I do come bearing gifts from Skyhold's own wine stores, but I am happy to join you in whatever you prefer to pass your time. Perhaps we might trade stories.
Then I will take my leave of Dorian and see you there momentarily.
( —he will find her in the gardens, a wineskin to share between them and no cups in evidence. her hair is damp, the road washed off her and put away with her traveling clothes, and her sensible trousers and less sensible blouse have been exchanged for the sort of dress for which she is best known: shades of grey and silver, plunging nearly to her navel in lightweight, clinging silken fabric.
she has put away her jewels and not put up her hair, so it's downright informal. a mostly white mabari is in evidence, albeit having already found himself a comfortable place in what grass he could find and sacked out entirely. )
[ Marcus is dressed in his usual respectable angles and layers and textiles, where he seems very proper at a glance, an impression that doesn't hold up to closer study. There is wear at the elbows and cuffs of his jacket, visible repair at his shirt cuffs, scratches on his boots.
As for the impression that Benuta makes, it's hard to say. He acknowledges her by standing, politely, and opening his hand to where she might sit.
A glance to the dog. Elegant women offering him nicknames, and their massive canines. He steers his mind from Petrana, and says, ] Evening, [ very smoothly. (If the fellow she made her message with is what amounts to a good conversational partner for her, this encounter may be a brief one.) ]
A promising one thus far, ( pleasantly, seating herself by him and considering for a moment how pleased she is with it. the air is warm and the garden is comfortable and already this place is better than the fucking frostbacks. the gallows history does not, she thinks, detract from that so much,
rather, it sharpens one. an ever-present reminder of what's at stake, if one were needed. )
I sat for a time on the Inquisition's Council of Mages, ( she says, conversationally, opening the wineskin and offering it to him first. ) I found it, ultimately, to serve little purpose beyond occupying the hands of Madame de Fer that she might not wrap them around the throat of mage rebellion more directly—but I am a natural born optimist, and I will climb in a window if the door is closed.
I understand Riftwatch to have lured you out of retirement, inasmuch as we might ever be said to retire. I'd have your veteran's thoughts on where Riftwatch stands with us.
[ Marcus takes the wineskin, waiting to drink from it, seeing an opportunity after the talk of windows and closed doors to do so deeply. He hasn't decided if he likes wine. It feels like an indulgence and that is still good enough.
He offers it back to her, a barely perceptible smile following on from talk of his retirement that wasn't. ]
Riftwatch [ he says, speaking an answer to a question he has been asking himself lately, and that he is doing it in the presence of a perfect stranger doesn't seem to be an obstacle, ] knows we're at our best when there isn't a boot on our necks. It has much to gain from a collective of talented mages in a way I'm not convinced the Inquisition ever properly realised. Or cared about.
Except for a moment, [ he concedes, ] in entertaining a Council.
(entertaining twists her smile lopsided, sly. agreement. yes, that's the perfect word for what they did. )
The better part of what leverage we have had with the Inquisition dissolved with the ascension of the Divine. It was always a Chantry organization, but there was a time that might have meant something different—
( she sighs. she drinks. )
It is in the past, now; there is only forward. I am allowing myself very high hopes for Riftwatch in its stead, so if you are going to disappoint me you must do it very gently.
[ --is saved from the sharp way it reads by his gentle handling. More weary than combative; more sympathetic, than alienating. There's only so many times you can throw your heart at a thing before something breaks.
More informative; ]
We've few Loyalists in our number. More that're inclined to more moderate stances. Those that want peace, first.
( she is affecting a terribly serious look, preparing her answer, and then he says loyalists and it's ruined by the face she pulls, and the pull she takes from the wineskin before surrendering it to him to say, )
Much worse, Marcus Rowntree; I won't.
( she will keep battering her heart against the same things until there's nothing left but blood, it's fine, that's what it's for.
after a short time, )
Skyhold is lousy with loyalists. Not at first, no—they were there, but it wasn't as it's become. But thus it begins: with settling.
