faderift | [open] beach episode volume 2: gallows edition

Entry tags:

[open] beach episode volume 2: gallows edition

WHO: everybody who wants
WHAT: (lukewarm) BEACH PARTY (on rubble, in harbor)
WHEN: late Justinian
WHERE: the Gallows, amidst its newly-acquired sea view
NOTES: he's trying

I. Prep

He didn't ask for help overtly, but Benedict is clearly working hard setting up the space he's designated for the company to have their beach staycation: drapings taken from his own stash and salvaged from the Gallows' erstwhile guest rooms are drawn across glyphed-in-place poles to create shade. He's hauled out a table, onto which he proceeds to place a variety of whatever canapés he could afford to procure with his own wages-- it's not a feast, all right-- and beside which he rolls two barrels of decent-ish wine.

From the baths come a stack of towels piled high in his arms, hindering his vision to such a degree that he may crash into someone not paying attention; pillows and the like come next, in armloads that take multiple trips, by the end of which he's visibly out of breath.

Lastly, it's his very own water pipe making an appearance, which he arranges amidst comfortable ground seating mimics how his room used to look: in fact, most of the accoutrements here are his personal belongings.
As such, he knows just how to set everything to create an attractive, if minimalist, space for an afternoon's leisure.

II. Party?

It may not be an all-out bash like their excursion to the sandier shores of the Waking Sea some years ago, but this, if nothing else, is an opportunity for work on the Gallows to pause in palatable increments. One can be clearing rubble or cataloguing property for the morning, then pop over for an hour of sunbathing and a glass of wine; they're all within calling out distance of the courtyard, and the party likely bleeds into the day's work in a manner somewhat more comfortable than if it were sequestered.

That said: the early summer sea water is cold, the sun is out but meek behind occasional cloud cover, and the festivities are on clean-swept stone rather than sand. The view across the water is of mainland Kirkwall, and all that that entails.
But it's none of it so bad, for anyone looking to take a break. A few musicians even show up a bit later in the afternoon, and Benedict provides a bonfire in the center of the party space as the sun goes down.

Anything brought to share is met with effusive thanks from Benedict, who ensures its appropriate placement and distribution. He doesn't spend much time relaxing himself, instead making the rounds with the air of a fussy host, where he's quick to offer refills or alternatives in libations, or diversions for unsatisfactory activities.

[make your own starters, do your thing, go hog wild-- if you have logistical questions feel free to ask on plurk or discord]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

"That's true," muses Benedict, following his gaze out toward the gloomy sea, "perhaps."

The side of his mouth twitches. "Probably just need to make sure I'm not the envoy." A sidelong glance, "our nations have a bit of a ...history."
Maker, imagine talking to a full-blown Qun-following Qunari about whether or not they have any sugar they're willing to trade.

“Just ‘cos it’s his thing doesn’t mean you can’t do it,” Astrid says, a blithe pronouncement. “People like to share their hobbies, y’know? Have something to bond over, or whatever. My uncle kept trying to get me into his but I was shite at reading and runes. I like to carve stuff, though, and made a few figurines but they were lost in the…”

She gestures to hunched rubble of the Gallows residential towers across the island. RIP.

“Anyway, so’s I could teach you if you wanted. Maybe not with the akvavit, alcohol and sharp blades and fine movements probably don’t go together—”

"How old were you?"

Not that their experiences are equivalent. Still, listening to Gwen talk, it's hard not to feel a connection with someone who is describing what she is: being sent away, or taken, or both, and being forced to learn to be a part of an entirely new world, and having someone at your back every day showing you all the ways in which you're not good enough.

A log pops in the fire. Clarisse watches its insides flare red as the flames consume it.

"And what was she seeing?"

It is a very Kirkwall beach. Clarisse is forcing herself to pretend it's decent, hence why she's standing in the frigid ocean daring people to come in with her.

"Come on, rivers have parasites in them. And there aren't even any rocks around here," absolutely not true, "at least not any close enough to get bashed into." She sighs. "But hey, if you're that scared of losing..."

