It isn’t easy to tell, in this moment: the bones of his face cut out stark in the candlelight, his eyes devoid of humor. This is a stupid thing Loxley has said. Another long-suffering cleric of Oghma might have given young Chivalry a similar look for a similar sort of question in an orphanage, once upon a time.
He sips his wine.
He takes a seat.
Thot has already stepped down off Loxley’s shoulder onto the table where she can hop to better see his face, to nibble his chin, to roll and slither her way down onto her side in search of space in his lap past the table’s edge.
It is enough like that—that look—for Loxley to pinch his mouth into a more rueful shape, but at least Richard is sitting now. Eye level. Distracted, then, by Thot and her restless affection, sharp-taloned and beaked. He tries to accommodate her, but the prospect of letting her scratch his thighs to hell is less than appealing.
Shh, he tells her, offering coat sleeve instead, where she could sit against his chest if she wanted. Stiff-backed at every little flutter of wing, but doing his best.
"I was worried," he tries instead, looking back over across the table, "when you didn't respond. But happy to learn you were back." Then, "Her claws are much bigger like this," with a faint laugh, a quick smile. "Her tentacles, I always thought, matched the friendliness, if a little too well."
There are lines here and there in the grain of his beard for Silas to feel for while he watches Loxley maneuver his familiar. Spaces where scars have nicked through; a gap at his temple where shrapnel raked by on its way to flicking out a chunk of his ear. He tests the prickle at his throat he hasn’t yet sanded away -- furrows his brow just slightly at mention of tentacles, an unspoken question mark.
He doesn’t follow.
“Who asked you to contact me?”
Shh. Thot croaks. Loxley offers a coat sleeve, she gropes a scaly mitten warm around his hand at the end of it.
There is a disappointed flicker of something in Loxley's expression as his Subtle Hint™ is rejected, but only a flicker. Overtaken, quickly, by the nature of the rejection, frowning at the question. At its assumption.
And Loxley lets Thot have his hand, rough and sharp, dimpling silver qunari skin.
Thot’s groping pauses mid-squeeze; she stills as if at the snap of a rolled paper, the ruff of her crest pasted back flat.
Richard is also still, bony fingers curled to a stop under his jaw.
Three years is a far longer stretch of time than he traveled with Ser Loxley after meeting him in Promias. Silas the snake man studies his face very closely across the table, silent measure. He’d murdered him in in a dream and was unkind about it afterwards. Loyalties change.
Richard. Loxley is not so oblivious that he can't read suspicion out of silence, after a pointed question. He does not clock Thot's stillness, necessarily, a hand resting light on feathery back as though she were still a cat, but his attention is forwards. Worried, again, after relief at finding Richard upright and apparently whole had done something to neutralise it.
Loxley considers, in silence, mouth opening before he actually speaks, first, still deciding, then, "Derrica had asked me if I'd heard from you," cautiously, unclear if this is what Dick is looking for but providing it anyway. "That you'd gone silent on your mission. So I thought I'd try.
"No one's asking me to be here either, for the record."
He looks away, chagrined, the scruff of his jaw hatcheted out sharp around a harder frown. Resistance is inevitable: doubt tucked away soft into his shell, his arms folded tightly against his chest. It’s easier to muddle through all the coal in his breast he’s compacting into diamond without having to look at Loxley’s face.
Derrica makes sense as the source. It’s within the realm of possibility she wasn’t even being manipulative when she asked him.
“We were close,” he says, finally. “I don’t think I’ll find anyone else here.”
It's unexpected, what Richard says—the second part, more than the first, and just as much for its offering as its content. Loxley's expression reflects a mild surprise that is just as quick to settle, doing some hasty arithmetic in silence. Resistance against offering pat platitude or silly questions, probably.
Well, fuck, articulated in a short sigh.
"I'm sorry," he offers, finally. "Truly."
He'd liked her, and even better liked seeing them together.
