faderift | this chaos, this calamity, this garden once was perfect

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this chaos, this calamity, this garden once was perfect

WHO: Martel & Adelaide
WHAT: Martel has been confronted with new truths about his history and what happened in his homeland after his apparent death; he handles them super well.
WHEN: The night following Sabine's rift incident.
WHERE: Emprise du Lion.
NOTES: I'll update this with specific warnings when they become relevant. In the mean time - Martel discovered some documents from Matherion at the rift.

No one else had recognised the papers for what they were; there's no reason they ought. They're translations from Tamul into Elene - two languages no one in Thedas, bar Martel, reads in the first place. He'd claimed them for himself, quietly slipping both within his armor for later, and had spent hours poring over them in his tent after dark, nearly tossing The Cyrga Affair into the fire at more than one point.

And that had been before he'd read Itagne's well-written and well-researched response text.

It's as quiet as it ever is when he stalks across the camp to find Adelaide, his hands empty, his fingers flexing. She has seen a shade of this mood before, but it was - different, then. More focused. He'd been threatening; now, when he finds her, it seems as if all of that focus is all that keeps him from unraveling entirely, jagged where he is so often sharp, thrumming with the effort of holding his composure.

"I must speak with you."

His tone brooks no argument, but there is a hint of something else; not an order.

A plea.

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Another day of patients and questions and fruitless research- word of a rift opened and sealed with little to find that could answer anything at all. As plentiful and frustrating as the rifts are, none have given them anything other than more rifters, demons, or puzzles. She wearies of puzzles and demons.

Her opinion on the rifters varies.

At least there are a few of which she's become somewhat fond- Martel the first and strangest of them considering how it is they met. His pace and distress, for he is distressed by something, are familiar at a distance and baffling when he is close. Anger she's seen. Cold fury, irritation- this is...new. New is rarely good. She motions to the inside of her healing tent, cluttered with books and cold tea and poultices. "Come, sit. What is it?"

For all that he's made the demand, he hesitates in the threshold - it doesn't feel private enough for what he means to do and say, but then, anywhere that would is necessarily going to be separate from the camp, and therefore exponentially more dangerous. He glances behind himself, jerks the tent-flap shut with a leashed unhappiness, and does as he's bade. His hands fall together in the space between his knees, a white-knuckled clasp, and he does not immediately look up from them.

"I have lied to you," he says, not defiant, not gloating - weary. Exhausted in a way that seems bone-deep, the hints of shadow that have lingered about him since their first meeting come to coalesce now into this angry ache that drags him to her door. "By deliberate omission, since first we met. I--"

His voice breaks in a way that he doesn't seem to have anticipated; for a moment he is silent.

"I knew not how deeply I had--"

He orders his thoughts.

"I had hoped," he says, after a moment, "that perhaps I could make of myself a man worthy of the gifts I was undeservingly given."

The single lantern within sharpens the shadows made by closing the tent's flaps- it adds a layer of gravity to an already grave expression, a harsh edge to a man made harsh by emotion. Something dark and unfamiliar in Martel- she cannot claim to know every shade of his scowls but she has come to know most of them. This is...

Dire.

He has come to speak and thus she does little more than sit, pale and washed out by her own exhaustion in the light, a counterpoint to the hulking knot of shadow Martel makes of himself. "Tel-"

Lies. She does not weather them well; a piss poor Orlesian is she in that regard. But this? She's known him to be strange, to be dangerous, to have some manner of history he has chosen not to touch for whatever reason and as this world is now his own- she's left him to it. But this.

What is she to do with this?

"What have you done?"

His choked laugh isn't only that; it takes him longer than he'd be proud of to master himself enough to answer her. A volatile man, deeply felt - the amount of control he exerts on a day to day basis is underscored by its absence, here and now, how raggedly he holds himself together. It is a self-pity of the worst fucking sort, but -

Well, his contempt for himself is nothing new.

"More than I knew," he says, low and angry and thick with a grief he doesn't know how to carry any more. A grief that is his own doing and therefore the worst kind of self-indulgence, that he has ignored for months now, that would always have felled him in time. But, perhaps, not like this. If not for Professor Itagne, who writes so eloquently and intelligently and in the voice of a man Martel is certain he'd have quite liked, in another life.