Clarisse is still snortlaughing over "Talons," but she follows Lazar's pointing pinky from person to person until he seems settled.

Yeah, fine, she has to admit that that is a pretty close match. She's still confident, of course, but it would be a respectable fight.

"Well I'm never going to say no to knocking Abby into the ocean."

She follows his gaze and nods. Yeah, that looks perfect, and it's out past the bigger waves. Not much chance of getting knocked over and humiliating herself.

"I'll do it if you come out too." Because she wants her performance to be witnessed up close, obviously. It wouldn't be the same if Benedict just stood on shore.

A big, theatrical, put-upon sigh-- why can't things just be easy, Clarisse-- then, "fine."

He steps toward a suitable chunk of debris and removes his tunic to fold it neatly, kicking off his shoes to then place them rigidly beside it. The trousers stay on, because leave it to him not to wear appropriate swimwear to his own beach party.

"Go on then," he says, coming back with a little glint in his eye, like he's trying not to laugh, "or do you want me to push you?"

So stupid. So fun. She laughs hard the moment Clarisse swears — in Ancient Greek, do you ever forget that your friend can do that? — and charges right in after her despite the clear warning, so that exact same wave slaps her in the stomach. The skin there feels so tender suddenly, so thin, the water so damn cold.

Abby screeches, no words, only pure offense. Then she gasps and goes, "Oh my god —" as another wave smacks into her. Isn't it supposed to be summer, or near enough to it that the ocean shouldn't be like this? The vision of sunny Santa Barbara is so, so far away from her now.

"This sucks!"

What the hell! She's still going in, though.

Abby, in the middle of unbuttoning her trousers, snorts at his caution. "Yeah, okay."

It's just the ocean —

And she isn't in there for very long, is back within twenty minutes and shivering hard, pale-faced, teeth chattering. At least she thought to leave her clothes by the fire — she takes them up and pulls her shirt on instantly, steps into her trousers and pulls them hastily up. Her braid is wet and dripping from the tail-end. She collapses into a heap near the fire, holding out her palms to it, still panting.

It wasn't a bad idea, but it was a short-lived one for sure. To Mobius, still sitting there, "Isn't it supposed to be summer?"

The first question is easier than the second.

“Twenty-three or twenty-four,” she says, “the Gallows was still an Inquisition outpost and I was, at the time, technically considered a guest of the Inquisition, called Lady Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, with my upkeep paid care of l'Comte de Vauquelin. Not a prisoner in the same way that neither of us are prisoners, exactly,”

with a tilt of her anchored hand,

“just unable to leave. I hadn't thought much about what anyone might see, looking at me, so it was a sharp shock to realise that she had thought about it a great deal— about how the Inquisition propaganda that I'd written, for all the much nothing good it'd done, had then made me effectively what everyone saw, looking to Skyhold. A lady's observations. There was a sketch of me on every copy, which I hadn't liked, but I had this idea that people would read the things I wrote the way that I intended.”

Best laid plans, and all that.

“I remember she said, you have chosen to be the face of the Inquisition, and I'd worried about her thinking me childish,” a childish worry to have, Coupe had thought at the time, not inaccurately, “and I hated it at once. It wasn't what I'd meant to do.”

(Everyone who's ever been frustrated in their efforts to spark her to the same sort of writing again can thank that one moment for her utter stubbornness in refusal. Including, as it had happened, Luwenna Coupe.)