It’s visceral in that way: a borrowed part that won’t be returned to him, a void in his gut atop the persistent pointlessness of such a fleeting, forgettable existence. If he’d vanished a year ago, he might have been spared half a dozen similar blows and no one in this world would’ve been much worse for wear.
But who is life fair for in Thedas, really.
As is, he manages to wring the wet sting at his eyes back into a manageable sheen, and he doesn’t have to sniff to do it. Dignity intact.
There is no other alternative to the silence that falls between them, a little funerary for someone that doesn't sound to Loxley like she is actually dead, but mourning hangs off his friend across the table like a rain-soaked cloak. And so. He scritches Thot through her ruff of feathers, gaze dipped down to afford Richard and his eye-sheen a little privacy.
But he doesn't leave. He does, instead, go to pick up his cup of wine without sipping from it, idly turning it in his hand.
Asks the question, finally, "Would you have gone with her?" The if you could have is implicit.
But a good time, for a while. He’d considered it, confession weary in a crook at his brow.
He’d considered it fleetingly, the way a man considers quitting his job and purchasing a motorcycle only to immediately recall that he has several children, a cat, and a home due to be consumed by a great looming evil. Folded up as he is, the extent of his resentment is difficult to discern. The warning in his earlier stillness has dissipated, tension released.
He’s just tired.
Thot has fluffed herself gradually back into an overgrown obsidian pinecone, making room for Loxley’s fingertips to get in under her feathers.
Loxley thinks there's the potential for his own feelings to be hurt, that Richard might have disappeared if he could have, but it's a tricky kind of feeling to actually stick when confronted with it. Irritation that has yet to mature to anger sort of flares off in a Fitcherwards direction, vague in itself, and it's not a spark he allows to catch.
Because the only utility to it would be to try to get Richard angry too, you know, instead of just sad, and the sodden lump of guy across the table from him looks like very unlikely kindling.
Scritch scritch. He breaks to take a long sip of wine.
"Do you mind if I'm glad you came back?" has a tentative amount of humour injected into it.
A tug at the corner of his mouth will have to pass for a smile.
The fact that he so rarely smiles to begin with makes for a low threshold for success.
Loxley is just very good, is the thing.
“We all have flaws in our judgment,” Silas says, while Thot waddles to bump under Loxley’s cup. Dick has a cup of his own to reach for; he takes his time unstitching an arm from its fold.
After a sip, Loxley kind of angles the cup for Thot to inspect as she likes, inasmuch as a hawk might have any interest. A fond chuckle, and he says, "And I her," and he remembers, quite abruptly, sitting on a blood-spattered marble floor in a grand palatial chamber, clutching a skin-and-bones cat to his chest that had, moments ago, been cracked open.
His chest, not the cat. Rough-tongued licking away blood. Air funnels through his nasal passages in a hint of disturb, chasing it with a longer sip of wine.
He wasn’t sleeping anyway, his cup plucked up and tilted for him to drink.
Thot clips her beak around the edge of Loxley’s cup as it’s offered. She’ll eventually turn over onto her back entirely, wyvern talons kicked up to squeeze and flex at empty air. Every so often she rocks herself closer with a tuck of her feathery shoulders. Richard watches her without speaking, his thoughts elsewhere. Nowhere.
"A few days, then, at least," Loxley says, sort of a prod of a reply. Shared quarters it is. It's not as though he needs a key. "Wonderful."
It's a little early to go to bed, for a Loxley, who had counted on a longer conversation before Richard's eye wanders distant. Well, that doesn't have to be a deterrent, even if part of him is a little bit looking for an excuse to dismiss it as unimportant. Irrelevant.
"There's something I'd raise with you," finally. "But it can wait for the morning."
Richard is mapping out what a few days might look like superimposed over his current plan to spend the next week wrapped in a blanket at his desk in pursuit of some crucial snip of research that has evaded him. He’s had mental breakdowns in mixed company before.
