closed | road trip

[dissolving]

WHO: Cedric & Gwen & a skull sippy cup
WHAT: Road trip!
WHEN: Vaguely after Satinalia
WHERE: Cumberland
NOTES: I'll edit as appropriate.

The Abbey's an ugly scene.

Thick walls, massed bureaucracy; some clerk dredged up to speak with her in quiet, clipped Orlesian. They cannot make promises for the Spire, but he will pass whatever papers she has brought along if she will just wait here, in the hall,

And no further. Young, robed things watch her sidelong. Older ones watch the doors, shaggy with humped muscle; eyes faded, skin worn hard for sixty. The hours pass. Some shift exchanges, a new man led out by the crook-curved arm. Armored, and not armed. Mouth turned down in dull, unhappy line.

An ugly scene. That was before the door slammed. Glass shatters, a breathless shout: "Carsus — !"

Amazing, the ground he can cover in a skirt. Commotion somewhere behind. The guard starts. Their eyes meet,

He looks like he means to say something. And then they're both out the doors.

Comments

fambly;

[dissolving]

Good thing he sprung for two rooms. The air's thick all afternoon, thunderstorm louring over riverside. There are lanterns, there is art, there's a bleak fucking mood. And eventually, there's a reply: Yes, they'll meet.

Cumberland is beautiful, Cumberland is grand. But it's a city. The buildings tower even as streets narrow, pitted out from cobblestones to rising mud. Ornate facades fall off to patched boards, painted letters; high as some kid might scramble. Chickens run. Rats do. And in the distance, branch lifts above wall,

They don't cross it. They haven't been invited. You hear stories: A jilted lover, debt-collector, con man preying on loss. His name's on the wall. It'd be easy —

So it's a cramped bar they shoulder into. The patrons jumble human, elven, one great horned man by the door. Cedric squints, and folds his sleeves for the seventeenth time. It occurs, finally, that he's got no clue what to look for.

"I'll go ask," Maybe he shouldn't do that alone. Last time he left her to go ask, he smashed a goddamn mirror. It's been half a day. "Y'want a drink?"

tattoo;

[dissolving]

It's been four hours. It'll be a few more.

"You're done?"

Faint despair. It'd taken her long enough to decide, and here he is, still draped over chair like a skin rug.

after;

[dissolving]

It all feels too small: The stupid pictures he's made her post, fistfuls of fried dough, statues; a dogged insistence that this wasn't just for him. It's not enough.

They're under the cover of trees before —

"Y'don't have to tell me what's been going on," There are things they don't talk for, that aren't his to hear. Just he's started to think some of those go the same place. "I know you got folks."

Friends, lovers, acquaintances and uncles and cousins. Proper family. Just,

"You got me too."

[elegiaque]

“Almost,” is almost sympathetic, but Cedric did get himself into this mess, so. “She’s taking a break before the finishing touches.” On her right foot, the phases of Thedas’s moons, looped through each other and scattered between stars. On her left, and with a little work still to do but not nearly as much as he has, a sketched skeletal outline of that foot.

Nevarra, probably, is the perfect place to come for a tattoo of stylised bones. Gwenaëlle had got the impression, on their initial conversation, that it isn’t exactly the first time the artist has been asked for something similar.

“Do you want me to get you something? She said wine will make you bleed more, though.”

[elegiaque]

“We’ll go,” she corrects him, over his question, probably thinking of how much she missed last time he went off on his own and how fast they’d had to leave the Chantry, the ink barely dry on the statements she’d signed her name to as she was hurrying after him out into the Cumberland streets.

Every turn they take down one of these winding roads of his memory lane, something gets broken. It’s not a great harbinger of things to come, but she only pulls her cloak tighter and affixes a suitably stubborn look to her face, the kind that says I’ve leapt off your griffon before and I’ll do it again.

“And by then we might need one.”

[dissolving]

"What about whiskey?"

A joke, which the dwarf on his back elects to ignore. He squints down for the design, approving:

"Maker, 's dead-on," Must mean the bones. Stack up the odds he knows shit for the sky. "Can you walk on it yet?"

[elegiaque]

“It isn’t going to be fun for a while,” she says, to little surprise, “but ouais— that one’s the worse, too,” the bones, with their details, their intricacy, the shading. The little nightsky on her other foot is scatter and subtler; the moons had been the worst of it, and all done much quicker, with far less returning over the same tender skin.

