closed: onboarding with hr

[dirthsal]

WHO: Talin Shira'nehn, Bene, Stephen, Gwenaëlle, Clarisse
WHAT: Talin (finally) completes his onboarding
WHEN: Hella backdated to his arrival at the end of September
WHERE: Various area of the Gallows
NOTES: Individual starters in comments!

After helping get the fennec family relocated, Talin is finally free to actually go about signing up for Riftwatch. It's mostly a boring affair, giving his name for records, making his mark on this paper and that. Who would have known saving the world involved this much paper?

It takes a long while, but the end result is this: he's an official member of the Riftwatch now, with all the protections and responsibilities that provides. His first mission: meet with the various leaders and answer any questions they have for him.

Comments

[elegiaque]

A fair question; she notes his willingness to ask it, where others might’ve elected not to take the risk. Pursued it elsewhere, or lost interest in doing so before the chance arose. It’s not a mark against him — nor, really, a mark for. It’s just shading in elements of a picture that will take time to come into full focus.

“He serves at his own pleasure these days,” she says, dry; their dynamic is familiar and comfortable, and the moreso now for the discomfiting instances of his deciding not to do as she wishes.

What once was instruction is now conversation— the distinction messy but necessary. Not better or worse, just different. Sadder if she thinks about it too hard.

“Anyway. My lord father’s father fucked his way into a title; married up, got hers. My lord father, l’Comte, fucked his way out of it. The bastard child of his chatelaine cannot be his heir, so it was really quite profoundly awkward for him to have passed me off as such for as long as he got away with doing— when he died at Ghislain, his titles, estate and assets passed back into the bloodstained hands of that bitch on the throne.”

She says it very casually. Fuck Celene forever!!

“Before that disgrace, I was the favourite grandchild of my lady mother’s father, l’Duc de Coucy, who didn’t see any reason why that should change only because we share no blood. He paid for the boat. He’s also old enough to have personally put the boot in Ferelden, and Guilfoyle not much younger, so—”

An illustrative tilt of her hand. She landed soft, after her fall from grace; she’s not stupid enough to only wring her hands in and over temporary luxury. The ability to send her grandfather her bills won’t last forever. She needs to know what happens after; it needs to be her decision.

[dirthsal]

Everyone at Riftwatch is remarkably forthcoming; has Talin ever learned so much about one person with just one question?

So. A bastard Orlesian highblood who hates Celene with an impressive vehemence—coupled with the portrait downstairs, elf-blood seems a likely enough explanation. Not yet likely enough that he's willing to comment on it (the humans fought a whole war about the Orlesian throne, didn't they, perhaps the Captain's resentment is to do with that) but it is, at least, something they have in common. That's not something he can say often about Orlesians.

"Not that I have much experience with Orlesians to judge by," drily, but with genuine esteem for her implied too, "but I can't imagine many of your peers would have taken this opportunity to do much more than whine about what they're owed."

If the stories he's heard from their servants among Fen'Harel's agents are anything to go by, anyway, and he's inclined to believe they are.

After a moment, he looks to her, assessing, considering what to ask next. He was rewarded for his boldness once already, does he dare to try again?

Stupid question, of course he does.

"I know why my People tend to spit on the Empress's name. Haven't seen a human do it before, though."

[elegiaque]

“It’s probably similar,” she says, drolly, squeezing out her washcloth and considering the shape of the boat that she’s dangling from as they speak. This thing around which she has built so much certainty in recent years, and the shape of this conversation something that once would have frightened her beyond the telling of it.

It seems so pointless to be cagey or circumspect about any of it, now. He could hear it from any number of sources if he wished; why pretend otherwise, when she can say in her own words when asked?

(Stephen had found it a little confronting, too, when they first met.)

“You walked past my mother on the way in.” A statement that doesn’t sound like she assumes he realised that, rather establishing a premise she assumes he hasn’t taken for granted, “My sisters were in Halamshiral when Celene butchered it. Baudin is a city elf’s name.”

And fallen out of use among humans generations earlier as a result; her complicated feelings on having claimed it to share with her mother and sisters when it had been given to them by a man she’d never known nor had any claim on are— another story. Another time.

[dirthsal]

For as droll as she just was, that is... not the answer he was expecting. Talin doesn't freeze, exactly, doesn't look at the Captain as if for the first time, eyes opened anew,

( screams all around him, or else drunken laughter, smell of woodsmoke and cooked meat. flash of red in the corner of his eyes as bela runs next to him, sulana strapped to her back, slow for his sake. halla scream. his lungs ache, legs burn, can't think about how many bodies he's run past )

because it's not an unfamiliar story. Sometimes it feels as though half of Fen'Harel's agents come from Halamshiral, and the other half have their own stories, their own horrors. If Talin fell to pieces about his losses every time some elf talked about theirs, he'd do nothing else for the rest of his life, even if he were immortal. He has too much to do.

She's not an elf.

His eyes flicker on Gwenaëlle's, looking at her without seeing for a long moment before he blinks. Inhales. Crosses his arms and looks at the wall instead.

"Ir abelas," he says, low and serious. "I'm sorry, lethallan."

He's called elf-bloods lethallin before, but never quite so sincerely.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle looks back at him for what feels like an entire age, a moment of solemnity amongst soap suds and her firm grip on the ropes holding her in place at the side of her ridiculous boat. She’s thinking of Halamshiral, but she’s thinking of the sound she hadn’t known immediately was a Dalish arrow landing in Guenievre’s throat, too, of the butchered shape of Herian Amsel’s ear, of the tension that unavoidably existed in Skyhold and in the Gallows when their Dalish population was higher and tolerances lower.

Despite her active disinterest — to Thranduil’s ongoing despair, once — she hasn’t avoided understanding enough of the elvhen she’s encountered to not recognise both what he’s saying to her and in its context, its significance. That is is significant. That the average Dalish elf has a far greater reason to distrust her than the reverse, she knows that; knows how much power was in her hands to harm, when she was angriest and bleeding her grief, how little could be turned against her.

And here, a thing that she’s not offered to any Dalish elves, nor been offered in return: kindness.

She fixes her gaze back on her work,

“My ex-husband is a rifted elf,” she says, “and he could go places and ask things I couldn’t. He was able to learn what had happened to them for my mother, before her death. Not everyone even gets to know. I know that. Couldn’t give me any chevalier names, of course, but what’re you going to do.”

Her hand flexes, like the answer to that question might have been terrorism in another life.

“Thank you,” is tacked on with an awkwardness that makes its sincerity obvious, in turn; an unexpected thing.

[dirthsal]

Talin might demur her gratitude in another moment, awkwardly as it was offered. Wave it away, play that there's nothing out of the ordinary in what he's said.

He meets her eyes and nods, just once. Thanks accepted. He understands what his words mean, what they signify. It's not about what he said.

His throat burns with an answering grief. I'll never know the names of the men who killed my bondmate. The charred-flesh smell of my people will never leave me. The ones who fell to their swords were the lucky ones, and I the unluckiest of them all, standing here. Your sisters would not have been better off alive, just dead in a different way.

A board creaks outside the room, and Talin looks to the door.

"Is there a roster I need to make my mark on? I think I hear your man coming back."