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[That prompts just the smallest tip of Fitcher's head—intensifying the impression of a dog with a pricked ear and a sharp eye and, somewhere, a master who might whistle for her. Her eyebrows rise by a fraction. If there's a question in the whole arrangement then maybe it's:

Is she wrong?]

[ He flushes off guard, ears darkening red beneath the hat cover. The tilt to Fitcher’s regard is thoroughly unhelpful, his eyes bit brighter in his skull for the heat locked in dense behind his ribs.

There’s the V of her shirt pointing down at the danger of her belt in proximity for him to focus on. It takes him a moment. ]

She’s never been forthcoming with personal details.

[ Yseult lets that response hang in the air for a moment. But her tone doesn't change, except to tilt into that register that indicates a conversation winding up. ]

Of course. If you think of anything that may be useful in determining her employers, or if there are any developments, please let me know.

Of course. [ He hasn’t moved, save to steady his breath to a count of four. ] I will report in once I’ve spoken to her.

Thank you. [ For a second she considers tacking on a parting warning, but it feels a bit too pat. And she doubts he's in any actual danger from Fitcher, anyway. ] Safe travels.

[And her face is still tipped faintly up, the line of her neck very long and her dark eyes fixed at the look of him in the shadow of the hat's brim.

There is dirt under her fingernails. Sweat prickles faintly at her hairline. It's instinctive to count the seconds it takes for Yseult to end things.]

Thank you.

[ He ends the connection.

His expression is hard to read; the bones of his face are very still under all their mugging furrows. Perspiration prickles dark at his chops, grimy and slick in the creases of his neck. There’s the wind through the grass, the peeling calls of seabirds.

He reaches to tuck the crystal away on his belt. ]

[The track of his hands is chased by some quiet flick of her attention. When it circles back to his face, there's something marginally less guarded in the height of Fitcher's eyebrows and the turn of her mouth—a gambler who's done all the calculations she's able to and now finds herself with nothing left but to make a play and see what falls out.]

Should I do up my buttons?

[ He’s a long time in answering for the nearness of him, the crystal slotted in and secured without lingering unduly at the hilt of the dagger at his back. The mood has shifted, all the space in his chest cavity logged with something that’s baking in him like mud while he weighs what else he has to lose.

That she’s asked at all is enough to stir it from setting.

The hand he has at his belt turns to unfasten it, deliberate on the order of caution. He shifts to slide over her, dragging the blanket off his shoulder between them as he goes. ]

One of Fitcher's long hands come up from the sandy ground a finger at a time, palm offered up like a badge of honor as it moves in patient parallel to her own belt. There's a little clip on the pouch with the magebane on the garrote which might be easily undone with a flick of the wrist. Her hand moves instead to address the belt's smalled paired buckles.

The weather is still decent. If any Tevinter agents mean to land on the beach below, then it won't be for a few hours yet. They're a long way from Kirkwall. And she knows where she's going after this in the sense that it isn't Ostwick. It would be shame to waste all that.

"I could make a joke about prophetic dreams if you like."

(Two scoundrels in an imagined Antiva City walkup, respective knives summarily shucked.)

Flint-faced with distraction and quiet in her hat, Silas glances up to eye level in the midst of flicking the blanket out into rough order beside them. Nothing approaching a flounce -- this is the right amount of consideration for a roughspun blanket picked to screw on in the scrub grass. His belt jangles over her while he works, pulled loose to one side by the weight of the dagger.

“We shared a common priority.”

A crucial oversight for the prophets in question. He risks a longer look at her face, paused over the brace of his off hand in the dirt.

Didn't they?

"The war effort."

Nearer now, it's easier to see under the sweep of the hat's broad brim. She's tipped her chin slightly higher to study him at greater advantage while she undoes the belt's second buckle. Despite the apparent ease in the other lines of her face, this part of the examination is rigorous and unblinking. When the belt comes loose, Fitcher folds it quietly back from her side. It exposes the topmost of the outrageously impractical slew of metal buttons that run down the side of her trousers.

"Tell me, Silas. Would you like me to ask the awkward question now, or later?"

