faderift | closed | and the past is a bastard.

WHO: Astrid Runasdotten & Gwenaëlle Baudin
WHAT: Sometimes you see Hakkon’s Wrath with your own eyes and just gotta follow up on that.
WHEN: Drakonis
WHERE: Training yard, the Gallows
NOTES: Foul mouths, probably. Memories of animal harm.

Astrid’s settling in. Scouting missions have been carrying her far afield — just the way she likes it — but all roads do eventually lead back to the Gallows, and her restless feet often carry her to the training yard.

Today, though, someone else has beaten her to the archery range. Astrid’s head pops up over one of the low walls like a curious groundhog, watching goggle-eyed as Gwenaëlle practices, squinting one-eyed and sending frosty arrows across the field. To get a better view, Astrid eventually winds up perched on the brick wall itself, one leg swinging beneath her as she stares at the other woman’s giant bow, the one of unmistakable Avvar make.

And in any other context her reaction would just be hey that’s sick as hell,

(except she remembers what it looked like during that first fight at the rift, ice crackling in the air. She had picked up one of the arrows out of sheer curiosity and the cold had practically bitten her, fingertips burning with the brief nip of frostbite. If Astrid had questions, they’d died on her tongue shortly after, vanished when she was scoured empty during the battle. That pile of bloody fur lying heavy across her, suffocating dead weight, the people from Riftwatch had had to haul her loose—)

But that was weeks ago. Blinking, Astrid watches Gwenaëlle’s scrutinising arc. She waits until the next shot goes clear, before deciding to approach. (Some of the first lessons drummed into her: don’t fucking surprise someone when their arm’s currently holding back all that tension and lethal weight, an arrow ready to leap for your throat if you jolt their aim.)

She finally slides off the wall, boots hitting the ground as she walks closer.

“Hi,” Astrid says, behind the other woman. Let’s just get this over with. “I’m sorry, I don’t really— remember your name? But meant to say thanks. For the other day.”

The other week. Month. Who’s counting.

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She wears the ghost of a smile, hearing that description. It’s a good one.

But which does beg the question: what even is Astrid after? Learning more about the rifts and if it’s ever possible to fix a Fade-touched animal, sure, but she’s not one of the bigwigs in Research; she won’t be the one to crack it or even know how to help someone else get to that information. She doesn’t even have a shard to help close those rifts. So she’s hanging around here trying to be helpful, like the way she used to hover at her mum’s elbow when Runa was cooking; waiting to get to chop some vegetables, chip in any way she could. To be of service.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m all momentum. Like I landed here ‘cos it was the next possible step and it sounded like a good idea,” and Gwenaëlle had been the one to kindly suggest it, had helped scrape the abject grieving mess of a girl into the boat and swept a Riftwatch cloak over her shoulders to keep her warm, she hadn’t been able to stop shivering, her wolf’s blood on her hands—

“And I’m like that coyote from the periodical cartoons, y’know? If I ever stop moving or signing up for jobs or missions then I’ll realise I’m not standing on solid ground anymore and I’ll fall.” Beat. “Does that feeling ever go away?”

Someone else might have a better answer, a more thoughtful one, a more experienced one, an answer that's more reassuring—

Gwenaëlle says, “Not so far, but I haven't run out of things need doing, either,” sort of philosophically. “What I found...”

Hm. She studies Hardie, although not as if she thinks he holds the answers; he's just comfortingly familiar, while she works her way through how she wants to say the thing she wants to say. Finally,

“If you do enough, I think it becomes clear what you're doing that matters and what doesn't. And how much is— now and needful. There's no better you without you, now. You know?”

Maybe? Maybe that sounds mad.

A little, yes.

Astrid’s literally echoing her, her mouth silently forming the shape of There’s no better you without you, as if saying it back will make it make sense and waiting for the moment it clicks. It doesn’t fully — she doesn’t know Gwenaëlle well enough yet to follow every step of her thoughts — but it does enough, like a hook snagging on a loose piece of thread, pulling just enough to leave some food for thought.

Because at least she’s not the only one wrestling with questions like this.

“So just keep doing the things,” she says slowly, “one step at a time, and then you’ll figure out what’s actually worth doing and what’s just spinning your feet above the crevasse, like. Something like that?”

“About the shape of it,” she agrees, ruminative. “I suppose, I don't know where it ends, I'm only certain — if you try something it might fail. If you don't try anything, you've failed right out of the gate. So why not keep moving, then? What's the alternative?”

Stillness. Failure. A life dictated not by your decisions but by the way you are buffeted about by the decisions of others—

“But,” after a hesitation, because this is true too but she likes it less: “you learn nothing from never falling, either. I don't know. I imagine,” more cautiously, “that before that day we met, what happened then,” oblique, but it isn't as if they don't both know where her mind went, “might have been the worst thing you could imagine happening. And you're still here. So you aren't the same person you were, in a way, anyway.”

There’s a careful stillness which settles over Astrid as Gwenaëlle touches so gently on the topic of what happened then. Astrid is still-fragile, her whole existence a still-healing bone; walking wounded even though there’s nothing, outwardly, to show her as battered and raw as she feels. She’d come out of the fight remarkably unscathed. A few scratches. That was it. (It had felt like she should have gotten more injured during the battle, to make her outside match her insides. It would have been fair.)

But it’s true. She’s still here.

She bites her lip, until, “Yeah. You’re right. And I don’t really know what anyone gains if I’d just laid down flat on the ground and stopped. And every other option of what to do seemed like shit. Like what, go become a mercenary? Nah. You’ve all got griffons.”

Which isn’t the main reason she said yes to joining, but it is a reason. And a safer one to mention, one which doesn’t have her feeling quite so jagged and off-kilter.

“Well, and we didn't have griffons when I came here,” Gwenaëlle says, her smile lopsided and lovely, rolling with the lighter-hearted pivot smoothly— maybe not so gracefully as someone else might make it look as if a pivot hadn't even happened, but with enough ease that she'd probably been very purposefully leaving enough space for that heavy thing to be stepped around, if stepping around it suits better.

It warps the space around it, a thing like that. They both know it's there. Isn't this the point? It isn't everything.

“Keep moving and who knows what else we'll have.”

Astrid flashes Gwenaëlle a fragile smile in return; not entirely firm around the edges, not as brilliant and beaming as she’d ordinarily be, but it’s an attempt and that’s what matters. There’s the sense of their mutually-accepting the shift, grasping for something a little easier and a little gentler.

And yet she feels lighter for having stepped closer to it, today.

She finally ruffles Hardie’s head and then unfolds her limbs in one go, smoothly swooping back to her feet. “More shooting, for one,” she declares, and that is what they’ll have, because she’s not gonna miss the chance to see more of that legendary bow in action — and to hone and practice and show off more of her own skills, as well.

Just keep moving.

closed | and the past is a bastard.

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