This is a step up from that. Familiar company to supervise the process of him packing himself away again.
He pulls back into focus through the warm buzz of wine soothing his Agonies, looks to Loxley in even aside at the sound of his voice. It’s possible the last time they were seated at a table like this together, Fitcher was there too.
Richard is treated to a searching look from Loxley, and customarily, it isn't clear how much he gets back from his efforts. Indecision manifests as idly and gently pricking his fingertips against Thot's talons, rocking her a little as he does so.
His shoulders lift, lower. "While you were away," Loxley says, "I dreamed myself back home.
"Amyra left to keep safe the Vessel of the Water Temple, after we cleansed it. We saved a kingdom from an archdevil. The wizard made his way back to us. Not all of that in that order. Now we're at the doorstep of the Fire Temple."
He'd been looking a little bit down, focused somewhere on the table. Now, he steers back up, offers Richard a wan smile. "It's so much, that's happened."
The coils of Richard’s attention tighten around indecision in return, less room to wriggle the longer they look at each other. Dredging up interest in this state might be a struggle, if not the buried instinct to pry after information someone isn’t sure they want him to have.
Even Thot has gone watchful, teetering as she is at the whim of leverage Loxley applies through her scythe claws.
It isn't an unwillingness to share it, so much as—it's such an awkward thing to speak about, and Richard is well-mired in this world. So is Loxley, in his way, but far less painfully. Maybe that can be read with decent insight, the way he sort of claws around his own memory for what he can offer.
Which may make this less fraught and less interesting for it, but. It's a risk Loxley is willing to take, now that he's here.
"I wrote Princess Kalysin a letter," he says, a little whimsically. "A love letter, and after I sent it, I realised I didn't use that word at all, so. Hopefully we all live through this next part so I can find out what she made of it. I learned that," and now there's an uncertain glance to Richard. Reticence.
But. He had only hesitated a little there, too. "The wizard had a theory about me, and proved it with a Banishment spell. You know, the way it sends the banished somewhere harmless if they're from the Prime Material. Um, apparently I'm not. I originate from where the Ascians come from.
"So, you know. It was me the whole time~," because why not make a joke twice.
The act of shifting perspective back to their home plane is more labor-intensive than he anticipated. He’d fallen asleep in a bog two years ago and woken up in this room, fresh memories cool and coppery sharp in the recesses of his brain.
They’ve had plenty of time to settle since then.
Loxley’s found his way into the princess’s good graces. Phineas is alive. Richard listens at a remove, his cup idle underhand, tracing back along lore that looms wildly out of place amidst his current drama.
What would Oghma think? Where do the Ascians come from?
Loxley drinks from his cup in the break between his speaking and Richard's answering. A little like he could use it, certainly.
No deaths to speak of, at least. Well. Sort of. No permanent deaths to speak of, and when Richard asks that question, the impulse is there to just say that, too, with good intentions attached: you brought me back. He swallows down wine and thinks seriously about it, before giving a bobbled nod. You know, yeah.
"I feel," and it sort of only occurs to him then, as he says it, "like so much less, here."
How important it is, the things he's doing in Tassia. This playing at romance with a princess and captaining a flying ship and a foot in the door of his third deadly temple of vital importance.
"Which is silly." A gesture of his wine glass, bringing it to his mouth again so that his next words trail off into echoey muffledness as they go. "I don't want to split saving this world only four to five ways, or anything."
A catch of non-comprehension might be telling if it wasn’t so fleet, there and gone into a more intent furrow -- supportive interest from a friend, a priest, a scholar.
“Who decides what we are?”
Something about this has recalled his wine to his attention; Rather than bolt the dregs to make room, Richard reaches for the bottle to top himself off. As a matter of course. He’s able to keep eye contact while he does it, past a glance to aim and another to measure.
“Surely it isn’t scope of influence.”
