faderift | [CLOSED] This is not my beautiful house

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[CLOSED] This is not my beautiful house

WHO: Pariahs, Scoundrels, and Heretics
WHAT: A catch-all log for Riftwatch's satellite office in Kirkwall for the duration of Mother Pleasance's visit.
WHEN: Fantasy!March
WHERE: Hightown, the de Foncé haunted mansion
NOTES: Related to Mother May I; additional IC Assignments/OOC info.

Is the timing of this remote Riftwatch installation in Kirkwall perhaps too conveniently in step with a Chantry Mother's visit to the Gallows? And are the particular individuals assigned to temporarily work out of the gloomy Hightown mansion more or less the exact roster that someone might wish to avoid having engaged in prolonged conversation with the aforementioned woman?

No. And if anyone were to suggest such a conspiracy theory, there would be more than a half dozen perfectly reasonable points with which to counter such a paranoid claim.

As far as anyone need know, this posting is derived entirely out of a sense of prudent caution; with Tevinter's forces comfortably ensconced in the recently captured city of Starkhaven, it is only sensible to make any potential assault on Kirkwall by that same force less straightforward than the Venatori might expect.

The de Foncé Mansion

The mansion crammed into the corner of an otherwise reasonably respectable, albeit small, square of Kirkwall's Hightown has long been considered a nuisance and an eyesore by its neighbors. Long before Wysteria de Foncé started blowing things up in the mansion's basement and her companions began to curate a barnyard in its little garden, the house was held in the possession of a particularly curmudgeonly old man whose sole ambition in the years prior to his death seems to have been to stuff as much hideous old furniture, moldy books, and ominous paintings in the house as possible in addition to harassing his neighbors with threats of baseless litigation.

Suffice to say, this particular square in Hightown is well acquainted with this corner mansion being a source of what might be delicately referred to as 'some bullshit.'

Despite the outfitting done to make the place function as a secondary office for Riftwatch (much to Madame de Foncé's extreme distress; this is an infringement on her third amendment rights! Which she knows about because maybe she read the constitution while visiting New York, 20xx!!) and Wysteria's own efforts to renovate on a Riftwatch stipend, the house remains in a state of extreme dreariness. While a majority of the rooms have been organized and scrubbed down to their battered floorboards and peeling wallpaper, still others have been piled full to bursting with the hoard of ephemera left in the house by its previous owner with their doors shut tight and narrow windows shuttered, but otherwise surrendered to a thick collection of dust. The few rooms that have been fully refurbished have a faint air of desperation to them—gay wallpaper in bright Antivan styles, the best of the house's old furniture made to look slightly less shabby and so on.

It's a shame the weather is so miserable. The side garden—which must be very charming in spring and summer—might offer up a welcome relief from the morose interior. Alas, the grim forecast has managed to flood most of the planting beds and cast even that space in hues of drab grey.

Anyone who finds themselves quartering in the de Foncé house will be fortunate enough to have their very own gloomy bedroom which may either be nearly bare of furniture or so cramped with it that it's difficult to navigate. At least all the bedding has been brought over from the Gallows, so no one is sleeping on some dead guy's old sheets, and the expansive servant's kitchen has been stocked appropriately for cooking in. Just don't go down into Wysteria's cellar; she's growing something nefarious down there. With Wysteria's maid quitting on the spot when faced with the prospect of attending to all these guests, everyone will be fending for themselves when it comes to cooking and cleaning.

In addition to suspect fungal experiments, those living and working in the mansion will find themselves companion to: six chickens, an Avvar goat who lives indoors, a large brown dog who resembles a mop (who takes her job safeguarding the house very seriously), a small white dog resembling a nuisance, and an alarmingly large dog-sized Donark ant who may or may not be poisonous (it's fine! she's never bitten a person!), and a sullen poltergeist who takes exception to visitors. Luckily most of the breakable objects it enjoys flinging at people have previously been flung, so while ducking may be at a bare minimum there's no telling when a door will lock shut or a painting will attempt to fall off the wall onto someone while they pass.

The Work

Two of the least miserable rooms in the mansion have been converted into temporary working space for the duration of Riftwatch's quartering there. The library has been converted into a shared office space, containing a few worktables and chairs, a desk for Flint's use, and so on. What is likely meant to have been some kind of dining room is currently acting as a temporary armory.

