faderift | clopen.

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clopen.

WHO: Tony Stark and the Ironettes, and some of my other guys.
WHAT: Business as usual, probably.
WHEN: Just generally Justinian
WHERE: The Gallows, Kirkwall, etc.
NOTES: Some open prompts in the post for any and all, but also a gathering place for some specific starters.

Nightmares are just another excuse to join the insomnia brigade, a disparate club of people constellated around the Gallows, lit rooms, lit hearths. Nowadays (nowanights?), Tony often takes himself and his restless hands out of his private quarters, now that he has a full human woman to share personal space with and she might not appreciate the sounds of tinkering and miscellaneous farting around one wall over.

So his colleagues might find him in the peace room, drinking coffee at stupid o'clock and going over paperwork, or those who know him well might hear the sounds of clicking tools being worked and set down again in the Research work spaces, where it is much too dark to see by the single candle he has going, but that's what enchanted sunglasses are for.

During the day, he is:
- jogging, sometime past dawn, stairmastering down the tower and then running a circuit through the expansive courtyards, and then out towards the docks, before the day has a shot at getting unbearably hot and sticky;
- chained to his desk to make himself, you know, available, some paperwork stacked at his elbow while he desperately seeks some dopamine by carefully folding a paper airplane instead;
- clattering a plate of pizza down on a taken table in the dining hall, and while it's a little lopsided, it is at it promises to be, melted cheese and flat circles of meat, everything sliced into slices;
- at the training grounds where the archery range is set up, wearing some light-weight leather armor and a more elaborate gauntlet, with articulated loops around the wrist he is adjusting. "You know the story of William Tell?" he says, positioned not where the archers are, but standing amongst the dummies, which should probably be some kind of sign. "Me neither, but probably worked out okay." He readies a defensive stance. "Hit me."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'm fully prepared to tell her the same thing," Tony says, a lazy slice gesture of a hand, and then relenting, "I mean, it's not not true. I remember when luck of the draw threw us altogether, and it was—I dunno. Like I was still stranded but at least I had some guys there on the island with me, for the first time."

Maybe he wouldn't have made it, if that had never happened, and he doesn't know what that looks like. Well, probably a total crack up. He's cracked up before.

However, saying all this makes something in his chest squeeze, which is disgusting, obviously, but he's a little better at saying the things you should probably say before it's too late. Before the void does its thing.

"I think you hold onto stuff so hard that the prospect of letting it go in some way seems like it'll break something, and it stresses me out to watch. So I vote you should try different. Take a load off."

Take a load off provokes a low snort of a reaction.

It sounds simple, the way Tony puts it. Try different, as if unspooling what rattles and claws at the edges of his mind can be easily done. Ellis feels the way his entire body braces at the prospect, cinches like a vise against whatever might be shaken free of him.

Who has he ever spoken these things aloud to? (Joppa is gone. Cathán is gone. And those had not been conversations so much as implicit understanding, discussions that skirted the naming of the thing.) He lifts his gaze to Tony, observes the his expression, the glow of blue in his chest. He looks tired, even in spite of the intention in his eyes.

"You have enough to contend with, without what troubles me at night."

They really need to invent therapy. Tony swears by the stuff.

He sips his tea while he waits for Ellis to mull that over, waits to see what comes out, and what he produces is not surprising. Not helping his case, Tony brings up a hand to rub at his eyes, massaging them through closed lids, before his hand flops back down.

"Now that's not fair," is a little jokey, as opposed to a serious complaint, even with that undercurrent of earnest concern. "Putting it on me and my blood pressure? Please. You don't know what I contend with," maybe a little sharper, which,

is hardly Ellis' fault, or anyone, and Tony kinds of waves it away.

"I wanna know. I like knowing things. It's the not knowing I have a hard time with."

The sweep of Ellis' gaze towards the door betrays some silent calculation: suppose he stood up and left?

But he maintains his seat. For the moment.

The room is warm, brightened by the fire but not enough to dispel the shadows cast over them both. The Gallows is deceptively quiet around them; Ellis is certain they are not the only two awake at this hour, chewing over dreams. Perhaps not arguing over dreams, but—

"I don't think you'd like knowing any of this," feels like a reasonable summation to Ellis.

