faderift | Tell me a story long and true

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Tell me a story long and true

WHO: Mia Rutherford and OPEN
WHAT: So much to do, so little time. Bustling around Skyhold.
WHEN: Wintermarch. Feel free to fudge the dates as needed.
WHERE: All over the bloody keep.
NOTES: n/a

The weeks press on. The world looks to the Inquisition to see what happens next, the mages and templars struggle to prove their independence and their willingness to work towards the greater good, and a calm finally seems to have settled over the keep in the wake of the abomination attack. Personal trials seem almost trivial in comparison.

Almost. She's still noticeably avoiding Pel, and stiffly departing if the woman ever comes around.

But there's more to be dealt with than one sour encounter. She drops in on Cullen from time to time now, a little less concerned with keeping her distance than she is with how well he's dealing with the lyrium-induced headaches. She visits Katniss soon after hearing about the unfortunate scuffle with one of the soldiers, though part of her is pleased that she's holding her own. There are care packages to be made up and delivered to various families and individuals within Skyhold -- herbs for the healers from the travelers and scouts, and sometimes cookies for the children -- and all in all life is as busy as it should be.

Better than sitting at home in South Reach and fretting, with no one to tend to. Though what must it say about her that she only feels at ease when she's seeing to someone else's needs? Likely nothing she wants to hear, admittedly.

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A faintly amused noise follows. "It has a number of healing qualities...although added to various brews and potions, I've known some to take in other ways as well. I'm not sure if the effects differ, myself."

Mia, meanwhile, is carefully handling what looks to be rashvine from Eastern Orlais. Luckily it's already been packaged, the faintest glimpse enough to determine the herb. With a faintly disgusted noise she moved it aside to another pile. "Ugh. Dreadful stuff. I remember getting into it as a child. Some lessons, one only needs to learn once."

For a man with as chequered a past as Martel isn't admitting to in Skyhold, he is capable of remarkable staidness; from the vaguely amused disapproval with which he sets the elfroot into its proper place, recreational use is not quite to his tastes. (A glass of wine, on the other hand - but he's barely touched the stuff, here.)

The rashvine gets a glance - and a grimace.

"I took a tumble into something similar, once. Not, I'm afraid, as a child." Not quite a man, either, though; his pride hurt, but the rest of him itched, and he'd handled his fellow novices' delight in his indignity with poor grace. Whose spectacular idea was it to combine male adolescence with steel weaponry and magic? Someone who'd also thought they'd be celibate as well, in fairness, but they'd found precious few men willing to promise to only ever wield the one sword and for King and God alone. That particular vow was not long for the oaths of knights.

"Which, as I think of it, makes me feel desperately old."

As do many of those in Skyhold, sometimes.

"Old." Mia's lips twist wryly. "There are worse things to be. Old means you've survived everything that's tried to kill you up to this point."

She's no spring chicken herself, but rarely if ever does she feel self-conscious in that regard. Who has time to? And perhaps that's part of the point.

But nevermind that now. There are still quite a few varieties of herbs to be separated, a quiet hum escaping her. "Let's see...spindleweed, blood lotus. Hm. No black lotus. Have to make a note of that."

It isn't often that Martel does - but his shoulder aches when it's cold, he's irritable in the morning and late at night, and at his age Lord Vanion had assumed command of the order. He isn't getting any younger. Sometimes he feels it more than others, all the things he could have done and didn't. All this youth around him, wasted on itself the way it always is, but - hell. The world might end. Who's he to judge.

(Someone who nearly ended his own world. So, honestly, shut up, Martel.)

"Here," he says, instead of dwelling on that too deeply, taking the note down. (His handwriting is spidery, but legible; unused to the shapes of the letters, more familiar with a frankly uglier system of writing.) "I daresay you haven't lived this long by accident, though I have trouble imagining anything rude enough to try to kill you."

Bears are fucking rude, though.

They are, quite. She's already had to teach one manners with the business end of an axe. But that's neither here nor there.

"Darkspawn are not known for being particularly courteous. Especially in the middle of a Blight," she replies wryly. Since then there's been little trouble, but honestly one Blight was more than enough for anyone to contend with. All the Rutherfords had dealt with the loss and the terror in their own way.

This, spending every waking moment tending to the needs of others, is hers.

"No, that doesn't seem to be their defining trait."

A bit earlier and Martel might've had to ask her what those things are, darkspawn, blights - but he didn't spend all of that time in the library sulking. He has researched this place he has to live in, now, beginning with what was available to him to read and spidering out to learn what of what was written he should trust, and what biases were less obvious. In part, for the express purpose of being able to have a conversation like this without having to pause and ask for an explanation of the things no one else needs an explanation for.

