faderift | you can't handle the truth

Entry tags:

you can't handle the truth

WHO: Whoever wants
WHAT: Kickoff of the truth plot!
WHEN: Right now
WHERE: The dining hall
NOTES: Feel free to use this to post open starters with prompts! Or make your own logs. Or create open posts on the network. Do whatever you'd like. No rules just right

If only the cooks had screwed up the soup. The problem is that it's a particularly nice soup today, full of fresh summer herbs, nicely seasoned, and plentiful. And so it's quite likely that you grabbed a bowl - maybe even got a second helping - and so ingested the potion that a devious hand had tipped in there earlier that day.

The effects begin to set in within twenty minutes of ingesting the soup. They may be mild - your tongue stumbling when you go to tell a little white lie...or they might be strong, and you might be overtaken by a sudden hysterical urge to tell deep truths to anyone who might listen. Or perhaps you skipped that soup, and instead, you're surrounded by babbling, confused people who want to tell you their life stories.

The potion's effects will last for up to two days. And they may at times be stronger, and at times weaker. Here's hoping you'll do minimal damage to your reputation in the meantime.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I suspect it's meant to."

Which is true, but also so clearly a substitute for the thought closest to the forefront of Flint's mind as he studies Byerly from where he sits. One hand has absently drifted across the other; one of the half dozen rings peppering his fingers is being turned, the red stone nearly black in the low light but glinting regardless whenever it happens to strike the right angle to exactly reflect back some little tongue of light.

"And after? When Corpyheus is dead. What then?"

"Then."

This feels foolish to say aloud. But: truth.

"Bastien and I have decided that we will travel the world and use our wits, such as they are, to help. I am well-connected, and I have my training; and he is a writer of some skill. Our intention, therefore, is to use our particular talents to help people. To find those who are caught in an unfortunate web and free them, one by one."

He lifts his eyes from his drink to meet Flint's. His smile is a little crooked. "I imagine it sounds petty to a man of your ambition."

The flexion in the line of Flint's mouth as Byerly meets his eye suggests that yes, maybe he agrees with him. That it does sound small, and easily pictured—a thing that can be held in the palm of the hand or carried in a pocket without much trouble at all.

Or maybe that brief thing in his face is something else entirely.

"It sounds like a fine way of passing the time. I suspect you'll be good at it."

His hand disengages from the turning of the ring. The line of Flint's shoulders shifts as he moves to settle back into the chair rather than leaning forward from it across the sprawl of his knees.

"Yseult and Darras mean to be done with this too."

Byerly's smile turns crookeder still in response to Flint's very unkind-sounding assessment. How condescending, and all the more so for being a very literal sort of truth. Passing the time. As if, to those helped, it isn't the difference between life and ruin -

But he's not offended. Truly, he's simply impressed at that backhanded compliment. Quite witty.

"And you?" He tilts his head. "What is your intention? Specifically, I mean. I fear that the dreams you've described so far are a bit too large for me to fully grasp."

That undefined slant to the line of his mouth behind auburn whiskers remains fixed. And so if there is a thinning sense to the quality of the expression, it originates from about the eyes and some untraceable adjustment of the brow—or in Flint having gone briefly still under the stinging point of that question despite having all but invited it.

He spreads his hands, a small gesture hinged at either chair arm.

"I anticipate that ending Corypheus will coincide with finding that I and the people most important to me have arrived at the vulnerable position of being rendered inessential."

If he wanted to disappear after this, clawing his way to the top of this tower has undone that. It's no mystery who commands Riftwatch's forces; part of him is surprised there's been no call for restitution already. Captain Flint once was a name that terrified any trade plied on the Nocen, and in any harbor attached to it.

"If by some miracle that isn't true and all has somehow been put in order so that ridding Minrathous of the Venatori coincidences with winning some real measure of security, then maybe it will just be me without further use."

The curve of his smile is the kind which has enured itself to the facts. After this? More. And after that? He wouldn't know.

Byerly is quiet a moment as an idea curls in the back of his head. Is it even worth giving voice to? Maybe under other circumstances, he wouldn't; he would convince himself that the notion was too precious a thing to expose to Flint's withering scorn. He would decide that it should be protected instead. But this isn't a normal circumstance, and so before Byerly can guard his tongue he's making his proposal -

"What if we worked together to free Tevinter's slaves?" His hand comes open on his knee; his voice is unvarnished, honest, simple. "I've been thinking about this a long time. We have places throughout Ferelden that are still devastated from the Blight - even Dragonmount has good farmsteads without hands to work them - but the logistics have seemed impossible. Coordination of the raids to free them from their slave-drivers, even just transportation to friendlier shores once they've been freed...But that sort of thing is child's play to a pirate, no?"

He feels a flush of embarrassment once it's out. The man's scorn feels inevitable - because this plan is so half-baked, surely it's flawed beyond measure. And yet as he speaks the words, it all feels quite fine.

On the short list of replies he had anticipated (a list drawn up, measured and weighed for odds in that sharpened beat of silence preceding his answer to Byerly's question), this hadn't been among the options. No, not so much the particulars—the Imperium's slaves, the holdings in Ferelden, the work that Byerly is suggesting might easily be accomplished by indulging the natural impulses of raiding pirates. What catches him off guard is the presence of any proposal at all given a certain long history of chasing their own tails. They have been in circles similar to this exchange of the personal before. Less unvarnished, less honest—obviously. Even so, if there is a thread Byerly is meant to have picked at then habitually it should have been 'What comes after this?' 'Nothing,' and the guts easily scooped out in the space between those two points.

Flint's surprise manifests as a brief and starkly blank look, that unpleasant curve of his mouth having slid sideways as if it might wander entirely off his face. It takes him a moment to rearrange the lines of his face back into that unruffled formation.