“I thought a great deal about the way that she looked at me across— well, always across something. Across a table. Across an argument. Across my uncle's knife, which I used less as she taught me more. It isn't really fit for practical purpose— it's a dangerous jewel. I'd assumed the other one was lost, somewhere, or stolen by one of the Templars that had done the Annulment, sold for less than it was worth to some war profiteer in Orlais. I was astonished, I remember, when Aura Hardie,”

yes, like the dog,

“wrote to me that she'd met the man who'd had it made for me, hiding in ruins and trading healing magic for food and a blind eye from small villages. Proving his use to the Avvar. I was astonished,” she says, distinctly, “but la limier was not. A lone, lost mage, long presumed dead, alive on the run for years, and the mage hunter, a Templar of his Circle, who I'd never really thought to connect to him because there were a lot of mages there, and a lot of Templars, and frankly I didn't know very much about what that entailed— she wasn't surprised. She wasn't meant to know, she said. Very well: no one had been meant to know. I had always believed him to be dead because my father had always believed that if he had lived, he would have known. I decided he would die not knowing different. But why, I wondered, would Luwenna Coupe have thought he might intend for her to know?”

The tilt of her head recollects another moment, sat across a table in a kitchen she has rarely stepped foot in, poised as a pocket cameo, a portrait to hang upon a chain, pitiless in her pursuit of this knowledge:

“He was a friend, she said. He was the brightest part of her life, she told me. And he had killed two of her men. Only, I thought. Rather restrained, all things considered.”

Having noticed being pointed at, Abby has come over.

Reflexively, "What're you — knocking me in the ocean? Not if I knock you in it first."

"If you can't handle a couple leeches, you shouldn't be in any body of water anyway," is what he has to say about parasites. That's what she means, right?

"And, I'll lose if I participate or not. I'm smart enough to admit that much."

Clarisse grins, taking no offense. She loves shit talking with her opponents almost as much as she loves beating them.

"We want to play chicken."

"That's bullshit," is disagreement made much weaker by the way she hunches up, making herself as small as possible so the warmth of the fire can wash over all of her. It's summer, so it should just — be warmer. So there. But she's actually grinning, rubbing her palms together briskly. That rush of adrenaline from the cold water is still working. "Yeah. Pretty good."

It was fun.

She looks at him, scoops back some wet bits of hair that are stuck to her cheek. "You good?"

His neck flops back to follow the Gallows: Half-blasted.

"Shit, I'm sorry," A common refrain across the last month. Even the ravens'll learn it. "Hard to lose a thing, when 's got a piece of you in it like that."

Does Broward have anything still to give? Didn't have much to begin with, not much wasn't shared. That's good, better - he believes that- but the candles on altars, the skeleton in its fine shroud. Her uncle's runes. Doesn't everyone want something, some memory of them left behind?

(Flames, his head hurts.)

"But I'd be grateful. Be an honour to learn from a real artist."

Something to bond over, or whatever.

What's more likely? That Gwenaëlle, she of the pile of anatomy books and attentive interest in every aspect of his job that he'll share with her, who has taken an active and marked interest in his area of expertise and expressed consistently her trust in his competence and knowledge, has abruptly decided in this one specific thing to decide to dig her heels in about anything unfamiliar to the average peasant of the Marches,

or that she has simply got exactly what she wanted out of this exchange, at the low cost of a little playacting?

Yeah, it's that second one. The prudish distance he's keeping is just a concession to the fact that she has, in the largest part, totally won.

“I can take my chemise off if that makes it easier,” sounds so reasonable, the way that she says it. Reasonably.

Ha, who's being tricked now? Huh?

"You could try," Clarisse goads him, but she's already stepping further into the surf.

The water is cold, but she's been in for a while and barely flinches as the waves start hitting her in the stomach, then the chest. Once it's that deep she decides, fuck it, and begins to swim in the direction of the sandbar. She's a strong swimmer, and it doesn't take her long to get there, where she climbs up onto a spot where the water only reaches her knees, and waits for Benedict to catch up.

"It was your idea!"

But in a weird way it's actually kind of nice, how shocking the cold water is.

It's like the sheer surprise of it has switched off the morose, anxious, overthinking part of her brain and left her only with the part that can process what's happening in the immediate moment: the waves rolling into them one after the other, the pebbly sand under her feet, Abby beside her, and the way they're both laughing over how dumb they're acting.

"Bet I can swim out further than you before it gets too cold," she dares Abby. Then, for added insult, she swats some more frigid water at her.