( the smile she turns on him, then, is winsome: )
I would like peace, too, don't mistake me. It is a different animal to silence.
That's why you have to take care, [ Marcus says, taking back the wineskin, ] and ensure that when those talk of peace, they don't mean the other thing.
[ Maybe it's nice, to have another join the ranks not only of mages, or mages who value autonomy and freedom, but mages who will declare that they do. ]
I'm given to understand Nevarra affords its mages more freedoms than most others.
To a point, ( is still agreement. more than most covers a multitude of sins, and still falls well short of to what they aspire. ) I have benefited from those privileges a hundred times over; from my father's belief that I am no less his daughter for the staff that I wield.
( if matej thevenet's feelings are mixed on how she wields it, that is much more her mother's politics than either of their magic. )
He gave me his name, and he makes a statement by taking no wife and making no heir. It would be easy, I have had it suggested to me, to protect those privileges—that I risk them by suggesting they aren't enough, and that my enjoyment of them alone is not. ( she tips her hand— ) The statement is nothing without a willingness to act. The privileges are worthless if my position serves only myself.
If my home might be taken from me because I suggest you deserve one, too, what home is that?
[ It'd be easy to read an excess of calculation into her words. Noble declarations to mask some more selfish motive beneath it all, or spoken to justify herself and her means and her actions to him, to the mages of Riftwatch in general.
But it would be that: his own reading. Her tone rings clear. And besides all that-- ]
I'd made a home, in my retirement, [ he says, to use her word. ] A humbler one than I imagine yours to be, and that of your father's, but a home still. More than I'd had since I was a child.
I came out of that retirement because it was made clear that as long as there is compromise, so long as they view us as less, it's a falsehood. To be taken from you or I at any moment.
it's pretty, because benevenuta is pretty and that's unavoidable, but it's not a nice smile. it's not a being nice smile, the sort she occasionally bestows as if the person she's speaking to is a clever child who has correctly come to the conclusion they were being led to, benevolently patronizing. it's that she's smiling because she understands and not because she's glad. because he's right, and it's always exhilarating to hear it said back to her by someone who believes it, too. )
The Chantry views the war won, and all of us merely on an exciting field trip soon to end.
[ Marcus drinks, and offers back the skin. It seems a strange thing to do, as if they were on the road and sharing a fire, or perhaps even more accurately, speaking as he spoke with mages behind the walls of Adamant -- mages he didn't know, guessing at the future.
He says, ] We'll have the opportunity to be ready for that day.
( in the early, heady days of the inquisition, of skyhold—
she had imagined that opportunity there. it's a bitter disappointment, still, to find it not so. accordingly, a relief to find that they will not be without likeminded mages in riftwatch. settling for doing fewer war crimes is one thing. )
It will be harder, next time.
( she takes a drink, and only marcus can say whether he is or isn't surprised by how she finishes that thought, ) We aren't strangers, now. We aren't children frozen in memory's amber or imagined demons corralled behind the high walls of a tower. People who would never have known mages before have not merely fought next to them but lived alongside. Drinking, eating, sleeping, screwing.
( she isn't above cutting him a sidelong glance. hey baby. )
Oh, Dorian and I, maybe. He is too Tevene, myself too Mortalitasi, both of us too aristocratic to be rallied behind if I do not bring the dogs,
( wry, self-skewering humor, )
but we are no longer the only sort of mages a person might see. Before—perhaps Vivienne, if a gawker were lucky at the Winter Palace. Perhaps myself. We will, neither of us, engender much fellow feeling with the common man of Thedas. ( she knows what she is. ) And we did not.
It has been the better part of a decade, now. The intolerably lucky few are not representative of the mage who turned their healing arts to community work, or the mage who saved a village from a rift, and told bad jokes by the fire after.
