faderift | CLOSED | She said, "Where'd you wanna go? How much you wanna risk?"

"Yes... alternate futures. That's one of the prevailing theories of our being here, that we've somehow... diverged from our own lives. Branched off on a new path."

Branched off, came loose, little errors in the shapes of people. Spirits, maybe, going through the motions, the way they do in dreams. No one here is familiar enough to notice if they get it wrong, so how would they know? Is he even himself? If he isn't, does it matter? Does anything? Thoughts come spiralling in a burst, like wire loosed from a spool: instantly a mess, and a pain in the ass to wind back into a manageable shape.

"I've met the doctor," he says, as the mundane variety of diversion. "He wears his ego like a hat."

The stack Ellie set down catches his eye; it wasn't there before. Seeing not only books, but a further off-ramp, he pivots toward it.

Edited 2022-10-25 15:55 (UTC)

"Or become a Fade-imagined copy of ourselves?" Ellie asks blandly, tilting her head to the other side. "Or we're spirits, but we absorbed the memories of watching a real person dreaming and now we're convinced that we are them because we're trying to give them a chance for something different?"

That last one she has not actually heard from anyone, anywhere, but he doesn't need to know that.

Instead she chuckles at Viktor's assessment of Strange and follows him curiously, feeling a faint flush rush across her cheeks. The books are mostly adventure stories, such as The Adventures of the Black Fox, one of the later copies of Hard in Hightown and a slim volume with the strange title of Majestic Bastards, which appears to be about griffons. Another thicker volume is On Astrariums.

Ellie's apparently a voracious reader.

That last one.

Viktor's gaze darts to one side, like he might turn to look back at her—though he doesn't—and takes a detour through flickering thought on the way back to her books. He sets his pick down next to them and lifts one from the top of the stack.

"Something different," he says, and turns the spine toward himself to glimpse the title. "Like losing the entirety of my life's work?" He then returns the book to the stack without comment, nor any particular indication of judgment. His expression is half-shuttered and cooling; his tone remains more or less amicable.

"They could have at least sent me somewhere with fewer stairs."

Edited (yucky) 2022-10-26 04:54 (UTC)

That last one is dark. She can't say it's something she really believes, but it's crossed her mind. It's one of many, things she cycles through, picks up and and turns over and puts down, and returns to the same answer, the one that feels the most true and the most like a cop-out.

Does it actually matter?

Ellie finds the edge of the table as he speaks, leaning one hip against it and crossing her arms across her stomach. Her smile fades out into something more thoughtful, quieter.

Viktor is one of the few people who doesn't remind her of anyone she can really name. But she has the sense of something spooling out between them, a thread unwraveling longer and longer. She can't see where it connects, or even if it does at all.

Ellie opens her mouth, gives it a tug.

"What do you think we are?"

"People."

He turns, too, and sets his knuckles next to the books. At a glance it barely resembles a lean at all, just a minor shifting of weight; as his thumb presses the table's edge the colour leaves his nail.

"Sapient creatures. Beyond that?" His mouth turns down, brief, like a shrug. "Without conclusive study, it's impossible to say."

Technically not an evasive answer, but still functions like one: ideal. Her what seems to him like a who in disguise, and he'd like to avoid looking that one directly in the eye, so good luck getting him to hold still.

"That's quite a bold question to ask someone you just met, by the way. I usually prefer to reserve my sensitive ontological opinions for the second date."

This is absolutely not a date and never will be and that is why he can say that.

It's a rough question. The answer is important, but so many things go into how someone answers. People, he says, both that simple and that profound. It makes Ellie ache with missing something she can't name.

(How can you be homesick when you don't have a home?)

No matter what they are, they are people. Does it matter if they're real, or copies, or shadows, or imagined? Impossible to say. But in the end, they are people.

Viktor drags her from her thoughts, and Ellie snorts a loud laugh before she can stop herself, reaching up to cover her mouth with one hand.

"Shit, you're right," she says, dropping the hand to theatrically cover her chest.

"That might even be more like a fourth-date question. Probably includes a telescope and some weed."

