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

[ipseite]

Petrana is still smiling when she says, “No,” pleasantly. “I wish to walk this way this morning. I wish to see who else is out so early,”

—isn't completely implausible. And certainly, she has spoken before of the uses of seeing and being seen in Hightown. She doesn't come all the way up here for her health, after all, even if it does boast a less antagonistic scent than does the dock, or Lowtown.

It could be that simple.

[luaithre]

It could be.

But the possibility that Petrana de Cedoux is, in fact, fucking with him, happens like a lurch somewhere low in his chest, white-static confusion clarifying in the midst of trying to figure out how to articulate exactly how little he wishes to go any further in this direction. And then he stops that.

The sigh that escapes Marcus is short and sharp through his nose. "Petra," spoken in place of resuming their walk. Well-to-do Kirkwall citizens patiently stream around them, with only a couple of glances in their direction.

[ipseite]

The way that she sucks in a breath, bracing, perhaps speaks for the latter possibility. The way that she pivots to him, and the particular arch of her eyebrows when she says—

“I am going this way, Marcus, this morning.”

This morning, in particular.

“And you may join me, if you wish. I understand you to be quite capable of choosing where it is that you wish to be.”

It's gonna be like that.

[luaithre]

It only makes sense that she was angry with him right away. Last night, over the crystals, and he knows a twinge of misgiving, irritation, that she is only making plain her feelings now. Said twinge is immediately swallowed. Guilt, regret, all those murky things that only kind of shows on his face.

The other sentiment there, more plainly than the rest: fair enough. Alright let's go look at some fucking cymbals. He moves to continue their walk, keeping possession of her hand in the crook of his elbow.

"There's nowhere I'd rather go," feeling vampiric in direct sunlight, her hand on his arm. He mostly means it, but it's not without a lick of dry, resigned humour.

[ipseite]

Fair enough, his face says, and followed up with that resigned, dry assent, and Petrana had been ready to have a fight with him about it, or to make the rest of this morning significantly more unpleasant than it is even about to be—

he gives in, and she relents less than she perhaps ought and more than she otherwise might have done. Some of the tension in her hand relaxes, a grip that had only not become particularly nail-oriented because of the softness of her kid gloves, and she leads the way forward with her chin up high, smiling again.

It is occasionally a problem that Petrana is so prone to smiling when she's angry, but not one that's to be solved today. No, today: there is music, brassy and bold and nothing suited to the morning after the night before, and the ambient chatter of those who'd come out of their houses and establishments to enjoy it, and the rattle of carriages rumbling past them and it is almost certainly becoming apparent the precise nature of his punishment.

The establishment she particularly favours most weeks in Hightown enjoys its own rotating cast of musicians, and it had been her intention to request a table nearer —

but upon arrival, she makes no objection to the pair of them being ushered to her usual alcove on the second level, where it is quieter and more private.

[luaithre]

Reaching the table, Marcus is of the interpretation he's completed a trial rather than being granted a reprieve from one. Beyond some squinting when faced with direct sun, and the tension knotted high in his back, and the fact that he does not smile unless there is something to smile over, there'd been no complaint from him as he'd escorted Petrana wherever she'd wandered.

Now, inside—well, first, he pulls out her chair, but then rounds around to his own to sit down with an air of relief that belies all that stoicism. When asked what they would like, his demand is a gruff, "Wine, and coffee after," and sets about taking out his cigarette case while Petrana orders their food.

Once they are alone—

He watches her through a fresh rise of smoke, semi-slumped in a way that might be rakish if he was less rumpled. His consideration is frank, even tactical. Places the case on the table, slides it over to her in offer.

[ipseite]

Petrana's eyebrow raises at wine, but she makes no protest of it — orders a tasting platter of their breakfast menu, and advises she'll speak up when the coffee arrives if they wish to order more of anything in particular.

“I do not know,” she says, as she neatly removes a cigarette from his case and lights it ably from the end of her smallest finger, “what it is that has got into you, of late, or why you seem to have forgotten at which hours the ferry is and is not available. I do know that I cannot be expected to be patient or understanding with behaviour you do not see fit to explain to me,”

she pours from the pitcher of water on their table, holding her now-lit cigarette between her fingers,

“or you will not expect it twice, certainly. You are, of course, a grown man who is by no means beholden to explain himself if he does not care to do so.”

It's just she can find someone with cymbals quite early in the morning, if that's the case.

[luaithre]

Time for a second trial.

If that 'trial' is 'loved one speaks her mind likely from a place of care and concern alongside all the rest', which, who says it isn't, given his avoidance. Little changes in Marcus' posture, consideration of her across the table remaining even, and the copper case left on the table, although there is a little tic of displeasure somewhere in there.

If he avoids nothing else about this experience, let it be being reminded by either of his partners that he's a grown man. He taps off some ash a little earlier than necessary onto a small empty side dish that probably serves a different function than that. Minor agitations.

"I'm sorry," he says.

[ipseite]

Petrana tilts her head and studies him for a moment, and—

“I see. Well,”

snapping a napkin open to lay it across her lap,

“then I suppose that is all that needs to be said about that.”

