open.

[luaithre]

WHO: Marcus Rowntree and you
WHAT: We don't talk about fight club, or poor coping mechanisms.
WHEN: Throughout fantasy-August
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: A series of open prompts regarding violences and also just normal drinking, and a place for closed stuff as you like!

There are a few incidents that take place after Marcus misses the ferry back to the Gallows (only the first time by accident).

He joins a card game, once, nearly barred from doing so when he arrives and sets down the mage staff by his seat. He hasn't a lot of coin on him, but without much thought, he undoes the clasps of his jewel-set cufflinks and drops them among the gold, and later, the silver pin that holds his tie. Maybe it's a miscalculation, on his part: being a mage, and a man who dresses as he does at this little low-stakes corner of Lowtown, gambling with people's working wages and his finery, but he ignores the slow building of resentment as he continues to drink and continues to win, until he has no more spare funds with which he can raise, or with which to buy more whiskey.

It only goes awry when he goes to buy himself out, a hand catching his sleeve as he rises. Accusations of cheating, perhaps with magic, who the fuck could know. There's a world where he finds a means of deescalation, but in this one, he simply shoves this man hard enough to upend the table. And falls on him, furious.

The most he wins is blood and bruises. Perhaps you're there to break it up, or later, when he leaves the tavern, hands empty.

The next few times there's a scrap, he starts it. It doesn't often take much. Just one civilian whose eye snags on him long enough to be asked if he has something he'd like to say, or a snarl in the direction of a body brushing too closely past him. Marcus is not a seasoned brawler (although you could make the argument that he's getting in some practice), and loses just as much as he succeeds, if success is what you could call hitting someone harder than they care to themselves.

Find him standing up over whatever poor random drunkard caught the brunt of a temper that had little to do with him, or Marcus sinking still when the next blow catches him across the temple, splitting his vision into double. Or in the midst of it, the grim tangle of blows in a tavern full of yelled encouragement.

Once, a fight that doesn't get far. The tangle of fists, elbows, and snarling is dispersed with the ill-advised summoning of smoke and embers, catching both Marcus and his attacker (his target) in a gust of magical but nevertheless firepit-filthy smog that has the latter shove away the former.

He is very efficiently ejected from the tavern, this time, when two barflies just fearless enough manage to get involved and shove him out into the street, and toss his staff out after him, which clatters loudly on the stone. You could find him at that very moment, off-balance and moving to collect it, or a few minutes later, throwing up his dinner in a side-alley, only just avoiding his boots.

Not every evening spent late ends in violence, however. Most of them, even. There's one little Lowtown den that tolerates his presence, where he sits at the edge of a bar and pushes silvers across it to keep a steady supply of ale flowing in his direction.

Comments

[bouchonne]

“First in these precise circumstances,” is the instinctual evasion. A true statement, to be fair: he has never hauled a gang of brawlers off a shitfaced mage. A technical truth.

But: it has nothing of the spirit of honesty to it, and By ought to be setting an example of being spiritually honest. So. “People tend to take exception to me.”

[luaithre]

The smoke that escapes Marcus' next breath has a flutter to it, betraying a laugh. it's a rough sound. Underused.

"Before or after you open your mouth," he says, a lazy swipe but a swipe nonetheless, not looking to see how it lands.

[bouchonne]

It elicits no offense, it appears; Byerly simply ashes his cigarette and answers, "After." And, in a slightly-less-lazy swipe of his own, he adds, "I don't wear what people might take exception to pinned to my chest, nor do I carry it in my hand, you see."

Then, after a moment of consideration - perhaps to defuse any tension that might result - he amends, "Sometimes people do just dislike my face. But that happens less than you might think."

[luaithre]

There is no particular bristling of hackles from Marcus, but less out of a sense of self-control and more simply that if there is something objectionable in Byerly's remark, it doesn't appear to register as insult. He's never been a very satisfying repartee partner for this reason, among others. Why shouldn't you wear, or bear, that which creates exception?

"I'm sure you know better than me," Marcus says, still given to speaking quietly even in this stake, but his Starkhaven brogue all the muddier for it. "But not of what I think."

[bouchonne]

"No?" Byerly asks. His tone is lightly amused. "Do you like my face?"

[luaithre]

No articulate answer, at first, just a rush of smoke through his nose, a dismissive exhale. No.

It would be easy to sink into silence, trudge along in the Ambassador's wake until something changes—an inn appearing in the dark street, or for Rutyer to run out of his sense of amusement and vanish, or for Marcus to catch onto some errant other impulse and peel away. Any one of those seem equally likely.

Instead, he speaks up again. "What I think," is what the confusion was, circling around it. "Is you're the leader of our Diplomacy division. You choose your fights. Who dislikes you."

[bouchonne]

"Ha," is his response to that. His grin over at Marcus is crooked. "Surely not. If, nowadays, I have the power to pick one fight out of every ten, I'm in a good mood indeed."