Edited (like this better ty) 2022-09-21 04:53 (UTC)
Loxley brings his glass back down in time for a top up, if Richard is feeling generous.
"I wouldn't have thought so, in Tassia," he agrees. "But then coming back here, so suddenly, and all of that urgency and pressure, gone—I don't really feel relieved about it."
What he does feel is confusing, clearly. If having less to do (even without the shortage of things to do, in Riftwatch) is a commentary on value, then how does one fathom the diminishment? But rather than hunt around for that meaning and how to pronounce it, he asks,
"How was it for you? When you woke up with it."
He hadn't shared it. Not until it could be used as a weapon. Loxley's tone is on the cautious side.
Richard rolls the bottleneck from his cup to Loxley’s glass, easy. The slosh of wine punctuates silence at the question, a moment’s thought before he plants the bottle back upright.
“Lonesome,” he says.
Rare honesty, while he’s reduced to an exhausted ginger scribble at their shared table.
“Oghma doesn’t exist here.” Two years is plenty of time to adjust accordingly, to plug the empty socket with weed and wine and an affair with a mage hunter and a magic cat. She uses Loxley’s wrist to roll to her feet as Richard scratches under his chin, not to return to him, but to try to pluck her way up Loxley’s sleeve to his shoulder. “There was an impersonator, for a time.”
Loxley startles just a little at the feeling of Thot readjusting herself, the flutter of feathers and prick of claws. He hovers a hand to help, but then she's on his arm, marching foot over foot to crab up onto his shoulder. He brushes a hand over her wing, but otherwise lets her sort herself out.
Suspecting her will have to fix his hair if she fixes his hair. But he picks up his refreshed glass, now leaning his elbows on the edge of the table in a more comfortable slouching forwards.
"A spirit?" he guesses, reaching for his scattered grasp of the local arcane lore. It nudges at another thing he ought to run by Richard, but not everything can be solved right here, at this table, so he focuses. Edges his thumb around the rim of the glass.
Says, "I fall in battle," a little apologetically, if anything. It's the thing on the way to the other thing he wants to say. "Properly fall, none of my own weird shit saving me that time. But you," gentle emphasis, "bring me back. And you bring Kally back. It was beautiful, that one.
"So, you know. If Oghma's not here, then at least he was making himself useful elsewhere."
Confirmation comes at a nod and a tilt at his brow, self-deprecating. He looks down to his wine, follows a fleck of cork spiraling loose at its center when he tilts it. Yes, a spirit.
His expression is difficult to read when he looks back up again, his study inscrutable in spite of its weary intensity, or all the more inscrutable for it. Like trying to read a very wet and haggard letter. One written in a cipher.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
And he is. Probably.
“Not that you died,” it’s unnecessary for him to assure. Until he follows it up with, “What was it like?”
Speaking to Richard without being wholly certain of what he is thinking or feeling is just one of those discomforts that Loxley has gotten used to. It's not an alien discomfort, not limited to only Richard, but made less comfortable in moments like these. Still, he has practice. It involves assuming what he is thinking, deciding it is charitable, and proceeding from there.
So there's just kind of the start of a smile for the question he settles on, and then some quiet as he thinks back to it.
"It was quick," he says. "You acted quickly. I think that matters. But I also felt as though I'd been asleep for days, waking up. But before that,"
death, not life, that's the question at hand,
"it felt like being lost. Like I didn't even know enough to know where I ought to go, no sense of where I'd been, just shadow. We talked a bit about it, what happens when a person dies. You were certain," or he spoke with certainty, "that I would go where those who'd done more good than bad would go. And perhaps that's what was waiting for me, and I don't think I got to see."
His hand wanders up, skritching Thot absent-mindedly under her chin, as though she were still cat-shaped. "But the way back felt like certainty. I ran to it, that sense of knowing. Woke up covered in blood," he tips his glass, "not all of it mine, but certainly a lot of it.
"It's also very odd," he adds, while they're being a little morbid, "to no longer have the scars to show for it. I can't even impress any girls about it."
