Nocta Oren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
twocomplex) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
driftfleet2015-04-07 07:56 pm
twocomplex) wrote in driftfleet2015-04-07 07:56 pm
Entry tags:
- !mingle,
- aang,
- aaron,
- allen walker,
- anders,
- asteffiel,
- aziraphale,
- belthazar spellscry,
- beverly crusher,
- chris halliwell,
- coil lenn,
- cole,
- cole turner,
- cullen rutherford,
- dorian pavus,
- elize lutus,
- felix harrowgate,
- garrett hawke,
- hiro hamada,
- jennifer keller,
- joel,
- jove lavellan,
- krista kingsley,
- ladon ceto,
- lea (axel),
- lioriley,
- lloyd irving,
- mattias larnaca,
- megaman.exe,
- nelkeila tarid,
- nocta oren,
- o'danya mitnu,
- robin redbreast,
- sheena fujibayashi,
- shirley fennes,
- simon tam,
- sokka,
- solas,
- stanley raymond kowalski,
- stephanie amell,
- stephanie brown,
- syeira,
- tay barnam,
- tekhetsio,
- varric tethras,
- yamanaka ino,
- zhas
Waystation Mingle Log!
Who: GAME-WIDE MINGLE aka everyone
Broadcast: If you want
Action: The Stations!
When: From 04/05 through the month of April.
[Well, that all sure happened. But at least you have the waystations! Whether you want to stock up on supplies, work, trade, or visit the very fancy Virtual Reality Dome, it's bound to be a nice break from the attacks of the 5th.
Make your own prompts, set up your own Virtual Realities, etc! For reference, the OOC post with info is over here!]
Broadcast: If you want
Action: The Stations!
When: From 04/05 through the month of April.
[Well, that all sure happened. But at least you have the waystations! Whether you want to stock up on supplies, work, trade, or visit the very fancy Virtual Reality Dome, it's bound to be a nice break from the attacks of the 5th.
Make your own prompts, set up your own Virtual Realities, etc! For reference, the OOC post with info is over here!]
no subject
He does not quite sit when asked, but he does lean against the ruined edge of the wall beside Hawke, hands and shoulders close enough for them to share warmth when the sun shifts behind a cloud and a breeze skips past them. Still not quite sitting together, which is a difference without a distinction, maybe.
This story does not get as much laughter out of him during the telling as the first one probably did. This isn't necessarily a bad sign— he listens, rapt, the entire time, his expression open in something like an amused half-smile. He actually interrupts only very rarely (with such gems as Is that for me? in reference to Hawke's impromptu sword stand-in, and Maker, Hawke in regards to the fighting strategy of choice, if it can be called that).
The sting of jealousy is still there, a petty, miserable twist in his chest. It's unlikely to ever go away completely, but this time it's at least muted by the animation in how Hawke tells his story, how easy it is to picture him shorter and skinnier and roughhousing with younger siblings, magic and all.
(Anders chooses to imagine Carver as much stouter than his brother, in this particular retelling. Carver would probably be appalled.)
It sounds... lovely, silly in an endearing way, like a foolish dream he had when he was 13 about running back to his mother's skirts and teaching magic to himself. The Circle would have gutted this story, maybe gutted the person Hawke eventually grew up to be. For all that Anders wishes he could have had the same thing, he's still privately, silently relieved that the templars' reach didn't reach everywhere.
At the end, he clucks his tongue disapprovingly.]
A family of apostates, acting just like any other family! I'm appalled. What would the Revered Mother have said? [Plenty, probably. Even small towns like Lothering can't escape the droning voice of their Chantries.] It's nearly picturesque! Aside from the fire. And the pommel to the face, I suppose. But some might argue that gives the picture character.
[This is actually mostly true— there isn't really a way to describe how nice it sounds to him, learning magic in the open air from someone you love and trust, with family causing a ruckus in the background.]
no subject
I'd say we were lucky, but ...[ He lifts a shoulder, leaning down to find a much smaller branch to strip of (virtual) leaves between his fingers. ] Luck is not my family's strong suit.
