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[nonvenomous]

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[nonvenomous]

"Rawp." Thot bows her back and shivers the slender cord of her tail, goblin paws pressed up in search of Ellis’ face, all bugged eyes and bat-like ears. Richard watches her go without interceding, truly the worst kind of parent.

“I understood the risk when I consented to his involvement.”

Even if he has no love for Barrow, there’s no venom to his saying so, reassurance of rhyme and reason while Ellis is probed over by a weird slinky baby.

“What sort of intercession would you think necessary?”

[heorte]

"If you need someone to speak in support," is said with the air of a man considering a number of possibilities.

What Ellis does depends on what that risk manifests, if anything.

If it's slightly difficult to make more sweeping points with his attention split between Richard and the questing cat, well—

Ellis runs careful, cautious fingers down Thot's sleek back. If he cared to, he could lift this cat away. But for the moment, he's inclined to patiently tolerate the inspection even as he leans back from it in an attempt to avoid Thot's face while still keeping Richard in his sightline.

[nonvenomous]

“Mmm.”

Speaking in support.

“I’d thought of poisoning him but it seemed ungrateful.”

There’s a bloodless honesty to his saying so, ill-matched with his delivery -- light and casual, as if in the spirit of a joke.

Thot’s knobbly spine lifts under Ellis’ fingers, the push and touch of nose and paw cold until she’s eeled down to stretch herself across his lap. Her legs go wherever there is room for legs to go, jutted up or out or across. Inelegant. But comfortable.

“I appreciate the concern.”

[heorte]

"Not if it's a fast-acting poison," is an easier rejoinder to offer up than a response to Richard's gratitude.

Is Ellis joking? It's hard to say. His gaze had followed Thot down to where she's sprawling, all absurdly long limbs. Ellis' fingers trail one long leg carefully before looking back across the table.

"You've been kind to me," Ellis says, because it feels true to him. That earns him something in return from Ellis, who has so few, specific tokens of friendship to give in return. He can do no magic, nor parse any science, and his attempts at navigating friendship feel haphazard at best, but—

[nonvenomous]

The slender bones in Thot’s leggy are all mostly in the right positions, loose in their joints, claws curled, squeezed, and relaxed.

“People should be kind to each other.”

It’s the least anyone can do to not actively make the human or elf or dwarf or qunari experience worse for someone else than it already is, surely. He drinks, matter-of-fact for his own logic.

To the lowest common denominator of decency.

“How are your chickens faring?”

a package and a note;

[kantikoy]

[ Routed through whatever Riftwatch authority knows how to reach Richard where he lives (if that's not in the Gallows any longer; Adrasteia doesn't know and did not ask) is a small package that has been sealed with wax.

Inside the package is a small metal case, a small metal ball with a bell inside (for Thot), and a note. The note reads: ]

Thank you for the dance and the opportunity to settle my nerves.

-Adrasteia

[ Inside the case are three handrolled elfroot joints. ]

[heorte]

People should be a lot of things.

Ellis' gaze lifts from Thot, beat of quiet carrying that dour thought forward. Richard does a fair amount for Ellis unasked for, often without sufficient return on his investment. It matters to Ellis, that it's acknowledged.

But as for the chickens—

"Thriving, much to their landlady's dismay."

But Ellis isn't interested in talking about the chickens.

"I need to ask a favor. What I meant to ask, after the dream, if you're in a position to hear it."

[nonvenomous]

Have you named them?

Richard is too composed to spend the breath he’d pulled in to ask on a sigh. There are more strategic routes he could have taken -- meatier subject matter, better suited to his audience, more barbed wire than signal light. But it’s nothing (or no one) he cares to discuss presently, in this little tavern, with a tankard in hand.

He sets the tankard aside, a twinge of tension along his neck passed off as a nod.

Of course. Easy.

[nonvenomous]

[ A slip of a note is left folded over in Adrasteia’s mailbox within the Gallows some days later, in tidy hand: ]

Warden Adrasteia,

Thank you for thinking of me.

-Richard

[heorte]

It's not as though Ellis hasn't had time to consider the phrasing of the request. But still, there is an answering quiet. Ellis looks down to the lanky cat sprawling over his lap to put a hand over her bony ribs.

"I was very forthcoming with you in that dream," Ellis says, words coming slowly. "And it would be a kindness, if you were to keep that between us."

Or better yet—

"And put it from your own mind."

[nonvenomous]

“I would argue you were more honest than forthcoming,”

There is a distinction -- one that is important among liars. He takes care to square his tankard evenly between two slats in the table surface, mild to his core.

“I won’t discuss what was said with anyone.”

Frictionless.

[heorte]

"Thank you," is easy, what's due to Richard for the promise he's making.

The urge to press further, to elicit some further assurances, rises and falls in his chest. Ellis looks down at his hand resting over Thot's ribs, waits a long moment before adding, with a note of apology, "I shouldn't have said any of it. Not when you had burdens enough of your own."

Some of which had followed him after waking. Richard hadn't deflected and turned from him that day on the steps because he'd woken without any concerns.

[nonvenomous]

There’s an off-axis give to his answering silence -- the torsion of a screw that’s been wound in and out a few too many times in its life stripping as it’s pressed. Resistance is being displaced, rearranged, changed.

“You were speaking from the heart.”

He’s been very fixated on the table these last few seconds, until whatever it is warps free, and he can look up to back assurance with eye contact. So carefully squared, he hefts his tankard to drink.

“I know they’re important to you.”

[heorte]

Having dropped his gaze back to the oozing splay of Thot's limbs across his thigh, whatever expression occurs in relation to the idea of his heart, of having exposed some part of it, is hidden. When he looks back across the table, it's with some wrinkle of a frown worked across his face, but no answer. No contradiction or question, but silent invitation in the lack of response.

[nonvenomous]

Thot’s eyes gleam green in her skull, narrowed now to contented slits over the poke of her fangs. Gradually, she’s rolled to raise her arms up over her head, making the question of balance more precarious if not for the hand Ellis has at her middle.

If there’s an invitation to be read into quiet, Richard lets it lie.

He has ale to polish off, and personal thoughts to pack away while he works his way down to the dregs.

[heorte]

The silence stretches. Ellis' hand remains, gentle and steadying over Thot's belly.

"I'd like to hear what you mean," is said against Ellis' better judgement.

It occurs to him that Richard has seen into him, knows a piece of him that Cathán might have guessed at towards the end but never knew. And Ellis leans on him, in a way that is perhaps unfair.

He glances down to Thot before pushing his own tankard along the table to Richard in unspoken offer.

[nonvenomous]

“My apologies,” says Richard -- his eyes are clear, his composure pristine. “What I mean by what?”

He starts to shake his head at the offer of the second tankard, recalls a previous conversation, and reaches to draw it across to his side after all. Resignation bleeds back in the form of a caught sigh as he does, a trace of shade in his next look. You could’ve just ordered stew.

Under these conditions, a single tankard is plenty.

[heorte]

"About what I find important. Why you mention it now."

What. Deliberately stepping back from who.

[nonvenomous]

“I’d anticipated you were likely to have,” Richard pauses to consider his vocabulary and continues, logically, while weighing how ill-advised it would be to start on this second tankard: “an emotional reaction.”

His eyebrows provide an obviously in gentle addendum.

[heorte]

"Alright."

Ellis' expression has veered further towards frown, confusion ceding ground to some quiet kind of affront.

"I don't understand why."

Richard has never baited him, but the answer strikes Ellis a little too close to the possibility of it for comfort.

[nonvenomous]

“Because I was complicit in the attempted assassination of the Provost and Miss Poppell.”

Ellis’ confusion is contagious enough for Mr. Dickerson to forget (momentarily) the dilemma of the tankard -- his brow hoods into a harder furrow to match. The exasperation stirred murky at the bottom of his ??? is awfully earnest for this to be some kind of labyrinthine tease.

“You care for them very deeply.”

Defensive tension has crept in behind his ears, too subdued to rig all the way down his shoulders to his wrist. This is all very straightforward.

https://i.ibb.co/qFbb9Dn/si8892ij-dg.png

[heorte]

The second, prodding reference to his feelings is unwelcome, further sparks up something self-conscious and uneasy, but trying to untangle Richard's goal takes momentary precedence over acknowledging that feeling. (Vance's voice, full of accusation: why are you wandering around like you got ducklings?)

"I don't understand the point you're trying to make."

Was it anger? Was that what Richard had been waiting to see? Ellis doesn't know that he can summon it, having burned through all of his fury in the midst of the dream.

His hand stays gentle over Thot's belly, careful as he keeps her pinned more or less steadily.

[nonvenomous]

After a beat spent watching the look on Ellis’ face, Richard unplugs entirely to look away, aside, and there’s the tension hackled in at the scruff of his neck. Beneath Ellis’ fingers, the regular feather of Thot’s heartbeat has quickened into an unsteady jog. Her ears are laid flat where she’s sprawled, wide eyes aimed blank at the ceiling.

“I’m not making a point.”

He traces back at a loss, facing down the possibility that he’s somehow broached this subject entirely on his own.

“You asked me to explain why it was relevant.”

[heorte]

Having fallen into friendship with a pair of absurdly intelligent people means Ellis isn't any stranger to the sensation of having missed some connecting idea in the course of conversation.

Is it as simple as sitting with that truth? He has carried some variation of it with him for a very long time, ever since he'd admitted that first inkling of it to Wysteria: I am devoted to you. I have been devoted to you and Tony for some time now.

But Richard—

"Do you think I'm angry with you still, for endangering them?"

Is that the first question he should have asked?

[nonvenomous]

“No.”

It’s easy to answer quickly, still aside. Of course not.

He’d be able to tell.

Tipped well out of equilibrium by whatever minor confusion and all the unhappier for the pervasive disorder of it, Richard smooths his whiskers with a pass of his anchor hand. It’s step one of a deliberate process: coiling himself back up after slipping off the side of a log. Zeroing back in on the present.

“It was only relevant to your anger at the time.”

And to any element of surprise he might have hoped for in similar scenarios in the future.