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

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[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]

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Once the sun has gone down and the bonfire has been lit, Gwenaëlle has wrapped herself up in her bear slanket, a thing comically large for her frame, large enough that it had once easily accommodate two dwarves (one on the other's shoulders) delivering it to her room in Skyhold with their best impression of a fearsome animal. (They hadn't quite known how to play it off when she'd been delighted instead of terrified.) It is part blanket, part coat (it's hard to immediately tell, but when she shifts it's clear it has sleeves) and part trophy, the enormous bear head resting on her shoulder, glass eyes glinting in the firelight and gazing sightlessly at Clarisse (which makes three out of four eyeballs there false, for those playing at home).

It's cosy. She wonders sometimes at the others of the Inquisiton who Asher had made these for, where they all ended up; she thinks, though she isn't certain, that she might be the only one here. It is an excellent outfit for telling stories in, and it puts her in mind for a moment of the Boneflayers around a campfire, listening to Yngvi read from whatever he'd lately got his hands on.

He isn't even far, in Kirkwall, but absorbed back into the Carta he might as well be a world away. She's said, “Alright,” thinking of him, before she's realised she's decided to.

“Any sort of story in particular?” Is this a good time for a sad story, or a heroic one, or something sweet—

Hmm. The bear head thing is very Gwenaëlle, she has to admit. Intimidating and yet so very weird. And Clarisse has seen people wear much weirder shit, she can't really judge, but now that she's facing Gwen she does keep making awkward eye contact with the bear. So that's uncomfortable.

Anyway, she doesn't need to think about what kind of story she wants. She knows what she's about. "Something exciting." That's the most important thing. "And... not too short."

She's on a mission here. Mission Don't Be Alone With Your Thoughts. Gwen is the best person to help with it, too. She likes to talk and she knows a lot about a lot of people. It's perfect.

The wheels turning behind her eyes are almost visible as Gwenaëlle leans back, considering, rifling through the stories she has at her disposal and deciding—

not that. Or that. Definitely not that. A distraction shouldn't be depressing, so she's got to find something that doesn't end with of course, they are dead now. Best not to think too hard on how severely that narrows her options. Don't think about it at all, in fact, just settle on,

“My uncle and aunt live in a cottage,” she begins, “in the Free Marches. They've a retired war mabari, a cat,” and very probably a dementia related suicide pact, but frankly, in these trying times the fact they've got to retire of their own volition and have the luxury of probably being in control of how Luwenna Coupe's decline ends— that's plenty romantic, and anyway, she's not going to mention that part, “and if it were pressing, we could probably stash someone in their basement if we needed to hide a person for a week or two.”

This sounds like the end of a story. And it is, but:

“Ten years ago, what I knew about my one paternal uncle was that he was dead. He had been no more than a story for all my life— when he was a boy, he was taken away to the Circle. He and my father,” a kinder thing to call him than my lord, though this story will wind its way through crueller paths for that man in due course, “wrote each other diligently. I had never seen him, nor heard his voice; my father hadn't since he was not even at the beginning of manhood. I couldn't picture him. He was a stranger who sometimes asked after me, in letters that my father would read, and I would mostly tune him out. Sometimes in the letters that he would read to me, Oncle Gervais would speak of la roitelet, the wren, and I thought him a dull man in a tower who watched birds. I didn't think of him often. I would receive Satinalia gifts in his name, to his specification, that my father had paid for and arranged; one of them was a knife. Jeweled. He has its twin, and I don't know what sort of favours, bribes or threats were involved in my father making sure he was allowed that—”

But she is certain that there were threats.

“When I was sent to Skyhold, it was sent with me in its case. I wondered what had happened to the other; we were told that he was dead, after the annulment of his Circle, called the White Spire. There were survivors of that Circle, mostly who'd been elsewhere when it was annulled, but my father was certain and I had no reason to disbelieve him: if his brother lived, he would have word. There had been no word. The knife came with me from Skyhold, then, to Kirkwall, where I first met a woman named Luwenna Coupe.”