She can hardly protest a decision to apologise rather than explain when she's only said it's entirely his decision—

[luaithre]

There is the impulse to let that stand.

Because Marcus is certainly not above enduring and sharing in an unhappy meal with minimal talking, especially in the service of deferring conversation to some mythical better time. Undirected resentment winds his jaw closed tighter and tenser, listening to the bright sounds of the eatery around them, the distant music, concentrating on the pattern of smoke, the scent of it.

It lasts for a moment, before he gives a slightly doggish huff of sigh and says, "Petra—"

Which is a great moment for the server to come by with the glass carafe of wine, something clear and sweet and summery. They make their exit quickly after pouring their glasses, which may or may not be due to the ambient tension, and Marcus sets his cigarette aside. Reaches, frost lacing across the glass where his fingers touch it, cooling the liquid inside with a minor enchantment.

Finishes half of it. It's probably not fortification for the day so much as defense against the previous evening, but it's not not that either. "I don't know that I have a good explanation," is honest. "But if I've vexed you—that wasn't my intent. The opposite of it."

[ipseite]

Petrana does not set her cigarette aside; she regards him through the smoke that rises from it and that she breathes out, irritation setting her mouth small and thin and warring with the impulse to let his apology be enough, and pursue nothing further for the worry of how much further it might go. Except that she had rather fight with him, frankly—

but it is not with that intent that she says, “I don't know how you imagine you could not have vexed me,” and it is honest, a true thing and not only said to wound. “I do not find it reassuring to have you so absent, without a word of your obvious—”

She takes a breath, and it comes out acrid smoke.

“Something is amiss with you, and you had rather share it with half Kirkwall than me. What is to please me, in that?”

[luaithre]

Fights are good to have, sometimes, and he has several bruises beneath over-warm layers of clothing to attest to this claim. His reluctance to spar with Petrana in particular, though, has him settle quiet in place amidst their shared smoke and the distance music, gaze dropped to the table cloth in quiet thought. The question of explanation.

The word 'obvious', even more than 'absent' or 'amiss', does something to lay a crack in prideful containment, sentence snipped mercifully snipped away. He is quiet only because he is searching for the simplest terms he can put something that feels complex into.

"Nights have been difficult," he says, finally, reaching to flick ash into a receptacle. "And comfort hard to reach for."

[ipseite]

Her words are measured, beneath a sharp gaze, saying, “It is not only yourself you deny comfort.”

And she might leave it at that, only, but she doesn't— cannot resist, a beat later, “And I think it unkind that you should think otherwise. Of me.”

Of Julius, too, but they are not one and the same and she shouldn't speak for him. Particularly not when she's minded to speak with such edge in it.

[luaithre]

"I thought,"

and Marcus hesitates, then takes a breath of smoke as if to fortify himself for whatever thing he's doing to say next, and when he does say it, it's not without some apology for how asinine it sounds also to him,

"that it would be alright, you having one another."

Asinine because they've been doing this for long enough that Marcus knows how it doesn't work that way, not really. None of them replace another in this strange, dynamic little tangle of personalities, love split—'evenly' is the wrong word, just split, the way arteries split, and just as vital. But still.

"I don't mean to say that anything you've done or are makes it difficult for me to reach to. The difficulty lies with me only."

[ipseite]

Were it not so clear from the tone of his voice that he's aware of exactly how what he's saying sounds, the look that Petrana levels at him for it might have been— wordier. More detailed aloud in his mistake. It isn't necessarily better in any substantial way that she clearly presumes he can take most of it read from just her face.

“That you wish to handle a matter yourself,” she says, eventually, “is not in itself unacceptable. It is cruelly unkind to pretend that it will go unseen, or that I shall not care. I am not merely vexed. It is not a matter of fleeting pique. It is an injury that someone who I love thinks so little of me that it is a surprise to you, now, that I will care.”

[luaithre]

It's good that Petrana does not elaborate on this first part verbally, or else Marcus might have to explain that it was merely the justification of a sad drunk man who had only internalised the sentiment rather than say it out loud. Which he doesn't wish to do.

The rest is not exactly easy for this absence, though. The prospect of doing injury is, as ever, the thing he wants most in the world to avoid doing to her and to Julius both, a pinch of unhappiness apparent in his expression as he otherwise sits silently, listening. He began the day with little appetite and has even less of it now, but he wouldn't mind it if a server came along with their breakfast to interrupt this conversation.

Of course they do not, doubtless busy applying sturgeon roe to creamed eggs with tweezers or something. Oh well.

"When we all begun as three," he says, after a moment, "I knew I could only allow you both to welcome me that way if it was to our gain. That I wouldn't be taking something away from you both, or that—whatever it is that I may do, or whatever may happen to me, it wouldn't reflect badly on either yourself or him. It hasn't truly been tested, that, not until now."

He's been talking to his improvised ashtray, he realises, and looks across to her now. She's cute when she's mad, but it doesn't mean he likes to see it. "I think everything of you. I'll amend my behaviour."