This is home, now, for better or worse. He's never done anything halfway in his life.

A moment later, "That was some years ago, if I'm not mistaken?"

"Ten, to be precise." She paused and huffed. "And now I feel old."

In truth, she'd still just been a young woman then, with teenage siblings. It wasn't so long a time ago, though at times it feels as if it were a lifetime ago. Sometimes, in dreams, it seems only yesterday. Funny how that worked.

"Ferelden only now begins to recover. And then the mage rebellion broke out. I suppose it's too much to ask for peace for any great stretch of time, but it might make for a nice change of pace."

His laugh is quiet - low, like his deep voice, and rough, like he isn't accustomed to doing it. (Of course, he had laughed, often enough - but it was a studied mannerism, an affect of cruelty, and quiet moments like this one were few and far between. Still are. There's a difference between charismatic and charming, and he makes an excellent example of it.)

"I would take it simply for the novelty," he agrees, though the wars and the struggles he remembers are different, and a third of them (a quarter, if one were more generous, as he rarely is to himself) his own idiot fault. "But I am years your senior and you'll probably still outlive me, Mistress Rutherford, don't feel too old."

He doesn't look like a man who lives a safe life because he isn't. He's always run towards.

"Cullen seems to think I'll outlive everyone out of sheer stubbornness." A ridiculous notion, obviously.

Her hand rests on the top of a stack of herbs, studying Martel for a moment. "I don't recall telling you how old I am," she finally counters, one eyebrow arching. "How can you be so sure?"

He's obviously not young, but not so old. Pleasantly weathered about the eyes, a few lines around his mouth that outline his favorite expressions. All in all he's still quite handsome, despite however many years he's managed to acquire.

"You make a good point," he allows, a wry twist to his mouth and a hint of amusement lingering from that remark about Cullen (discretion being the better part of valor, he doesn't suggest her brother might be onto something there), "but I am yet older than I look, and good manners will not allow you to be."

On occasion, when he exerts himself a little, he's almost charming.

A moment later-

"Nothing dramatic, mind you." Sephrenia was close to a thousand years old. Martel just wore forty-something better than his brother, whose crooked nose and selection of scars did not a romantic hero make. "I have to admit to having slightly lost track. I saw forty a few years ago."

"Oh. A flatterer."

She'll have none of it. She knows her age and is perfectly comfortable with it, but if makes him feel better, he can certainly be as charming as he likes. She still waves a dismissive hand at the attempt.

"As it happens, you're right. But not so much older. And if you try to deny my looking it, I may find use for that rashvine after all."

His chuckle is brief and not unkind - or particularly deterred, as it helps to have little to deter in the first place. Here is a man who knows when to give ground graciously, and it's 'before the woman you're speaking with gets irritated and makes you look a fool'.

(Light-hearted moments trading remarks with someone whose company doesn't offend his sensibility - he can behave, for those. His inability to give ground when it might cost lives has really been the problem.)

"I concede," he promises, raising his hands in surrender. "I value my skin."

"Wise, for all your years." The corner of Mia's lip curls upwards, but she takes the victory for what it is. "Now, what is it you have over there? I don't suppose it's more elfroot? We keep running short."

Everything, as it turned out, required elfroot. That, or someone had been stealing stores of it from under their noses, but Maker knew what for.

Probably to smoke it.

Martel tilts a hand -

"You'd think we'd have more, for as much of it as seems to come back to us." He sometimes wondered if anyone did anything besides scour the land for elfroot, but ah, yes, they did find time to close rifts, kill bandits and piss off the local nobility. (Never difficult, in his experience.) "But you are in luck."

"You would think. But the plant has so many uses that we inevitably run low. Luckily it grows like a weed. Perhaps planting some in the gardens might not go amiss. I should ask if they'd be willing to place a few more planters..."

One hand lifts, beckoning for the package. "You're a treasure. I think that should be enough for at least the next few requisitions. Perhaps even some to spare for the common folk."

"We should be so lucky." They might be, there's plenty - though there always seems to be rather a lot less when it's getting divvied up amongst those as need it for this, that and the other thing.

(Honestly, it's not the youth in Skyhold that makes him feel old, it's sitting here sorting herbs and grumpily thinking about prioritization of stores, but it's a novel sort of feeling that he doesn't dislike. He's past the age for youthful, thoughtless enthusiasm; he did not imagine living a life where he worried about where resources would come from or how best to divide them. Mercenary work such as he did it was a different beast again.)