Clarisse is not typically the sort of person who sits quietly and still to listen to a story. Even when she's enjoying one, she fidgets and asks questions. Gwenaëlle is lucky tonight, because Clarisse has just hit the level of drunkenness where she's pleasant to be around—chill and willing to go along with pretty much whatever.

So she listens in silence, hardly moving, a little hypnotized by the flames and the weird bear head's glass eyes.

"Luwenna Coupe," she repeats when there's a pause in the story, sort of testing how the name feels in her mouth. Since this is a Gwen story literally anything could happen, but Clarisse is already suspicious of anyone new showing up in any kind of tale, since there's a decent chance they're going to end up being a villain. The Gwen factor only adds to it. "Then what?"

“I didn't like her.”

What a breadth of sins that covers.

“I'd heard of her, a little; la limier, the mage hunter. A Templar, but the Chantry hadn't recovered then the way that it has now, so that wasn't a straightforward thing any more— they'd all been disavowed with the war, and the Divine's death, and sort of no one was a real Templar any more, they were just a bunch of drug addicts with swords.”

Now, of course, some of them are Templars again.

“But what that meant for people was different. She came to Riftwatch representing some dried up Chantry mothers somewhere in Orlais; I don't think I ever got the entire story. She had an interest in the propaganda I had been writing— which didn't explain, to me, the interest that she took in every other aspect of my life. Coupe, Coupe, Coupe. Everywhere I turned, there she was, at my elbow, having a fucking opinion about what I was doing.”

(Wow, that doesn't sound like anybody familiar at all.)

“When she first met me, I was— a soft thing with sharp teeth. A hot house flower in fine dresses. The only knife I owned was the one that my uncle had given to me, and I'd never held it to purpose; I'd lifted it, once or twice. Examining the jewel settings. Showing a friend. But only that. Coupe had decided to put herself in charge of my further education, insisting upon my practise and study with the powers that the anchor-shard was developing, and when the second ability was more ... projectile than what I had had before, she decided that it was past time I learned to defend myself. I didn't want to.”

It's hard to imagine, now. Oh, she swans around the Gallows or about her Kirkwall errands in a fine dress often enough, but she's rarely unarmed doing it; always among the first to volunteer throwing herself bodily at whatever Forces needs of them. It's still strange, sometimes, to know that there are people who wouldn't recognise the girl who had been sent, wailing, into the Frostbacks.

“I didn't understand why it mattered so fucking much to her. And I could have made her stop; my grandfather is l'Duc de Coucy. If I'd told him I wanted her to leave me alone, he'd arrange it. If I'd told him I wanted her sent to the Emprise and left in the snow somewhere, he'd probably have arranged it. I didn't...” Her nose wrinkles. “I didn't like the idea of being unable to manage it myself. I could have ruined her life with a word, but we'd both know I'd had to go running to bon-papa to do it, and I couldn't stand that. So I tried to hurt her, instead. To make it so unbearable to be around me that she wouldn't bear it — no one had ever asked her to. I am exceptional at making people fuck off when I want to. I got to know her, as she was getting to know me; I tested every vulnerability I could think of. I pressed her past the bounds of patience or politeness. I was cruel,” matter of fact, “in the hopes that I would find the knife that hurt her so badly she would stop making me handle the one my uncle had given me.”

It's possible that Gwenaëlle is the villain of this story.

“And there she was, inexorable, at my elbow. I always remember when we were standing in what had been my ballroom, converted for the purpose, and I was holding that knife, and over and over she would say: who is holding the knife? She would make me answer, and it was ... worse than the demon. The first one I ever saw, the rage demon that did this to me,” drawing her thumb down the line of burned-in clawmarks that curve around her breast, disappear down her sternum into her decolletage. “It felt like laying in the dirt, burning, waiting to die. I was so sure that these people protected me only because they had to; that if I learned even a little to fight, that they would abandon me to die. That if they could tell themselves, it's a shame, but we expected her to be capable, they would— it would be a little diplomatic incident, but not impossible to smooth over. I didn't see what she was seeing.”

"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?"

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.”

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.”

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.

“Ouais. He did.”

So she has always thought, anyway, since she was told.