Loxley’s retelling takes time to hold up against his own experience, one lens beside another glassing a distant flame. His recollection hasn’t dimmed over time. Oghma had welcomed him, only to turn him right back around before his bone-deep relief could calcify into resistance.
No rest for the wicked.
Or for Loxley, who has a princess to marry.
He dials back into the sight of Thot with her eyes crushed shut, stretched like a watering can to the scuff of Loxley’s fingertips, snakey muscle firm beneath the fluff of her feathers. A forked tongue sits blue in her parted beak.
“We could carve you up and I could heal them over again with scars,” Silas says. “If it’s integral to the operation.”
sounds real in affect, but the tip of a look to Richard mid-Thot skritch undermines it. No thanks, goth-dad.
There's a silence that follows, thinking back over their conversation, and before it, his own sense of anxious urgency that had compelled him not simply across the water, but also to pick the lock barring him entry. He ever feels inept about what to do or say about the things that happen to other people, on account of feeling inept about what to do or say about the things that happen to himself.
Still, that isn't any excuse. He says, "I'm sorry you've felt lonesome," and it doesn't ring like hollow sympathy, a sorry for your losses, but of a thing he has contributed to.
Richard settles his attention back on Loxley after a long drink, purple harsh around his eyes in his teeth. He’s scruffed raw and lean, pride shot around the slant of his bones, connections all frayed. Animals dredged out of flood waters have the same look.
He doesn’t know what to say either, hemmed into a half-hearted rifle through reassurances, platitudes.
“It was nice for a time. To have someone.”
This is the truth, for all that it’s also a stumping out of this line of conversation.
“I should rest,” he adds, to make sure. “I’m glad that you’re here.”
Loxley smooths rather than continues scuffing up Thot's feathers, finally lowering his hand. She is, anyway, welcome to stay on his shoulder for as long as its upright or he's not trying to dress down. He nods understanding, an understated gesture.
One that sympathises. They'd talked a while ago of love, or at least of the kinds of partnerships that resemble it. That being a Rifter is a complication. That there was no risk of love happening, for Richard.
Odd reversals all around, really.
"Rest," he bids. "I'll finish off some wine and follow your example."
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faderift2022-08-27 07:25 pm
no subject
It isn’t easy to tell, in this moment: the bones of his face cut out stark in the candlelight, his eyes devoid of humor. This is a stupid thing Loxley has said. Another long-suffering cleric of Oghma might have given young Chivalry a similar look for a similar sort of question in an orphanage, once upon a time.
He sips his wine.
He takes a seat.
Thot has already stepped down off Loxley’s shoulder onto the table where she can hop to better see his face, to nibble his chin, to roll and slither her way down onto her side in search of space in his lap past the table’s edge.
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Shh, he tells her, offering coat sleeve instead, where she could sit against his chest if she wanted. Stiff-backed at every little flutter of wing, but doing his best.
"I was worried," he tries instead, looking back over across the table, "when you didn't respond. But happy to learn you were back." Then, "Her claws are much bigger like this," with a faint laugh, a quick smile. "Her tentacles, I always thought, matched the friendliness, if a little too well."
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He doesn’t follow.
“Who asked you to contact me?”
Shh. Thot croaks. Loxley offers a coat sleeve, she gropes a scaly mitten warm around his hand at the end of it.
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And Loxley lets Thot have his hand, rough and sharp, dimpling silver qunari skin.
"No one," he says, easily.
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Richard is also still, bony fingers curled to a stop under his jaw.
Three years is a far longer stretch of time than he traveled with Ser Loxley after meeting him in Promias. Silas the snake man studies his face very closely across the table, silent measure. He’d murdered him in in a dream and was unkind about it afterwards. Loyalties change.