So not quite as young as Clarisse had been imagining, but it doesn't change much. It doesn't change the fact that Gwen was out of her depth and untrained and felt stupid and scared a lot of the time. Clarisse had felt that way when she'd been taken to New York as a ten year old, and she'd felt that way again when she'd arrived in Thedas nine years later.

Maybe it's universal. Maybe it never totally goes away.

Anyway. "Why did he kill them?" Sure, "only" two might be considered restrained, but not when they're your friend's guys.

She hadn't thought she'd really be paying attention to this story at all, expected it to be more of a distraction than anything, but she's invested now.

“The White Spire was a Circle in Orlais, one of the grandest,” she says, which sounds like a pivot and isn't. “It was under order of annulment, which means every single mage who had been housed there, from the oldest to the very youngest, was to be executed. Most of them were slaughtered within the Spire itself, but my uncle's work meant that he was sometimes escorted under guard outside— taken to study or to offer healing where his work could be progressed in ways that locking him in a room in a tower didn't allow for. He was on one of those trips when his Circle was annulled. He was — is — a quiet man. He's had a stutter all his life, and he's careful, peaceful. They thought him harmless, because he's taken care not to seem a threat, because of what happens to mages who are seen as threatening. Their guard was down enough that they were careless, when they discussed how they would kill him.”

Gwenaëlle explains it very calmly, very matter of fact; the way that the world was, the way that the Chantry would have them return it.

“Too careless, so he heard them. He could've fled then, but they'd still have his phylactery— the Chantry would have it, regardless, but if he were to kill the men who were closest, who'd be the best positioned to chase him, then in the chaos...” She shrugs, one-shouldered. “There was so much chaos, with the mage rebellion, with the Templars taking their own stand. They were never found and there were only ever a handful of survivors of the White Spire; he was presumed dead, and there was so little reason to question it.”

"Not leeches," she says, "little bugs in the water that'll make you shit yourself."

Fine, though. Clarisse will stop trying to convince him. She shrugs and begins to walk out of the surf, stopping when she gets to the point where the waves are only lapping at her feet.

"Suit yourself. I was thinking about getting a drink anyway."

He's not so sure about that, but it sounds like some of the stuff Stephen and Cosima tend to say, so he can't call it bullshit on the nose. More reasons not to take a dip then! Thanks!

"You want something hot when you pop back up like a block of ice, or you want something that'll put a fire in your belly?"

He restrains himself from mischief, mincing in after her with a screwed-up and unhappy face as soon as his feet touch the water: y'all are swimming in this? --and yet.

If he were a braver soul he might just launch forward and get wet all at once, but instead he comes in with another face (this time accompanied by an aggravated whine) as his midsection hits the water line.

He takes far too long to arrive at the sandbar, and has somehow managed to do so with his hair still dry and pristine; all he's missing is a lit cigarette in his mouth, but he left those on land.

Abby wrinkles her nose, shrugs, an equal amount of non-answer. Her smile starts to fade.

Thing is, she decided to go do the dumb thing to keep herself from sitting around and doing something equally as dumb: turning Ellie's disappearance over again in her mind, flipping it in her palm like a rock from a tide pool, looking for something that makes sense. She's overthinking it all, maybe, but she can't seem to drag herself out of it. It's always there.

She rubs the back of her neck with her hand, cups it.

"Wanna talk about it?"

A problem shared is a problem — that belongs to somebody else and not to her, and she'd much rather hear about that.

Annulled is such a fucked up way to say massacred. It sounds so fussy, lawyerly, all business. Clarisse has only ever heard it used before during talks about marriage. Short-lived celebrity marriage, mostly.

She takes a sip of her drink to mask the little shiver that runs up her spine.

"He did what he had to do, then." Simple as that.

She is wondering about the wisdom of simply assuming that a guy is dead even though the people assigned to kill him have disappeared, but she believes Gwen that it was probably too chaotic to keep track of everything. Plans are easy. People are different.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 4 of 9

[open] beach episode volume 2: gallows edition

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

lemme know if I should tweak :V

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject