And the lights, they glow, Like I just lost the world war

[fightingale]

WHO: Leliana & Brosephine; besties bruh it's a log for besties
WHAT: listen we're both drunk don't expect much Leliana being a paranoid jerk because of EMOTION although she doesn't have feelings because she is PROFESSIONAL
WHEN: time is a concept imposed by man and thus irrelevant
WHERE: josie's quarters
NOTES: I hope this still makes sense tomorrow tbh


Leliana is not at ease. Leliana is rarely at ease, these days. Betrayals from those she would deem most trusted. Zevran, though, would seem no more than the assassin he was raised to be, though she believed to be so much more. Alistair absorbed by the Wardens, though always they had been bound by their fights and their experiences, if not their beliefs.

Josephine is someone who she might trust better, for knowing her before she fled to a Chantry. Equally so, perhaps, because she met Josephine when she was still a bard, when Marjolaine still guided the beat of her heart and she was still truly hers. When someone shaped you so completely, could you be anything but?

(And on some days, the darkest ones, those that she did not care to give voice or acknowledgement. She met Leliana when she was so enchanted by Marjolaine, when she could talk for hours about how she was strong and beautiful but never pretty nor delicate, and sometimes she has those moment of dread where she wonders if Josephine has any true notion of who Leliana is, or if she knows only illusions warped by circumstance.)

And so she finds herself sitting in Josie's quarters, waiting for the diplomat and the Inquisition's true voice to arrive.

Only when Josie is in her room does Leliana speak, never mind the light or much else.

"Josie."

No one ever accused the Spymaster of being anything other than 'dramatic.'

Comments

[theproperglove]

"And what is the alternative? To act rashly, without thinking of the consequences of our behaviour?" She's not looking at Leliana as she says this, her eyes instead trained on the opposite wall, because she is not thinking of Leliana at this moment but of Cassandra, whose recent actions had mostly made everything more difficult.

She droops slightly, trying to quell the anxious tension that is now crowding her chest, thrumming in her blood. "Surely there must be another choice, another option, something we have not yet thought of."

Looking up at Leliana properly now, Josephine's gaze hardens and her fingers bunch in the sheets beneath her hands; she feels so angry but so useless.

"I refuse to believe anything else."

[fightingale]

"Perhaps." But she does not believe it, and she does not doubt that it is given away in the schooled neutrality of her tone. It seems too easy, that there is simply another way. More and more she wonders if anything that is worth achieving in this world can be done without blood and brutality.

It is no good to see Josie so tense, so harsh, and she steps forward to lay her hands, gloved and armoured as they are, on her friend's shoulders. For Josie she can be kinder, gentler, than she can be with others. Josie deserves the better things in this world, not all its burdens. "If anyone could find such a way, it would be you. And you will not be alone in your search."

She is not sure of it, but her friends are rare - rarer, now - and precious. She cannot see them suffer for their ideals, or her own.