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Richard. Loxley is not so oblivious that he can't read suspicion out of silence, after a pointed question. He does not clock Thot's stillness, necessarily, a hand resting light on feathery back as though she were still a cat, but his attention is forwards. Worried, again, after relief at finding Richard upright and apparently whole had done something to neutralise it.
Loxley considers, in silence, mouth opening before he actually speaks, first, still deciding, then, "Derrica had asked me if I'd heard from you," cautiously, unclear if this is what Dick is looking for but providing it anyway. "That you'd gone silent on your mission. So I thought I'd try.
"No one's asking me to be here either, for the record."
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He looks away, chagrined, the scruff of his jaw hatcheted out sharp around a harder frown. Resistance is inevitable: doubt tucked away soft into his shell, his arms folded tightly against his chest. It’s easier to muddle through all the coal in his breast he’s compacting into diamond without having to look at Loxley’s face.
Derrica makes sense as the source. It’s within the realm of possibility she wasn’t even being manipulative when she asked him.
“We were close,” he says, finally. “I don’t think I’ll find anyone else here.”
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Well, fuck, articulated in a short sigh.
"I'm sorry," he offers, finally. "Truly."
He'd liked her, and even better liked seeing them together.
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It’s visceral in that way: a borrowed part that won’t be returned to him, a void in his gut atop the persistent pointlessness of such a fleeting, forgettable existence. If he’d vanished a year ago, he might have been spared half a dozen similar blows and no one in this world would’ve been much worse for wear.
But who is life fair for in Thedas, really.
As is, he manages to wring the wet sting at his eyes back into a manageable sheen, and he doesn’t have to sniff to do it. Dignity intact.
“Thank you,” he tells the table. “So am I.”
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But he doesn't leave. He does, instead, go to pick up his cup of wine without sipping from it, idly turning it in his hand.
Asks the question, finally, "Would you have gone with her?" The if you could have is implicit.
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But a good time, for a while. He’d considered it, confession weary in a crook at his brow.
He’d considered it fleetingly, the way a man considers quitting his job and purchasing a motorcycle only to immediately recall that he has several children, a cat, and a home due to be consumed by a great looming evil. Folded up as he is, the extent of his resentment is difficult to discern. The warning in his earlier stillness has dissipated, tension released.
He’s just tired.
Thot has fluffed herself gradually back into an overgrown obsidian pinecone, making room for Loxley’s fingertips to get in under her feathers.
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Loxley thinks there's the potential for his own feelings to be hurt, that Richard might have disappeared if he could have, but it's a tricky kind of feeling to actually stick when confronted with it. Irritation that has yet to mature to anger sort of flares off in a Fitcherwards direction, vague in itself, and it's not a spark he allows to catch.
Because the only utility to it would be to try to get Richard angry too, you know, instead of just sad, and the sodden lump of guy across the table from him looks like very unlikely kindling.
Scritch scritch. He breaks to take a long sip of wine.
"Do you mind if I'm glad you came back?" has a tentative amount of humour injected into it.
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The fact that he so rarely smiles to begin with makes for a low threshold for success.
Loxley is just very good, is the thing.
“We all have flaws in our judgment,” Silas says, while Thot waddles to bump under Loxley’s cup. Dick has a cup of his own to reach for; he takes his time unstitching an arm from its fold.
“She’s missed you.”
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His chest, not the cat. Rough-tongued licking away blood. Air funnels through his nasal passages in a hint of disturb, chasing it with a longer sip of wine.
"Do you mind if I stay for a bit?"
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He wasn’t sleeping anyway, his cup plucked up and tilted for him to drink.
Thot clips her beak around the edge of Loxley’s cup as it’s offered. She’ll eventually turn over onto her back entirely, wyvern talons kicked up to squeeze and flex at empty air. Every so often she rocks herself closer with a tuck of her feathery shoulders. Richard watches her without speaking, his thoughts elsewhere. Nowhere.
It’s decent wine.
