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 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.
"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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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.
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.