With her belt dispelled, however close at hand, Silas is comfortable enough to tug loose any tuck left to the tail of her shirt. The familiar tab of his talisman bumps at the inside of his own tunic at the sternum while he works, just shy of slipping through loose laces.

Then there is his own belt to see to.

Pulling it loose drags it through the fittings of the dagger’s sheathe, dropping the entire rig blind into her lap. He’s too tuned into her study of him to grope for it, progress stalled by the question of a question.

It’s easier when he pauses to see how deeply unhappiness has wrought itself in wiry muscle hard-bit into his skull behind the ears, tight in his shoulders and buckled in across his ribs, where it’s out of the way for clothing management. Little scars bleached white with the tension, all the frustration and upset he's kept off his face squeezed like a fist about his core. There it can bleed off tension on its own time, without need for discussion.

He tosses his belt aside, leaving the dagger for her to sort.

“Which question do you personally find is the most pressing?”

Edited (rah rah) 2022-07-23 19:22 (UTC)

It's true. There is a list of possibilities.

Though for a long moment, Fitcher fails to produce the one at the top of it. Instead, she marks his face and the line of his brow. It has the delicate intent of a needle—sharp and clever, sticking and knitting. When her long hand moves, it's heedless of the dagger left in her lap or the potential distraction of flicking her shirt fully open. Rather she makes to touch Silas' cheek. Her fingernails scrape purposefully at the bristle there. Not gentle, but not entirely unsympathetic to the wear and the crease in his expression or to the tension in him.

It's not will he let her go, or what will he say to anyone who might ask; what he thinks of her, or what he wishes to know that she'll refuse to tell him. She isn't unhappy, no, but she isn't unfeeling. or unable to sense her own trajectory. Indeed, there's a small spark in the look of her that suggests Fitcher is fully aware of what cuts she's rendered and what more she will.

Starting with:

"Whether or not you'd like to come with me."

The furrows around his mouth crease under her nails, crooked to one side in time with a pinch at his brow for the sheer gall --

“Where would you take me?”

In this purely hypothetical scenario. To have his arm amputated above the elbow? To the Templars for study? With her shirt still doing most of its duty, he runs his free hand up under it as he settles a little more closely against her. Tired, already, in the one shoulder, and watching carefully for her answer all the while.

"To track down secret Venatori in the South would be my preference. It's dangerous work," she admits, though he know that as well as anyone does, yes? "And it seems I can stand to work with someone competent, which would be a useful advantage."

She tips her face faintly in the other direction, as if to the changing of the angle might reveal something to her.

"I don't see any reason why we couldn't continue along as we are for some time, minus a few inconveniences."

His arm. A certain requisite degree of subterfuge, apparently.

What was there to stop them doing that all along? He asks with a look on his way to following his progress behind her buttons.

“I have an obligation to see the Gates closed.” His nails are trimmed back blunt, barely there along familiar pathways, tracing dips of muscle and bone before he tests a firmer roll of his thumb across her breast. That he’s considering this at all is an open exercise in wry humor at both of their expenses, well-accented by the slant of her hat.

“And only Riftwatch has the resources I’d need for a new arm.”

A robot elbow for him to offset the weight of his weed-musty corpus across her.

"You may have a point about the arm."

She's not going to pretend there are many Tony Starks wandering around in the wild, just like she's not going to pretend to be immune to the trajectory of his hand when it crosses from scarred skin to more tender flesh. But who's to say what interesting things they might learn from stray Venatori? It's not beyond reason to think that one of them may know a thing or two about Gates—

With a last scrape of her fingernails against the bristle of his cheek, Fitcher's hand drops from his face so she might at last remove the weight of the dagger from her lap.

"But give it some consideration. It's possible you might find something else to motivate you if you do."

Her eyebrows rise and fall in suggestive parody as her hand falls to the buttons at her hip.

He nudges his hips in to better follow the dagger’s trajectory without his eyes, the blanket he’d just flicked out so tidily bunched up again while she touches at buttons, as if a better use for it has occurred to him. He has to borrow his hand back to see to it, glimpses of his attention osprey-keen in the hat shade. Whatever good humor is left in him is awfully bleak.

“What do you think should happen to me after this war is ended?””

No outside input is needed for when he should ask his awkward question.

