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 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."