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.
It might not be entirely true. He left a good book tented open on the arm of his chair, back in the Gallows. He passed a dockhand acquaintance, not far from the ferry, who invited him to join a card game. One of the taverns down the street had its door open and a particularly lively tune, accompanied by the voices of most of the occupants, spilling out.
But he's content enough to be here instead. He smiles at her, and catches peripheral sight of a waving hand—another acquaintance, on the other side of the room, to whom he waves back quickly enough for the gesture to feel like a hello and not today at once. Then Derrica and the cups have his full attention.
Those were the terms, even though Derrica finds she isn't so concerned with drinks or bargains or anything else. She hooks her cup by the handle and lifts her to swig the entirety of the contents in one smooth motion.
Only the smallest of flourishes when she sets it back to onto the table. An empty cup. Under different circumstances, it might be cause for a little gloating, or a bit of teasing, but this isn't really that kind of occasion.
"Whatever you like," she says, in anticipation of the question, as she rests her chin on one palm. "I don't really know what you prefer."
"Usually I drink wine," he says, scooping up the cups, "but you drink—whiskey?"
It's ninety percent rhetorical, not a wild guess. She said so over the crystals during the pin hunt. So unless she contradicts him, he's gone and back again within a few minutes, with two full cups in hand. Whiskey in both, for the sake of being companionable.
"I am kind of a lightweight," he confesses while he takes his seat. He will not be knocking this back in one go. Fortunately it's decent enough to sip. "And I didn't mean to ask you something difficult—why you came here. We can talk about something else, if you want."
No, Derrica doesn't mean to throw this drink back all at once either. She takes a sip, slow and careful, giving her attention to the taste instead of Bastien while she thinks of what to say.
"Do you really want to know?" seems like a fair question.
Maybe her suspicion is unfair. She has never had the sense that Bastien is a bad person, and it is only that he is—
Not a mage. A man who will never be constricted in the same way as she is. A man who stands very close to someone she does not and cannot trust.
So she needs to hear again: is he truly interested in what he's asking after?
Bastien takes a respectable drink, while she’s sipping, watching her with open, patient interest until she asks her question.
“You are making me a little nervous,” he admits—a light confession, friendly, hyperbolized if not entirely false. Being asked more than once if one is sure is usually not a prelude to anything harmless. “It is not one of those situations where you will tell me and then have to kill me, is it?”
Marcus' assessment carries weight, yes, but Derrica knows this about Bastien: he doesn't mean her any harm.
The difficulty is that he stands very close to someone she doesn't trust, yes, but also—
He has no magic. She has never heard him to raise his voice one way or the other on the crystals or in her company. He is easy company, and she knows him to be kind, but she doesn't know anything about the viewpoints he holds.
"I haven't needed to talk about these things very often. Mages understand it well enough without speaking of it."
Even when Marcus or Kostos had asked, it had been with a fundamental baseline. Any answer she gave built upon it.
Bastien turns his cup in a circle on the table while he listens, then shakes his head, eyebrows raising slightly: an expression that means something between nothing and I don't know.
"I said it was brave for you to come," he recounts, "and you said you should have been braver sooner. I wanted to know what changed. Why you came when you did. Why here."
He hadn't expected it to be a particularly complicated question. A difficult or personal one, perhaps, if Derrica was spurred to come by some tragedy she didn't want to talk about, but not a complicated one.
After a moment, he offers, "I came after they invaded Orlais. I have never wanted to fight in a war. I, uh—when the Empress and her cousin were having their spat, I faked a limp for nearly a year to make sure no one tried to conscript me. But Corypheus, you know. It is not a question of which overgrown inbred child is sitting in which fancy chair, if he wins. It could be everything. So I came."
This feels like a sincere offering, and she accepts it as such. She understands the sentiment. It is not so far from what had propelled her here.
"I heard a rumor about Kirkwall. About the kind of work that was done here," is a more delicate way of saying: About the kind of people doing work here. She admits, "I wanted to see if it was safe here for someone like me."