He knows that Tony likes discovering things, loves knowledge in a way Ellis understands very well even if he can never quite participate in its acquisition the way Tony does. But he thinks knowing a terrible thing, one that looms large and is so deeply gouged into a person that it cannot be extracted, is not the type of knowledge that Tony might celebrate.

There is a subtle sound out of Tony, just a harder exhale through his nose, when he clocks Ellis checking his exits. Not quite disbelief, but bordering it.

He can tell they're nearing that territory, that spooky silent centre of things that the Wardens surround as if they're as much in the business of guarding their own secrets as they are protecting the world from darkspawn. Problem is, he's also familiar with it. Being alone with it, whatever 'it' happens to be. Its corrosive properties.

"Maybe not," he agrees. "But I want to anyway."

"You're not going to let it rest, are you?" is a question derived of the same impulse that had Ellis considering the door. Measuring Tony's investment in the topic, whether or not this is something possible to deflect in due time, or simply beg off from.

They are persistent, Tony and Wysteria. This is not quite the same as being stood in a frigid garden on the opposite end of Wysteria's agitation and wounded confusion, but it is akin to it. Tony is very deliberate in his interest. Steady and focused the way Ellis has seen him in his pursuit of other curiosities. Prying at a wound he understands lives in Ellis. He's going about it gently, but diligently.

It is difficult to bear up under all the same.

Tony's smile is pressed thinly, not quite a smile at all, in a way. He could say something flippant, playful, but what comes out is a compressed sounding;

"Can't."

Aware that Ellis is a person that could well interpret an ultimatum as an excuse to walk out, and maybe a handful of months ago, Tony wouldn't have risked it. It's not that he thinks he could live without a whole person in his life, this one in particular, but he's willing to gamble on his own importance.

Can't is about the answer Ellis had expected.

But still, it is met with a long stretch of quiet. Ellis' eyes sweep the room again. Not for a door. His hands fold, right over crooked left, thumb pressing at the knuckles.

Maybe thinking of a way to say no. Maybe measuring out what is tolerable to share.

It is not a matter of trusting Tony. It is about the way that speaking of these things feels akin to putting his hand into a fire, holding it there and bearing the lick of flame on his skin. (Whatever parts of the thing aren't bound up by millennia-old oaths. Things he won't say.)

He isn't looking at Tony, when he begins to speak. Ellis addresses his hands, the pressure of thumb against knuckle increasing as he goes. A tell, illustrating something his steady voice does not.

"It's always the same," is a carefully chosen turn of phrase. Perhaps intended to head off some other question (How often—) before it is formulated. "It is dark, in the deep roads. Torches only carry light so far, and if you have no torch..."

A shrug. It is far underground. Tony understands.

"I hear my mother in it. Her, and my father. Far off. Screaming."

Economical. Pared down to this part which can be offered over, without the whole of what comes snarled up along with it. (Other voices, hissing and indistinguishable and alien, worming into his mind in the dark.) Ellis lapses into quiet, letting the answer settle between them. Apparently content to elaborate no further.

The dark, deep roads. The screaming of loved ones.

Then silence fills in between them, and Tony fidgets his thumb against the edge of his cup, tries not to let his expression betray him. Because! It! Seems kind of rude to say that's all? to something you've surgically excavated out of your friend's soul, that you were warned against even knowing. Maybe you had to be there.

Except he can fathom it. The crushing underground and the weight of it. The things Ellis isn't describing, such as the blind panic, the knowledge of being alive while others are dying. The long march that Wardens are duty-bound to take, into the pitch black crevices of the world, full of rot and death.

And still. It feels like half the story.

"What do you do?" he asks, unable to help just a little more probing. Seeing what else ekes out.

The brief, slanting look sideways is—

Not quite nettled. Closer to tired, worn painfully thin.

It passes. Ellis' thumb sweeps back and forth over the disjointed break, badly healed, as he addresses his hands.

"Run after their voices, in the dark."

Bitter over the words, for reasons Ellis doesn't delve into.