“I don't know when she knew that it was him who had done it. After she knew that he had survived, because that wasn't right away, either— but he mentioned it, once, in a letter. Obliquely. He's very good at being oblique in betters. That she had written letters, too, explaining away the deaths of those Templars.” Gwenaëlle doesn't say absolving because she doesn't think that's in Coupe's gift to give, and moreover, she doesn't think her uncle needs it any.

Whether or not it ever kept him up nights, she's never asked.

“I put the pieces together slowly,” she says, “the shape of them, it wasn't all at once. We were never— she was never Luwenna to me, so she was certainly never Wren, but I knew how she was called. I had these ideas that I would wait, you know, I'd wait until my lord was close to passing and then I would tell him that his brother had been alive, that he'd never told him, I'd take that away from him,”

and this is how you know it's family, the way that it hurts, the way that they know each other's wounds, the cruelty that needs love like fire needs fuel,

“but it didn't work out that way. The phylacteries were a point of contention— a cache of them was found. We were still part of the Inquisition, then. They were secured here in Kirkwall and they were going to be sent to the Chantry, I think? Which is as good as taking sides, in my opinion, but that wasn't a time when I was wading hip-deep into mage politics, so I mostly wasn't. The mages found out about it, big drama, and they went on strike about it, they didn't want decisions like that made for them behind closed doors, in conversations they weren't a part of. My uncle arrived in Kirkwall the day it kicked off, having stopped to see my lord first, which I didn't love, and came to see me before he carried onto the Gallows. With my grandmother's ring,”

resigned,

“telling me his intention to propose marriage to one Luwenna Coupe. Which I also didn't love.”

"Oh," Clarisse says, "that—"

She should've been expecting this, since Gwen started off mentioning her uncle and aunt, a married couple, and yet she's still caught off guard by it. Eyebrows raised, mouth open. Damn.

"So your uncle went to your father first," before she could tell him the news herself, "and then he proposed to the person making you miserable?"

It is a good story. Has all the hallmarks of the drama Clarisse has always loved in the Greek myths, betrayal and dramatic returns from the dead and weird family bullshit, although there's the slight damper of the fact that the story is real and happened to somebody she knows and is friends with.

“I was very polite about it,” she says, dry enough that it sounds like what it is: I tried to be polite and I was transparently fucking unhappy about it. She thinks he had seen it for the kindness she wanted it to be, that she thought he was worth making the effort for even if she couldn't, quite, convincingly sell it. It is not Gwenaëlle's nature to say a thing she doesn't mean; there was no earlier point in her life where she was somehow any better at it. “He hadn't seen his brother in, I don't know, forty years. He hadn't met me, ever. He'd stopped in Orlais and got caught up with a quickness, inasmuch as that was possible,”

debatable, and from a biased source, and it had been reasonably clear to her on first impression that he was reserving his own judgment on more than he wasn't.

“I had lost my standing, by then. Someone had dug up the proof of my parentage and I'd been stripped of my inheritance, imperial auditors come to take stock of what the throne would gain from clawing back the de Vauquelin holdings after my lord's death. My uncle had some news for me from Orlais; what could and could not be promised to me. I hadn't expected it to matter so fast, except that all of us were at the Grand Tourney when word spread of the Venatori invasion into Orlais. My lord went to the front from there— I went to Halamshiral and the Greatwood, to see to his final affairs. I think we all understood, without him saying so, that he didn't want to come back from it. I saw to what we could take while he was still living and it was still his, the bequests he wanted seen to, those who he wished to provide for before the homes were shut up. My uncle's portion, which I assume paid for the cottage and its land. Mine, stored against the end of the war. Guilfoyle's, which has funded his retirement,”

her emotional support murder butler is actually retired and technically unemployed,

“references for servants. Jobs, where we were able to arrange them. Everyone dismissed, and everything locked up, and I've never bothered to find out what became of it all after Ghislain. I remember, I found a letter in a drawer that had never been sent. It had never even been finished. He wrote to la roitelet, the wren, in his terrible grief, and I remember saying to Coupe after, I had always thought he was just talking about birds.”