For the duration of the time that this secondary Riftwatch office exists, those assigned to it will be expected to quarter within Kirkwall (be it in the mansion or otherwise) and report to these offices rather than traveling to the Gallows. Anyone who doesn't already frequent the mansion is barred from it. While those assigned to report to it may still attend to work in Kirkwall and beyond with their colleagues still living out of the Gallows, they are similarly barred from actually traveling to the fortress.

In the mean time, the work everyone will be turned to typically involves coordinating with the Kirkwall Guard to assist in reviewing, repairing, and bolstering the city's defenses should any attack occur. There are also refugees to herd, Tevinter supply lines in the Marches to disturb, and rifts still in need of closing. More than likely, those working out of the division will personally receive their orders directly from Flint rather than having them dispensed in any other fashion.

Everyone is very busy, and the house is very drab, and there should be little reason to think much at all about the Chantry Mother visiting the Gallows.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"It is a stopgap measure. It comes apart the moment Rutyer decides to stop neglecting his duties and pays some attention to the business of his division."

Here, John's hand lifts finally from his thigh to seek his crutch. Tired, perhaps, of trying to make his point while seated. Tired of the space stretching like a gulf between them.

"If we have an opportunity to see him from that seat and someone more reasonable, or at least able to speak more than two words at a stretch without stirring discontent, we shouldn't dismiss it out of hand."

"I'm not dismissing it," he says, (dismissively) in that brisk way of his where he has examined a thing, noted its dimensions, and is curtly choosing to set it aside.

"I'm telling you that I know him and that I see a way forward for us with him in that chair. That he is more pliable in it than he is out of it. Why throw that away? Just to make the Gallows more comfortable?"

"Because we are both aware there is a way forward without him in that chair. One which does not actively lose us allies and trust, but still reaps whatever potential you see in his participation."

In what year of his life will the sting of embarrassment and resentment and irritation cease to accompany any moment when he must endure the graceless process of levering to his feet? There is no way to do it with any kind of speed without a hand-hold, and he has none in this musty-covered room, only his trunk from which he might propel himself upwards onto the support of his crutch.

"There is a way forward in which we maintain both. But the balance we will require to go forward with such an arrangement won't hold forever, not if it's known you extended yourself to keep him in power over this company. I cannot understand the motivation to gamble our capital on a man we both know to be unreliable in this."

And what will it require of John to keep hold of what they have cultivated? How will he have to extend himself to bridge whatever gaps form, and what vulnerability will that create? What chance will there be for it to be exploited?

In that gap necessitated by John getting his foot up under him and hefting up off the trunk, Flint makes a short sharp sound of frustration. He bends to pull shirts from the sea chest at his heel, though they're perfectly suited to simply live in the box for whatever short duration for which they're in residence here. There is no need to pull them out into the dusty air of the room, or to lay them across the musty linens at the foot of the bed alongside that discarded book like he does presently. But maybe he threw them in without much consideration, and now they require refolding lest the crumple of seams make for unavoidable wrinkles in the too clean fabric. What he wouldn't trade for the stiffening scorch of salt air and sea spray. But this—

prompts him set down all pretense of unpacking.

"I don't see what's so fucking difficult in it. You say there's a way forward with both. I'm telling you not if this is what deposes Rutyer." One of a short order of dark linen shirts, pale knots of stitching at the collar, is pitched back into the open trunk, sleeves fluttering. "I'm asking you to trust me, John."

The reaction ripples across John's face. He finds himself caught off-guard by this particular appeal; there is a moment of something split open in his expression, a crack in which something raw shows through.

"I do."

Simple. True.

It complicates all other aspects of this conversation.

"You aren't asking me to trust you," is careful clarification, a reframing as his expression knits and reforms. "You are asking me to trust in Rutyer, and I do not."

What John does, what bleeds forth from his palms, would see him drowned, or burned, or made tranquil in a Fereldan Circle. How far removed is Byerly Rutyer from that attitude? (Far enough removed that it would not be held overhead, a weakness something to be exploited?) How long would it be kept secret in this business Flint is proposing they engage in?

The flare of frustration that answers the raw cut in John's face burns brief, hot and sharp. It tastes like metal on his back teeth. How many times has he reduced himself to a flayed open state for Byerly Rutyer's examination to stand here now and watch all that twist down the drain?

"No. I'm telling you I have spent more than four years in a room with that man and know what he is and isn't capable of, and how far he may be pushed and in what direction. If that isn't what I'm meant to be doing—determining how best to insulate you all—, then why don't you tell me what it is that you imagine my being in that room has achieved? Would you really have me stand up in front of the likes of Rowntree and de Cedoux with nothing in my hand to offer them except, what? To rob them of the Circles' cache to fund a front of this war they've already invested everything else into?"