[ A not exactly sour note wends below the cheerfulness there, just the sort of humor that exists to keep other things from getting in. Doublejointedness runs in the family, or baldness. Not a penchant for early death. He leans back into the (....virtual) sunlight, position a little precarious on the fence except the wedge Anders' shoulder makes; if he moved Hawke would probably topple. Then again that doesn't sound so bad, even if the grass and the trees and the scorch marks are all essentially all pulled loose from the weave of his imagination. What warmth or green or ash means separated from a mind is a much bigger question than they came here for. ]
Character, now that we are exceedingly good at. [ No one would ever have guess from meeting Hawke! Haha! He has his eyes closed, face tilted up; he only opens the one with the errant brown slots on the iris to contemplate Anders. ]
I used to think if I made it to 30 I'd probably better sign up, the idea keeps following me around so. Between Carver, my cousin, my father, the Inquisition's whole ....wardeny thing, attractive apostates I keep running into ...wardens everywhere. But here we are, I'm 34. Looks like I missed my window.
[ A pause. He'd be a terrible Warden. ]
Carver ...do you remember that story I didn't tell you? With all the darkspawn and Deep Roads and everything? This is a different one to that, imagine! I've been accused of having an inexplicable need to revisit them every few years, which is nothing but unkind. The Deep Roads just keep happening to me. Rather like headlice.
[ An actual hint of sobriety crosses his face, seeps into his voice. ] He hasn't always been a Warden, of course. Contracting the Blight because you're foolish enough to try for some mad dwarf's idea of treasure in the Deep Roads - running, as Carver so likes to remind me, from My Bloody Templars - not exactly a hero's journey, is it. We were a week below the surface, you know. He'd have died.
D'you want to know the rest? It's not exactly kittens and accidental immolation. Happy ending though, I promise. Happy as any in my family anyway.
[ Accompanied by an entirely real smile; he's only ever bitter when he is, and right now he isn't. ]
no subject
They say that the only cure for the Blight is to become a Grey Warden, but any Grey Warden knows that's not really true. Anders has been present for Joinings other than his own. He knows that some recruits take the revelation better than others.
He sighs, smiling.]
That's all right. I'm not sure any Warden's recruitment is really pleasant enough to count as a party story. [beat] Except maybe for Ogrhen's. Did I tell you, I think he did it on a dare?
[Or got drunk and made a bet, or stifled and isolated in his life on the surface after the Blight, one of those.]
You must have run into them somewhere. [The Wardens, he means, glancing back over his shoulder to indicate that Hawke should keep telling the story.] Accidentally cross paths? Wacky coincidence? Encouraged together by overly friendly darkspawn?
no subject
[ As Hawke is incapable of not performing at any given time, he could be conveying this more somberly. Then again this time he stays seated, hands dangling between parted knees when they're not doing half the talking for him, so: he could be more absurd, too. He hadn't even imagined sharing that part of his history when they got here, today was meant to be--well, kittens and accidental (uh, curable) sibling immolation. Incongruous summer in space.
Yet if it's taken this turn that's at least in part because Hawke is letting it; he could probably still pull things in another direction with minimum snag, but a singular thought, one solid conviction, stops him. ]
We were only down there in the first place because we had the same kind of maps Wardens use. And the Warden who'd provided them. [ An oddity in itself already, a Warden on what sounds (accurately) like a fortune hunter's expedition. ] Former warden, anyway, if that's possible. [ One of his eyebrows cuts brightly upwards. ] You'd know better than me, though I suppose I could ask Carver's thoughts on the subject if I wanted to hear about it for the next hundred years.