[ The sidelong glance is absorbed in a way that could seem disinterested if not for the fact he was already attentive when it was delivered. Listening. It isn't as though he has never heard such beliefs -- although more and more, they come hindered in qualification, in defeatist backwards circles, in fear -- so much as he is interested in the people they come from.
The 'better part of a decade' has him look down between them, as if the knowledge of that time of freedom has a weight to it. So too, the knowledge that it could be all they get.
He takes the wineskin from her. ]
Perhaps we'll get lucky, [ he says, ] and Nevarra will have us.
[ There might be a version of events where Marcus absorbs her meaning and otherwise does nothing more with it than file it away amongst all the other interesting aspects to this conversation. But that version could only exist has not Marcus himself guided them to this point, where politics are abandoned on the floor and Benevenuta twists around just so.
He sets the wineskin aside, rather than drink from it.
And he reaches out instead to smooth his palm up the side of her long neck, his fingers mapping to the curved line of spine to skull. He is not rough in his forcefulness, but he does draw her in closer in a way that demands she come to him. ]
of course she does; by the time she had shifted her knees toward him there had been almost no question that she would, if he reached for her, and he has, so she rewards him with her willingness and her fingertips against the scar at his jaw even as she notes the calluses of his own hand upon her skin.
she fancies he smells a little of fire, perhaps smoke hanging in his hair or his clothes, perhaps only a fantasy elaborated from his reputation. it is quite the reputation to have caught her interest, and he quite something to hold it—
well, she thinks, they both deserve an uncomplicated good. this can be the only reason why she bites him. )
[ It's not all imagination; trace smoke scent lingers in the fibres that tend to snag on these things. Some of it is innate to his magical ability, evoking embers and volcanic ash. Some of it is past cigarettes.
Equally, there is a sensory fineness to the scent carried in Benevenuta's hair and clothing, on her skin, that draws him in. It is feminine and intimate and nothing he is very familiar with, but decides he likes it very much--
She bites him. He makes a sound that implies he likes that too.
It does make the kiss stop, mouth hovered close to hers, his hand sliding up into her hair worn loose, contemplatively letting his fingers curl through it. Considering her, pale eyes brighter for proximity. ]
( there is a faint smell of ozone about her, and overlaid upon it a heady, musky perfume oil, and something of incense-smoke. probably, if we are being totally honest, she also smells a little bit of scrupulously-groomed mabari. (he sleeps in the bed.)
(what's with marcus and women whose dogs sleep in the bed.)
she smiles at him, which does not look much more trustworthy this close than it did when she couldn't tip just the littlest forward to press their noses together, and she says, )
Shall we excuse ourselves from this fine garden, and become better acquainted?
( not that she isn't sort of down to stay in this at best tolerable garden and get better acquainted. regardless which answer, she thinks the spirit of it will not be no. )
[ Magic and redolent ritual and-- dog. Sure, why not that also.
He doesn't appear to mind, certainly not enough to comment on it. Marcus tips his head ever so, back into that angle that would beget more kissing, but instead he pulls back, letting her slip free of his grasp. Old feelings of having gotten away with something all simmer away beneath the surface.
It's not so bad, that, even if it no longer applies. They are not misbehaving Circle mages. Not like that, anyway. ]
My room is not fine, [ he informs her. ] But I'd be glad to show you there.
I promise I will not run my finger along anything for dust.
( she holds his eye. not for dust.
and then, straightening, clicking her tongue against her teeth in a way that has max on his feet: )
Off you go. Go mind the room.
( & dorian, if he's in it. either way, she is apparently sparing marcus the audience, which is more consideration than some get. perhaps best she isn't inviting anyone back to their shared room, for now, since obliging her casual affairs to put up with the knowledge that the skull is aware even if it isn't offering commentary might be
well, it might put the most battle-tested mage off his stroke. dog accounted for and lecuyer spared the indignity, she offers marcus her hand. )
I expect the Inquisition has obliged me to worse conditions than you could possibly be offering.
