WHO: Bastien & Kostos + Various WHAT: A catch-all WHEN: Harvestmere 9:47 WHERE: Mostly Kirkwall probably! NOTES: No open things but I will be delighted to plan & start things for you if you hit me up.
Her hands fold over the table, drink abandoned despite exacting it as payment for this whole conversation. For this answer, she does not look away from him.
“No.”
It sounds harsh. But she learned her lesson so thoroughly at Dairsmuid. It isn’t dispelled by a small contingent of templars who have yet to put a sword through her throat.
“I would have said yes, if you asked me before,” she admits. Before skirting the edge of Dairsmuid; it would be unfair to Bastien to draw that into the room with them. She had hardly liked speaking of it to Byerly Rutyer. It shouldn’t be a thing used to make a point. “But I know even the kindest of them, who would flinch from raising a sword themselves, still turn away from what their fellows do in the name of their Divine.”
No, she says, but then her bar seems higher than Bastien would have placed it. Maybe that's just him, positioned to relate—in a way his aversion to helplessness won't allow him to look at directly—to children who were hammered into blades, insulated from a sense of the wrongness by people who made it seem natural, and who took too long to walk away. Who didn't have it in them to do anything more heroic or dramatic than just that. He didn't even have the excuse of lyrium addiction.
But you don't argue the case of the redeemable raider to the woman whose village is still smoldering. He only absorbs what she's said, considering what it says about what she's been through, what it says about her, while their neighbor holds up a hand to summon another drink. He's turned an interesting mix of ruddy-cheeked and green-gilled.
After he's sat with it for a few moments, a nod, and then a shift: "What do you think is possible? After the war, I mean—the world where the people you care for are safe. What is that like?"
What is there to say? Derrica's familiar with the usual attempts, and none of them have been persuasive before now.
And though she is grateful that Bastien refrains from arguing the point, she is uncertain of how best to answer him. Derrica knows exactly what it should look like: Dairsmuid, before it was destroyed. Mages treated like people, free to come and go, taught to control their magic and not to fear it. What a circle should be, not what circles were.
But here is the difficulty: saying anything close to return to Circle Towers to a man with no magic of his own feels like a betrayal.
"I think that there's no possibility of finding safety and peace for my people if we wait to beg for it after the war," sidesteps the larger question. Avoids specifics for the trouble at hand. "After the war, the Divine won't have need of us for anything anymore."
Bastien marks the avoidance with a brow furrow, but it's not a bothered sort. This isn’t an interrogation. They can wander here instead of there.
—though here greets him with an unexpected pang of something. Envy? Envy: how nice, to have leverage. He thinks of Thomin, his bandmaster's quiet shadow, borrowed from the Circle in the Orlesian tradition. The rest of them believed he could incinerate them (though of course he never did), and they also believed his services were valuable enough that they would be swept out the door with the dust bunnies and never spoken of again if he did. If serfs and elves could summon lightning and raise the dead, he might believe the world could be rearranged in this age to be kinder for them, too.
But it's fine. He takes a drink, swallows, and gives her a faint smile.
"If you make a bargain based only on need, they might evaporate at the same time," he says, because he is Orlesian—and the Divine is Antivan—so that is how these things often work.
"Then do you think there's no point? That all that's left to us is to resume the war Corypheus disturbed?"
It's hardly a question for Bastien. That is the trouble, Derrica finds. It's not his fight. And that makes it so difficult to lay such a thing out across the table between them, and ask him to speculate from remove.
But still. What is the alternative? To bargain while they can and hope it holds, or attempt nothing and pick up weapons again once Corypheus has been dealt with?
"No, I think—I mean, I hope not," Bastien says. "I don't the war was good for anyone, especially the people trying to farm in the middle of it."
He didn't visit the Hinterlands himself until the fighting had been over for a few years, but people still talk.
"Maybe it does all come down to need. I don't know. But there must be needs that will not depend on the whims of one woman. When Anders—" who it is very strange, now, to think he once spoke to in person "—was in Kirkwall, he was a healer, non? In Lowtown. And even here, and even though he seemed like he must have been very annoying, people protected him. Maybe if more people see a world that is better because you are around, and not only in the scary fire and earthquakes on the battlefield ways, they will not be willing to give it up."
Alternatively, maybe he's overly optimistic, uninvolved, and spouting off at someone who doesn't need his advice. He squinches one eye shut in an apologetic wince, lifts his drink, and offers nonsense:
"Or I don't suppose you know anyone who would want to seduce the Divine. That seems to be what made the difference with the Empress and the elves, in the end, to the extent, you know, there is a difference—" Anyway. "If no one is excited about the prospect, you could draw lots."
But it would be pretty to think that Thedas might be won over by good deeds and kind words. If nothing else, it endears her a little to Bastien, that he might say this to her and recognize the ways in which it is not quite the right thing to sketch out as a possibility.
