closed.

[cozen]

WHO: Bastien + Byerly & Gwenaëlle; Redvers + Barrow
WHAT: Working hard or hardly working
WHEN: Winter/Spring 9:50
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Catch-all for a war table mission + some jobs. Eternally available to plan additional things! Just hit me up.

CONTENTS
I. Byerly & Bastien deal with an Antivan problem (and take a detour).
II. Gwenaëlle & Bastien escort a Chantry Mother.
III. Barrow & Redvers fetch jellied pigs feet.

Comments

[cozen]

Anis cuts a look back over his shoulder and says, "Thank you," with some genuine pleasure. Some reservation, though, too. A quiet watchfulness, instinctive calm, and holding-back in the face of something earthshaking—same as Bastien. Not all from a bardmaster's instruction after all.

Bastien hasn't let go of Byerly's elbow. He looks around the house once, and once is enough for him to know how many rooms and where the doors are. It's not a rich house. Small, especially if more than one or two of the children outside belong here, but it's tidy and in good repair, and there's no sign of anyone sleeping on the floor by the stove.

"This is Byerly," he says before he has quite finished his look around. "Byerly Rutyer. He's my companion," comes easily, proudly, Bastien having already played through this much in his head to decide what word to use, with enough weight to it that it can't just mean the traveling kind. The change to his accent registers, and Bastien would like to say something about it, if he could say it without saying it in front of Anis, but—

"Pleasure," Anis says. For a moment he hesitates in the center of the room, awkwardness showing through the calm, before he points at the table and its chairs in invitation. While they're sitting and he's heading for the cabinet and rustling around in it he says, "I was sure you were dead. But Amani always said you weren't, so she's been... the worst, since your letter came. She told Mamma about it like she was a magistrate ordering a hanging. Dad is gone," he volunteers before Bastien can ask. "Eliya and Lyes are fine. And there is another one. Ahsan. He was a surprise."

"Oh," Bastien says. He looks at Byerly, overwhelm barely visible beneath a smile.

He doesn't know what to say. But the children outside save him. One of their joyous shrieks becomes a wail of insult or injury (or both) and Anis pops up from the cupboard, muttering a mix of curses and apologies on his way out the front door to make sure none of them are actively dying. He sets cups on the table as he passes, but nothing to put in them yet.

Bastien's more grateful for the pause than he would be for water, anyway.

"There's another one," he echoes quietly. That's bigger, weirder news than the death of his sickly father.

A second later he blinks out of his daze—insofar as he’s ever dazed, gaze slightly further away without qualifying as faraway—and grips Byerly’s knee beneath the table.

“Hey, don’t change,” he says. Not in a whisper. He can hear Anis outside, managing the children’s crisis. “If we are going to know each other, I want them to know you. You can’t—“ Ignore the irony. “—fake an accent forever.”

I appreciate your bullying

[bouchonne]

Byerly's lips part a moment. Then they close again, and he looks down. I don't want to make trouble for you, was what he had been going to say, but it would have come out so strange. What trouble? Mentioning trouble would invite the possibility that the family might reject their wandering brother, and By doesn't want that thought to so much as enter Bastien's head. And it doesn't even seem possible at this stage, not with the awkward warmth shown by Anis, not with the easy way they've been asked in.

So: Maybe, By has to admit, if only to himself, it isn't about not making trouble for Bastien. Maybe it's just about wanting them to like him.

"You can't fake an accent forever, maybe," By says. "Some of us actually have talent."

It comes out reasonably light. It has to come out light, after all - because this is Bastien's time to feel tentative and anxious, not Byerly's. This is Bastien's reunion with his family.

"Should I - Can we help out in some way?" By cranes his neck around and admits, "Your little nieces and nephews seem like quite a handful, eh?"

you heard it here, folks! bullying works!

[cozen]

The scrunchy face Bastien makes at that first part—not truly offended, given it's true and given he's so pleased whenever Byerly acknowledges being skilled in more than convincing people not to take him too seriously—promptly smooths out into oh. He looks toward the door. It hadn't occurred to him to help. Overstepping, maybe–but it wouldn't feel at all overstepping with a stranger's children. Of course they'd offer to help then. And these are practically strangers, even if they're also his little nieces and nephews.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, let's."

