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“With another Rifter, during the Satinalia fire.”

Recent, then, in the scheme of things, no undue tension to his knuckles curled to pack tobacco down between layers. He’s intent on his work, the pipe tilted just so.

“His name was Vanadi.”

Later that same evening he’d found Fitcher in a cramped inn in Kirkwall and folded himself up into one of her blankets on the floor.

Does she recall it? That he'd slept on her floor after struggling out of his jacket? And breakfast the morning after with thick slabs of bacon and warm butter and thin watery cider, the ghost of grease paint whiskers still stuck on her face. The light gossiping with the hangover-delicate girl who'd served them breakfast about the details of the prior evening's fire.

Maybe. Hard to say whether it's that or some other thing that softens the put-on edges of her chosen expression. Maybe it's his attention on the job she's given him, or the slant of the borrowed hat perched on top of his head.

"Very handsome," sounds like approval. Good catch. Or at the very least, good near miss.

"Why didn't you?"

If he’d intended to lie he might have done it earlier in anticipation of this line of questioning. Within the premise of this having occurred before his arrival in Thedas, any number of terrible flying creatures or supernatural events might have interrupted him and a Mysterious Stranger.

“He distrusted me.”

The wide brim of Fitcher’s hat would be a convenient barrier to glancing her way again. Silas glances anyway, matter-of-fact in his self-censure. Vanadi was handsome.

“It was impulsive.”

One last dusting of leaf and he tests the pipe before offering it back to her, blunt nails and smudges of ink under dirt in the creases of his palm. He has a familiar scar straight up the back of his arm behind it that she’d helped to stitch some months (years?) back.

“Who was yours?”

Fitcher shifts accordingly, tucking a bent arm between her head and the ground. The pipe's stem is set between her teeth and the bowl rests briefly in line with her sternum in the open V of her shirt collar as she produces her little Riftwatch issued light. It takes a few quiet moments to scorch the surface of the the tobacco, to employ the bottom of the lighter to tamp down the swollen flakes, and then to light the bowl's contents properly. Eventually, given a few reassuring puffs, she settles comfortably there in the crook of her own arm.

"Matteo Garza," she says, the words smelling sweet and earthy as she exhales them. "His uncles made silk flowers using a great press with metal stamps. It could be relied on to go thumping away from sunrise to sunset. Made for excellent cover so long as you were careful to bang away right over top of it."

Is that self-deprecation or boasting egotism in the look she flicks in his direction? Both, maybe. Youth is disgusting.

"But I'm not sure it counts. They had furniture set out up there in the summer."

There is still the pouch to arrange for; he folds it over and secures the fasten, some leaning up across the fulcrum of his elbow necessary to fit it back down snug into her belt.

“Hmm,” he mulls, as he tucks. This does sound sickeningly youthful. But more importantly from this elevated angle and in the shadow of her hat, he can nearly see down her shirt.

“What kind of furniture?”

"I recall an especially prickly wicker chair," she muses, the angle of her hip shifting helpfully to assist with his work at her belt. "Otherwise the finer details escape me."

Presumably on account of having left slightly fewer basket weave patterns indented in inconvenient locations.

(The catch of the breeze is slightly too brisk for any exhaled smoke to linger long, though the tang it lends to the salt air is warm and rich and falls along similarly complimentary lines as the earthy crinkle of crushed long grass and the whiff of sweat.)

"Has there been anyone else from Riftwatch?"

He’s musky with elfroot himself, stale under sharper sweat in his shirt and the scratch of his beard, his mouth creased now into a resentful crook at one corner for this latest question. Surely it shouldn’t surprise her that this might be a sore subject. So much so that it doesn’t bear remarking that wicker is at least as perilous as the scrub they’ve bedded themselves down in.

Silas unwinds from her and her belt to think on truth telling, bones lifted and reset for him to lie flat on his back beside her. The hat makes its way to the loose lacing of his tunic as he settles, preserving its shape.

“I slept with Brother Gideon.”

Fitcher's draw on the pipe is easy and steady and apparently untroubled by how he rearranges the angles of his limbs to fit in next to her. No, it isn't a surprise. She's good at picking questions he disapproves of.

(It's a pleasure to ask them. Feels a little like gambling.)

"Admirably sturdy brow. Excellent chin." She breathes out. "Shame about the zealotry."