[ At some point, Dorian will have to wonder what became of the lady, when he receives only the dog.
But for now--
Marcus takes her hand. He has had not very much wine, but he hasn't had a great deal to eat, and it has been a relatively short amount of time spent drinking it. It's enough that he feels it a little when he is on his feet. Blood flow, blood warmth. It's a good thing she's not a Chantry spy sent here to slit his throat or something. He'd be an easy mark.
He takes her to his room. He keeps a hold of her hand all the while, which is very indiscreet, but at this hour, they pass no one. He lets her into his room and shuts and locks the door while she makes her assessment. There would be no dust to lift, everything very clean and neat. His bed is made, a set of spare boots are lined up and polished at the foot of it. Any dirty laundry is packed into a basket. The desk is bare, save for a clean ash tray of glass. He could do with a rug. Some flowers. A decorative unread book.
At least it doesn't smell like dog. Just earth, and soap. A trace of smoke.
From behind, Marcus takes a hold of her hips and pulls her in close. His presence becomes the physicality her back meets behind her, him nosing into her hair above her ear. He asks the question he is curious about, not whispered but pitched quieter; ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
I do come bearing gifts from Skyhold's own wine stores, but I am happy to join you in whatever you prefer to pass your time. Perhaps we might trade stories.
no subject
[ Sound less shady, Marcus. ]
The gardens are good at this hour.
no subject
( —he will find her in the gardens, a wineskin to share between them and no cups in evidence. her hair is damp, the road washed off her and put away with her traveling clothes, and her sensible trousers and less sensible blouse have been exchanged for the sort of dress for which she is best known: shades of grey and silver, plunging nearly to her navel in lightweight, clinging silken fabric.
she has put away her jewels and not put up her hair, so it's downright informal. a mostly white mabari is in evidence, albeit having already found himself a comfortable place in what grass he could find and sacked out entirely. )
no subject
As for the impression that Benuta makes, it's hard to say. He acknowledges her by standing, politely, and opening his hand to where she might sit.
A glance to the dog. Elegant women offering him nicknames, and their massive canines. He steers his mind from Petrana, and says, ] Evening, [ very smoothly. (If the fellow she made her message with is what amounts to a good conversational partner for her, this encounter may be a brief one.) ]
no subject
rather, it sharpens one. an ever-present reminder of what's at stake, if one were needed. )
I sat for a time on the Inquisition's Council of Mages, ( she says, conversationally, opening the wineskin and offering it to him first. ) I found it, ultimately, to serve little purpose beyond occupying the hands of Madame de Fer that she might not wrap them around the throat of mage rebellion more directly—but I am a natural born optimist, and I will climb in a window if the door is closed.
I understand Riftwatch to have lured you out of retirement, inasmuch as we might ever be said to retire. I'd have your veteran's thoughts on where Riftwatch stands with us.
( does it? )
no subject
He offers it back to her, a barely perceptible smile following on from talk of his retirement that wasn't. ]
Riftwatch [ he says, speaking an answer to a question he has been asking himself lately, and that he is doing it in the presence of a perfect stranger doesn't seem to be an obstacle, ] knows we're at our best when there isn't a boot on our necks. It has much to gain from a collective of talented mages in a way I'm not convinced the Inquisition ever properly realised. Or cared about.
Except for a moment, [ he concedes, ] in entertaining a Council.
no subject
The better part of what leverage we have had with the Inquisition dissolved with the ascension of the Divine. It was always a Chantry organization, but there was a time that might have meant something different—
( she sighs. she drinks. )
It is in the past, now; there is only forward. I am allowing myself very high hopes for Riftwatch in its stead, so if you are going to disappoint me you must do it very gently.
no subject
[ --is saved from the sharp way it reads by his gentle handling. More weary than combative; more sympathetic, than alienating. There's only so many times you can throw your heart at a thing before something breaks.
