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

[elegiaque]

A laugh breathed out for Florent's sake, and— well, it's more than a little funny that her first reaction to what he says next is Maker, no, all things considered. She manages to say, instead,

“Not a bit,” which it occurs to her is maybe only two thirds true, but it feels like a strange conversation to broach with Guilfoyle. And besides, even if Mistress Baudin had been faithful, that wouldn't have meant anything for her own upbringing. No, this question refers to two of them particularly, and it's a straightforward sort of answer to a question that her years in this war could have complicated.

Hasn't. Could have, though.

“One of my namesakes, Lady Decima Roux, is notoriously devout. Famously,” she corrects herself, with a casual roll of her eyes, “we only ever attended services so she'd see my lord attending. I don't know what he thought it was going to achieve. About as much as anyone's prayers to the Maker ever have.”

Well. Marcellin Roux exists, so maybe slightly more than that.

[cozen]

Bastien knows the name. He knows the names she doesn't say, too. They're all still in there, but largely frozen in time, arranged the way they were a decade ago when he stopped spending his life keeping track of them and began only hearing the very important or very funny things. The common man's grapevine.

"I've heard worse plans," he says, laugh smothered behind the first syllables. "And better ones. But plenty worse. Is that why you were named for her, because he—?"

Loved is presumptuous; wanted to fuck is rude. Silence full of implication will suffice.

[elegiaque]

Sure, it could suffice, or:

“Jerked himself off imagining new and exciting ways to humiliate and punish my mother?” she suggests, sardonic. “I can certainly only assume.”

Insult to injury, she has always thought, to have named his bastard after yet another mistress. Her father's daughter, but her mother's creature— of all the little vengeances that Anne had managed to take, the pitiless rage nurtured in Gwenaëlle's breast is her most enduring and successful. There had been a time that he had imagined his wife's death might have led to a relenting; that without her to look to, his daughter might soften toward him, in time.

It hadn't lasted very long.

But since that is a real fucking downer,

“What about you? Did you imagine a world the Maker might return to, one day?”

(She assumes if he ever did, he doesn't still, which is mostly because she thinks him quite intelligent.)

[cozen]

Gwenaëlle's choice of description curls his shoulders inward—the only sign of a laugh, suppressed because if loosed it would have been loud and sharp and attention-grabbing, and because her poor mother.

Which mother does she mean? He could just ask. He thinks she wouldn't mind, even with the company and non-zero chance of multilingual eavesdropping—

"The way I imagined Antiva and the Amaranthine Ocean."

He swipes a wandering fly away from his horse and himself. It buzzes over to Gwenaëlle, Bastien's mild apologetic grimace following.

"The Chantry fed us if we came to services. And if you came often enough they knew your face, you were first in line for new shoes and things when they had them. I wasn't pious," is what he meant with Antiva and the Amaranthine, whose existence he accepted with equal ease and equal impact on his behavior, "but it took me some time to realize it was up for debate."

[elegiaque]

The practical matter of self-preservation makes a great deal of sense; Orlais is not, she knows, a gentle place to be without. That the Chantry is often the only place a person might turn is — she has been coming to think — half the problem. In those half-formed thoughts of solidarity between elves and mages and maybe more than only them, too, she'd begun to envision, what if they weren't? What if people could work together, what if there were other avenues, what if,

it has been clear, every time she is kindly dismissed on that front, that it's thought naive. What do they have in common? Why should they help each other?

Well, maybe so people like Bastien have somewhere else to turn, and the people who are less like Bastien has turned out to be are less minded to cleave to the Chantry all of their lives, the only place that had helped them. It's so large a thing, though; not something she can reshape Orlais into with only her own hands, and unlikely to move anyone to pull alongside so long as it sounds like no more than fancy and presumption. Mulling that over, spinning out from the moment of just one little boy with a familiar face, she isn't— downcast, exactly. Just thoughtful.

“I think I took it all for granted a bit like that, I only thought it all seems a bit ... the faith part, I mean, doesn't it seem a little desperate? Running after someone who's deemed us all unworthy already, and spread that desperation around with a sword.”

Hm. Maybe there'd been something personal in what she hadn't liked about Andrastianism. Probably better not to examine that altogether too closely.