Outside is light chaos: Anis holding a girl of five or six who's trying to articulate why she's so upset between wails into his neck while an assortment of others stand around protesting their innocence. A couple have lost interest in the proceedings in favor of resuming attempts to shove snow down each other's collars.

The presence of the two strangers alone is enough to stop the protests and the wailing. The girl sniffs and blinks her wet eyes at them, maybe because she doesn't want to cry in front of strangers, maybe because she's curious enough to have forgotten her woes.

"We thought we could," Bastien begins to say.

But the tallest and scampiest of the boys, maybe nine years old at most, cuts him off with, "He looks like Uncle Lyes."

"Yeah, he does," Anis says cautiously, and the war between wanting to be honest with the children and not wanting to be too hasty to introduce this near-stranger as their relative is visible on his face before the same boy combines cleverness and eavesdropping, lickety-split:

"He's the brother Mama is so mad Grandmother left in Orlais."

Amani's boy, then. Not Anis'. And Anis looks helpless, resigned, a little amused—used to this kind of thing—as he wobbles his head in noncommittal agreement with that diagnosis. The line of children consider Bastien with interest, some undoubtedly trying to do the math as to what being their aunt's brother makes him to them. Bastien smiles at them, nerves professionally disguised, while the scamp turns his adorable calculating gaze on Byerly.

"You can't be anyone's brother," he says. "You're too tall."

[bouchonne]

People who don't know how to interact with children can often default to one of two modes. The first mode, and one that is typically less successful, is to speak with them like they're simpletons. The second mode is to speak to them like they're peers. Byerly's instinct guides him towards the latter.

"Not a brother to anyone in this family - that's true." He sighs mournfully. "But would you believe that I'm actually descended from dwarves? I had to leave Orzammar because I kept hitting my head on the ceiling."

Amani's clever little boy looks a little skeptical and also a little bit like he wants to giggle at the image. The little girl, meanwhile, swallows the lie whole.

"How did you get so big?" she asks, her eyes wide with amazement.

"I fell off a cliff," Byerly replies, "but grabbed onto the edge. They didn't notice I was gone for three days. And while I was dangling there, I ended up stretching out."

The children don't entirely look like they buy this, but at least one goes and clambers up into a tree to conduct an experiment by which they dangle to see if they start to extend.

This side conversation, and the subsequent distraction, gives Bastien a little bit of room to speak directly with Anis. Perhaps a minute before the children start clamoring adorably for attention once again.

[cozen]

It's a productive minute. The children are identified: Nadim is the scamp, Aida the crier now hanging from the tree, and the others are Jaza, Luja, Halim. Only Nadim is Amani's—an accident, when she'd been endeavoring not to raise any more children than the ones she'd already spent her own childhood looking after, but not one she regrets. The rest are Anis', plus the oldest boy sent off on a mission—

"We, uh. We named him Laith," Anis says.

—and his wife is visiting her father but should be back tomorrow, if they stay that long. Bastien had already explained in his letter that he was in Kirkwall, with Riftwatch, but he explains a little further, avoiding the violence and spying of it all while the children are in hearing range without trying to fool Anis into believing there isn't something more.

Byerly is not included in this exchange because Byerly is being swarmed by children. The smallest two, Luja and Halim, who may very well be twins, are trying to climb him like squirrels up a tree, so accustomed to adults swinging them in circles by their hands until they're dizzy or carrying them on shoulders that they feel fully entitled to hang from his arms instead of tree branches to get taller that way. And in the meantime Nadim is quizzing him: what's his name, why is that his name, is that a dwarf name, if he's a dwarf why isn't his beard longer, does he know Garrin Durten who is a dwarf and who makes the little soldiers out of stone, where did he come from, what's it like there, how long did it take to get here, where are the horses and what are their names, do they like apples, does Byerly like cats, does he want to see a mama cat and kittens—

"You have to stop harassing that cat every twenty minutes," Anis interrupts, half an ear on this conversation even while he's having his own with Bastien.