[ He ...doesn't, except that there's little he wouldn't do to hear Carver bitch at him about anything, one last time. If that's visible it's there and buried under the upward hitch of one crooked corner of his mouth. ]
He was the one who found the Wardens for us, and believe me, in his shoes I can't say I'd have done the same thing. Carver spent the whole time we were in Kirkwall hating everything--most things, if I'm honest. Magic, mages, anyone with the temerity to speak to me, everything I did...if this Warden--
[ Making the central figure of this story a Mysterious Someone Else might be brilliant rhetoric, but Hawke lets it drop along with the thoroughly shredded flora between his hands. ]
We're talking about you here, if I haven't made it obvious. You helped us. Nothing--I don't know, nothing that rewrote the face of Kirkwall or has its own poorly-rhymed ballad, but the reason I'm not the only Hawke left standing all the same. And you didn't have to, Maker knows--I know a little. About what you were running from.
[ If there's one thing in any of this he can understand it's that: when the idea that home will drag you back is worse than having to leave it in the first place. ]
It's that just you...when you say that isn't who you want to be, or you who can be, I just think you ought to have that to take into account.
[ Hawke's singular conviction remains, of course, the firm rejection of the idea that Anders needs to become the person who would risk recapture for the sake of a near-stranger who'd never been anything but hostile toward him. He was already that person five minutes ago. Yesterday. Before they met. Or remet, or whatever it is that's happening. ]
I wouldn't have let them, you know. Not ten years ago, not now.
[ This uttered with absolutely no bravado, just certainty. Anders had always thought, their entire association, that his time was borrowed only barely because it inevitably ended in the Calling. Mostly it was that between the Templars and the Wardens there was no way he'd live the rest of his life without anyone else's hooks in him. Hawke decided at some point - probably there, watching black ooze through his brother's veins and knowing there was nothing he could do to so much as slow it down - that that was an arrangement that needed to change.
He's uh, never mentioned it before, however. What time is right if not now! ]
no subject
[He'd known at former Warden where the story was headed. Maybe he knew earlier than that. It's almost as difficult to listen to this as it had been to listen to all the anger and vitriol sent his way by the others; it's always easier to hate something abstract, to set it aside and never look too closely at it. He knows that very well.
This, though. This he isn't sure what to do with. It's simple, of course— faced with someone suffering the Blight and an opportunity available to help them, what point is there in leaving them to suffer the kind of end the corruption calls for? That isn't self-preservation, that's cruelty.
But then, perhaps he only feels that way because he doesn't have a clear idea of what he'd be running from in the Wardens. For all that Varric had been eager to share his apparent philosophical turnaround on the subject, Anders had never actually heard a reason why he'd felt the need to run. Other than the obvious, that is. If there were templars standing between him and getting Hawke's brother to the Wardens, he isn't sure that he'd make the same choice this other Anders did.
(He would, but that's beside the point.)
Still, he'd always known that the Wardens were just a slightly larger, slightly more gilded cage than the Circle. (Which is, incidentally, saying something, calling the Wardens gilded.) The idea that someone else might be willing to stand between him and the closing mouth of a trap, templars or Wardens or anything else, makes him feel... vaguely nauseous.
In a good way or a bad way, he isn't sure. Maybe both.]
The Commander saved my life when she conscripted me. [Conscripted, not recruited. He isn't looking at anything in particular when he says it.] Not that all Wardens would share that sentiment if they heard the story, I'm sure. Some of them would probably tell you she killed me just as surely as the templars would have.
[He doesn't agree, obviously. He might not ever agree with a perspective like that, even after he becomes disillusioned with the institution as a whole. Right now, he watches himself bend the stalk of a dandelion with the toe of one boot.]
If I— [It's a slip. He swallows.] If he brought your brother to them, he must have known that it wasn't exactly a gift he was giving him. Or you.
[Here he does lift his head, finally, just enough to watch Hawke out of the corner of his eye.]
Not that dying is much of an alternative. I mean, look at me. [It's a weak joke.] It does sound like it worked out for your brother, in any case. That's— good.