"How many times has he publicly belittled de Cedoux? Antagonized Rowntree? Professed himself unmistakably in opposition to them in the most crucial of their hopes for what lies past this war?"

Having stood, John finds that the action has not afforded him any further steadiness, any sense of control over the flow of conversation between them.

They have the cache, and the leverage that affords them. They could force the hand of the southern mages, maybe. But to make such a play would be destructive in a way John could not repair, could not talk his way past.

And he still cannot see the value in it. What bridges all the things that could be lost in the attempt.

"We have an opportunity to see someone of use to you into that room. Someone who would not hobble us, who would give us support without half the groveling Rutyer requires from you, from them. If he withdraws his support, we have other avenues to rely upon."

Madi, her people. Secure, for the moment. Her name like a bruise, even unspoken. John feels the point catch in his mouth, feels himself grasping for different words, a way to say this thing another way that will make the point in a way that lands.

"James," instead, quieter. A question.

They are stood apart in this dust-covered room. The single, hopping step forward John takes feels all the more ungainly within that chasm.

It prompts him to fetch the book, a brisk movement. For a split second, the trajectory of the thing casts in the direction of—

It would be easy, actually. To take the book and step across the detritus scattered about the old rug, and to quit the room. There is, ostensibly, some need to scavenge a curtain to throw across the heavy frame leering over the room. He could comfortably make his way down the stairs and across the wet garden and be gone into Kirkwall's Hightown with very little inconvenience at all.

Instead he turns the book in his hand and sets the dark, skeleton inscripted spine on the rail of the bed's dark mahogany footboard. Studies it there, the pages bulging up between its boards from the pressure exerted on the spine. Or, past the book at some point in the dark shadow between the wood and the linen. For a thick second. For five. A moment in which to carefully assemble:

"I understand why it is that you would be wary of all of this."

In that split second, John does consider—

He is easily outstripped. There are a number of stairs between here and the ground floor. He is only so quick on his feet. He is fettered by the limitations of his body, all that is unchangeable about his circumstance.

It would not be difficult to leave him behind.

He is quiet, posture shifting, straightening as his grip adjusts over the handle of his crutch. Waiting, rather than interjecting the shrewd guess at where this train of thought might lead.

A tip of hand between them. Allowing space, should there be more following after.

Is there more?

A thumb presses at the book's fore edge. The pliant pages crumple very gently in accommodation to the slow exertion of force.

"I won't ask you to be comfortable with it. But I would ask how you would see the arrangement made most functional were he to maintain that chair. Indulge me," he says, raising the point of his attention back to John. He has forced some of the heat in it to cool. It can be a genuine request. "Hypothetically."

A question that feels like a fetter. Like being lanced between two unfavorable outcomes and held there, caught.

John crosses the room. Eases to a propped lean at the edge of the bed, against the carved footboard, where he braces with one hand there alongside Flint, the detritus of his chest, the book and it's bending pages.

Having relocated to this position, well within arm's reach, with no further reason to remain silent, John is obliged to consider what's being put to him. To absorb with some bitter humor the concept of comfort and his own passing relationship to it, all the ways in which he has yielded and quartered his own comfort in these past years.

"You are asking how to corral an inherently dysfunctional individual."

This is what John knows: they might spend hours in this room coming to an understanding as to how they might balance two opposite factions, and see it all upset on Byerly Rutyer's poorly controlled whims.

Indulge me, James Flint says. John's hand falls to his thigh, thumb digging against the thudding, ever-present ache there.

"James," he says, quieter, expression intent as he treads back to the unanswered question: "Are we coming to a decision together, or has the choice already been made?"

(It feels like a question that could easily turned in the hand and pointed straight back in the direction from which it'd come. He doesn't know; are they? How much slack can he be expected to feed into this?)

The pressure of his thumb relents, though only to shift restlessly between the book's boards. To the book's fore-edge with a ratty thumbnail. It brings no relief to the poor book of Nevarran Iron Age verse, battered once by age and twice by whatever rough passage it has taken to arrive in Kirkwall and ultimately come to be here in this room, and now again under the clamp of Flint's hand. He is rarely easy on things.