She leans to get a better look at what’s going on behind him.

Ruminatively, “You’re going to be sleeping on your stomach ‘til first night.”

[elegiaque]

I know you got folks, he says, and it’s strange to recognise — beyond that he’s one of them, too — that she knows so, too. Half her life spent convincing herself she doesn’t even care to be seen (easy to accept love that hurts if it’s the only kind going; harder to accept it, over time, when it has finally become harder to convince herself it’s all she can have), and here she is leaving a city she only came to because she cares for him. Because there are people in her life who would be there, if it were her. Because he’d be one of them.

(The fights she knows they’d have if she were less circumspect with him— whatever, that’s family, too. She’s taking Stephen to the woods for First Day. And maybe there’s a version of this story that doesn’t end in the fucking woods. Maybe she can tell it.)

“I told Abby this story once,” she says, “about when a whole mess of us nearly got sold into slavery. Or, well, we did get sold, we just escaped. And we all escaped, walked back into our own memorial service. This young boy had taken pains to learn how to say my name right. And she says, what did you do after that? What happened after that?”

Persistence likes the sedate pace they’re riding at. She’s no battlemount, as Bellerose, and increasingly less interested in being coaxed into more than a brisk trot for anything less than actual peril. Gwenaëlle considers the space between her ears, for a moment.

“Same thing as ever. Getting on with it.”

(Maker, she’s dramatic. But it doesn’t feel like grandstanding for his sake, brash bluster or — too much — oblivious navel-gazing; more like the painstaking work it takes to rebuild shattered armour, gluing it together with the real hurt of not trusting him with the thing she is not saying.)

[dissolving]

Tomorrow, he'll apologize to Tisiphone. He'll swallow his pride, and go stand in the hall like a scolded kid, and she'll cry into his shoulder; and Cedric will say, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. I'm so grateful –

His chin jerks, as if for a fly. Yeah, alright, they'll both have something.

"Thanks," Mumbled, exchanging mug for coin for Gwen. "Hey, have you –"

He leans over the bar, falls into Nevarran. They're being watched. Even in the bustle of the room, they stick out: Tourists, travelers, and strange ones of it. Gold eye, green hand; the neatly-stitched cuffs of new, unpatched cloth. At length, a tug at her sleeve — the bad side, and the furrow of a brow might be an apology —

Might be worry.

"Excuse me," Thickly-accented. Overly-formal, from a small woman several years their junior; all high bones and wide, intelligent eyes. The resemblance isn't exact: Set a little wider, a little more skeptical. And the ears, of course. It's not exact, it is striking. "Are you lost?"

Her eyes slip past Gwen.

[elegiaque]

The bad side is a bad approach; it’s clear that Gwenaëlle has to stifle a stronger, startled reaction. She’s habitually a little tilted for the sake of centering her vision (an ache that’s harder to roll out at night in unfamiliar spaces, but nothing new any more), and here her head swings first and her shoulders after it, righting herself so she can take in— the resemblance.

It is striking. Her Nevarran lessons haven’t caught her up enough to grasp much of quiet conversational patter in a loud bar, so she’s already more focused on the stranger than on overhearing Cedric, taking in the eyes, the bone structure. The ears.

“No,” she says, and even before she’s said anything else, that’s an Orlesian voice and no mistake. “We’re waiting for Carsus’s relations. Is that you?”

It doesn’t seem like an absolutely wild leap.

[dissolving]

"If I smother, blame Clarisse. Told me she wants one, ages back." The tree beginning to span his back is simple, geometric, more icon than illustration as it crawls over shoulder and spine. "How'd you pick 'em?"

[dissolving]

Sturdy ambles steady as his name. A big borrowed paint, heavier than he needs, but Riftwatch collects the tall and armored; and Cedric knows that sort of horse. There's something fine of it now: To look a little nearer canopy, higher than life.

"Wonder, sometimes," He says, and means lately, "If all the old stories are like that. All the wrong got done, and they got on with it, and the farther they walked the more that looked a story."