"I'm sure the gardeners would be amenable, mind. I see Adelaide there often enough - I don't doubt she'd agree with you."

"Ah. Are you friends with Adelaide, then? Lovely woman."

She knows few enough people here on a personal level, but it's always rewarding to be reminded that yes, she does have people here she'd consider friends. None that are terribly close, but perhaps that's her own doing.

Even at her most friendly, she tends to be a bit guarded. It's difficult to be anything else, despite her efforts.

"She is exceptional."

And that is rare praise from Martel, whose diffidently not-antagonistic descriptions of Dorian had prompted a very suspicious Lady Leblanc to accuse him of liking the man. (And he sort of does, so she had a point.) He doesn't sound like a man enamored; more like someone who has settled into the kind of friendship it ordinarily takes decades to cultivate. They're like a well-established marriage, not in their bickering (sometimes that) or their sexual charge (literally never) but in the natural ease with which they work and talk and appreciate one another.

He'd set out to be a friend to her for far from selfless reasons - it had been a pleasant surprise to find someone he can value as a friend to him.

"And she kept me from dropping dead on my feet before I ever saw Skyhold, I owe her a great deal," a bit wryly.

"She's certainly done her dead-level best to help in any way she can. Remarkably sensible woman. I can't tell you how grateful I am to have her here."

It barely even registers at times that she's a mage, that she might feel any other way because of that fact. Even the fact that she's Orlesian manages to be overlooked in light of her sterling company and admirable resolve, and...

Well. She shouldn't go on and on, should she?

Instead she turns her attention to Martel's remark, a curious furrow in her brow. "So you met before Skyhold, then?"

With an illustrative gesture-- "I was with the first, so far as we're aware, group to arrive through a rift. Adelaide was present, or nearby...you'll forgive me for being less than clear on the early details."

He probably doesn't need to go into too great detail as to why, having already established he'd needed the urgent aid of a healer. (He doesn't remember coming through or falling or even hitting the ground, really; he remembers being on his knees, his own blood in his throat and all over the ground beneath him, how long it took for pain to become specific instead of just what felt like his entire state of being.)

"She aided me, on the walk."

That isn't all that happened, but why relive it? It wasn't pleasant.

If he doesn't want to give over the details, he isn't obligated to. She's curious, of course. The look she gives him after that scant explanation is clear.

Well. Better to press on, then.

"That does sound like her," she allows generously, letting the issue slip away. "Have you had her look at that shoulder of yours? She's a miraculous touch."

It had been the first time anything even like magic had been near her, but it had done wonders for the aches that overworking herself tended to earn.

The face he pulls almost before she's finished asking her question halves halves his age in the work of a moment - do knights ever truly grow up? Probably not, let's be honest. Even if they leave the knighthood.

(Or get thrown out.)

"I consulted with Detlef," he says, "he had a salve that served."

And was less likely to give him a withering look for being reluctant to have the old injury properly healed, or tell him that he's too old to care for himself so cavalierly - yes, he has considered taking some of his aches to Adelaide, but he doesn't have a better explanation for his reluctance than some kind of misguided nostalgia. Rather than accept that or come up with a better one, he's just avoided being in a situation where he might have to answer the question in the first place.

Men.

Mia's eyebrows arch higher, but one healer is likely as good as another. The only real difference she can see might be bedside manner.

She's not one to judge where his preference might lie.

"Well he seems to know his business as well as any other. Very intense, isn't he? Even for a mage?" she murmurs, expression thoughtful. Even in passing, occasionally speaking now and then, he had a strangely compelling presence. She scarcely knew how else to describe it.

'Even for a mage' makes him laugh, briefly - not at her so much as the consistency between worlds. They do tend to the intense; he is, himself, an excellent example of the type. And so his opinion on the matter is practically professional--

"I found him very mild," with a slight twist to his mouth. "Very studied in it."

Restrained, if he had to choose a word. For precisely that reason.

"Oh yes. Terribly knowledgeable. And very dedicated to his craft, and his fellow mages. You should hear him speak of it, such passion..."

After a moment she almost seems to laugh at herself, waving a hand dismissively. "I don't mean to gossip, but listen to me," she murmurs, clucking her tongue softly. "He's a very interesting fellow, that's all I mean to say. Pleasant as well. In fact I haven't met a mage yet that wasn't simply..."

Then she pauses, wrinkling her nose.

"Well. One that was rather unpleasant. But I get the feeling that's a cultural difference, or something more personal, rather than a reflection of mages in general."

Tell me a story long and true

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