More informative; ]
We've few Loyalists in our number. More that're inclined to more moderate stances. Those that want peace, first.
no subject
Much worse, Marcus Rowntree; I won't.
( she will keep battering her heart against the same things until there's nothing left but blood, it's fine, that's what it's for.
after a short time, )
Skyhold is lousy with loyalists. Not at first, no—they were there, but it wasn't as it's become. But thus it begins: with settling.
( the smile she turns on him, then, is winsome: )
I would like peace, too, don't mistake me. It is a different animal to silence.
no subject
[ Maybe it's nice, to have another join the ranks not only of mages, or mages who value autonomy and freedom, but mages who will declare that they do. ]
I'm given to understand Nevarra affords its mages more freedoms than most others.
[ He drinks. ]
no subject
( if matej thevenet's feelings are mixed on how she wields it, that is much more her mother's politics than either of their magic. )
He gave me his name, and he makes a statement by taking no wife and making no heir. It would be easy, I have had it suggested to me, to protect those privileges—that I risk them by suggesting they aren't enough, and that my enjoyment of them alone is not. ( she tips her hand— ) The statement is nothing without a willingness to act. The privileges are worthless if my position serves only myself.
If my home might be taken from me because I suggest you deserve one, too, what home is that?
no subject
But it would be that: his own reading. Her tone rings clear. And besides all that-- ]
I'd made a home, in my retirement, [ he says, to use her word. ] A humbler one than I imagine yours to be, and that of your father's, but a home still. More than I'd had since I was a child.
I came out of that retirement because it was made clear that as long as there is compromise, so long as they view us as less, it's a falsehood. To be taken from you or I at any moment.
no subject
it's pretty, because benevenuta is pretty and that's unavoidable, but it's not a nice smile. it's not a being nice smile, the sort she occasionally bestows as if the person she's speaking to is a clever child who has correctly come to the conclusion they were being led to, benevolently patronizing. it's that she's smiling because she understands and not because she's glad. because he's right, and it's always exhilarating to hear it said back to her by someone who believes it, too. )
The Chantry views the war won, and all of us merely on an exciting field trip soon to end.
no subject
He says, ] We'll have the opportunity to be ready for that day.
no subject
she had imagined that opportunity there. it's a bitter disappointment, still, to find it not so. accordingly, a relief to find that they will not be without likeminded mages in riftwatch. settling for doing fewer war crimes is one thing. )
It will be harder, next time.
( she takes a drink, and only marcus can say whether he is or isn't surprised by how she finishes that thought, ) We aren't strangers, now. We aren't children frozen in memory's amber or imagined demons corralled behind the high walls of a tower. People who would never have known mages before have not merely fought next to them but lived alongside. Drinking, eating, sleeping, screwing.
( she isn't above cutting him a sidelong glance. hey baby. )
Oh, Dorian and I, maybe. He is too Tevene, myself too Mortalitasi, both of us too aristocratic to be rallied behind if I do not bring the dogs,
( wry, self-skewering humor, )
but we are no longer the only sort of mages a person might see. Before—perhaps Vivienne, if a gawker were lucky at the Winter Palace. Perhaps myself. We will, neither of us, engender much fellow feeling with the common man of Thedas. ( she knows what she is. ) And we did not.
It has been the better part of a decade, now. The intolerably lucky few are not representative of the mage who turned their healing arts to community work, or the mage who saved a village from a rift, and told bad jokes by the fire after.
no subject
The 'better part of a decade' has him look down between them, as if the knowledge of that time of freedom has a weight to it. So too, the knowledge that it could be all they get.
He takes the wineskin from her. ]
Perhaps we'll get lucky, [ he says, ] and Nevarra will have us.
[ Ha ha. ]
no subject
she swivels her knees slightly, turning to orient more toward him. it has the entirely intentional effect of being an excellent view. )
Nevarra should count itself extraordinarily fortunate.