Clarisse, still thinking over the comment about Guilfoyle's retirement (he's retired? but he's a butler? is he just... being a butler for fun?), doesn't respond to any of the other relevant information right away. She heard it, though, and is processing it.

"It's fucked up," she says finally, and draws her knees closer to her chest. "That they just took all that away from you." Maybe this isn't the point of the story, but it's what she's taking from it.

It isn't the point of the story.

It isn't the story she had intended to be telling, it's just that all of these stories are so entangled, overlapping; half a dozen asides that she's already said could have been whole tales in their own right. The intersecting places where it's sort of unavoidable context to everything else, the immense way that the landscape of not only her life but many others had been changed—

“My mothers gave up so much for me to be my father's daughter,” she says. And the sacrifice that she always remembers first is their fucking dignity, Anne alone at the end with the girl who could not will herself hers, Guenievre whose voice slips away in memory because she had heard it so rarely only to die with an arrow in her throat— “and everything they had given it up for had slipped through my fingers.”

She doesn't say: I felt as if I'd failed. Does she need to?

“My aunt remade me, I think. Or unmade me, so I could do it. So many people here have never known me other than as I am, but I thought it would kill me to even try. I didn't know it was love, when I was railing at her. All the years I'd spent trying to be my mothers' daughter,” and failing, and failing, and failing, “she asked me over and over and fucking over again, who is holding the knife? and eventually I understood that I could do something with it.”

Metaphorically.

Also, literally. It's amazing how many problems can be solved by stabbing someone if you specifically look for that kind of problem.

“I could make the sacrifice worth something. A different way.”

And— hers, too, maybe. (But this story has to have a happy ending. It ends at the door of the cottage, and not inside.)

Clarisse lifts a hand to her mouth and worries at her thumbnail as Gwen talks. It's another thing overlapping between them. Not exactly the same, but similar enough, like if you overlaid one's story over the other the significant points would match up.

Mothers giving up everything so their daughters can be claimed by their fathers. A girl being handed a weapon and using it to reshape herself.

"And... you did." She can't imagine anything else. Mostly because it's Gwen she's talking to.

A log in the bonfire pops. When the breeze settles, the heat from the flames is hot enough to feel like it's baking the skin on her arms and legs, but Clarisse kind of likes that. It feels like both a punishment and a challenge to see how long she can last.

"What happened then?"

And she did.

“She gave that to me,” she says, “and they looked around, and they had given so much, you know? My uncle went to the Circles as a boy. Something like forty years were taken from him. My aunt, she was the Chantry. She was the Templar order. She was Riftwatch, sitting in the Forces office, wrestling with all of it. And they're— not every mage gets to be as old as my uncle. And not every Templar gets to be as old as my aunt.”

She'd wanted to tell a story that wouldn't end with and of course, he's dead now, like fucking most of them, but she has the disorienting realisation that she does feel — lighter, for telling it. For telling this story. For deciphering some of it in the process. For allowing herself to think,

to feel that it is good, that they have what they have. For as long as they're able, still.

“Flint became commander when she stepped down. My uncle made sure I would know how to reach them, and where to find them. They write to me.”

Gwenaëlle watches the flames, for a moment.

Finally,

“I took up a sword, and she set hers down, and there's a cottage where the rebellion is over. And it's just one story, and it's just one cottage, and it doesn't fix anything else, and I think it's right. Still. I think it was worth it. I miss them every day, but I can't think they shouldn't have a cottage and a cat and a sunset.”

She has the sword, now. She'll figure it out from here.

Clarisse doesn't speak right away. She's not sure what to say.

The cottage and the cat seem like a poor reward for all the years of bullshit, but she reminds herself that most people don't even get that much. That's the happiest ending a lot of people could hope for.

She'd asked for a story that would distract her, and this one did, but in exchange for getting her mind off of Ellie it seems like Gwen has dredged a dozen other memories out of the murkier waters of her brain. Still preferable to the way she'd been feeling, but not exactly good, either.

"Thanks for telling me," she says finally, leaning back in her seat. "It was a good story." It was, too. It even had murder in it.

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[open] beach episode volume 2: gallows edition

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