Just as she'd hesitated over her phylactery. There is always the very worry Ilias had repeated back to her: she is a walking reminder of the Chantry's work at Dairsmuid, and there is always a chance
"I don't know if I would have stayed if I'd come to the Inquisition instead of Riftwatch. I might have gone looking for something else," she pauses, mimicking the turn of his cup with her own. Slants a smile at him as she adds, "Some other Riftwatch."
Rhetorical. There isn't anything as strange, maybe, but there are plenty of other places to good, thankless work: the Grey Wardens, for one, and any number of more-ethical-than-average mercenary bands who are assisting with the war effort without being beholden to an ideology.
His cup-circle gets wider and wobblier for a revolution or two, before he lets it lie flat and still again under his hand.
"You must have already been ready to go look for something, then, before you heard about this."
Maybe, maybe not. She might have gone looking. (There is always the chance she goes looking.) But that is not what they are here to discuss.
"I was taking care of people as they came to us," she says. "But I wasn't raised to be the person people came to find. I was supposed to be the one seeking places I could repair."
Nevermind what else she was raised to do. Derrica would never become the person the Seers had meant her to be, or the person Enchanter Iria and Enchanter Juliette saw in her. She is something different now.
"No," Bastien says, but he says it cautiously, with a questioning lilt and matching eyebrow quirk.
Why did you come is the sort of question he'd ask someone in the dining hall. After the insistence on a drink and the do you really want to know prelude, he hadn't expected her answer to be I heard a rumor and I came because I wanted to do good. He's reluctant to leave the matter behind without grasping the deeper import—because it must be important to her—but after a moment he shrugs.
"But I suppose it depends on what you want from it—from being here."
Not most days. There are always points where she feels very keenly their limitations. It is inevitable. They are small. They cannot do all that she wishes.
"Are you trying to make out what I want?" feels like a fair question. Marcus had spoken well of Bastien, as well as Marcus ever speaks of anyone. But it is hard for Derrica not to proceed as if waiting for some trap to close around her.
"I suppose so," Bastien says, not bothering to disguise the touch of bafflement, "if you want to talk about it. You don't have to. We could talk about, uh—"
He casts a look around the room and tips his head toward a nearby table.
"—how much of his drink that fellow will get through before he makes himself sick."
"We could. I could bet you five copper he'll drink two more before he throws up."
With a little sweep of one hand, before she rests her elbow on the table, chin in her palm.
"And I could tell you that I want to be sure the people I care about are safe. Now, while we're fighting, and when this is over."
When decisions have to be made. When there isn't a clear enemy and the world must rearrange itself to accommodate all the change that's occurred, decide what changes will remain and what will be returned to it's original state.
His tone isn't dismissive; his eyes are sympathetic. Anyone would want that, if they have someone to care about in the first place. For a moment longer he's quiet, scratching the tip of his tongue thoughtfully against his front teeth inside his closed mouth.
"There's one."
Their nearly-sick neighbor has acquired a new drink. Bastien hasn't looked back at him; it's peripheral awareness.
Less wryly: "The thing is, I don't think discord with our," what, silently, and counting on his fingers, "three? Three Templars. Three Templars who have come here, to help us, when they could be with the Chantry instead. I don't think that will keep anyone safe. That is where I stop following, I think."
It is not a lecture. But she hears the echo of Byerly Rutyer in the words, hedging towards a question that feels so inherently unfair.
"We do our duty," she says, face turning from him to observe their neighbor rather than watch Bastien's expression. "But I don't fault any mage that would prefer to keep their distance from a templar when circumstances allow for it."
"No," Bastien says. "Drawing a boundary isn't discord."
He thinks the incident with Barrow, the one that prompted all of this, might count as more than drawing a boundary—especially more than a merely personal one, for a mage to choose for themselves. But is he being dismissive?