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It's a little early to go to bed, for a Loxley, who had counted on a longer conversation before Richard's eye wanders distant. Well, that doesn't have to be a deterrent, even if part of him is a little bit looking for an excuse to dismiss it as unimportant. Irrelevant.
"There's something I'd raise with you," finally. "But it can wait for the morning."
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This is a step up from that. Familiar company to supervise the process of him packing himself away again.
He pulls back into focus through the warm buzz of wine soothing his Agonies, looks to Loxley in even aside at the sound of his voice. It’s possible the last time they were seated at a table like this together, Fitcher was there too.
“Well now I’m curious.”
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His shoulders lift, lower. "While you were away," Loxley says, "I dreamed myself back home.
"Amyra left to keep safe the Vessel of the Water Temple, after we cleansed it. We saved a kingdom from an archdevil. The wizard made his way back to us. Not all of that in that order. Now we're at the doorstep of the Fire Temple."
He'd been looking a little bit down, focused somewhere on the table. Now, he steers back up, offers Richard a wan smile. "It's so much, that's happened."
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Even Thot has gone watchful, teetering as she is at the whim of leverage Loxley applies through her scythe claws.
He’s listening.
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Which may make this less fraught and less interesting for it, but. It's a risk Loxley is willing to take, now that he's here.
"I wrote Princess Kalysin a letter," he says, a little whimsically. "A love letter, and after I sent it, I realised I didn't use that word at all, so. Hopefully we all live through this next part so I can find out what she made of it. I learned that," and now there's an uncertain glance to Richard. Reticence.
But. He had only hesitated a little there, too. "The wizard had a theory about me, and proved it with a Banishment spell. You know, the way it sends the banished somewhere harmless if they're from the Prime Material. Um, apparently I'm not. I originate from where the Ascians come from.
"So, you know. It was me the whole time~," because why not make a joke twice.
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They’ve had plenty of time to settle since then.
Loxley’s found his way into the princess’s good graces. Phineas is alive. Richard listens at a remove, his cup idle underhand, tracing back along lore that looms wildly out of place amidst his current drama.
What would Oghma think? Where do the Ascians come from?
It doesn’t really matter, does it?
“Are you alright?”
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No deaths to speak of, at least. Well. Sort of. No permanent deaths to speak of, and when Richard asks that question, the impulse is there to just say that, too, with good intentions attached: you brought me back. He swallows down wine and thinks seriously about it, before giving a bobbled nod. You know, yeah.
"I feel," and it sort of only occurs to him then, as he says it, "like so much less, here."
How important it is, the things he's doing in Tassia. This playing at romance with a princess and captaining a flying ship and a foot in the door of his third deadly temple of vital importance.
"Which is silly." A gesture of his wine glass, bringing it to his mouth again so that his next words trail off into echoey muffledness as they go. "I don't want to split saving this world only four to five ways, or anything."
no subject
“Who decides what we are?”
Something about this has recalled his wine to his attention; Rather than bolt the dregs to make room, Richard reaches for the bottle to top himself off. As a matter of course. He’s able to keep eye contact while he does it, past a glance to aim and another to measure.
“Surely it isn’t scope of influence.”
no subject
"I wouldn't have thought so, in Tassia," he agrees. "But then coming back here, so suddenly, and all of that urgency and pressure, gone—I don't really feel relieved about it."
What he does feel is confusing, clearly. If having less to do (even without the shortage of things to do, in Riftwatch) is a commentary on value, then how does one fathom the diminishment? But rather than hunt around for that meaning and how to pronounce it, he asks,
"How was it for you? When you woke up with it."
He hadn't shared it. Not until it could be used as a weapon. Loxley's tone is on the cautious side.
no subject
“Lonesome,” he says.
Rare honesty, while he’s reduced to an exhausted ginger scribble at their shared table.