"Do you actually imagine that you could find enough support in the south, in Ferelden, to even begin to validate the attempt?"

It could easily be a biting question, doubting and dismissive. But opaque as he is in most respects, Flint's face rarely manages to maintain the same illusion. There can be no mistaking the intent gleam of interest which sparks behind the reassembled shape of his expression for anything else, clear as a light in a paper lantern.

What pleasure it is to flummox James Flint. How rare. And rarer still, to have that shock followed not by jeering, not by contempt, but by - do his eyes deceive him? - excitement.

(And how utterly obnoxious it is, to see that expression and to feel a little flutter of his heart in return. How terrible to understand how and why Flint managed to inspire men to follow him with such fervor. The man is like Northern sunlight - scorching and harsh and punishing, but sometimes it warms the soul.)

"Please," is Byerly's response, with fingers flipped up in easy dismissal. Then, he allows - "There will be work involved. But...an opportunity to recruit able-bodied people for working those backwater Bannorns? In such a way that those Banns get to feel morally righteous? Easy as selling mulled wine on First Day."

Then, he spreads his hands, and confesses, "It might not help the war effort. It might even harm it, if we're not careful; the few magisters on our side would likely sour on us if they know we were behind it. But it would be right."

This is not an easy thing. Look at how the South has greeted their own refugees driven loose by Tevinter's forces. What possible welcome would a score of freed slaves, among which are elves and mages both, be offered? No, it is complicated even before they weigh the risks of alienating what friend they might have within the Imperium's borders. Byerly is suggesting that they tie a rope to a dragon and simply dig their heels in.

(But it is not, as he'd accused him, rushing around with their heads down trying to put out fires in the thing's shadow.)

"Fuck the magisters," is not argument, but conviction—something resolving. A turn of a hand to secure a line in its grip. All right. "If that's what loses them, then we never had any of them to begin with."

A short laugh in return. "Easy for you to say," he says. "All you must needs do is put a sword in the people who stand in our way. I have to actually juggle their displeasure."

And isn't that dispiriting? This little job of his. For a moment, it feels impossible: because for all the impassioned declarations of his devotion to liberty and justice, at the end of the day, it's his job to keep them on their side. And if he doesn't - He'll be the one to have lost the war. What a sordid little thing, what a rot of the soul.

But.

"But fuck them," By agrees, a little lower than he'd like, a little tenderer, not with the ferocious conviction that he wishes he might summon up - But, well. It is, by necessity, his true sentiment.

More tender, yes. But where does a hard edge come from if not the callous of wear rather than because it was somehow bred that way, spontaneously immune to being at all bruised to begin with.

Flint, in his chair, leans forward. He doesn't laugh.

"They're only men. The power they have stops being inevitable so long as there is someone willing to challenge it."

"Someone willing to challenge it who can win," Byerly amends with a crooked smile.

What an odd thing it is, to think ah, a difference between us, instead of ah, a similarity. Because if there's anything that's been made clear, it's that - well - he and Flint are, absurdly, perhaps, quite similar. Most would laugh to hear the idea even spoken aloud; perhaps Byerly himself will even look back on this and think that the idea is laughable, realize that the drug in his system and the lateness of the hour had combined to turn his brain gummy. But right now, those likenesses stand out. Their matching desires for fairness in the world. Their willingness to use underhanded tactics to achieve it. Their comfort with seeming perhaps a bit villainous.

That key difference is in their practicality, Byerly thinks. Flint seems ready to rush, bull-headed, at what he thinks is right - while Byerly is tangled up in what he thinks is possible. (And isn't that ironic? Flint, the man of Tevinter, impossibly blunt; Rutyer, the man of Ferelden, subtle and hesitant.)

(The other difference, unspoken, is of course in every aspect of their respective personalities. Perhaps underneath it all their spirits are aligned, but Maker knows that body and mind of Flint could not possibly be more distant from Byerly's own.)

Byerly hesitates. And then, he allows himself to say this truth, to stray from the making of plans - "I admire you, Flint." An apologetic half-smile, a shrug. "I think it's why I want to strangle you so bloody often. You're courageous and cunning. A man of many virtues - many of them in excess, but better to be immoderate in virtue than to have none. So if we are to work together - " Another shrug. "It's worth saying aloud. That I think you are a man of great worth."

It's an evening of unpredictable turns, the absurd turned genuine by dint of unvarnished honesty. This, too, is clearly a chord Flint doesn't expect Byerly to strike—two surprises in as many minutes. Leaned forward there across the arms of the borrowed chair, some shadow passes over the hot glint in his eye in response to it. It lingers there as a curtain partially drawn might—a half hearted effort to blot out the daylight of praise.

Nevermind that none of these facts are alien to him. He knows he is clever and that he is determined, and has heard the same sentiments expressed (less kindly—Captain Flint is a cunning bastard) before. He doesn't need Byerly Rutyer to say any of it.

Though maybe this too is a secret overlapping point of contact between them: it's possible that James Flint isn't immune to wanting that, or to bristling warily under the pleasure of the sensation.

"Why do you do that?" Can't possibly be the answer he is meant to give, regardless of how genuine the question sounds. "Insist on hobbling yourself before we've even left this room."

"Ah," says Byerly, who certainly does not expect that question. Indeed, he hesitates, brows drawn, thinking back to what he'd said that might have prompted it - Was there something in his assessment of Flint? Had he obliquely insulted himself? But - no; it had been in his assessment of their chances, he recalls. His reflexive cynicism.

He smooths down his mustache, and then he ventures, "A man can choke on too much hope." And then, "Haven't you ever had your heart broken? Don't you want to protect it a little bit?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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