[The rest is too much to address directly so soon. It's a slow constructing image, this picture of himself years down the line, but it is forming.]
no subject
[ Whether this is truly thoughtful or utterly facetious can be seen from so many angles as to be indistinguishable. Hawke's smiling, at least; that's enough for most people. ]
Though whether or not that's a boon depends on who you ask. Carver hates being happy. So much less to complain about that way.
[ Given all those people previously mentioned, Hawke probably knows as much about the Wardens as anyone who isn't, so he's been well apprised there's very little actual glory in the task aside from surprise moments like managing to route a Blight, for instance. Carver's poured so much of his identity into the mantle of the Grey without criticism Hawke can't help but roll his eyes, and yet ...let him have that. He probably won't ever understand why his brother needs it, not really, but that matters not nearly as much.
In some ways that's as important as having 'saved' Carver's life. Hawke doesn't belabour the point by saying it aloud. ]
For what it's worth I am glad you piqued my cousin's interest. [ Like, duh, but of course he must be flippant about it, to match. ] Who else could I have dragged all the way out here? No one who would have appreciated a passel of bloodthirsty kittens quite so much, I can tell you that.
[ In other words even though it's been a little trickier than anticipated he's still glad they did this. ]
no subject
[This little excursion has been more than he expected in a slew of different ways, but he can't say he's upset to have done it, either. He feels a little hollow and unsteady in the wake of that revelation, like wind might whistle straight through him, but that will pass. Or, at least, there are memories enough from today to fill the space.
The (virtual) sun is still warm, and the smile that unfolds on his face is not at all fake.]
Anyway, it sounds to me like your brother is the perfect fit. Taint this and doom that. I can't keep up with the level of bemoaning the Wardens require on a regular basis, most days. It's a wonder they haven't kicked me out on the grounds of being too sunny.
[A beat. His jaw works, like what he says next needs preparation before it can come out.]
Still. It isn't all terrible, the Wardens. For some people, it— fits. [A final, skittering attempt at eye contact.] If he had to do it, I'm glad it happened the way it did.
[Unclear whether "he" here refers to Carver or to the Anders who suddenly feels a step less distant.]
no subject
His eye contact doesn't flinch, but it doesn't insist on much of anything, either. ]
He's good at it. The doom bits and the taint bits, but the whole silly saving the world thing, too.
[ Probably he's talking about Carver. At least mostly. ]
Right! Had enough psuedo-Thedas for the day, do you think? Though there are always the many, many places my teenage virtue and I parted ways.
no subject
[His fingers twitch slightly on Hawke's shoulder, but he doesn't pull his hand away; not immediately, anyway. He feels vaguely warm and the sun has that just enough cast of red to it, and Anders has the inexplicable urge to kiss him, which he knows would be a colossally stupid idea. Instead he slants the feeling sideways, turns it into something more agreeable:]
Besides, I'm much more interested in making sure you didn't accidentally pick up any of your virtue during this little adventure.
no subject
[ Does the Chantry have like, re-purification ceremonies. Important considerations. Hawke, as amenable to being agreeable as ever, hauls himself upright via hands on his knees. He tries not to think about whether or not he misses being who he was here; that's another thing sloughed off and more or less permanent, so the fact is that although he is, as noted, glad they made the trip, he doesn't feel obliged to keep looking for reasons to stay, either. ]
Although if you wanted to check I don't suppose I could fault your reasoning. Looking out for my welfare and all.
no subject
[His fingers drop, no longer having the excuse, and he uses the moment instead to look back out, not at the village itself, but across the fields to where the simulation peters out into vague forest at the edges. The waystations are almost as grey as the ships are, and even in a simulation like this he can take a moment to pretend he might be free.]
Still. It's a nice little place, isn't it? For having just the one chicken, I mean. [The closest he'll come to thanking Hawke for the opportunity to see it. He drifts slightly, a few steps backwards towards where the dome had left the controls.] Shall we?
no subject
Formerly just the one chicken. She was delicious, remember?