"Everything echos in the Deep Roads. Anything loud, you can hear it from far off, but it bounces. There are hundreds of empty, dark spaces that'll amplify a sound. Sometimes I never find them, but I can hear them dying."

Those are good nights, arguably.

"And sometimes I find them. And it's worse."

Flatter. Bad nights. Stripped of detail still, pared down to the barest truth without illustration. Ellis' mind is unchanged as to what does and doesn't need to be shared, what Tony need carry on his behalf.

Tony agrees.

At least as far as the gory details are concerned. He never described, anyway, how heavy the bodies of his friends, how pale and how blind. It is not exactly his intention to frogmarch Ellis back down memory lane, even though that part's inevitable, but to have a sense of what dark tunnels exist beneath the surface, and where they go.

He knows there's more. But it's a start.

"Your folks," he asks, into the quiet. "In the real world."

"Aye."

A word falling like a stone. Weighted down with all that comes attached to it.

Ellis' jaw works around something. Some sentiment he is turning over in his head, stripping down to the barest parts.

It is nearly imperceptible, the tilt of his head. But it comes as they speak of this, this dream, the Deep Roads, what Ellis might find there. A slight tip towards seemingly nothing, because what is there to hear but Tony? The Gallows is quiet, in spite of all the unrest contained in the main hall or the adjacent offices.

(But there is something. Whispers, chillingly harmonious, rising and falling as Ellis speaks. Something he's heard before.)

"It is a bad way to die," Ellis says slowly, "Dragged into the Deep Roads by darkspawn."

A bad way contains such heavy, ugly things inside of it.

"I don't know if it's what became of them," is tacked on a tempering explanation. Ellis doesn't know. But he fears it.

Imagination does a lot. Imagination and the concrete knowledge of what can happen, what the absolute worst thing is.

Tony finds that this news isn't surprising but only because it makes sense, in an awful way. It makes sense, too, as it settles and he can turn it over in his mind, why Ellis guarded it as fiercely as he has. There's no actual shame in losing people, in being the one that doesn't die when everyone else does, but—

"I was seventeen when I lost my parents," offered kind of lightly, more of a reprieve, somewhere to go for a moment. An offer. "I wasn't there. Found out later how it happened, when I thought I knew. They were run off the road, killed. Knowing doesn't exactly help, but then again, I don't dream about it."

More importantly— "I'm sorry," he says.

All pieces set together, run off the road and killed create something slightly ambiguous. Accident is missing from the equation.

There is a pause, Ellis' attention drawn wholly back to the room and to Tony, sitting across from him. Realizes, abruptly, what has been omitted and the picture it paints. Tony wasn't there. Ellis has no such excuse.

His head shakes, silent rejoinder to the offering of apology. Comfort. That's predictable, maybe.

"I was eighteen."

How had he said the truth of this to Wysteria? It's necessary to pry it up from the scar tissue, offer it over. Ellis can't abide Tony carrying the wrong understanding forward, even if the consideration of it comes wrought with dread.

"I'm sorry," repeated back, for the story. For necessitating the sharing of it. Sincere, even as Ellis tries to parse out something beyond the immediate topic. "You needn't speak of it, not on my account."

"It was a long time ago."

Easy. Factual. It isn't irrelevant but it doesn't keep him up at night, not anymore. Plenty of other demons for that. Talking about it is fine.

Ellis was eighteen. That's plenty grown up, in this old timey world and his own, to feel like you should have done something about it. Is that it? The weight he quietly drags around behind him? Maybe not, maybe some of it. Tony brings up his tea to drink, thinking it over. What to do with this thing he insisted on receiving.

He kind of wants to ask—

"Mine were Howard and Maria. Who were yours?"

The question winds a quiet tension through Ellis' body. Bracing against it. Or the inevitability of the answer and what must come attached to it.

His thumb sweeps along the crooked fingers of his left hand.

"Dugald," comes softly, Ellis' accent gone thicker over the words. There is a stretch of quiet, before Ellis proceeds along to: "Odette."

His head lifts, meets Tony's eyes as he relates, "I was there. And I left them."