He takes a drag off his cigarette. "There were Ambassadors before me. And some of them - including one of whom you're quite fond - did not leave the position in better standing than it had been in when they assumed the role. And even if that were not the case, well." I have people like you. "I find myself often making apologies for sins that weren't mine. This sin included."

His gesture takes in everything - the evening, the environment, the blood on Marcus' knuckles.

[luaithre]

Marcus takes that in. Offers no argument, remembering (a little as if in a dream) Byerly quelling the animosity in the tavern like a bucket of water thrown over a fire, of pulling him away. Of involving himself at all. A Riftwatch mage, making trouble. He hasn't yet determined what he thinks of it, but he doesn't like it.

But all of that in a flash, distracted in something else. Nettled at merely the mention of Madame de Cedoux, perhaps, but no, not quite that—

"Would you like to do it again," Marcus says, a spark of something, and he veers to a stop, a step ahead that sort of cuts Byerly off from the straight line of his movement. "Apologise for a sin that's not yours, if you've such obligation for it."

[bouchonne]

Byerly stops as well. His expression remains mild, his posture relaxed, but he’s also powerfully aware of the fear that surges through him at that maybe-a-threat. He takes stock of his surroundings and his resources: the one alley leading into a dead end, the other leading deeper into Lowtown; the magebane in his pocket, the knives hidden up his sleeve at at the small of his back. And he thinks back to the conversation with Benedict - Benedict saying that the mages saw Byerly, more than the others, as hostile to their cause…If Marcus drunkenly decides that a new Ambassador is needed, what happens?

I die. Almost certainly.

Well. That’s fine. That’s a potential problem, and one for a few minutes from now. So: “Sure,” Byerly says easily. “I’m good at eating shit. What do you want me to apologize for?”

[luaithre]

Mild, relaxed, easy. It would probably take more intuition (and more sobriety) for Marcus to meaningfully detect fear, to clock a darting glance as a stocktake of escape routes. But all the same, his focus now set on Byerly seems to know it, the way a hostile predator has an instinct for when something might bolt sooner than attack. Maybe not particular to the Ambassador, but a general expectation.

There is a twitch of what is almost a crooked smile at the corner of his mouth. Like he might have laughed at the funny thing Byerly had said, in another life. Marcus pauses over it, glances down at his cigarette. Flicks ash. Looks back up.

"You were friendly with Madame Fitcher," he says. Serious, as if daring Byerly to mean it when he instructs, "Apologise for her." An arm raises an inch at his side. Drops. "Someone ought."

And no one will.

[bouchonne]

Another sort of apology would have been easy. Sorry for the mages, sorry for the Circles, sorry for not having been born like you - Easy.

But. But Fitcher. Fitcher, whom he misses - Fitcher, whom he hates. With all her tangled, painful history which might have been a lie told to him to exploit his open heart - but which didn't feel like a lie. And if it wasn't a lie, then the agony of that life...Wood, once burned, ends up hardened, doesn't it? Becomes a weapon?

So how is he to apologize for her? To this man? Who did not understand her, all the complexities of her betrayal - Who was fucked over by her, sure. But who had never given her some part of his heart to shred. He thinks he is owed an apology?

But. Byerly's manner remains easy enough. He lifts his hands. And he says something that is, at least, true. Something that is owed. "I am sorry," he says, "that we did not see through Fitcher. It was a failure on our part."

He doubts that will be enough for pugnacious Rowntree.

[luaithre]

As much as he is daring Byerly to be sincere, Marcus is equally daring him to not. To say something frivolous, mean-spirited, dismissive. To refuse outright, tell him to go fuck himself. To laugh. This sudden focus is more distrustful, cynical, than anything else. And he doesn't have a plan for what happens if his expectations are met.

Possibly nothing at all. But he doesn't know.

Not that I'm sorry for Fitcher would mean much of anything, but then, it's not what Byerly says. A failure instead, a failing, is described. It twinges—hadn't Marcus failed too, differently—and his silence is heavy, looking more at the middle-distance between them than at Byerly direct. Bothered that it almost does ease something.

It's not, really, possible for it to be enough, but it is what he asked for. Marcus stands there in his semi-dissatisfaction for a moment, then tips his head.

Yeah alright.

And turns to keep going, bringing cigarette back up, embers flaring.

[bouchonne]

Well, that was -

Huh.

If not successful, then at least less disastrously unsuccessful than Byerly had assumed. After a moment, he falls into line, walking beside Marcus.

"Are you recovered?" he asks. Maybe for lack of something better to say, maybe because he's actually curious. "From your ordeal?"

[luaithre]

In his renewed momentum, Marcus' shoulder clips against someone else headed in the opposite direction. Grunts his irritation around the cigarette in his teeth but ignores the belligerent insult fired at his back, letting that slip into the fog, forgotten. Byerly keeps apace, rather than do the same thing.

"Aye," he says. Instinct has him add, "And Julius."

Maybe Marcus'll tell him the Ambassador apologised on Fitcher's behalf. See what his face does.