open

[atonally]

WHO: Redvers & You
WHAT: Traditional "new arrival hanging around the Gallows" log
WHEN: Nowish
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: Wildcards welcome. If you want prior CR with a Starkhaven Templar and don't want to wing it, hit me up via plurk or discord or pm.

I. WAITING FOR THE FERRY

The pain in his hand subsides by the time he reaches the docks. So what exactly is the point of going any further, is what he's contemplating, sitting on his heavy trunk (left crooked and in the way, where the cart-driver and a charitable passing dock worker helped him unload his things) and watching the dark waves. If this is close enough, he could stay in a tavern. See about the city guard in the meantime, if the Chantry won’t pay for lodging while he’s trapped here.

The ferry is occasionally visible in the distance, when the moons peek through the clouds. Headed for the Gallows now, and then it will come back. There’s plenty of time to leave. So Redvers contemplates it, and he thinks he’s very serious about it, but he doesn’t move until someone else comes to a stop on the same dock.

The look he gives whoever it is is wary interest, not unfriendly. His glowing hand is hidden in a glove; his unmistakable Templar armor is hidden in the chest he’s using as a bench. He’s dressed to travel in the cold.

“Someone told me people go over to that island sometimes and never come back,” he says, which is true—someone did tell him so.


II. IN THE GALLOWS, AROUND

Redvers doesn’t go join the city guard. He goes to the Gallows, talks to whoever he needs to talk to to be allowed to stay, and finds himself sleeping on a bunk bed for the first time since he took his vows.

His uniform comes out in the morning, but only so he can rearrange the contents of his chest for a longterm stay. The pieces left haphazard on the empty bed across from his are indistinct in bundles of oiled cloth, but the neatly folded red and white robes that go with the plate are a dead giveaway. So’s the lyrium kit and his careful use of it, sitting on the bed with the box open on his knee.

Otherwise—it isn’t that he’s hiding it. He’s tired, he’s dressed for being off duty, and he isn’t announcing himself by name and title when he enters a room. That’s all.

He wanders around the parts of the fortress a new, involuntary arrival is allowed to wander around: the courtyards, the dining hall, the baths. Eventually he’s standing at the edges of one of the training yards—just to watch, bent forward with his forearms on a wooden barrier while others shoot arrows at targets or try to non-fatally pummel one another with practice weapons.

If someone joins him (or looks at him long enough), he waves his glowing green hand less in greeting than demonstration.

"It had to be my sword arm."

Not that the anchor prevents holding a weapon. He'd have cut it off by now otherwise, is what he means.


III. WILDCARD

Comments

ii. personal space.

[luaithre]

Here's a strange thing: when Marcus reads the name Redvers Keen, he does so while sitting in an office that is his own and behind a desk that has been assigned to him on account of maintaining some position of authority, dressed in clothing that aren't robes and haven't been for many years, his mind half-distracted with the sort of occupations that would never have been given to a Circle mage of any stature, several years ago. And all of this in the Gallows, no less.

And yet, this context abstracts and absents itself for a few moments spared recollecting that name, and the associated memories that string out after it, slippery and plenty.

He turns aside the page, after several cold and still minutes have gone by. He addresses the next piece of paperwork that lays beneath it, and focuses with unmitigated attention.

It's the next day that Marcus roams a direct path for the location that he understands Keen has opted to make his home. It's a business-like stride and pace, and likely sounds distinct with purpose by the time bootfalls are audible from where Redvers is seated at his bed. Slows, once he reaches the doorway, but doesn't pause. They are nice boots. He bought them recently and they've yet taken a beating from too much use. Grey layers of fine fabrics, grey threads through dark hair, and new scars.

No staff, for once, for no real purpose save he did not have it on him when he decided to go.

[atonally]

Redvers, midway through returning the pieces of his lyrium kit to their velvet-lined places, looks up with habitual mild interest when someone enters. But time and distance and an unstrategically placed bunk bed stand in the way of recognition until the trajectory becomes clear and he looks up a second time, from those good boots on up.