While Nadim argues his innocence in the matter of cat harassment, Bastien catches Byerly's eye and smiles. Pleased and grateful and clearly touched by the sight of him with the kids. And promptly interrupted again, this time by, "Laith."

Amani, still far down the slushy road, isn't quite shouting. There's something hoarse and hissed about it even while it's loud enough to carry down the street. She's striding fast, leaving the preteen—Laith—strolling further in her wake with a young man. And the sight of her snaps something in Bastien that the sight of Anis didn't. Maybe because Anis looks so different and she looks so much the same, the added weight of motherhood and middle age bringing back her baby face as well.

He doesn't run, but he matches her pace, leaving Anis and Byerly behind to meet her halfway. Nadim leaves Byerly's alone to trail after him—maybe curious and looking to pry, maybe because that's his mother, maybe both.

Anis crosses his arms, then uncrosses them immediately to relieve Byerly of the weight of at least one of his children. "Companion, huh," he asks, with a friendly sort of wariness. The kind that comes from, say, having made rules about how long some other sibling had to be with one of their revolving door of companions before introducing them to the kids as anything more than a friend. "Long time?"

[bouchonne]

Byerly is well accustomed to wariness. He has, on more than one occasion, been with someone who had the bad judgment to take him home to meet their family, and he certainly wasn't about to turn down the bed and meal. The response to his presence had typically featured hushed conversations, broken off abruptly when he entered the room, interspersed with pointed questions about who he was and why he thought himself worthy of being in the room.

Long time? seems much less loaded than reviews of his family tree or icy inquiries about what had brought him to this part of the world. Particularly since he can even give a rather satisfactory answer.

"We've been friends for nearly two decades. Off and on. Oof, all right, I'm not that strong - " He'd been doing his level best to hold his arm out horizontal to provide the child in question (he will be damned to death if he can remember a single child's name except for Laith) a branch to dangle from, but he can't keep it up long. The wriggling grub who'd been holding on drops to the ground, then demands to sit atop his shoulder.

Byerly quirks an eyebrow at Anis, unsure if Papa will be accepting of the prospect of the grub cracking its head open. Papa nods, and so Byerly hoists the child to sit atop his shoulders. There's much exclamation of delight, and soon several other little bugs are demanding their turns.

"Those two were close?" By manages to ask Anis in between all the hooting and hollering, nodding over at Bastien and Amani.

[cozen]

Anis is watching them, too, looking fairly dignified despite the fact that the child on Byerly's shoulders is using her giantess' height as an opportunity to pull beads of melted and refrozen snow off of her clothes and try to land them on her father's head.

"If he was close to any of us," agreement and not. A touch of cynicism from a little brother not little enough for the youngests' hero worship, trapped by illness and temperament while his brother came and went (but mostly went).

Amani chief among them. She doesn't reach for him now, stopping several feet in front of him. Fists clenched at her side. A family trait, this lack of inclination to fall crying into anyone's arms, even when they're back from the dead. But she isn't a bard. There's something on her face. Heartbreak, relief, outrage.

"I looked for you," is still not shouted, but sharp enough to carry. "I looked for you, I looked—"

"I know," Bastien says. He knew. He dodged and ducked and didn't go home. And so he owes it to her to be the one to close the distance, touching her shoulder as a checkpoint for discomfort before he hugs her to his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Nani."

No tears from either of them, but she clutches him back.

She says, "You sound so stupid and I can't believe you're still using that stupid fucking name—"

On Byerly's shoulders, the grub—Luja—whispers, "Stupid fucking name," with delight that makes it very obvious she will have found fifteen things to call stupid fucking by this time tomorrow.

Anis shakes his head, dislodging some snow beads, and gestures at the array of boys surrounding Bastien and Amani to stop standing there rubbernecking. Only his son obeys.