"I am the Order's worst disgrace since the atrocity of trying to convert Rendor by the sword." Centuries ago. His laugh, no steadier than the first, is bitter. "And all these years I believed my downfall my own, but no, I am a fool and a dupe as well as a bastard. She loved me even when she denied me and I was a knife sharpened for her breast. He wielded me toward my mother and I didn't know--"

He is weeping. Some distant part of him is aware of it; of the shudder of his shoulders and the wetness reflected in the lantern-light. It seems unimportant, in the grand scheme of things.

"Martel." It is not the chiding, exasperated tone she often takes with him. It is not the fondly exasperated twist of his name, the irritated crack, the curious and cautious nudge for him to continue his tale. No. It is the flattest, coldest offering of an oppertunity to elaborate. Shades of his world and his life, she knows.

No.

She knows what he has told her. What he has deigned relevant enough for discussion. Months she has kept him in her company and it is only now when his control shatters about him from some unpleasant truth that urges him to come clean that she finally considers how unwise it might be, to keep someone so strange and dangerous close to her. To wonder what he is capable of. She, again, has seen shades of it but this? Again, she wonders, what she is to do with this.

Compassion bids her act against the raw wound in his chest, deeper with gangrene than the blade that ought to have ended him. Adelaide remains still, watching the mask she's come to know as the truth fall apart shard by shard until there is only blood and bitter pain behind.

The tears have her reach out. She has ever been weak against repentant sorrow. Softer, now, kinder as she strokes the tears from under his eyes. "What have you done?"

"I defied my lord," he says, allowing the touch without responding to it; unsure what response he might give. He has no desire to push her away - less, now, at the dwindling remnants in his hands of what little care for him might have been left with those he'd loved. Sephrenia must know; does she regret it, he wonders, her kindness at what she believed to be the end of him?

How can she not regret it. How can he live with himself - how could he ever? Why is it this, now, and not a thousand other mistakes...he has made, after all, quite the habit of them.

"My lady, our little mother, would not teach me the forbidden secrets and I found another who would. I raised creatures beyond the piddling things that stumble through these rifts and when I was found out-- I did not leave the knighthood, Adelaide, I waded out of it through the blood of my brothers. I was dragged before my lord in chains and I defied him again. They ripped from me what I had learned, bound my power, excommunicated me from not one but two religions," a glint of the awful humour of the man she's come to know, bitter and angry and palming the knife of his cruel jibes inward. "I swore my revenge and I went into exile. I saw...I had lost my mind. I had done things that could not...I could never be forgiven. I was a monster, so a monster I became."

He is no accident. He is deliberate, he is choice, he is so bloody-minded he makes himself sick sometimes.

"I wanted him to kill me," he says, bleakly. "I regret he did not succeed so well as he believes."

She only knows what he has told her- and yet he has told her enough, truthfully if his earlier declaration of his lies being only of omission- for her to understand the depth of this action. They've spoken of religion, of the knights, of demons.

Of what the cost might be. Of what it would do to a man's mind.

Of what it did to his.

He speaks of what he did, of what he lost. Of the death he should have had and the lives he ruined behind him in the world he'll never see again- and her hands fall away. Shock, most likely. She is accustomed to disappointment for her impossible standards.

But nothing in those helps her understand what it is he attempts to say. "Why?"

Intent, regret, what did he mean in becoming a monster- why did he wish to learn more than was his due-

Actually that she can understand well enough without the asking. Martel is not one that cares for knowledge denied, what he does learn he puts himself to studying with a voracious hunger that rivals her own. But the cost...

What did he find an acceptable cost?

"I was a stupid boy come into my inheritance," he says, and more than penitence the words carry a naked self-loathing such as he's never before displayed and, in all likelihood, never will again. "A carriage accident - they never lived long enough to be ashamed of me."

A small mercy, but there is a distance in the way he speaks of his parents; he had said my mother with such feeling, but he had not meant the woman who bore him.