The surprise, recognition, confusion, concern, and amused appreciation of the irony that pass over his face, one after the other, are saved from being comical by restraint and subtlety that's all personality, not effort. He doesn't try to hide a bit of it. His face is just sort of lazy about changing too much too fast.

The lyrium fresh in his system—it's just a disciplined touch, the minimum required to keep his hands from getting cold and his head from getting foggy. But the little rush of boldness is still enough to land him on, "Marcus," rather than Rowntree.

[luaithre]

The recognition is recognised, and gains only a subtle reaction—a small, dismissive exhale, before Marcus flicks his focus away to look at Redvers' living set up. First to the lyrium kit, something he's seen before, apparently, no curiousity there, and the gleam of an anchor shard nested into palm, and then to the chest at the end of the bed, and any other sign of personal belonging, settlement.

Moves around it all, as if it were an inspection, but less like a superior checking in on a new recruit and more like if you left the door open and something sharp-toothed and blunt clawed had wandered in from the cold. Although, that's really up to Redvers, as far as impressions go.

[atonally]

A curious bear seems right. Or a bored/cautious/suspicious Templar, in a room more or less exactly like this one. Redvers shook his fair share of apprentices' bedding in case anything fell out.

But there's little to see here. A bed made to military standard. The book lying on the pillow is religious and dull—he makes it through about a page and a half every night before his lids get heavy. The chest is not quite closed, cracked open by a thick fold of sturdy cloth that was disturbed when he pulled out the lyrium, and his armor and sword are tucked inside. It's only the shield that's made it out, laid flat beneath the bed. The clothes he's wearing are plain and warm and perhaps the first time Rowntree has seen him out of uniform. The beard is not new, but it is better.

Redvers watches his progress, scratches an itch beneath his mustache with his knuckles, and stands up. It's nice to be tall, when things are uncomfortable. He doesn't fix the wrinkles he leaves behind in the bedclothes.

[luaithre]

Marcus is not particularly tall, personally, but when he takes Redvers' measure in a glance over at this movement, it's less to mark his reach and more to take note of what he looks like when not bearing the bulk of plate armor. The answer is: smaller. He next marks the shield, before turning his focus back for the chest.

He reaches down to slide his fingers beneath the lid, catching at the first knuckle, enough to lever it open and peer in at the contents. Unsure if he expects to see the familiar shapes of Templar armor or something more anonymous, as appears to be sometimes favoured.

[atonally]

That’s a bit forward, isn’t it. But—

“Sure,” Redvers says as the lid rises, without sarcasm. His half of a conversation that isn’t occurring. “That’s fine. Go ahead.”

The armor is in pieces, wrapped in oiled cloth, beneath an equally wrapped sword, but there are places where the shape or a glint of metal shows through. Scattered on top, too sparse to cover, are a few folded articles of clothing. The uniform red robes. Socks. Underpants. A whetstone, too, and a flask of oil, and a bound book without a title. On closer inspection, if it warrants one: a journal, filled not with paragraphs of feelings but mostly with dated lists of names (the dead), numbers (measures and doses of lyrium), and symptoms (lyrium again, with the stray malady interfering). Also, some inexpert doodles of trees and mountains.

He joins Marcus by the trunk, stooping to return the lyrium kit to its place. While it’s open anyway.

[luaithre]

Belated permission ignored, Marcus noting Templar colours in the muddle as he bends to pick up the book sitting there. No particular shame in thumbing it opening, but his inspection—or whatever this is—is cursory only and without expectation that he's going to find anything very interesting.

And he doesn't, at a glance. So, drops the book back in, not carelessly, not carefully. It lands flat-side down where it was found, slides a little.

Marcus hasn't backed up in the wake of Redvers' approach, seeking out eye contact all the same as he asks, "Did you come here alone?"

