faderift | open.

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open.

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.

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It's disorienting, first, the rapid coiling tension of incoming conflict left to stand idly by and seize in on itself while the barkeep switches his focus. Marcus' expression shutters up, but not without tells; tension set in at the corners of his frown, a restless dropping of his eyeline to the edge of the bar as he collects up his staff in its holster, slings it over his shoulder.

It isn't much coin at all. Some cheap variant of whiskey, certainly not selected for its taste, if Julius is familiar with his liquors if not able to make a judgment as to its pricing.

The coins are handed over, the barkeep kind of grunts a thanks, and—

Movement, a creak of floorboard under boot heel, as Marcus is moving along behind Julius in a door-wards trajectory.

The way he catches Marcus's elbow is steadying, not steering. Once they're outside, he says, "Should I ask what that was about?" quiet. He's not concerned, not yet, but adjacent to it. Marcus isn't the only one who's just been surprised.

The way Marcus' hand catches on the door frame on their way out is also steadying, and he is reminded enough of the firmer directional grip that Rutyer had steered him with that once they step out into the street, he pulls away. Gentler, here, in match of Julius' gentler handling, but not subtle.

"A disagreement," he answers, shortly, dismissively. A better question: "What are you doing here?"

The note of accusation there is less charming than it might be, in combination with pulling his arm away. Julius's tone is still patient, but his expression is a bit more assessing. "I had a long day, and I thought I might have a drink before I headed back. I didn't know you were in town, yet in that particular tavern."

Oh.

As with anyone, if you drink enough, certain layers are stripped back. In the case of Marcus, his customary opacity is scrubbed thinner, so Julius can see the oh and easily read it as someone who anticipated a different answer. He stands there for a second, then loosely gestures back at the building they just exited.

"Don't go in that one," Marcus advises, accent more pronounced than usual. "They'll overcharge you."

Edited 2022-08-28 23:27 (UTC)

The response is so unexpected that it startles Julius into a brief laugh. "...noted. Were you heading for the ferry, or did you plan to try your luck at a different establishment next?" He's not especially eager for this to be any sort of disagreement, though the lopsided quality of a conversation where one party is sober and the other is distinctly not is a hard one to navigate around.

It is a nice laugh. Normally it feels like a victory to evoke it, and it still does, somewhat, but the mirroring pang stops Marcus short of, like, smiling, instead dropping a look to the muddy street between them as he searches out his cigarette case in his pocket without yet retrieving it.

The news that it's not so late that he could return to the Gallows is also flinched back from, and he shakes his head. "I'll get a room." It won't be the first time this month, more since the Conclave, that he's informed them of this particular intention—normally later, though, when the room is already gotten, conveying the bare minimum.

But Julius is here, and not a crystal, easily abandoned. Still. "You should," and when the end of that sentence fails to form, Marcus settles on, "do as you like."

Have a drink and go home, ostensibly.

The smile that accompanied the laugh fades. He's been telling himself to give Marcus space, but seeing him in person, it's harder to cling to the idea that he's being overprotective when he worries. "Do you not want company?" he asks, after a slight pause, and it's a little more loaded than Julius strictly intends it to be. Who is Marcus running from, exactly, hangs behind it unsaid.

"No,"

automatically, and it's an awkward answer to that question because it could mean no, I don't and also no, I do, and Marcus catches himself in between these impulses, irritation crossing his expression, in the next breath out. Inwards facing, really, although the nuances may be difficult to make out, murky.

"Does it appear to you as though I planned on any?"

"It's not an accusation," Julius says, frank and unsure how to get at that irritation, what it's for. "It's not ... I only don't understand. What it is that you need when you stay in town." He realizes as he says it that it's possibly too much honesty for when Marcus is already in his cups, but once it's away he stands by it. There's no calling it back, after all.

There's been a little foot traffic. It flows around them with the immunity of a night time crowd that deals with far stranger things than two mages having a slightly sharp conversation in the light of a tavern, on the street. And the longer Marcus dithers here, the more restless he feels, more aware of Julius' concern sinking in like a hook, the more he wishes to tug against it.

"It's what I don't need," he says. "Fussing over."

It feels like biting down, and then biting harder, something instinctive and physical. Maybe Julius will argue with him. Maybe that would be nice to do. (Guilt, already, for only flustering him, for making him worry, churning away.)

Edited 2022-08-29 01:24 (UTC)

"Fussing." It's a bit flatter, where Marcus has prodded a sore spot. There's a part of Julius that knows this isn't productive, that he should let Marcus go and perhaps have a different conversation in the morning. But there's another part that suspects they will just never have the conversation at all, and that's what leads him to say: "Maker forbid that she or I care to know how you are."

"How I am is not good, Julius," a little sarcastic. Obviously.

And very well, if this conversation is to be had in the middle of the street, then they shall, and Marcus steps in nearer. It isn't posturing, exactly, not the same kind of stepping up where he's inviting something violent, even if it can't be described as friendly, either. Intimate, more like, following the swerve of impulse.

Well, most of them. He doesn't put his hands on him, not right then. "You know," he starts, sharp focus managed through the bleariness, "there's this hallway that leads from the guard offices to the tower we live in, and unless it's raining hard, I take the long way instead. I don't think about it, really, it's only instinct. And even when it is raining hard, and I go through it, I didn't think about it then, either. It was a long time ago.

"But now I do think of it," a brief smile, of a biting kind, "since Solace, I do. And now I wake up in bed with you both, after one of these dreams, and I feel nothing that I want to feel when I'm in bed with either of you. And I don't want you to look at me like," and now he runs out of some steam, a breath out.

Regret, icy. So much for impulse.

There is just a moment when it's as if he's struck him, and Julius is teetering between hurt and anger at the unexpected blow. But then it vanishes, sinks in and away like it was never there and Julius just looks tired, for all there's a slightly more stubborn set to his jaw now. He doesn't back up.

"Like what, Marcus?" he counters, quiet. "You know you're not the only one who has been sleeping worse since Solace, I hope." They haven't talked about it, and Julius had thought it was because Marcus simply didn't want to. It's jarring now to suddenly wonder if he didn't even have the capacity to notice.

Regret, again, and even icier.

"'Sleeping worse'," Marcus repeats, enunciated in harsher Starkhaven brogue, eyes bright. "Is that what I said, just now."

Anyone else, perhaps he'd retreat. Shake them off with the silent indication that they should go and fuck themselves and leave him be. If it is better or worse that he doesn't, he will have to decide that in the morning, his hand then going out to find the edge of Julius' jacket and hold him there, in this extremely conspicuous argument. Like perhaps if someone were to leave, he wants to decide the terms of it.

Committing, anyway, to what he tried to bail out of. "I don't want you to look at me like you are now," taking care to make sure there isn't any slurring. He wishes to be clear. "Tired. Done. 'Sleeping worse'. You're such a polite idiot sometimes, truly."

"You absolutely know what I meant," he says, clipped, letting Marcus hold his jacket. He's not pulling away. In fact, it's almost defiant how he isn't: Julius hasn't been the one running recently. "And I can't imagine how you got anywhere near the idea that I am 'done' with you in any capacity, but if my wanting to treat a person I care about well offends you, let me say this in blunter terms. You absolutely have the right not to be well right now, but if you are trying to convince yourself that I, or Petrana for that matter, only want you near us on your best behavior, neither of us intends to sit back and let you wallow in that baseless delusion in the name of ... what. Not wanting to see that we care about you?"

He's aware that they're making a scene, but just at present, he doesn't care.

Well, when you put it that way.

It is all reasonable and articulate and, well, frank in the way Marcus has before made light of them both for not being, and all at once he is just directionlessly angry and inebriated and holding onto another man's jacket as much for balance as it is for the miscalculation that Julius might try to walk away from him. The stubborn set to his shoulders and jaw loosens by a fraction, if not completely, still reeling a little between words like 'wallow' and 'baseless' and 'delusion',

but not for nothing. He does not draw back from any of it the way you would at injustice, at mischaracterisation, absorbing honesty like poison. The wet prickle that surfaces at the corners of his eyes feels like self-sabotage, as though he hadn't already been doing that.

Finally, "I've been angry," roughly, quietly, "with nowhere for it to go."

Templars sitting across from him, politely or disrespectfully, but all untouchable. Loyalists in a fancy auditorium, no warring mood besides his own. A missing saboteur. Easier, maybe, to take it out on whoever will fight him, or at least let it get wrung out of him in the process.

"It's not fair," is a little more ambiguous, but the slant of his tone implies: for Petra, for Julius, to be around.

It's uncharacteristic, the way his quiet laugh shakes. "Fair. I'm a Southern mage, what the bloody hell do I know about things being fair?" They've been through so much, the both of them: recently and not, together and separately. And he can't help but be struck, in a way he'd usually not show, by the ridiculous fact that they can both still find it in their hearts to feel betrayed at injustice after all this time.

Marcus is right. It absolutely isn't fair.

The hand not somewhat restrained by Marcus's hold on Julius's jacket goes to Marcus's forearm. It's just light, not gripping.

"You have everything to be angry about," he says, lower. "But you don't need to hide it from us. From me. And if you need space, that's one thing, but you can't tell me not to worry because I love you and I briefly thought you were dead and now I sometimes feel as if you'd rather I'd never have seen you weak when all I wanted, desperately, was for you to be alive."

It is difficult for Julius to be this direct, let alone in public. But this encounter is the latest in a series of things that have shaken him. Better to do the hard thing than to let go; that much, at least, feels familiar. Whether or not it will profit him much this evening remains to be seen.

He has the dim awareness that Julius is doing this for him, that this is not a thing Julius just does for free, or for just anyone. It has the same register and lack of relent as truth serum's compulsion, that same intensity, and perhaps it is shameful to have brought it out, or perhaps it is good. Perhaps it is both. Marcus' grip on Julius' jacket tightens, reflexive.

