closed.

[hornswoggle]

WHO: John Silver + Petrana de Cedoux
WHAT: Country Roads Take Me Home.mp3
WHEN: Last week of Wintermarch into early Guardian
WHERE: Free Marches, Fereldan, etc.
NOTES: Best friends road trip at long last.

There is an open gash at John's temple, a split begun over his left eye curving into his hairline. It has since painted half his face in blood, the flow of it only staved off after one Imperial soldier had slapped a stinging handful of salve into the wound.

Incidentally, how John had come to: with someone else's hands on his face and the sharp, antiseptic prickle of some vaguely medicinal paste smeared over the wound.

As far as collected injuries, this is the most annoying of the lot. The best to settle his focus on, while John watches their captors crow over their acquisition and pass wine skins back and forth around the fire. His hands twist idly in their binding, testing the limitations as he tempers his own fury at the stupidity of the situation.

They are very much at ease. John can't blame them. A cripple parted from his crutch is hardly worth concern. Petrana is not a battle mage. Leaving the pair of them shackled and bound to posts at the edge of their camp is hardly unreasonable.

"How many are there?" John is asking quietly. "I count eight."

They have done him a favor. He is bleeding. He has pain to spare, to trade for what they might use to get themselves out of this. But it goes without saying: they'll need to pick their moment carefully.

Comments

[hornswoggle]

A misstep.

John knows it. The waterskin is in his hands still, unopened. It is a little like watching a disappearing act, the way she recedes from him. Yes, he knows it. Has admired the armor of it.

Finds being the recipient of it to be less than enjoyable, unsurprisingly.

"Petrana," is a kind of appeal, lower and quieter, colored by what is certainly a shared exhaustion. "Forgive me."

It is still beyond his understanding, such an act occurring on impulse. But it matters less than the tightening of her jaw does in this moment, the stiff recoil from the familiarity they have habitually shared.

[ipseite]

For a moment, Petrana says absolutely nothing. For another. A beat longer, her mouth pressed into a tight line, as if she might stubbornly deny him not merely her forgiveness but even anything else—

“That you would think this of me and not even speak it!”

There is a flex of her hands that suggests, strongly, that if he had not taken the waterskin he would have found himself wearing it. For the best; he has had enough strong knocks, and is in no state to be the first man in Thedas to find out just how stroppy she can become in high temper.

“That you would allow me to blunder, foolishly, taking for granted our friendship— to walk stupidly into such a thing because you have imagined yourself the great victim of my trust—”

The rest of what she says is not completely comprehensible to Thedosian ears, even should he have acquainted himself with Orlesian at some point; she is not speaking Orlesian, and Lamorran is not completely interchangeable. She says something at one point that sounds suspiciously like the language she commands her dog in, though she's never said it to the dog in that tone,

she points a finger at him,

“I have done nothing but trust you, at every turn. I was certain that there could be no danger in bringing this to you. I have advocated for you and for James—” they are intimates when she is angriest, “—only to be so insulted, by my own dearest of friends, as if this were Anders all over again—”

oh, it's like that.

She thinks about taking the waterskin from him so she can throw it at him.

[hornswoggle]

Anger is better than absence; through it John can parse the fracture, consider how he might mend it.

Even so, for the better than when John shifts the waterskin it is placed on his far side rather than within her reach. They have little in the way of supplies, and what they have in that waterskin must be split between scraping the blood from John's face and seeing them back to the road.

"Petrana," is the first attempt at finding footing, making space within the flow of her anger.

There is a particular truth that John will not offer, because he is aware it will not be well-received, or seem to be shifting blame. (Not so long ago, he and Marcus Rowntree sat around a campfire in waterlogged Seattle, talking about mages. About John, who circled the identity from a distance.) Instead, he straightens, shifting his weight to lean towards her.

"Petrana," a second time, imploring. "Listen to me."

Of course, she could go on. He is a patient man. He is capable of waiting, if there is more she has yet to say.

[ipseite]

“Is what you ought to have said to me before you decided to accept the basis of your lack of faith in me as simple fact!”

—she's not quite done.

“Listen to you! Now, shall I, when you had no questions for me but to have already made up your mind to believe the worst and only quibble over my motivations! I cannot imagine the picture of me that you must have— what spoiled thing you must have taken me for, to laze about for weeks over a matter of such urgency to no purpose but wasting precious time that Starkhaven did not have if this were even possible to debate amongst ourselves a thing we could simply ask the woman— to have held back from my own allies for no reason but what, petulance? Womanly secretiveness?”

She takes a breath, as she hasn't.

“What an incompetent, cruel fool you have thought me. And now you would have me listen to you.”

[hornswoggle]

"Petrana," a third time, now reaching for her hand. "I have never thought you incompetent, or cruel. Certainly not a fool."

Riftwatch has it's share of fools. Even before they were anything at all to each other, John had not taken her for such a person.

"Will you let me explain?"