[atonally]

"Yes," wins, without hesitation or thought, over a half-dozen smarter, assier impulses that still lurk in his throat. He bends again, does a token straightening of the uppermost contents of the chest. But from down there, he says, "If this is the standard greeting," which obviously it is not, "it's no wonder you're hurting for help."

Just a rumor he heard.

Upright again, he rolls his shoulders. His spine crackles. The bunk beds are a bit shit.

[luaithre]

Growing into maturity, while the Circles were still standing, Marcus had two ways of dealing with Templars: disregarding their presence as much as was feasible to do so, or addressing them in polite terms, business-like requests or explanations, where hostility was something coiled tight and tense, maybe found in a too-long pause, some quiet, latent tension.

Out here, in the world, and in here, in this room, questions emerge blunt in delivery and without small talk to ease their passage, engagement staring and frank.

It obviously is not a standard greeting!

And so Redvers' retort is muscled by as Marcus asks, instead, the next question most pressing to him; "What of your brother?" The semi-stale smells of a living quarters like these are being invaded by some other undercurrent, a sharper scent of smoke, cold ash.

[atonally]

Redvers' nostrils flare. A few other muscles in his face flex and contract, with less specific purpose. He is taking the measure of his ability to not take a swing if Marcus looks pleased at the answer. If he says good.

"Dead."

The reasons why a mage might say good—the personal ones, beyond the uniform—he knows. He found out around the fire, during the war, as Con swapped anecdotes and boasts with the others. And it's been nearly eight years now. He's decided he will not take a swing. But he was still Redvers' brother. Redvers' face is still set into sharp edges. He doesn't volunteer the precise timeline, the potential satisfaction; it could just as easily have been the Vints.

"For a few years now."

[luaithre]

There's no attempt to disguise any sort of analysis on Marcus' side, keen eyed interest for those muscle twitches and tics. When you spend your adolescence and much of your adulthood surrounded by men and women who, often enough, wore full helmets and visors for long stretches of their guardianship, you do wonder what goes on beneath them. And then you stop wondering, and imagine nothing at all but cold, unfeeling, inexpressive steel.

On his part, there's a slight eyebrow raise that could count as: good.

"I don't know that I knew him very personally," Marcus says. There were quite a few Templars in the Gallows, a much larger institution than the austere walls of their own Circle. All the same; "But he had a reputation. His being here would have been an insult."

[atonally]

Redvers' head inclines a few degrees.

"And you're deciding that, are you?"

No edge or hostility in his tone, only the perhaps inherent insult of asking. Of assuming this inspection has been something he's humoring, rather than something Marcus has any right to do.

[luaithre]

"Deciding."

It's an echo, not an answer. Like there's something funny in it, although Marcus doesn't go so far as to smile. He doesn't do that terribly often, not even when he was a much younger man than he is now.

Finally, he breaks from looking so intently at Redvers towards the nearest window, the sad narrow gap in the stone that lets on meagre light. "Coming back here, I thought, maybe they've changed this place. Outfit it to its new purpose, killed the spirit of what it was before. It's been a few years now and I know that the only way you'd be able to come near that is taking it all down. Brick by brick."

Then back to Redvers, considering him as though through memory rather than the present moment.

"I want to tell you something strange."

[atonally]

Redvers' head stays at its angle. His eyebrows raise. His silence is as much this might as well happen as sure, go on.

[luaithre]

"I noted your name," Marcus says, the inevitable pushing through silence. He has spoken to walls, before; he can speak into Redvers and his ambivalence. "And I fancied that you'd finally arrived, and too late. As though you and the rest of everyone that oversaw us in Starkhaven would have done something for us while we were here. I believed that, for a little while."

It's probably apparent that there are no win conditions available for either of them in this kind of conversation, and Marcus stops there, as if sensing that to have come here almost expressly to share that sentiment was an error, but not too much of one. Dully dissatisfying.

"Tsenka Abendroth is also in Riftwatch," he says. "Scouting. No others."