It's good that she laughs; Viktor might have felt a little bad if he'd accidentally nudged her into existential melancholy. (He doesn't laugh, himself, but it dances in his yellow eye.)

"Fourth? No, no..." With a little sway of shifting weight, he frees up his hand and returns his attention to the stack of books. "Don't save the best for maybe. You open with the telescope. I'll leave the weed part to your discretion. Speaking of which— telescopes, that is, not the, eh... let me know when you're through with this one."

One bony finger tap-tap-taps the stiff leather spine of On Astrariums.

"I can't believe you won't go on four dates with me," Ellie says, theatrically shaking her head as she reaches for On Astrariums and hands it to him. She's here to return it anyway.

"And I can't lend out the telescope or anything, 'cause it's not mine- but there's a balcony off the library..."

That is, if Viktor doesn't mind seeing her around.

The restrained shape of his mouth parts into a silent Oh. For him, already? How nice. This one can join his rock book on the table. Maybe later he'll flip through a title or two from Ellie's stack, glimpse a little insight there.

"Indeed there is... and it happens to provide an unobstructed view of the sea, and the sky above it. No towers in the way, only stars."

It would be a prime location for miserable rumination if there weren't so much library traffic. Alas.

"If you plan to spend much time out there, I recommend taking a blanket. The architecture of this place is so relentless in its brutality, even the seats are stone."

Ellie pushes the rest of the stack of books toward him in mute offer- if he wants to look through it before Mobius gets to putting them away, be her guest.

Considering the balcony, Ellie nods, in that slow way that says she's making rapid-fire plans in her mind.

"I've got a couple blankets upstairs for padding. I'll see if I can bring some here." She gives him a wry little smile. "I mean, it's called the Gallows. I think the assholes who built this place wanted everybody to be miserable at all times."

While welcoming the rest of the stack with a gentle placement of his hand, he says, "That's likely true, given the history of this fortress."

For weeks he's done almost nothing but read on the Fade, magic, lyrium, mages, anything to feed his years-long fascination, while occasionally sampling any compelling tangential topics—though he doesn't remember everything with the same steel-trap zeal as his pet subjects. Chronicles of the Gallows seemed especially relevant.

"But clearly they weren't trying very hard if their plans can be thwarted by wool."

Whatever plans Ellie is making, Viktor expects to hear about them in some later conversation whenever they next happen to surface at the same time.

"I wish you luck in defeating them."

Ellie laughs under her breath. "Slow but steady," she admits. "They've already done a lot to fix this place up. It was covered in a lot of creepy statues of people in chains."

Shrugging one shoulder up, she pushes out a sigh.

"I've seen worse? I mean, I'm from an apocalypse. But most of those place weren't worse on purpose."

Viktor nods. He's heard about the statues, those massive things and their grotesque depictions of suffering, and is not at all sorry to have missed seeing them in person. Surely all that bronze has been put to better uses by now.

It isn't a total revelation, what she says next—he's overheard things on the crystal chatter, incidental indications that here is better than there. Wherever there was.

"May I ask what happened?"

To the world, he means, but she can fill it in however she likes.

"Yeah. I mean it's just... reality?"

Ellie shrugs, more with the discomfort that she anticipates in Viktor than her own, actual discomfort with her own past. To her, Thedas is a reprieve, not what's normal.

"So, about a quarter of a century ago-" longer than she's been alive, then- "There was this parasitic fungus called cordyceps. It originally infected insects. But then some kind of mutation happened, and it started to infect human beings. Anybody who got infected would lose their minds and start attacking people, trying to tear them apart with their bare hands. If you get bit, it's over. There's no cure."

Ellie gives a slight shrug. "We don't have any magic or anything, so everybody just learns to be hard to kill. Some people decide..." she pauses, here, trailing off. Wondering at the best way to put it.

"There's not exactly a justice system in most places. So some people do everything they can get away with. Everything from your normal bandits on the road to religious cults to the same kind of people who thought up this place, and worse."

As Ellie's reality unfolds in brief, concern shapes the set of Viktor's brow, the creasing there; if there's any true unease, it isn't strong enough to surface.