"I'll propose it at our next meeting," she tells him, very serious up until the point she smiles, ducks her head to look down at her drink.
Though where do this leave them? It feels like an impasse, not quite what they'd come here to achieve.
"Will you help me think of ways to do that? To show us to be helpful in ways that don't terrify people?"
Healing is one thing. But even Holden had flinched when Derrica had called down lightening. It is hard to find some line where the former doesn't outweigh the latter.
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no subject
“No.”
It sounds harsh. But she learned her lesson so thoroughly at Dairsmuid. It isn’t dispelled by a small contingent of templars who have yet to put a sword through her throat.
“I would have said yes, if you asked me before,” she admits. Before skirting the edge of Dairsmuid; it would be unfair to Bastien to draw that into the room with them. She had hardly liked speaking of it to Byerly Rutyer. It shouldn’t be a thing used to make a point. “But I know even the kindest of them, who would flinch from raising a sword themselves, still turn away from what their fellows do in the name of their Divine.”
no subject
But you don't argue the case of the redeemable raider to the woman whose village is still smoldering. He only absorbs what she's said, considering what it says about what she's been through, what it says about her, while their neighbor holds up a hand to summon another drink. He's turned an interesting mix of ruddy-cheeked and green-gilled.
After he's sat with it for a few moments, a nod, and then a shift: "What do you think is possible? After the war, I mean—the world where the people you care for are safe. What is that like?"
no subject
What is there to say? Derrica's familiar with the usual attempts, and none of them have been persuasive before now.
And though she is grateful that Bastien refrains from arguing the point, she is uncertain of how best to answer him. Derrica knows exactly what it should look like: Dairsmuid, before it was destroyed. Mages treated like people, free to come and go, taught to control their magic and not to fear it. What a circle should be, not what circles were.
But here is the difficulty: saying anything close to return to Circle Towers to a man with no magic of his own feels like a betrayal.
"I think that there's no possibility of finding safety and peace for my people if we wait to beg for it after the war," sidesteps the larger question. Avoids specifics for the trouble at hand. "After the war, the Divine won't have need of us for anything anymore."
no subject
—though here greets him with an unexpected pang of something. Envy? Envy: how nice, to have leverage. He thinks of Thomin, his bandmaster's quiet shadow, borrowed from the Circle in the Orlesian tradition. The rest of them believed he could incinerate them (though of course he never did), and they also believed his services were valuable enough that they would be swept out the door with the dust bunnies and never spoken of again if he did. If serfs and elves could summon lightning and raise the dead, he might believe the world could be rearranged in this age to be kinder for them, too.
But it's fine. He takes a drink, swallows, and gives her a faint smile.
"If you make a bargain based only on need, they might evaporate at the same time," he says, because he is Orlesian—and the Divine is Antivan—so that is how these things often work.
no subject
It's hardly a question for Bastien. That is the trouble, Derrica finds. It's not his fight. And that makes it so difficult to lay such a thing out across the table between them, and ask him to speculate from remove.
But still. What is the alternative? To bargain while they can and hope it holds, or attempt nothing and pick up weapons again once Corypheus has been dealt with?
no subject
He didn't visit the Hinterlands himself until the fighting had been over for a few years, but people still talk.
"Maybe it does all come down to need. I don't know. But there must be needs that will not depend on the whims of one woman. When Anders—" who it is very strange, now, to think he once spoke to in person "—was in Kirkwall, he was a healer, non? In Lowtown. And even here, and even though he seemed like he must have been very annoying, people protected him. Maybe if more people see a world that is better because you are around, and not only in the scary fire and earthquakes on the battlefield ways, they will not be willing to give it up."
Alternatively, maybe he's overly optimistic, uninvolved, and spouting off at someone who doesn't need his advice. He squinches one eye shut in an apologetic wince, lifts his drink, and offers nonsense:
"Or I don't suppose you know anyone who would want to seduce the Divine. That seems to be what made the difference with the Empress and the elves, in the end, to the extent, you know, there is a difference—" Anyway. "If no one is excited about the prospect, you could draw lots."
no subject
But it would be pretty to think that Thedas might be won over by good deeds and kind words. If nothing else, it endears her a little to Bastien, that he might say this to her and recognize the ways in which it is not quite the right thing to sketch out as a possibility.
"I'll propose it at our next meeting," she tells him, very serious up until the point she smiles, ducks her head to look down at her drink.
Though where do this leave them? It feels like an impasse, not quite what they'd come here to achieve.
"Will you help me think of ways to do that? To show us to be helpful in ways that don't terrify people?"
Healing is one thing. But even Holden had flinched when Derrica had called down lightening. It is hard to find some line where the former doesn't outweigh the latter.