[open] beach episode volume 2: gallows edition

[altusimperius]

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]

Comments

[elegiaque]

“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.”

[laruetheday]

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.

[elegiaque]

“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.”

[laruetheday]

"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.

[elegiaque]

“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.”

[laruetheday]

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.

[elegiaque]

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.)

[laruetheday]

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?"

[elegiaque]

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.

[laruetheday]

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.