She might offer him the short stemmed pipe while she's at it, but no. Instead—

"Raw luck."

There’s something dry in the stretch of his silence, a tilt at his head that kinks the grass beneath it. A few blades spring back to tickle through the wedge missing out of his ear.

“I knew it was ill-advised.”

Brother Gideon didn’t even have to tell him so explicitly and in no uncertain terms.

Whatever Look he’s giving her, he vanishes it behind the curtain of her hat reset to lie flat across his face. In there, he can trade fresh salt air for privacy and protection for his ginger constitution.

“Are you going to tell me yours?” He asks on a delay. Muffled.

It's a good shield of a hat—finely made for defending against the sun for cat naps and the keen attention of would-be examiners which might otherwise be difficult to steer elsewhere. The downside of it is that it's impossible to say which expression Fitcher adopts as she Mmms thoughtfully around the pipe stem. It could be anything. Grass points tickle at her wrist bent behind her head. She plucks the pipe from between her teeth.

"Mine's more compromising than either of yours," she says after some seconds of rotating the metaphorical hook in the sun.

From the inside of the hat, it could sound a little like a denial. No, says her even temperature in the afternoon heat. She isn't going to tell him. Only that's dull, so:

"I let Byerly and Barrow both think they might get somewhere. But, no. I'm afraid it's just you."

It’s equally difficult to tell how sharply he’s listening, and in what degree of suspense. He does turn slightly towards her after a spell of quiet, a tell in the tilt of the brim.

“Ser Barrow is a handsome man,” says the hat. “Strapping.”

The hat has nothing to say on the subject of Byerly Rutyer. But he does reach up to lift the brim just off his nose after a break to consider this information all up, his thumb hooked and flexed wide from a pang through his anchor. His eyes are light in the shadow underneath, measuring her appetite for responsibility with Thot on the case.

“I could fetch a blanket.”

There, pillowed on the crook of her bent arm, her head is tilted only fractionally in his direction. It's not a terribly flattering arrangement. Her chin has to tilt nearly all the way down to her chest to accommodate the angle of the pipe which, with a thoughtful hum like a low gravel scrape, she sets back into the corner of her mouth. After a few contemplative pulls from it, Fitcher raises her chin. The results of that languorous exhale are quickly swept away.

The sideways look she gives him after has a glimmer of fox slyness to it.

"Do you estimate I trust you, or have you just decided to accept ill-considered?"

He has a free hand to fit in under the knob of his skull with her hat held just so.

Enough of a gap to keep eye contact while he weighs the truth.

“I estimate that you trust yourself.” And whatever instinct or confidence in coming out on top in a scrap that entails. He tilts one brow, not quite a shrug: a little chilly as acceptance of worst possible outcomes goes. He trusts himself also.

Edited (remembering all the angst over murdering dream loxley hours later) 2022-07-07 08:03 (UTC)

Madame Fitcher has a dozen smiles in her catalogue, and it's often obvious (in the way that a liar will sometimes playfully confess to being one) when she rifles through her cards and selects one to play rather than coming by it naturally.

But this one blooms rather being drawn. It's slow and crooked, and the wrinkles it makes are deeper for the dust and sweat. 'Narcissism' would be a cruel accusation. Instead, consider: pleased to be recognized.

"I could make do with a blanket."

Is this terrible?

It feels a little terrible.

The crook of his smile back at her is just as grungy -- less easily defined in the shadow of her hat, save that he seems to know what he’s wagering. Surely that’s part of the thrill, permeating as the queer pang at the back of his heart when she smiles at him. He lingers in the grass a beat before grunting back up onto one arm, and from his arm to his feet.

There’s still a hint of a hitch to his step, brush line (briefly) be damned.

Her hat goes with him, seated snug with an unapologetic glance back. His satchel stays behind.

Camp isn’t far.

Silas is away for ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.

A careworn blanket is cast rakish around his shoulders when he returns. It goes well with his hat, the grubby vacation bristle of his beard, the crystal held loose in his upturned palm for him to ask aloud:

“Would you like me to pursue her?”

And to receive an answer in Scoutmaster Yseult’s voice:

”What plan did the two of you make when she left?”

The look he cuts to Fitcher is expectant on the order of a cat left waiting outside of a glass door overnight with the unspoken promise that it intends to claw every piece of furniture it can reach the instant it’s let inside.

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