"I think it isn't my place to decide," may sound like a non-answer, skating over his point without penetrating the surface tension. That it's true probably makes little difference, and so she deigns to elaborate— "I don't know what will happen to Rifters after the war, but I do know there are places for a mage outside of a Circle and always have been if that's your concern."

Under him, her chin rises by a fraction. Buttons are undone. Her other hand drifts absently so as to brush her fingertips against his knee or thigh or side—whichever comes most conveniently to hand.

"Do you know what you want after?"

It’s not something he’s let himself think about often. Fantasizing about one’s future is a human sickness.

This reminder that it’s been utterly inescapable lately is enough to wring shame into the lines around his mouth, hard in his brow. That he’d ever have let himself dwell on the possibility of an early retirement spent bounty hunting off the grid with one arm and a partner in crime is as maudlin as it gets. Never mind the myriad of other romantic scenarios he’s worked out for himself with other variously unlikely prospects.

“I don’t expect to make it that far."

The words fray in his throat.

While they’re being honest, all the reserve hackled up behind his neck isn’t enough to quash a self-deprecating huff at the brush of her touch. Like a popped seam, the rest of his restraint begins to unravel loose after it; warmer breath, the spin of his tunic clinging damp at his middle when he shifts up to straddle over her.

Her hands travel with him as he moves nearer, palms flattening across his front and the fingers of one hand anchoring the edge of that amulet otherwise half hidden by and swaying against the tunic's lacings.

"That's a shame," she says, characteristically graveled and low. In that narrowing space, Fitcher's eyes are very dark and her examination keen. Her hands are warm through his clothes. The ivory colored pipe remains tucked behind her ear and about them, the long dry grass rasps under the influence of the breeze cutting up off the Waking Sea.

"But say you do. What then?"

Snake over mongoose, he settles against the stay of her hands, reluctant to resume eye contact, and more critical when he does. A thread of frustration winds thin through the whistle of his breath, has to be traced back, caught, and deliberately stifled while a needle tongue feathers at the talisman pinned to his breastbone. It’s not by chance they’ve never discussed this before.

“It’s only a matter of time before I’m Blighted in my studies,” he says. “I’d like to be made a Warden.” Saying so rings true in the way it makes him tired. He’s already met resistance.

The truth in what he says next has more to do with the mutually dangerous position they’ve tangled themselves into, trust earned over the past several months, the reality of his self-assessed odds of survival. And the simple fact that she seems set on hearing it:

“If they won’t have me I’ll retire to a hamlet in need of a healer and never be found.”

It's true she makes a practice of being expressive and readily parsed—Madame Fitcher laughs and smiles and passes out coy looks over card tables, and stamps her boots when she comes in from the sheeting rain; she bats her eyelashes in ways that sometimes imply a joke and sometimes do not, and is often visibly pleased with herself. But here, and not infrequently in his presence, she slips toward something partly illegible. Yes, she wants to hear it. This business about his work, and what will inevitably become of him, and the very unlikely escape route sketched like something out of smudging graphite.

What she thinks of it is difficult to say, although maybe absence is a thing that can be deciphered too with practice. Who knows. She's not much of a scholar.

After a moment's consideration, Fitcher applies herself to the lacing at the neck of his tunic. When there is space to, she slips her fingers past the fabric's edge in an effort to coax out the snake lurking there.

It is childlike as sketches go, the rough shape of a small slanted house and trees around it. A black cat on the roof.

He only needs the broad gesture of it for the possibility of escape to feel tangible, details occasionally filled in and forgotten between iterations. He’s usually alone in this one, the grass long and the air cool with salt. He lives like a witch on the edge of town and is seldom bothered. Eventually someone finds him and they fight to the death.

The snout under his collar dips back away from her reach, naturally wary until he whispers in a foreign tongue for it to comply.

Ribbon drops off the back of his shoulder into his tunic, a slender, gliding weight as warm as the cloth and hide around her. She crosses slowly over into Fitcher’s fingers through the laces, gold button eyes and dark scales pinstriped with pale yellow.

Silas is otherwise quite still around the huff and puff of his breathing in close quarters, watchful of her watching him.

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jk swapping to prose because I refuse to continue typing html on mobile

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