He's thinking the back half sounds like the mainstream conception of his own home, the broadest strokes of its truth, and that there's even some resemblance in those first horrible descriptors. He's trying to picture how a fungal plague would look, if it looks like anything at all beyond wretchedly sick and violent people. He's wondering if red lyrium ever reminds her of it, and suspecting it does.

"Desperation drives people in all directions," he says, and lets that sit a moment while he makes a quiet study of the young woman before him. Little flicks of his attentive amber eyes. It ends with the kind of soft inhale that always signals transition, and a short-lived straightening of his slouch.

"That's one of the reasons," Ellie acknowledges, studying him right back.

Desperation. Survival. Pain. There are a lot of reasons why somebody would justify hurting another person. Some of those reasons even make sense.

"What about your world? You told me a little about the magic and the technology, but what was your world like?"

Ellie's answer opens into a question, and he seems suddenly restless, lets slip a hint of impatience in this momentary tilt and sway, the shifting of his weight to the other hip and back again, like he's uncomfortable with the question. A momentary pinch in his expression—barely a flicker of it.

"I lived in a city." His tone is unchanged, however, soft and even as before. "Two cities, together, not unlike this one," and this flick of his head says, Kirkwall. "One half stretched up to the sky, the other deep into the ground. A river ran between them on the surface, and a single bridge. It was... tense. But between the city's resources and the undercity's resourcefulness, the culture of ingenuity shared between them was unmatched."

(Except, perhaps, by the pain in speaking of it in past tense.)

For a second Ellie thinks that she pushed him too far by asking, but then his tone doesn't change, and he readily tells her.

Shit. That was discomfort, yeah. But not for the subject. She's kept him standing for a long time.

For the moment, though... a world, distilled down to the hurts of two cities, locked together as one. Ellie grows very quiet as her mind automatically fills in the blanks with things she knows. Not entirely accurate, of course, but enough to follow.

Boston. Seattle. Kirkwall.

Was, Viktor says. Past tense, in a way she's not sure is because it's his past or because the city was a city and no longer is. Maybe it's the same in some ways. Their worlds are far beyond their reach now. For better or for worse.

Ellie thinks on that, her grey-green eyes traveling sightlessly over the desk near her hand.

"One more question," she says. "And then I'll let you sleep, 'cause I interrupted..."

Ellie trails off, trying to think of how to phrase it.

"Which part of the city were you from?"

This flicker of hesitation is so brief, it likely doesn't even register. They don't know each other well enough to mark such subtleties.

"The undercity."

He isn't ashamed of it, doesn't qualify—though Ellie would no doubt find that story interesting—doesn't lean into it as an assertion, doesn't even expect her to take it poorly, but a part of him is nonetheless waiting to see where that information lands. He wouldn't have been asked at home; anyone would simply have looked at him, known, and made their judgments. (Even him. Even though he tried.)

Strange, to both appreciate a thing and be disappointed by it in the same thought.

Ellie is a person who moves like a knife, all cuts and sharp angles. She has a young face that makes her look younger than she is despite the scars, wary eyes and maimed hands. She stays precisely far enough away from people when she talks to them that they can't touch her with an outstretched hand, like she's always gauging the distance of someone's reach, even when there's no threat to be had.

And something in her relaxes when he says that. Like a piece has clicked into place, like she's letting go of a tiny bit of her guard.

She nods to herself, like it makes sense.

"I'll bring the telescope by later tonight." And leave it there, along with blankets.

It's a mutual unwinding—barely a conscious thing. It makes sense, and it makes sense Ellie would accept it.

No hurry, he would like to tell her, and it can wait until tomorrow, but those sentiments had fled from his vocabulary long before he came here and took on a rifter's existential uncertainty. Far from a new and terrifying concern, it's almost a relief—if the Fade took him back suddenly, at least then the failure wouldn't be his.

"I'll be here," is what he settles on, and can only hope it's true.

CLOSED | She said, "Where'd you wanna go? How much you wanna risk?"

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