This too, is half of a story. But to Ellis, this is the only part of the story that matters. The part that quashes whatever generous estimation Tony has made of him.

There's a clear weight to it, this confession. Tony's brow crinkles at the centre. Wondering what it is Ellis is bracing for. How could you? He clamps down on saying anything that is too automatic, an attempt to let that weight settle rather than immediately overturning it.

All the same—

"You were a kid," he says, quietly. "And I bet good money that's all they wanted you to do."

It's not the place or time to tell Ellis how and why he might understand exactly how any parent should feel, the easy sacrifice, and he doesn't know anything except for the softness with which Ellis said their names, but that's why he asked.

"I was eighteen," to the tune of a gentle correction.

Not a kid.

It stands in for something far more kneejerk: It doesn't matter.

What does it matter that there was nothing to be done? Will that ever outweigh the full weight of his choice in that moment?

There is nothing else to say.

"Tiny baby," Tony counters, playfully, in spite of the heaviness of everything. Sedate, due to the heaviness of everything. The corner of his mouth hooking up. "That's the deal when you have a kid, no matter how tall they get. The two deals. They're little forever," he ticks this off on his fingers, "and you want them to continue on from where you leave off."

He would like to simply lift this off of Ellis, job well done, survivor's guilt cured, but all he can do is this: a free and easy lack of judgment, and not out of ignorance, even with some cards still clutched to chests.

Soberly, "You went through something hard. Fucked up. I'm sorry."

Tony means this as a kindness. Ellis knows that. It should be a comfort, but in spite of all good intentions, it is still a fistful of salt ground into an open wound.

He shakes his head, brow knitting into a deep frown.

"Don't be."

This isn't Tony's to bear. There isn't a single part Ellis would have him carry.

And it is intolerable to observe Tony take all of this in stride, return this truth with empathy. Ellis won't hear it. Can't hear more of it.

"Okay,"

but not really, probably. You don't take back a sorry when it's the real thing. But Tony says 'okay' as if to release Ellis from the torment of this conversation, a sigh in the background of it. He doesn't say you've met Flint's child labour lawsuit, Matthias, right? as an example of what an eighteen-year-old looks like. But he could.

Thinks, instead. Says, "You don't belong down there," and adds, "No one does."

It should be a comforting thing to hear.

But it isn't.

The flinch away from the sentiment works its way through Ellis' body slowly. A tension in his shoulders. A tightening at his jaw. Biting down hard enough that his molars ache with it, because Ellis knows that a contradiction will initiate a conversation neither of them want to have. That Ellis still regrets having with Silas.

Regardless, it's too much to bear.

"I think," Ellis begins slowly, emotion flattened from the words. "I should let you get back to your project."

And then, as he finds his footing, focus sharpening, to add, "Or to try to sleep."

"Yeah."

He's gonna count this as Ellis surrendering, and not him. Tony looks towards the work station he'd been labouring over, and it doesn't call to him. A warm bed, a lady in it, that sounds a lot nice. Still, he sips his tea, doesn't rise up out of it yet, a sudden change in tone and tactic as he says,

"We should get outta here. Not now, I mean, like a trip. We can write it off as a business expense if we accomplish something at the same time."

Tony is allowing him a reprieve. Ellis is grateful for it, even if it takes him a few long moments to find the equilibrium necessary to dredge up a response. Reorient himself away from the memories he'd been sunk into and return to this room, the conversations they often have within it, the lightness that might color those conversations.

"Where?" is as good as agreement.

The first thing, nonsensically, that comes to mind is Orzammar.

But that likely isn't what Tony has in mind.

"Beach place," isn't Orzammar, although it's not far from Tony's mind either. If he actually says it, they might be in real danger of committing. Jealous, a little, of Wysteria's new found hand-less freedom, is how he might frame it. "Place with beaches on it. White sands, blue water, coconut shell cocktail. I bet everyone dresses sluttier the more north you go, too."

Or, says a swervey tip of Tony's head. "Either that or the next awful bog-adjacent jungle adventure we all have to go on. But those can be fun too."

clopen.

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googles "does dragon age have coconuts"

googles "when were coconuts invented"

nearing bow territory y/n

bow time