His habit is to think his thoughts in silence, then speak the ones he thinks are worth it, but that doesn't seem to be helping with her wariness. So he tries thinking out loud, explaining: "I am trying to decide if I would be having this conversation in defense of a chevalier." A pause to drink. "I think it is not so different with them—different in density, I suppose. There are places in Orlais where you might not see one for a few months at a time. Your Templars were always there in force."
Orlais had always been so far away, and then it hadn't mattered beyond the scattering of days they'd put into port there, and now it is only a place where Riftwatch sometimes goes but rarely requires more of her than what she gives at the site of any skirmish: to be present and heal whatever injury is placed before her, or to be present and cut down the enemy in her path.
But this is not a flattering comparison, even without much understanding of the organization Bastien alludes to.
Bastien hums, chancing a glance at their neighbor, who seems to have mistaken Derrica's attention for attention. But he also seems too drunk to do more about it than contort his face into what he likely imagines is a suave smile.
"Our beloved knights," he says. "They are drawn from the nobility, all of them, and uh—there is no law, about what they can or cannot do to the rest of us. Defending yourself, that is the crime. One tossed me into the canal once," is not his only story, only his funniest, and he hopes the least likely to seem like a play for pity, "by the back of my shirt, like a puppy. He wanted to talk to my sister. But she jumped in after me, so it was alright."
His relative cheerfulness about that fades.
"The elves have it worse, of course. They always do. I understand in Halamshiral, their new initiates are set loose to kill anyone out after curfew. Some sort of ritual. Even the nicest chevalier you meet would have been there for that, one time."
The attention is dismissed with a slight shake of her head, then a full turn away. It is perhaps good fortune that Bastien has said something which prompts a reaction, something so instinctive that Derrica doesn't catch it before her hand sets over his on the table.
It's not pity. But it is not a good thing he is telling her, even if it comes couched in good humor. The pressure of her fingers is very brief, but firm.
"Is it still a crime? To defend yourself against them?"
She wouldn't be so surprised to find that the answer is yes. The world isn't as changed as many like to say.
Their neighbor, hopes dashed, slithers down in his chair with defeat so immediate his strings might have been cut, so low he can keep his elbow on the table while he tips his mug up over his mouth. And at their table, if Derrica’s touch surprises Bastien, he doesn’t show it. He smiles and gives his head a musing tilt. “If you’re caught.”
That isn’t what he would have said, if not for her hand. He would have said of course, faintly surprised that it’s a question. But sympathy, commiseration, whatever it is, is close enough to pity to spur him into taking that extra step away from victimhood, which has never suited him.
“Maybe they have stopped—in Halamshiral, with the elves? Now that we have Marquise Briala. Or maybe they have gotten worse,” Bastien says. Either option seem as likely as the other. “I’ll find out.”
But to the current point:
“Do you think it’s possible for a Templar to be a Templar without hurting anyone like that?”
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.
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no subject
It might not be entirely true. He left a good book tented open on the arm of his chair, back in the Gallows. He passed a dockhand acquaintance, not far from the ferry, who invited him to join a card game. One of the taverns down the street had its door open and a particularly lively tune, accompanied by the voices of most of the occupants, spilling out.
But he's content enough to be here instead. He smiles at her, and catches peripheral sight of a waving hand—another acquaintance, on the other side of the room, to whom he waves back quickly enough for the gesture to feel like a hello and not today at once. Then Derrica and the cups have his full attention.
"I am supposed to buy you a drink first, no?"
no subject
Only the smallest of flourishes when she sets it back to onto the table. An empty cup. Under different circumstances, it might be cause for a little gloating, or a bit of teasing, but this isn't really that kind of occasion.
"Whatever you like," she says, in anticipation of the question, as she rests her chin on one palm. "I don't really know what you prefer."
no subject
It's ninety percent rhetorical, not a wild guess. She said so over the crystals during the pin hunt. So unless she contradicts him, he's gone and back again within a few minutes, with two full cups in hand. Whiskey in both, for the sake of being companionable.