"I was too arrogant to hear her no for what it was. She said that I could not, and I heard that I could not. So I found someone who would take the coin no one could stop me from spending." And he couldn't stand it - hadn't stood for it. And by the time he'd understood the consequences of his foolishness, they were already burning down everything he'd worked for, all that he'd loved and taken pride in.

He shakes his head, half to clear it. "By the time I knew the depth of my own..."

His exhalation is awful.

"There would be no going back. And I could not...there was a hole in me where my gods had been, there was-- she would not - I have always," something both gentle and horrendous about the way that he articulates this, the delicacy of the words, the depravity of what he'd done. "I have always excelled."

At everything. Even failure.

Itagne's papers are produced from within his jacket - he gestures with them, knowing the words on the page will mean nothing.

"I was a fucking pawn, Adelaide, I never knew. Groomed from that first mistake to betray all that I had loved - my own hubris all the opportunity he had needed. Only Sparhawk could have taken up the Bhelliom, this unimaginable power - only I could have challenged Sparhawk. If I had been..."

He roars the words, animal in his agony-- "I should have protected her."

Edited 2016-02-19 10:27 (UTC)

Most of this is some manner of perverse surprise. Some? Is not. Martel's desire to learn everything, to resent being told he could not, taking strides and steps to have that which is denied him? This is no surprise. His pride, his need to be better- something she can empathize with, something she understands in a bone deep, visceral way- something she'd seen shades of in how he reacted to her own inability to be anything other than exceptional- this does not surprise her in the slightest.

That he'd ever been so blind as to be a pawn in his own undoing, to be turned against someone he cared for so deeply. This does not suit what she knows of him.

And yet it is the truth of the matter- spurred on by whatever these strange papers might be. For lack of anything else she might say or do- Adelaide reaches to take them. The lettering is foreign, the contents unknown but the very ink vibrates with whatever pain the words have caused Martel. Compassion sings.

Adelaide? Tucks her own shock and lingering horror into a bright, burning knot and sets it under her ribs to one side, just shy of her liver. The same space that holds most of her anger and stress- perhaps it plays a large part in why she drinks. "You were manipulated into learning what you should not so someone else might see your mother dead?"

Her voice is gentle- but distant. Less a consoling friend and more a mentor walking a student through a particularly vexing equation they cannot quite yet parse. He is crumbling- she cannot.

"I wish that he had wanted her dead."

The words are grim - the truth is worse.

"Bhelliom, the sapphire rose. It's the power to bend reality to your whim and will trapped in crystal, and it is immense. Immeasurable. Power enough to unleash an Elder God from his ancient prison and subjugate the continent. When I tell you that I died to make my world a better place," with a flicker of a smile like something cut out of him, the gleam of a knife, "what I mean to say is that my death exponentially improved it. I served an Elder God because I could not bear the silence, and even before that I was trying to kill Sparhawk. The better man. The good man. My friend; my brother. It took a half-dozen knights to subdue me in the first place, you know, not all of whom survived the encounter, and he dragged me across the city by my ankles in what I can only assume was the fervent hope I'd fight him after. And for all that, we were still brothers, in the end."

He isn't sure if he's going to weep further or be ill; he presses his fist to his mouth and says, "We were so tired. Hammered at each other like novices. My lord would have been ashamed of the both of us, but he put his sword through my chest and I...cannot say I was surprised. But he was kind to me, at the end. And she held me. She spoke her blessing. She wept for me and I had nearly, I had come so close--"

He doesn't close his eyes; he doesn't meet her gaze.

"He would have killed her, in the end. Destroyed her and all she'd loved in his place." Martel, as well; one of the Elenes she cradled so close to her heart, tainted irredeemably. "When he saw that the Bhelliom could not be coerced in such a fashion. But he had thought to use the most powerful force in all creation to burn out of her all that she was and make of her the woman he imagined he loved."

Better if he'd wanted her dead - easier now. Martel is sick with how close a thing it was, in the end. He had been precisely the tool required, and it had come so close.

Edited 2016-02-19 10:59 (UTC)

The sapphire rose.

She goes utterly still at that. Here it means nothing. Here it is a pretty jewel and naught much else. A mockery of whatever it was meant to be for him in his world.