[ipseite]

Petrana jerks her hands into her lap, but she doesn't move any further away from him and she does not, immediately, continue snapping at him like an infuriated spaniel.

“Speak, then,” curtly.

[hornswoggle]

Before him, a handful of differing hurts. Some do not come from John; they are wounds made by others, and he has aggravated them.

What he must account for here, in the midst of all this fury—

"You must know how highly I regard you. When I considered you may have withheld your plan from me, I trusted there was a reason. Not a petty or a foolish one, but a reason that had merit compelling enough for you to act on it. One I believed I would hear, when the time was right."

Which may well have been this day regardless, if not for the ambush and subsequent delay.

"You don't truly imagine I believe you are any of the things you have spoken of?"

[ipseite]

Some effort goes into making this answer measured, and not a great deal more sound and fury—

what she settles upon, finally: “It is immensely difficult to credit, instead, the notion of something so self-evidently absurd and unnecessary.”

Self-evident to her, certainly.

“Nor, in truth, why under the circumstances in which we found ourselves there would be any justification, further, for taking weeks to deliberate on a thing as simple as putting one question to one woman. If there were a thing that should have warranted that, I couldn't imagine you would have somehow not been equally aware of it. How am I meant to reconcile those things?”

[hornswoggle]

"Because I would have taken the time."

A type of trade, opening himself to the application of those descriptors.

[ipseite]

By the narrowing of her eyes, Petrana would much rather continue to be vexed with him than allow herself to be coaxed down from this— but it does get through. Especially because it is her honest response to say,

“Well, had you done so, I would have called you a fool,” with a some exasperation. “I suppose I would have tempered it,” a begrudging allowance, “but you must see the appalling waste that would have been? To take weeks where you can do nothing only to agonize over whether or not you will even ask a question?”

A brisk shake of her head, “We did not go to persuade Fiona. We were not machinating to arrange her into a favourable— you must see how what she's chosen had to be only her choice. The only thing that could have taken weeks to do would have been wringing hands, and if I had any concerns about speaking of it when it was no more than an idle idea to division heads, it was certainly not James that I thought would wring his hands over it.”

[hornswoggle]

"Well, it is the job of the quartermaster to wring hands over things that may not necessarily require it."

Ha, ha. (What exactly does John Silver know of the formal duties of quartermaster, when his service as one has been so unique as to render all traditional explanation useless?)

But in this, he considers the explanation. Finds truth in it, because a lie would be absurd. She is describing an impulse to him in such plain terms that even though he finds it unexpected, he can't say it doesn't align with all else that has passed between them tonight.

"I didn't imagine our approaches differed to this extent," is speculative. Not doubt, not second-guessing, only considering this new facet of her and comparing it against himself. They have been aligned in so many things that the incongruity of this feels more noteworthy than it might have otherwise.

[ipseite]

“I did not think it merited different, and the results would bear that out— we could do and plan nothing unless there was something to be done and planned, and that was in Fiona's hands entirely, none of our own. I have found Yseult to be an eminently sensible and capable woman, and took for granted that we would be aligned in seeing the benefits— Stark would leave such things to his colleagues and Rutyer,”

well, Rutyer. She spreads her hands.

“We discussed the idea amongst ourselves, the three of us, and it seemed so absurd not to simply ask when we'd Marcus right there, a rebel mage who'd fought under her, that we could simply through him go to her. Had I thought at all of whether or not we should speak with anyone beforehand, and I did not see any sense in it when it was no more than a conversation between us three, my only concern might have been that Rutyer could not help himself but disdain the work of those he so little respects and I have long found it easier to go around him than inconvenience him with his responsibilities.”

It is more than she's said even to Derrica and Marcus on the matter of what they had done, and what they might or might not have spoken on — there had been no debate or deliberation on this point, specifically. It had seemed clear that they were either aligned or did not consider it; she had taken for granted the same, with Flint and Silver.

Finally, “I have never had the luxury of time. A delay has always been a decision, most often the decision to relinquish the outcome entirely, and rarely with any wisdom. In Sulleciel and in Thedas— it is well, I agree, when there is time. A gift.”

Not something to take for granted; not something that every decision would allow.

[hornswoggle]

Between them, there is little expectation of—

Transparency, maybe, is the word John would use. As quickly as they had established their friendship on the heels of shared experience within a dream, familiarity with each other had come faster upon waking.

Their friendship has always been a choice, to John's thinking. They cultivate it day by day.

And that is why he understands the importance of what she is doing here. She is gifting him this insight, so he might better understand her. That they might repair this misalignment, avoid a repetition of it in the future.

"A gift," John agrees, reaching back for the waterskin. "I think I've fallen into the habit of requiring it. Maybe not always as long as I like, but more than I expected once."

It mattered less, when he was scrabbling through life grabbing hold of any advantage he could. There is far more riding on his decisions now.

"Will you help me?" he asks, a small aside as he uncorks the waterskin.