"I am kind of a lightweight," he confesses while he takes his seat. He will not be knocking this back in one go. Fortunately it's decent enough to sip. "And I didn't mean to ask you something difficult—why you came here. We can talk about something else, if you want."
no subject
"Do you really want to know?" seems like a fair question.
Maybe her suspicion is unfair. She has never had the sense that Bastien is a bad person, and it is only that he is—
Not a mage. A man who will never be constricted in the same way as she is. A man who stands very close to someone she does not and cannot trust.
So she needs to hear again: is he truly interested in what he's asking after?
no subject
“You are making me a little nervous,” he admits—a light confession, friendly, hyperbolized if not entirely false. Being asked more than once if one is sure is usually not a prelude to anything harmless. “It is not one of those situations where you will tell me and then have to kill me, is it?”
no subject
Marcus' assessment carries weight, yes, but Derrica knows this about Bastien: he doesn't mean her any harm.
The difficulty is that he stands very close to someone she doesn't trust, yes, but also—
He has no magic. She has never heard him to raise his voice one way or the other on the crystals or in her company. He is easy company, and she knows him to be kind, but she doesn't know anything about the viewpoints he holds.
"I haven't needed to talk about these things very often. Mages understand it well enough without speaking of it."
Even when Marcus or Kostos had asked, it had been with a fundamental baseline. Any answer she gave built upon it.
"And I'm not sure what you really want to know."
no subject
"I said it was brave for you to come," he recounts, "and you said you should have been braver sooner. I wanted to know what changed. Why you came when you did. Why here."
He hadn't expected it to be a particularly complicated question. A difficult or personal one, perhaps, if Derrica was spurred to come by some tragedy she didn't want to talk about, but not a complicated one.
After a moment, he offers, "I came after they invaded Orlais. I have never wanted to fight in a war. I, uh—when the Empress and her cousin were having their spat, I faked a limp for nearly a year to make sure no one tried to conscript me. But Corypheus, you know. It is not a question of which overgrown inbred child is sitting in which fancy chair, if he wins. It could be everything. So I came."
no subject
"I heard a rumor about Kirkwall. About the kind of work that was done here," is a more delicate way of saying: About the kind of people doing work here. She admits, "I wanted to see if it was safe here for someone like me."
Just as she'd hesitated over her phylactery. There is always the very worry Ilias had repeated back to her: she is a walking reminder of the Chantry's work at Dairsmuid, and there is always a chance
"I don't know if I would have stayed if I'd come to the Inquisition instead of Riftwatch. I might have gone looking for something else," she pauses, mimicking the turn of his cup with her own. Slants a smile at him as she adds, "Some other Riftwatch."
no subject
Rhetorical. There isn't anything as strange, maybe, but there are plenty of other places to good, thankless work: the Grey Wardens, for one, and any number of more-ethical-than-average mercenary bands who are assisting with the war effort without being beholden to an ideology.
His cup-circle gets wider and wobblier for a revolution or two, before he lets it lie flat and still again under his hand.
"You must have already been ready to go look for something, then, before you heard about this."
no subject
Maybe, maybe not. She might have gone looking. (There is always the chance she goes looking.) But that is not what they are here to discuss.
"I was taking care of people as they came to us," she says. "But I wasn't raised to be the person people came to find. I was supposed to be the one seeking places I could repair."
Nevermind what else she was raised to do. Derrica would never become the person the Seers had meant her to be, or the person Enchanter Iria and Enchanter Juliette saw in her. She is something different now.
"Do you think it was a mistake to come here?"
no subject
Why did you come is the sort of question he'd ask someone in the dining hall. After the insistence on a drink and the do you really want to know prelude, he hadn't expected her answer to be I heard a rumor and I came because I wanted to do good. He's reluctant to leave the matter behind without grasping the deeper import—because it must be important to her—but after a moment he shrugs.
"But I suppose it depends on what you want from it—from being here."
no subject
Not most days. There are always points where she feels very keenly their limitations. It is inevitable. They are small. They cannot do all that she wishes.