( a meaningful beat, because there's a time and a place for subtlety and sometimes she eschews it entirely, )
To have you.
no subject
He sets the wineskin aside, rather than drink from it.
And he reaches out instead to smooth his palm up the side of her long neck, his fingers mapping to the curved line of spine to skull. He is not rough in his forcefulness, but he does draw her in closer in a way that demands she come to him. ]
no subject
of course she does; by the time she had shifted her knees toward him there had been almost no question that she would, if he reached for her, and he has, so she rewards him with her willingness and her fingertips against the scar at his jaw even as she notes the calluses of his own hand upon her skin.
she fancies he smells a little of fire, perhaps smoke hanging in his hair or his clothes, perhaps only a fantasy elaborated from his reputation. it is quite the reputation to have caught her interest, and he quite something to hold it—
well, she thinks, they both deserve an uncomplicated good. this can be the only reason why she bites him. )
no subject
Equally, there is a sensory fineness to the scent carried in Benevenuta's hair and clothing, on her skin, that draws him in. It is feminine and intimate and nothing he is very familiar with, but decides he likes it very much--
She bites him. He makes a sound that implies he likes that too.
It does make the kiss stop, mouth hovered close to hers, his hand sliding up into her hair worn loose, contemplatively letting his fingers curl through it. Considering her, pale eyes brighter for proximity. ]
no subject
(what's with marcus and women whose dogs sleep in the bed.)
she smiles at him, which does not look much more trustworthy this close than it did when she couldn't tip just the littlest forward to press their noses together, and she says, )
Shall we excuse ourselves from this fine garden, and become better acquainted?
( not that she isn't sort of down to stay in this at best tolerable garden and get better acquainted. regardless which answer, she thinks the spirit of it will not be no. )
no subject
He doesn't appear to mind, certainly not enough to comment on it. Marcus tips his head ever so, back into that angle that would beget more kissing, but instead he pulls back, letting her slip free of his grasp. Old feelings of having gotten away with something all simmer away beneath the surface.
It's not so bad, that, even if it no longer applies. They are not misbehaving Circle mages. Not like that, anyway. ]
My room is not fine, [ he informs her. ] But I'd be glad to show you there.
no subject
( she holds his eye. not for dust.
and then, straightening, clicking her tongue against her teeth in a way that has max on his feet: )
Off you go. Go mind the room.
( & dorian, if he's in it. either way, she is apparently sparing marcus the audience, which is more consideration than some get. perhaps best she isn't inviting anyone back to their shared room, for now, since obliging her casual affairs to put up with the knowledge that the skull is aware even if it isn't offering commentary might be
well, it might put the most battle-tested mage off his stroke. dog accounted for and lecuyer spared the indignity, she offers marcus her hand. )
I expect the Inquisition has obliged me to worse conditions than you could possibly be offering.
no subject
But for now--
Marcus takes her hand. He has had not very much wine, but he hasn't had a great deal to eat, and it has been a relatively short amount of time spent drinking it. It's enough that he feels it a little when he is on his feet. Blood flow, blood warmth. It's a good thing she's not a Chantry spy sent here to slit his throat or something. He'd be an easy mark.
He takes her to his room. He keeps a hold of her hand all the while, which is very indiscreet, but at this hour, they pass no one. He lets her into his room and shuts and locks the door while she makes her assessment. There would be no dust to lift, everything very clean and neat. His bed is made, a set of spare boots are lined up and polished at the foot of it. Any dirty laundry is packed into a basket. The desk is bare, save for a clean ash tray of glass. He could do with a rug. Some flowers. A decorative unread book.
At least it doesn't smell like dog. Just earth, and soap. A trace of smoke.
From behind, Marcus takes a hold of her hips and pulls her in close. His presence becomes the physicality her back meets behind her, him nosing into her hair above her ear. He asks the question he is curious about, not whispered but pitched quieter; ]
What is it you want of me?