And he had given one to her. Because it was pretty? Because it was a mockery. One lie- one series of lies of omission and it makes every nuance of their association suspect. What did he mean overtly, what did he mean in secret, did he laugh or consider her less for not knowing? For her kindness? Did he only listen for what she could teach him- for what she did teach him without thought? The paper crinkles in her grip, the air in the tent dropping a few degrees- as though that is noticeable with how bitterly cold it is outside the canvas walls.

"You did not regret it until this." these. The papers in her hand. He did not act like a man filled with regret. A man resigned? Certainly. But resignation and regret- the desire to go back and undo what had been done or never do it in the first place- these are wildly different. She cannot help if it is his pride that makes it sting half so much- or shades of nuance she does not yet see.

"I have regretted every moment of my life since I was exiled from Demos," he says, an ugly, weary truth that he has no artifice left to hide. A little more roused, "What the fuck does my regret matter worth a damn?"

His contempt is almost tangible; no one will ever hate him as much as he's so long hated himself.

"What does my regret do for any of those I killed? What does it matter to Kurik's widow that the man who meant her husband had to follow his champion across the border and die for nothing wishes it otherwise? Sparhawk would not profane her household by giving her my apologies."

And he knows, because he had spoken them and been told as much. And he had known the truth of it.

"To Petrana whose name cannot be said in Elenia without mine after it, the renegade's whore who should have been a Margravine. To all those who were too late to flee as I dawdled my march into Chyrellos. I live and better men don't, where is the justice in that? I died for my sins and here I am, carrying them in my hands, and what right have I to beat my breast and wish it were different?"

He is more sorry than he'll ever be capable of expressing, and the rage in the words is not for Adelaide - not defiant where she challenges him. It is what has burned inside him all of this time; he was a monster, so a monster he became, and he can undo none of it. It isn't within his power.

Quieter, "What right have I to grieve?"

"What the fuck do you hope to accomplish by telling me this?" This lie is one easily spun if only for it's nature. Tell what you like, leave out the rest, and none here know him or of him half so well as to guess at the ruin he'd left in his wake. No one could speak to counter him, no one would question him.

Adelaide certainly never thought to do so once they'd come to their understanding.

More the fool she.

Martel is a man grieved and he comes to her, takes the knife she'd never meant to hand him and carves out a wound on his chest- spilling bitter pain and regret and grief with a depth of emotion and sincerity beyond anything she's seen of him in their time together. The crinkling of parchment is the only sign of her discomfit, of her distress- it seems loud in the stillness between them before she swallows back everything more that would be unkind- not that she much cares to be kind- and smooths it out in her lap to avoid tearing it. "What do you want? Forgiveness? Understanding? Expulsion from my good graces?"

He's managed the last, at least, with a decisive thoroughness she cannot quite consider the extent of just yet.

His hands tremble and it isn't in fear of lashing out, but a moment of sudden and breathtaking weakness--

Itagne had, casually and in a footnote, taken away from Martel the comfort he has clung to these past months; she had loved him, still, she had given him her blessing and held him as he passed. This isn't so bad at all, he'd whispered. I get to depart in the presence of the only two people I've ever really loved.

And how could she still, knowing the full truth? The extent of his failure that had been so much more and so much more personal than he could ever have known. He'll never know if she forgave him - he'll never know if Sparhawk thinks on that moment with regret, or if the civility of his death was right for him. He can never ask these questions, only live with the uncertainty and the knowledge that it's only as he deserves, that he deserves much less, that he has none to blame for but himself.

Adelaide is dear to him. He had come to her because he was tired of lying to her, and for comfort, and the rush of shame at the realisation clenches his jaw as he defies himself to go on gazing back at her. It is uncomfortable. He doesn't wish to be comfortable. He struggles in silence to find an answer, and it's a token of his respect for her that he searches, instead of taking the torch she offers him and burning the bridge. It would be easier, and the part of him that has been in self-destructive free-fall for so much of his adult life is tempted more than he'd care to admit. She cared for him - past tense, another of his litany of failures - and he had wanted to feel it. And now, what does he do with it? Well, what has he ever done with the love of those better people?

