faderift | [open]

"Very well. But I warn you that the bulk of them are quite boring and not at all salacious and there will be very little for you to gossip about, should that be your motivation for wishing to read my private letters."

Ha ha ha. James Holden, a gossip. Imagine.

She squirms a little lower under great arrangement of items piled on top of her. If she is going to have to lie here as he reads to her, she may as well be comfortable.

Indeed, the letters are a strange combination of technical and conversation and they range from a number of locations on the globe. It seems that over the course of her travels—which have, in the last years, been rather considerable—that Wysteria has contrived to make and keep a friend or two here and there. There is a brusquely worded but not dismissive letter from a blacksmith and enchanter in Orzammar and long great treatise from a scholar in Markham by the name of Brown with whom Wysteria is evidently quite familiar if the contents of the letter (equal parts mathematical engineering and Markham University gossip) are any indication; and so on and so forth.

"You caught me," he says dryly, pulling out her letters, preparing writing implements. "Having nothing to gossip about keeps me up at night."

The real reason he's an insomniac, revealed! But he dutifully puts himself to reading her these letters and making notes of her responses; though he struggles with the more technical terms at times, needing some help so he doesn't completely mangle them, probably needing to repeat a few for her more than once, till she understands what he's trying to read.

At some point, he'll say, faintly impressed,

"I didn't know you knew so many people around Thedas."

"Well it's hardly as if I go about hither and tither without speaking to anyone. You should do your best to keep up your correspondence, Mister Holden. One never knows when someone might do you a good turn. —Or might do the war effort some good, I suppose."

Perhaps this seems silly from beneath her great mountain of blankets. It certainly feels silly to say so, particularly after she has coached him through one or two tricky bits of jargon.

"Mister Brown was one of the very first people I met in Thedas. I attended a conference with—" Here, she pauses, lapsing into a remarkable full beat of silence. "Oh, it will sound very strange to say but at the time he was only as anyone else in the Inquisition might be. You recalled the name 'Solas' from our shared dream, of course."

It's good advice, but he offers, "I'm not sure I'm as personable as you are."

Maybe surprisingly, there's no sarcasm to it. Who wouldn't love Wysteria de Foncé née Poppell, asks one James Holden. But the pause is enough to have him look up, first for fear of her condition, and then curiosity.

"Solas," he says slowly. He does remember, but more from conversation later than much experience with that particular dream. "The one who wanted to destroy the Veil? He was in the Inquisition?"

"That's right."

Maybe it is the fever or the ache in her fingertips or the heat under the blankets or the strange unreal quality of all of these things in combinations while residing in a tent at the side of the road, but it seems very strange to say. Odd. As if it doesn't fully join together.

"I suppose there was no way for us to have known. He was—well, not personable exactly. But not everyone must be. Imagine if we used that to disqualify someone from Riftwatch."

"We'd barely have anyone left," he agrees, but somewhat absently.

— because no fucking wonder the Herald had thought it important to warn them, specifically, of Solas. No wonder it'd come as such a terrible surprise to some of them. Jesus Christ.

"How did he leave?"

He's certainly not here amongst Riftwatch, at any rate.

Here, a pause as she considers the question. It's a relatively brief combing of the memory, though; perhaps if she weren't currently feverish or in prickling pain, there would be no need for it at all.

"Truthfully, I hardly recall."

Perhaps his departure was all very clandestine, but she doubts it. Solas would have hardly been the first person to leave Riftwatch, particularly in those days. For it had happened not so long after dividing from the Inquisition, had it not?

"You might ask the Provost—Mister Baudin, I mean. Solas was a member of Research while he still oversaw the division."

He's quiet a long moment, as that sinks in. What a strange thought, that he was in their division, much as it makes sense; what a strange thing, to wonder if he's really inclined to destroy the world, on the basis of a dream; how long their list of enemies seems to be getting, lengthening every time he looks away.

He might speak to some of that, if not for the fever sheen on her face, the flush to her cheeks.

"Have you ever heard of this happening before?"

is not a question about Solas at all, nor her correspondence.

"Hm? Oh." She lowers her attention to the lump of her left hand.

It looks like a perfectly ordinary limb, the field bandage adorning it a somewhat silly bit of theater. The pain of it is an internal thing, scraping at the interior of her somehow in a way that some elfroot or other medicinal topical applied some little to diminish. The herb she had been given to chew a few hours ago has narrowed the pulsing pain down to a small irritating reminder, but it's still there. Waiting for her to become sharper and so recognize the full extent of it again.

"In a sense. There is some record of an elven woman who had her anchor in her abdomen. Or her chest? I don't recall which. But she was native to Thedas. I've never heard of a rifter developing any similar issue."

Not without fondness,

"You just had to go and be exceptional, didn't you?"

Because no, he's never heard of a rifter with any similar issue either. Gwenaëlle, he knows, has an anchor powerful beyond the norm, and Tony too. And that's a worry long to simmer now, if something like this might happen to either of them, to any other anchor-bearer. Hard to say if being a rifter or not makes any real difference here.

"Well obviously it's hardly my preference," is short, a little snipping. "If you would like to trade places, Mister Holden, then you're most welcome to this one. It's quite warm under this assortment."

Of blankets and cloaks and all their attention. Honestly, it might be very fine indeed if not for the niggling little flicker of anxiety living where it's been pushed very, very, very deeply down. For who doesn't like being the center of the universe for a little bit?

"But enough of that." Because the other woman, that native elf—she had died. "How fared my gun?"

It's not a strange thought, in the mind of James Holden, that were it possible to exchange places in a real sense — that he would. That he would die for her, if it came to that, without question. This had been true in the dreams, all blurred, flimsy sense of responsibility and guilt and years that never passed. This is different; this is care built on a bedrock of time spent in her company, on missions, in their workspaces, at meals. The wish for her happiness, instead of regrets for her past.

But he only breathes out, makes a faint, rueful sound, before attending to the topic change.

"It's been working pretty much like as you've said it should. I can't tell you about the paralysis setting," because, mainly, he hasn't run into any creature big enough to merit it yet, "but the enchantments have been holding up and the kickback isn't too bad."

She is meant, it occurs to Wysterua only afterwards, to be dictating correspondence to him. But that's all right; she can recite her reply to Mister Brown after they discuss Holden's field work. Indeed, this is a far more compelling subject than even the Markham scholar's pleasantly gossipy candor (and is indisputably a preferable subject of conversation compared to ominous anchor developments or how she should rest).

"Good, good. And there have been no failures? No misfires or jams? What is the rate at which you're able to reload? Did you time it?"

He did, in fact, time it.

So he's able to give her specific answers; more specific, in truth, with these practical considerations than the more magical, or even the earlier jargon he'd struggled with. Papers and writing implements sit in his lap, forgotten. This is preferable, too, in its way — something to offer her, prized data about her invention that she worked so hard to make.

"It'd be faster," he says, "to reload if the slugs were lighter. That'd help with mobility too," though mobility is an ongoing question with any long gun, "and no jams, but I've been kept it well-oiled — probably better than would be doable for someone using the thing more often. The trigger starts to catch after a few shots, get harder to squeeze."

Edited 2021-10-07 17:42 (UTC)

[open]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject