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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 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.

The impulse to brush it aside with a reassurance is all but visible, but he pauses. "Thank you," he says, instead. "I know I surprised you, however inadvertently, and it's ... I wish I'd said something to you before then, now. But I'm glad you did come to find me today." He's more quiet than angry, and his fingers readily lace with Marcus's when he takes his hand.

It contrarily seems somehow harder, now, tapping the frankness he'd managed to reach for last night under duress.

The reticence is visible, understandable, but not offputting. In the clarity of a sober morning, it becomes quite plain to Marcus that he'd rattled the other man, never mind how surprised he'd been to see him, and he has no desire to do it again. Marcus considers the room—there's the table and seating area, and the bed, but where the former strikes him as potentially formal, the latter feels like it sends an incorrect message.

So, he draws him towards the window, a place to stand and lean, and keep their hands tangled together.

"I ought to have done so myself," he says, as his shoulder finds a place against the stone. From here, the sun isn't blaring through, sunk on the other side of the Gallows. "I've been cowardly about it. I wasn't much better last night, either, but I didn't intend to hurt you at all, even when I was."

As much time as he's spent on crawling his way out of a hangover, he's also had some time to think. About the conversation, the patterns that led to it, about what a useful conversation might be after.

"Part of all this has been that, too. Keeping things away."

"I can understand the impulse, you know," Julius said, softer. "To stay away from the people who matter to you until you're somehow better. It's not that it's unfamiliar."

It's just that it looks different from the other side, when he's the one who so often goes away. True, it looks different in Julius; he's usually still physically to hand. But he knows the pattern intimately all the same.

"I have missed you, though," he adds. "And I've wondered if I've left anything I should do undone. I suppose a bit hard not to, under the circumstances."

"I don't know."

—errs on a doubtful side of not knowing, judging by his tone. If Julius left anything undone, if Marcus had given him room to do anything otherwise, him or Petrana. Hard to imagine that if he'd been given half a chance, Julius wouldn't have simply said all the right things some more and half of this month at least might have been spent a little more peacefully. It's nice to be missed.

It's also nice to be understood, but it feels like the fantasy equivalent of a blank check, blindly cashed in. Marcus squeezes Julius' fingers just lightly. "First evening I stayed away," he says, finally, "it was because I got into a fight. Nothing to the argument, and no magic to it, just ordinary. And I didn't want to come home to you both like that, in that state.

"And then the other times it was the same, but different because I found them faster. It felt," and a pause, grasping for a word, "not good, but almost. Exhausting, which was better. Fair fights. And fewer dreams."

It isn't a good explanation for anything and it isn't really presented as one, spoken somewhere more mid-chest on Julius than to his face. He hasn't shaken it, whatever he'd been avoiding about how he would prefer to be looked at.

"A less frustrating way to be angry?" Julius suggests. He doesn't try to force Marcus to meet his gaze, letting him take the time he needs. He's here, and he's trying, and that counts for a great deal, in Julius's opinion.

It's hard not to want to suggest alternatives, to start fixing things, but he resists the urge as unhelpful for now. Instead he just waits to see if Marcus will elaborate, or correct him, or whatever else comes next. It's not unpleasant, standing by the window and holding his hand, even if Julius wishes the circumstances prompting it were better.

The sound Marcus makes to that is affirmative. Not incorrect.

And in itself, this move to inquire is reassuring, as far as responses go. Even if Julius certainly has the capability to conceal more honest thoughts and feelings and reaction behind measured response, he trusts it anyway. "A way of being so," he adds. "And doing anything for it. Not just taking it, living with it.

"I know drunkards in Lowtown aren't Templars," he adds, a shade of wryness evident in tone. "And—sorry," reflexive apology, heralding a shift in thought, bright memory offered up out of last night's fog, "I shouldn't have thrown that at you, about the Gallows."

"I could have responded better," he says, quietly. "I only ... I do know this place mean something different to you. I suspect it means something different to me, again, compared to Petrana. We all came into this place carrying heavy things, but they were different things." He's quiet a moment, his thumb moving slowly along Marcus's thumb.

"It didn't not affect me. The attack. I mean, I don't think you think that, but I know I..." Getting Marcus back had been so much his focus, and once that had been done, it was easier to prioritize his well-being. Even if Julius too had needed time to physically heal, it was easy for Julius to keep his focus on the trauma that had been done to the attack's main target.

Marcus' attention further drops to their hands, first, but only after for a moment before watching Julius' face, silent in the wake of a broken off sentence.

In the days after, Bastien had asked: how is your Fereldan? He'd responded with noting Julius' resilience, which remains true, will remain true, and he thinks less of that and more of the other man's hedging. How Marcus had gotten the worst of it, but perhaps he's used to that sort of danger, and how neither of those qualifications felt correct. Simple.

Resilient, though.

There's no end to Julius' sentence, so Marcus speaks up. "I left you with it," he says, an apology in his tone. "Not purposefully, but I did. I suppose—"

A broken off sentence, uncertain the worth of expressing something that could go wrong. But, well, not expressing things never goes right.

"Correct me," in restarting. "If I have it wrong. But there are times when we speak of what we carry, you will make it lighter. Less. In the way you speak of it. I don't know if—I never worked out if it's deliberate or not, or just what you do for yourself. It's not a good reason not to ask how you are," he adds, turning their hands in what almost constitutes a shrug. "Like I said, I've been cowardly."

But there was something there he wasn't ready to do.

Edited 2022-09-18 00:50 (UTC)

There's a long pause. Julius doesn't pull away, but his gaze is downward for a moment, considering. It's perhaps telling that he needs the time. But he does look back up, eventually.

"It isn't you in particular," he says, finally, quiet. "I only never felt as if ... things that have happened already, that nothing can change. I survived better if I made them lighter to carry with me. There were always more, after all, and I didn't see what good it would do, examining them in detail after the fact. It became a habit. I don't mean to make you wonder if I'm turning away from you in particular. I'm not."

He's still not entirely sure what would happen if he stopped. He's skirted it before, with Marcus and Petrana both, a time or two. But it feels rather like letting go of a railing while standing somewhere very high.

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