He'd meant it, speaking of truth serum, when he'd said he wanted things to be good for the pair of them. His inability to hold true to that—

Well, is more of a testament to the stupid impossibility of anything being good all the time. Some knot of tension halfway releases, the next breath out harder, shaky. "Part of me wants to vanish," said, after a moment, and with a kind of frayed dryness to his tone that indicates he means this in the ground swallowing him whole kind of sense. And yes, how much he'd prefer not to be seen weak. "The rest wants to go home."

Which is, perhaps, progress.

"I love you as well," not to let that just go unsaid, finally easing up off crinkling Julius' clothes. Hand resting at his wrist. "Both of you. And the fussing. And it isn't— I didn't mean it that way."

Is there a magic spell to be immediately sober? That'd be great.

Edited 2022-09-07 11:37 (UTC)

Julius exhales, and though it doesn't shake, it does suggest that he's been shaken a bit too. "Come home. Tonight or tomorrow or whenever you need. But don't stay away for our sake, that's not ... we don't need you to be not angry." It's quiet, and it sounds as if there should be a for fuck's sake on the end.

Still quiet, he adds, "I would suggest having some water, wherever you end up," and it's a gentle joke that's also testing where they've landed.

First, there's a pinch at Marcus' brow, more expressive than he'd be if he were not so thoroughly in his cups—a protest, somewhat, even if he hasn't a coherent order of words to express the content of that protest. That it's as simple as that, the way Julius says that word, when it is an ugly, spiky, poisonous feeling that needles and chokes. Like he himself had misrepresented something vital about its nature.

But it eases. You absolutely know what I meant. His fingers curl around Julius' wrist. Tries to know what he means.

—and then does issue a laugh-adjacent sound at this last helpful reminder.

Helpful reminder in part to recall that he has had a lot to drink (for him) and that Julius has not, and while such a configuration might ordinarily be Fine, perhaps Tolerable, if not even Pleasant or Amusing—this plainly hasn't been such, and will continue to not be.

The temptation to bury all of this into a deep sleep in some anonymous bed spurs him to decide, "Tomorrow," without actually letting go. "But come with me a bit."

That last addition gets a small but warm smile. "Of course. Where were you planning to stay?" It's clearly a purely logistical question; it's not a question of trust, he just wants to know where they're going. Eventually, they'll probably let go of each other, but it's helpful that Marcus wants to him to at least see him to where he's staying. (If nothing else, Julius is alert to the chance of Marcus's risk of getting cheated for what is possibly the second time in the evening, and the way that chance lowers somewhat with a sober companion at his side.)

Everything else can wait until tomorrow.

Having Julius walk with him has several benefits. Wards against the possibility of cutthroats, for one—Kirkwall is not exactly known for its safe streets. Ensures Marcus does get to where he's going, after he speaks of the Red Lantern and where it can be found, instead of becoming lost. It also functions as something of a peace gesture, of allowing the other man to look after him in some small and tolerable measure before they part ways.

It's also just much less awkward than trying to shake free of each other right then, still stinging. That's also vital.

It is very early that Marcus wakes, pounding headache and some dim edges to his recollection—everything except the conversation itself, the minute details of it. There is a feeling of urgency that he carries throughout the morning, a need to act without being wholly and immediately certain as to what that looks like, but Julius' crystal remains dull (at least, of messages from Marcus) as his day continues.

It is a little by accident that they run into each other in the late afternoon, Julius returned to their quarters for whatever reason (some forgotten book, scrap of paperwork, this is what you guys get for bringing your work home with you), and then the sound of the door opening behind him.

Stepping through, Marcus has cleaned up, scraping himself together within the lines of presentable, but this is also obviously the first time today he's made it back to their room. There is a moment of pause to see the room isn't empty, but he closes the door behind him.

"Hello."

Marcus had said they'd speak, and Julius had trusted that he'd find him when he was ready. But the truth is, at present he's so focused on retrieving his wayward notes that Marcus's presence manages to fully take him by surprise. "...hello," he says, clearly shifting from one mental track into another as Marcus comes in. He does put the notes away; whatever they are, they're something that can wait. "How are you feeling?"

He means, probably, mainly the hangover; how Marcus is feeling more generally is fairly clear, after the previous evening.

"Hmh," is approximately the sound he makes, as an answer.

Which doesn't mean he doesn't wish to talk, otherwise he'd probably go about what he was going to go about doing. Shaving, probably, a few days worth of growth now showing darker than usual on his jaw and throat. Changing his clothing, also very likely, rumpled at the edges. But those priorities are quick to slip down the list of order.

He tracks Julius setting down the notes, takes that as some form of permission or sign to enter the room further, specifically in his direction. "I was going to go by your office," he explains, and clears his throat, its usual underused roughness all the worse for a hard night and the cigarettes he's since burned through.

But here you are, is the implication. He reaches out, taking one of Julius' hands. The other man could be (quite rightfully) angry with him, or resistant to familiarity, and so it is something of a testing of boundaries to breach personal space. Better, Marcus thinks, than hovering at its edge.

"I'm sorry about last night," straightforward, all the while.

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