"My fall from grace was so striking for how far I had to go," he says, eventually. "I could have been a better man."

He had become a great one; neither inherently good nor inherently bad but perhaps too much for himself, needing a cause to sink himself into. Idle hands do the devil's work.

His hands drag through his hair, lowering; his forearms rest heavy on his thighs. "I wanted you to care for me. To forgive me for how I handled you after the rift - to let me stay and thrive and give this world what I cannot give my own. It's a poor foundation to build my better self upon, isn't it? The better man owed you the truth." A thin smile aimed at the ground between them. "Progress, I suppose. For what it's worth."

Less than nothing.

"And now- what? You mean to be that better man?" He had said he wished to be worthy of the gifts given to him without cause. Her respect, her trust, her affection are all considered in this- the esteem of those in the Inquisition that have begun to look to him for guidance or teaching. Her own students take his lead in their training- for them to hear of this after so violent a betrayal at the Spire, they've only just come about to reaching out after Lauren's loss to the demon.

Whatever his reason- he had been acting contrary to whatever convoluted, prideful, spiteful bullshit had him lashing out in some manner of desperate spite in his own world. He is trying to be something else.

Something new.

But this cuts too deep, too soon, after so long she had thought herself not beyond such foolish indulgences in trusting those she ought not but better able to tell those from people that were safe enough bets. A gamble she'd made, here.

There is a reason she never puts coin down for cards.

Eyes hard and voice cold, she murmurs- and this. This is the deciding factor, the thing that would have her endure his presence till he regained his composure or expel him from her tent in short order. "Was any of it sincere- or was I merely convenient?"

Something old, as well; shadows of the man he should have been, the man he would have been in the order. He could have been Lord Preceptor by now, serving alongside and over his brothers, working in tandem with Sparhawk as the Champion, the Prince Consort. (His brother, he reflects, wears too many hats.)

He exhales, and feels the drag of psychosomatic pain; his lungs are whole, and clear, but he chokes on memory now and then, even before this waking in cold sweat, alone, angry. The anger has drained out of him and left shame and weariness in its wake - it will return. But not yet.

"You were the only person in the Inquisition with a personal reason to want rid of me," he says, a hard-won honesty that is palpably difficult for him to give her. "I sought you out purposefully to protect myself. As it later became evident your particular approval would be useful for other reasons-- I won't pretend to you I wasn't aware." She's an intelligent woman. He's told her too much of the truth for her to not see him lying on that score if he tried it.

The medallion hangs above his hands, loose from his shirt, and he curls a fist around it.

"I am your friend, Adelaide," he says, quietly. "I am a bastard and a liar and I misled you for my own sake, but it would have been much more difficult to do if I had meant none of it. And it would have been much easier not to do this." He would not have done this, if it weren't true. "I suppose from a purely pragmatic standpoint I should say you were in fact vastly inconvenient, as I did not intend that I should care for your opinion or your feelings in the slightest, much less - so much."

His eyes close for a moment. Steadying.

"I don't have so many friends, any more, that I can afford to be careless with them. I suppose I wanted comforting, but all that I've done. All that this is. It wouldn't have been right. To ask that of you, and keep you in the dark."

For a long, silent moment, she endures his wallowing. It isn't terribly kind to see what these pages are, to know what they mean in the terms of his life and dub his reaction wallowing, to make light of his grief but at the moment? She is not terribly inclined to be kind. To extend any shade of Compassion despite her spirit's urging her to do something, to do anything. She has, without a shadow of a doubt, been used.

It is not something she endures with any manner of grace from those she doesn't care for- when it comes from someone she thought she ought to be able to trust?

He pleads for forgiveness. Asks for comfort, asks for her trust. Asks for things she cannot find in herself to offer- least of all when he curls his hand around the medallion that had been the ruin of their initial meeting, that caused him to reach for her throat. She'd known then he was dangerous, that he had endured some shade of misery. No man kind or stable or sane had such a visceral, immediate reaction. And she had chosen to trust him all the same, in time. To bond over intellectual discourse and distaste for templars, for political foolishness. The fault lies in her. She ought to have known better- she did know better.