What did you do after that? What happened after that? He's been angrier for less, for all the things she oughtn't have seen; but there are things they don't speak for. He'd sooner meet her there now, by the edge of that gap, too cavernous to cross. Maybe someone else could, one of the old heroes,

A different sort of dead man. Already buried in a book, and not walking home, new names in their mouths.

[dissolving]

She's not a good liar — or it's not a good lie — confirmation flinting like a chisel through stone. But from that coil of hesitation, she hasn't quite decided whether truth's in the giving.

(She chose the bad side, and the Orlesian swung in the particular way of someone who knows where and how to move. I am a soldier is one thing to hear from your dead kid cousin, and another to see written in a stranger's battle scars.)

"Afira," she offers. Carsus hasn't been her name in six years. Cedric's caught his own by now, staring dumb over his shoulder, "I have a table."

Already making her way for it, in the back of the room; a little like someone running. The reedy blonde man already perched there starts to stand, but she pushes a hand down on his shoulder: Easy,

Backup, evidently.

[elegiaque]

“Oh, no, this is all you—”

but to be fair, what she sees of it does sort of look worth all the work. The geometric shape of it makes her think of her hair-comb: geometric representation of a city elven tradition, carried with her. His, of course, a bit more intimately. Significantly more permanently. And she’s only making assumptions about the why, but it doesn’t seem so outlandish to draw a line between them,

“Mine, I guess, it’s…” Probably there’s not a way to make this sound or feel less pretentious, although she at least briefly tries to imagine what it might be. “Morrigan told me to live gloriously.” Be selfish, be wild. The world will not care for you so why should you care for the world?

“I don’t know. I feel like it’s a thing that’s just true, you know? One foot in the stars and one in the grave, this whole time.”

A part of her is always walking through Granitefell. A part of her is always looking to the stars. Maybe she’s tired of fighting different parts of herself.

[elegiaque]

In return for Afira, she returns: “Gwenaëlle,” perceptibly lowering the hackles raised by Afira’s strategic approach in a way that seems conscious and purposeful. (It’s been long enough since those pamphlets were in circulation that she’s not especially worried about being unexpectedly famous in Nevarra; Lady Vauquelin feels a lifetime ago, and the girl in the drawing had two eyes.)

“Hello,” she says, the very soul of courtesy, to the sitting blonde man as they join him.

[elegiaque]

“The people in stories all started as people,” she says, more at ease with the nature of narrative than she is with what’s been going on, even if the further she gets from it the less those two things feel separate. There’s a cargo hold full of meticulously kept notes — a grasp for control of a tale that isn’t finished and hasn’t been told yet. A lantern against the encroaching darkness of surrendering your story to the people who tell it.

(Trust her to look at it in the bleakest fashion imaginable.)

They keep walking, beneath the leaves. She says, “I thought about Andraste when I was taken to Skyhold. Not— you know,” a vague gesture that encompasses the Chantry, because whatever they’ve talked about or not, no one comes away from Gwenaëlle with an impression of pious devotion, “but, the woman who was alive and died. What she’d have made of everything that came after her. We tell stories to tell each other what the truth is.”

And then we got on with it.

“I wondered if she’d even recognise what truths we tell with—” not about, a tool and not a person, “—her.”

[dissolving]

They're both spared skepticism of Korcari witches by the tap of needle over nerve, and a mumbled curse for someone's crypt –

He resets.

"'S beautiful," Means that much. She came to the right country for it, not so different from some of the symbols that etch these streets. The pause is slight, but it's there. Maybe it's only for invoking another name, so hot on the heels of others. Maybe it's because: "Astrid sort of reckons them the same. Guess that's not it, exactly. But the sky, y'know. Says 's where they send their folk."

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle softens in a different way, then—

“To the lady of the skies,” she agrees. “Always think of her when I see crows.” The Avvar’s lady, and not Astrid, though it’s easy enough these days to get to one from the other. A clear line towards: oh, I wonder what Astrid’s up to, a question she can more easily answer than what Aura might be, or what Asher would.

She looks down at her feet, mostly finished.

“I always remember my mother at the healer’s tents outside Skyhold,” she says, after a moment, “shaving Asher’s beard for him, so he wouldn’t go to the lady looking a fright. It was still a secret, you know? He took it with him to her for safekeeping. Much,”

injecting deliberate humour, a hint of irony,

“good that that did.”

It doesn’t really sound like she regrets the way it’s gone.