"Our mother thinks he must want something," Anis says while Laith the Younger trots back over. Maybe it's a bit of an apology for the woman's absence, the fact that he didn't send anyone to get her like he did Amina. But it's a little cynicism, too—a little not being entirely unwilling to rule out that this is a prelude to some request, even if it clearly can't be one for money. He's glancing sideways to check Byerly's face.

[bouchonne]

Anis will find that Byerly’s smile has gone tight around the edges. Perhaps the heartfelt, painful warmth of that greeting - and the delicious revelation that Bastien had adopted his stupid fucking name as far back as childhood, a fact that Byerly will store fondly until such a time as he wishes to fluster his beloved - had disarmed Byerly’s defenses a bit. And so there’s more honesty in his expression than he would normally allow. Specifically, honesty in the form of fury - fury that their mother would think that, fury that Anis would repeat it, hidden behind that smile that’s gone brittle.

“Well,” says Byerly, “advance notice that she’s about to take the whole family out of the city is obviously off the table. So that can’t be what he’s after, eh?”

He realizes that his temper has gotten the better of him, and takes a moment to be surprised by it. Not very like him, to snap instead of lying in wait for a moment to take revenge. He hopes to the Maker that he didn’t seem defensive, and that Anis hasn’t decided based on his snarling that Bastien has evil intent.

Then he takes a few steps forward, bouncing little Luja on his shoulders. “Hey-ho,” he says, and then does a convincing horselike nicker, which delights the girl. She grabs onto his hair like it’s a bridle and starts steering him around. He obliges, trotting along, until he’s been steered towards the pair of Bastien and Amani.

“Don’t mind me,” he reports to the two of them. He sounds cheerful and lighthearted. “I’m just a horsey.” (Bastien will, of course, understand perfectly that Byerly is checking to make sure he’s all right.)

hi I'm back to demand continued indulgence

[cozen]

"Stupid fucking horsey!" Luja crows cheerfully from his shoulders, devoid of malice, and Amani—who has let go of Bastien as Byerly approached, mostly, one hand still gripping the back of his sleeve hard enough to leave wrinkles, like he's twelve years old and needs an iron grip to prevent him from slipping away before she's successfully dragged him home—tsks up at her niece.

"That's a gallant thoroughbred if I've ever seen one. You better treat him with respect."

Bastien was smiling before this, but it makes him smile wider, and it makes Luja give Byerly's hair a chastened pat. Aside from some wiggling and one attempt to kick him into resuming his gallop, she's relatively patient through a full minute and a half of adult conversation, as Bastien introduces Amani and Byerly, and then Amani introduces Ahsan, who looks as bemused by the arrival of this mythical older brother as Bastien feels by the existence of this surprise little one.

"We should," Amani says—

And pauses to pry Luja off Byerly's shoulders while the girl makes a disappointed whining sound.

"We should get it over with now. Better than seeing her on your way out and ending on a low note."

Her is his mother, Bastien understands. He understands too that Amani, beyond assuming Bastien would want to see her, wants their mother to see Bastien—that she has a point to prove in their apparently ongoing fight about him.

And if he doesn't want to see his mother, exactly, and would probably be perfectly content to leave Kaiten again without having spoken to her, he's also not afraid of her. So why not let Amani make his point.

"Alright," he agrees, and Amani turns her attention to persuading Luja and Nadim and Ahsan to all go help with dinner, while Bastien turns to Byerly. He could say Byerly doesn't have to come. But Byerly will come anyway. Bastien may as well admit to wanting him to. So he admits it silently, by taking hold of Byerly's elbow to make sure he can't join the little parade of children and teenagers who have been successfully persuaded to go make themselves useful by the promise of cobbler and/or the threat of having to deal with their grandmother.

The walk is long. But with the children out of hearing distance, Bastien is able to explain himself a little better. Realizing they'd gone for real. Being taken in by bards. Riftwatch, once he couldn't ignore the war any longer. Amani hasn't left Kaiten since they arrived here, busy raising siblings and a son and caring for their declining father and running a shop, but she takes this in stride. The two absent siblings have given her practice accepting adventure stories without too much amazement.

She leans forward as she walks to look around Bastien and up at Byerly.