“Oghma doesn’t exist here.” Two years is plenty of time to adjust accordingly, to plug the empty socket with weed and wine and an affair with a mage hunter and a magic cat. She uses Loxley’s wrist to roll to her feet as Richard scratches under his chin, not to return to him, but to try to pluck her way up Loxley’s sleeve to his shoulder. “There was an impersonator, for a time.”
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Suspecting her will have to fix his hair if she fixes his hair. But he picks up his refreshed glass, now leaning his elbows on the edge of the table in a more comfortable slouching forwards.
"A spirit?" he guesses, reaching for his scattered grasp of the local arcane lore. It nudges at another thing he ought to run by Richard, but not everything can be solved right here, at this table, so he focuses. Edges his thumb around the rim of the glass.
Says, "I fall in battle," a little apologetically, if anything. It's the thing on the way to the other thing he wants to say. "Properly fall, none of my own weird shit saving me that time. But you," gentle emphasis, "bring me back. And you bring Kally back. It was beautiful, that one.
"So, you know. If Oghma's not here, then at least he was making himself useful elsewhere."
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His expression is difficult to read when he looks back up again, his study inscrutable in spite of its weary intensity, or all the more inscrutable for it. Like trying to read a very wet and haggard letter. One written in a cipher.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
And he is. Probably.
“Not that you died,” it’s unnecessary for him to assure. Until he follows it up with, “What was it like?”
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So there's just kind of the start of a smile for the question he settles on, and then some quiet as he thinks back to it.
"It was quick," he says. "You acted quickly. I think that matters. But I also felt as though I'd been asleep for days, waking up. But before that,"
death, not life, that's the question at hand,
"it felt like being lost. Like I didn't even know enough to know where I ought to go, no sense of where I'd been, just shadow. We talked a bit about it, what happens when a person dies. You were certain," or he spoke with certainty, "that I would go where those who'd done more good than bad would go. And perhaps that's what was waiting for me, and I don't think I got to see."
His hand wanders up, skritching Thot absent-mindedly under her chin, as though she were still cat-shaped. "But the way back felt like certainty. I ran to it, that sense of knowing. Woke up covered in blood," he tips his glass, "not all of it mine, but certainly a lot of it.
"It's also very odd," he adds, while they're being a little morbid, "to no longer have the scars to show for it. I can't even impress any girls about it."
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Loxley’s retelling takes time to hold up against his own experience, one lens beside another glassing a distant flame. His recollection hasn’t dimmed over time. Oghma had welcomed him, only to turn him right back around before his bone-deep relief could calcify into resistance.
No rest for the wicked.
Or for Loxley, who has a princess to marry.
He dials back into the sight of Thot with her eyes crushed shut, stretched like a watering can to the scuff of Loxley’s fingertips, snakey muscle firm beneath the fluff of her feathers. A forked tongue sits blue in her parted beak.
“We could carve you up and I could heal them over again with scars,” Silas says. “If it’s integral to the operation.”
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sounds real in affect, but the tip of a look to Richard mid-Thot skritch undermines it. No thanks, goth-dad.
There's a silence that follows, thinking back over their conversation, and before it, his own sense of anxious urgency that had compelled him not simply across the water, but also to pick the lock barring him entry. He ever feels inept about what to do or say about the things that happen to other people, on account of feeling inept about what to do or say about the things that happen to himself.
Still, that isn't any excuse. He says, "I'm sorry you've felt lonesome," and it doesn't ring like hollow sympathy, a sorry for your losses, but of a thing he has contributed to.
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He doesn’t know what to say either, hemmed into a half-hearted rifle through reassurances, platitudes.
“It was nice for a time. To have someone.”
This is the truth, for all that it’s also a stumping out of this line of conversation.
“I should rest,” he adds, to make sure. “I’m glad that you’re here.”
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One that sympathises. They'd talked a while ago of love, or at least of the kinds of partnerships that resemble it. That being a Rifter is a complication. That there was no risk of love happening, for Richard.
Odd reversals all around, really.
"Rest," he bids. "I'll finish off some wine and follow your example."