Lips pressed thin she stands and walks around Martel to the coal brazier and the kettle resting on it. Without a word of comfort or condemnation, without demand- she pours him a mug of tea and presses it into his hand. "Stop crying before it freezes on your skin. I am not going to thaw snot from your beard."

It's difficult not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the moment and his life in general; not particularly wanting to get that tea smacked into his face, he tamps the impulse down ruthlessly and wonders what Sephrenia would make of all this, now. (She would like Adelaide, of that he's certain. He is less sure what she'd make of him.)

He curls both hands around the mug, the medallion falling against his chest as he sits a little straighter. Doesn't wipe his eyes, but begins the process of quietly and methodically packing away all that he'd spilled out on the ground before her; he can't leave this tent as much of a mess as he's become. (He would prefer no one ever see him like this - but at least, not ever again.) What he grieves is something he can't touch, there's nothing to be done with it, no useful purpose to it, and he doesn't expect - has not expected, since he began speaking - to be comforted. It goes away, where it belongs, and

He drinks his tea.

"And wipe off your face." She mutters, offering a kerchief. One of her own, pressed with lavender to sooth the mind and skin, one she will not ask after once handed away. "You look like a stable boy that's tripped and scraped his knees raw."

Easier, like this. To chastise. To feign scorn to cover the hurt. She could wail or snap or toss him out on his ear, but the idea is wearying. She does have not so many friends that she'd forsake him.

Even if she is less likely to bare her vulnerabilities to him after this. Even if she will need some time before offering her company to him once more.

"You do stable boys a grave injustice," he murmurs, taking the kerchief and doing as he's bid, "hard-working young men not to be confused with knights who don't know the right end of a shovel."

The echo of humour in the remark isn't his; Kurik is dead and Martel lives, and he remembers him better than he imagines Sparhawk or any of the others would credit. Scolding them, managing them, Sparhawk first of all but any of the rest within grasping distance. He misses him all the more fiercely for knowing that he does not go on, that it's his fault; he doesn't wish Aslade would hear his apologies. He doesn't wish her any more pain at his hands. Of all the things he might undo - it is the bitterest for having been nothing he knew.

Adus is dead, too, at least. Krager, too, at last.

It is more of a balm than she probably intends, the harsh edge of how she doesn't precisely relent. He is grateful beyond words that he doesn't think it would help to say aloud to be even sharply fussed over, to be allowed to stay.

"Knights never do know when to be quiet and do as their told, or so I hear." Drink your tea, wipe your face, these things go unsaid but the direction is pointed enough in her voice as she pours herself her own mug of tea. To settle her nerves. To keep from shouting. To- bear his company in frigid silence till he saw fit to leave. She has shaved the last bit of kindness she can afford him with this in a gutted mess at her feet. It is more than he deserves- they both know it.

It is more than she can bear- and they both know this as well.

Yet she extends it all the same for the crackling of his laugh and the certainty of his regret. No remorse is quite so keenly felt as that which prompts bitter tears and near sobbing. She's never seen him quite like that before. If nothing else the depth of emotion in this is proof enough that he would never wish to be twisted that way again. Perhaps later, perhaps if she can care enough to twist it from him- she'll ask for his word.

No, he supposes, that is quite true.

So he tidies his face with her kerchief; smoothes back his hair into some semblance of order. Drinks his tea and attempts to impose on her as little as possible, after as much as he's done already. It's probably not always this difficult to do the decent thing. Probably it's a lot simpler, if you're in the habit of it.

Eventually, he sets the cup aside.

"Thank you," he says, a moment later. "For hearing the whole." It isn't anything like a full accounting of his sins, but the gory details - they aren't the point. "I will - excuse myself."

"Do." No murmur of when he would be welcome again, no request for time. He knew her well enough to understand she'll not only want the space- but need it to work through the myriad of emotions this...whole ordeal has stirred up.

Better to have the space to process and choose how it is they would be on her own without the imposition of his shadow.

Nor does she say he's never welcome back- that also does not need to be said. If that is how this was to end she'd have thrown him out earlier instead of giving him the time to compose himself.

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this chaos, this calamity, this garden once was perfect

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