"I've stood in a place very like the one he occupies," he says, careful like arranging pieces of himself for observation. And it itches, this intentional exposure of vulnerable parts that John is simply meant to be conscious of without their being emphasized. "It matters to me that you understand why I might care to recognize that. Why I might look to make some effort to navigate a way forward from out of it."

And more, though this requires even less saying and so is more careful still—

"It isn't just Rutyer there. He's only the most abrasive example."

Between them, John abandons the useless application of one palm over the ever-present ache in his thigh to reach for Flint's hand. Interrupt the work of his fingers over the pages and cover.

There are differences. John could point them out. He is aware of what is being displayed to him, and the span in which there is overlap and where there is not. But that is not the point.

"I'm not unaware of where those in that room choose to stand," is foregone conclusion. Making some allowance for Stark, and the unpredictability that must be afford to a man formed entirely outside of Thedas, the configurations of that room are no mystery to John. "But you are not asking me to tie our business to them, and stake it on their ability to maintain their seat."

Business being made to cover such a broad stretch of territory.

And it's invocation is only part and parcel of some passing clarification on the way to—

John's thumb over Flint's knuckles, looking up into his face as he says, "I do understand. I can see how there is similarity enough to form a link. I know you are trying to hold steady two opposing things and see a way to striking a balance. But there are a number of ways forward, not all of which necessitate keeping him in that seat. It is one way, but I am not convinced it is the only way to do him a kindness, or to serve our work."

Some flex in the heel of his hand— may ease the pressure on the book's aching spine, but doesn't undo the corded tension in his wrist or knuckles. It just changes at John's behest, altering its trajectory in some less clear direction while Flint studies his face.

Isn't it? Their business—tied to that room and its makeup. Whether Byerly Rutyer is in it or not, he has shackled himself to the influence that might be leveraged from that room. Anyone who would move into it becomes a person he must give some consideration. They become a figure who exacts a form of deference; one that is difficult to articulate from here in this room in a miserable house to which he has happily banished himself. But he has a sense of it like a hand heavy at the scruff of his neck, or the feeling one gets when they have sat for such a long enough time that all their joints have gone stiff.

Is there anything less dignified than becoming an old man clinging to his chair in a crumbling fort?

"I won't be the driving force to depose him. Until either someone sets a fully formed alternative in my hand or he proves himself totally unwilling to be checked, I'm not going to play that role."

Could John put an alternative into his hand?

Maybe, maybe not.

Here is what has been proven to him, time and again: employing another to act on your behalf is a difficult, perilous thing.

"I'm asking that you not stand in its way."

Though still it sticks, a point John would push were tension not strung so tight through Flint's body, the weight of the tenuous structure woven around Riftwatch turned such a tangible weight in the moment. He has already said it once, finds little use in revisiting: You would not have proposed to consider it, if there was nothing—

The book falls to the mattress. John's thumb runs along his knuckles, looking up into that close study without flinching from it.

That penetrating, exacting examination lasts a beat longer, then lays sharply over. Stood there, not looking at John and not removing his hand from under the sweep of the man's thumb, he visibly reorders something in his head. Gathers his thoughts. Sets his teeth around something and measures its tensile strength between them.

What does he care, really, to stand between Rutyer and whatever might be coming for him? Enough to steer the point away and see what Byerly makes of the opportunity afforded by the space, maybe, but beyond that?

(It could be done. There is a way forward there; he can sense its path and the urge to go hacking after it itches at his fingertips. Any movement forward feels like it must be good movement.)

"You needn't concern yourself with that," he says after a moment's reconciliation of these two things, moving his hand then to gather back the book. Something less harsh in the set of his grip about it. "It's evidently out of the question."

Edited (Comes back hours later to flesh something out) 2023-04-22 13:00 (UTC)

This break in contact leaves John briefly unmoored. A hand suspended in the space between them.

He might return his palm to the dull ache, ever present, beating in the muscle of his thigh. Instead—

"Tell me what you mean," comes as an appeal, John's fingers setting light at Flint's wrist.

The point of his attention cuts bluntly back. He doesn't pull his wrist free—doesn't care to—, but neither does he trade the book away in favor of working his hand round to set a thumb at the strap of skin bared below John's sleeve cuff.

"I mean that even if it were my preference, I wouldn't be able to see that done in any effective way without either assistance, or someone else's confidence in the utility of the thing, or both. Barring those things, it's beyond doing."

Simple for all that it might be residually scuffed and barbed about its edge. See, he is perfectly realistic.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[CLOSED] This is not my beautiful house

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