes strong enough that it no longer requires the blade for leverage."

[hassaran]

Her exhale is short and wry. A soft thump announces the back of her head meeting the shelf.

"Pretend for a moment that my upbringing included very little study of political philosophy. How do you do that? --I presume," it's almost aside, "the arm in question is yours."

[katabasis]

Here, a laugh. It's exhausted by merit of their situation. It's made genuine by the simplicity of her agony. Maybe this version of torture is a preferable distraction from the other kind.

"Nascere could have proven its independence by routing the Venatori there and dispensing with Tevinter's claim on the island. With the Inquisition's endorsement, it might have found the means to entice the fighters on Seheron to join it's force, raided the Imperium's mines and liberated the slaves there. It could have razed Alam, captured Ath Velanis, and made the Straits into a place so feared by the Antivan merchant trade and coveted by the Qun that the south would have no choice but to recognize it or else risk the encroachment of Par Vollen."

Is that practical enough an example to satisfy her? Unlikely. It hinges on mights, and coulds, and perhapses.

"If enough people recognize something as true, then it is. And no one has to raise a sword to defend what everyone knows."

[hassaran]

It is a great many mights and coulds and perhapses, and even now it immediately begs a dozen more iterations of her question. How could one small island of unruly pirates be organized enough to do anything? How could they raze Alam or capture Ath Velanis? How could they be enough to make any dent in Seheron, where two great powers have failed for Ages? How do these pretty maxims account for even the present war's many demonstrations that recognition is no guarantee of safety within or without? How does any of this theory become reality?

Another day, the temptation to press and probe at the loose weave of this vision might win out. Now, she can't be arsed. There's only one question that really matters, anyway. "To what end?"

[katabasis]

They're carrying on a conversation better suited to a study while chained in a dark Hasmal cellar as she bleeds through her fingers and he can't lift his arms without flinching, yet the absurdity of that question still surprises him.

"What do you mean to what end?"

It's followed immediately by a second sawn laugh, reflexive and bewildered and an entirely different kind of exhausted. This must be what madness feels like—trapped in a pit with only someone who speaks the wrong language and the unrelenting urge to communicate for company. Flint checks himself from laughing again, though can feel the impulse of its mania lingering behind his ribs.

"To make a place here livable. Sailing off the edge of the world may be well and good for Alrazin, but it doesn't do anything for anyone stuck on the map."