"You aren't from Kirkwall though," she says.

I'm delighted

[bouchonne]

"Ferelden," Byerly says.

Don't change. That chastisement lingers in Byerly's ears. It likely wouldn't be enough to draw honesty out of him, though, if it weren't for Amani's manner. But Amani is so calm in the face of stories of Bards and warfare and all the madness that had been Bastien's life; if that story didn't shake her, why would Byerly's?

"We met when we were young, Ba- Laith and I. Then parted for a while, and met again in Riftwatch. I'm in service to Queen Anora as an intelligence agent - a spy - but - well - " He smiles wryly over at Bastien and offers a shrug. "There is a greater good, beyond our own agendas and our own national loyalties. It's what we fight for."

Perhaps there is a bit of an agenda in saying that. Perhaps he's building a bit of a wall against the mother's disapproval by telling Amani in no uncertain terms that Bastien is a good man.

But he suspects that practical, clear-eyed Amani will also smell bullshit if it's laid on too thick. Not that this is bullshit (high-quality fertilizer, if anything), but it wouldn't help to cut the stuff a bit.

"That and a steady wage. And the cook there does a good job, actually. The grub's better than you'd think."

[cozen]

Byerly says Laith, and Bastien looks at him sidelong with a furtive, half-bewildered warmth. Byerly is so careful with him; Byerly asked him what he should be called and accepted it and never pushed or teased. So this, three years later, is the first time Bastien's heard Byerly call him that. And he imagined it would make him feel like a cat being pet in the wrong direction, but instead it makes him feel like a cat being skritched carefully beneath the chin—that's the bewilderment.

A small thing. He has to focus on the small things right now, little pieces he can chew on one at a time. He watches the way Amani watches Byerly when he explains himself: first with calm credulity, then a gentle wave of eye narrowing-skepticism that washed over and recedes again as she does the calculations and arrives at why not. Why not a spy in a Fereldan Queen's service. It's not stranger than the fabled tear in the sky, the blight and corpses and griffons, the return of a long-lost brother.

She smiles wide at the grub—her teeth are straighter than Bastien's but not much smaller. Her smile is aimed first at Byerly, then at Bastien, who smiles back mostly with his eyes, pleased she's impressed, proud of who he's managed to ensnare.

"He's there for the greater good. I'm there for the food—"

Amani says, "Of course," playing along.

"—and the men."

"Mmhm. You know, he looks kind of like that boy you liked. What was his name?"

Bastien opens his mouth to argue about how little Byerly looks like him, aside from them both being tall, then recognizes the trap she's laid out and manages to swerve to, "I don't know who you're talking about," in time to prevent losing a twenty-year-old argument about whether or not he liked their gangly, spotty neighbor.

Amani beams at him. The breath she heaves in and out could be an exasperated sigh if she didn't look so happy.

"I want to hear about it," she says around him, to Byerly. "All of it." But not this moment. Her walk is slowing as the snow-coated houses above them get smaller and less well-kept. She says, quieter, "She's worse than she was. You don't have to..."

Second guessing whether this is worth it after all—and Bastien understands, for the first time and all at once, that he got off easy compared to her.

"I'll be fine," he says. "And By was raised by dragons."

[bouchonne]

"Growl," Byerly contributes helpfully.

He finds that - painfully, with the ache of a stiff knee being unbent - he loves Amani. He loves her for the easy way she talks about the boy he liked, teasing and warm. He loves her for big-toothed smile. It is always difficult, finding a new person in your heart, because they hurt when they slot in there.

And it hurts to think of Bastien living a life without her. Who might Bastien have been, if he'd always had this nosy, loving, teasing sister beside him? Less hurt, to be sure. Less scarred. Maybe less willing to pretend. But Byerly, selfishly, knows that this is the Bastien who loves him, and so in some ways, he is grateful for Bastien's sisterlessness.

Still. Distracted though he is by the ache, he still does hear that warning. And so he scratches his cheek and asks in bard-sign: Are you lying? A neglectful mother, worse than she was, doesn't sound like a recipe for being fine.