"Are you trying to make out what I want?" feels like a fair question. Marcus had spoken well of Bastien, as well as Marcus ever speaks of anyone. But it is hard for Derrica not to proceed as if waiting for some trap to close around her.
no subject
He casts a look around the room and tips his head toward a nearby table.
"—how much of his drink that fellow will get through before he makes himself sick."
From the look of it, not many.
no subject
With a little sweep of one hand, before she rests her elbow on the table, chin in her palm.
"And I could tell you that I want to be sure the people I care about are safe. Now, while we're fighting, and when this is over."
When decisions have to be made. When there isn't a clear enemy and the world must rearrange itself to accommodate all the change that's occurred, decide what changes will remain and what will be returned to it's original state.
no subject
His tone isn't dismissive; his eyes are sympathetic. Anyone would want that, if they have someone to care about in the first place. For a moment longer he's quiet, scratching the tip of his tongue thoughtfully against his front teeth inside his closed mouth.
"There's one."
Their nearly-sick neighbor has acquired a new drink. Bastien hasn't looked back at him; it's peripheral awareness.
Less wryly: "The thing is, I don't think discord with our," what, silently, and counting on his fingers, "three? Three Templars. Three Templars who have come here, to help us, when they could be with the Chantry instead. I don't think that will keep anyone safe. That is where I stop following, I think."
no subject
It is not a lecture. But she hears the echo of Byerly Rutyer in the words, hedging towards a question that feels so inherently unfair.
"We do our duty," she says, face turning from him to observe their neighbor rather than watch Bastien's expression. "But I don't fault any mage that would prefer to keep their distance from a templar when circumstances allow for it."
no subject
He thinks the incident with Barrow, the one that prompted all of this, might count as more than drawing a boundary—especially more than a merely personal one, for a mage to choose for themselves. But is he being dismissive?
His habit is to think his thoughts in silence, then speak the ones he thinks are worth it, but that doesn't seem to be helping with her wariness. So he tries thinking out loud, explaining: "I am trying to decide if I would be having this conversation in defense of a chevalier." A pause to drink. "I think it is not so different with them—different in density, I suppose. There are places in Orlais where you might not see one for a few months at a time. Your Templars were always there in force."
no subject
Orlais had always been so far away, and then it hadn't mattered beyond the scattering of days they'd put into port there, and now it is only a place where Riftwatch sometimes goes but rarely requires more of her than what she gives at the site of any skirmish: to be present and heal whatever injury is placed before her, or to be present and cut down the enemy in her path.
But this is not a flattering comparison, even without much understanding of the organization Bastien alludes to.
no subject
"Our beloved knights," he says. "They are drawn from the nobility, all of them, and uh—there is no law, about what they can or cannot do to the rest of us. Defending yourself, that is the crime. One tossed me into the canal once," is not his only story, only his funniest, and he hopes the least likely to seem like a play for pity, "by the back of my shirt, like a puppy. He wanted to talk to my sister. But she jumped in after me, so it was alright."
His relative cheerfulness about that fades.
"The elves have it worse, of course. They always do. I understand in Halamshiral, their new initiates are set loose to kill anyone out after curfew. Some sort of ritual. Even the nicest chevalier you meet would have been there for that, one time."
no subject
It's not pity. But it is not a good thing he is telling her, even if it comes couched in good humor. The pressure of her fingers is very brief, but firm.
"Is it still a crime? To defend yourself against them?"
She wouldn't be so surprised to find that the answer is yes. The world isn't as changed as many like to say.
no subject
That isn’t what he would have said, if not for her hand. He would have said of course, faintly surprised that it’s a question. But sympathy, commiseration, whatever it is, is close enough to pity to spur him into taking that extra step away from victimhood, which has never suited him.
“Maybe they have stopped—in Halamshiral, with the elves? Now that we have Marquise Briala. Or maybe they have gotten worse,” Bastien says. Either option seem as likely as the other. “I’ll find out.”
But to the current point:
“Do you think it’s possible for a Templar to be a Templar without hurting anyone like that?”
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.
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