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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.

With a soft curl of long fingers and a gentle turn of the wrist, cognizant of being observed by two sets of eyes, she draws the narrow slip of a snake free from under his collar. The looping body is treated with more care than his dagger had been. Fitcher moves the pad of her thumb absently against the snake's smooth underbelly once as it's displaced from Silas' shirt onto the sandy earth among the whispering yellowed grass.

"Come then. Let's see about this blanket you've brought me," she says once the last measure of dark scales has slid out from between her fingers. Her attention returns to him, and so too does her hand—coaxing him to her with a not dissimilarly light touch.

Ribbon’s scales are soft and smooth as she winds away into the grass, the head that slips through first too sleek for the little serpent to have venom socked away in her cheeks, the cling of the tail last to part ways.

Silas watches her go.

But yes, the blanket. A sharper breath and he nudges for a lift at her hip -- the better to ease the padding of the blanket in question underneath. Tilting her up, now that they’ve come to a formal accord, as he leans in to bristle a kiss in hot at her ear, her neck. The hat nudges loose without falling, not enough fervor to send it loose-wheeling off after his snake.

There’s really no reason to hurry, with as much trouble as they’re both about to be in.

The scuff of his whiskers lingers, a pleasant bristling against sensitive skin made sharper for how avid her kisses become—as keen and as thorough as any other part of Fitcher's study has been. It's only in the sweat prickled aftermath that she does herself the favor of partly shielding her chin from Silas' beard by kissing him at a crooked slant, long fingers lazily insinuated between his stubble and her cheek.

Eventually, with just the single shirt button between her breasts done back up in an absurdist nod in the direction modesty, Fitcher finds herself returned to the state of rifling through her discarded things in search of the standard issue Riftwatch pocket lighter. Once produced, she sways back toward where she has a leg still thrown partly over him. A few temperamental clicks from the flint wheel sees the joint newly set at the corner of his mouth lit.

"I think," she says, snapping the light closed and tossing it underhand back where it came from. "Pleased as I am to have had my curiosity indulged, that fucking outdoors may not be my next hobby."

Lank with sweat and striped lean with five-fingered streaks through sand and grime once they’re untangled, Silas stretches in jut-jawed to assist with her lighter’s reach. Only his eyes have raked through unscathed, warm in his study of her while he settles back in his coils to work up an ember. The scar-chewed scaffolding of his side splays slow around a sigh.

He smokes. A weed-coarse cough must constitute his agreement

There are less familiar marks marring up his hide these days: cuts crisscrossed in light behind his elbows, across the back of his left shoulder in a curious scattering of near parallel lines.

Easier to see when he reaches from tracing light along her knee to pluck up her hat from the blanket between them. Per a pause for calculation, he’s running the numbers of how unhappy she’s likely to be about him using it to stave off a sunburn he would be hard-pressed to explain back in Kirkwall.

Do not, say her eyebrows, though she makes no real effort to intercede. Instead, Fitcher plants a hand on the blanket behind her and settles back onto the locked joint of her elbow. Half sat beside him, half straddling him still, she's upright enough that the breeze stirs through the loose filaments of her dark hair and tugs idly at her shirt's unbuttoned neck. If he shows his wear on his skin, she is remarkably unchanged from all her time in Kirkwall. Yes, there are the ragged, coiled scars coursing from ribs to hip are very dark in the sunlight. But she came with those and has evidently acquired no easily noted others.

(The scar just behind her hairline has healed into a line so fine that it doesn't significantly interrupt the lay of the hair about it.)

"You should auction off my things once Yseult's finished looking through them." The hand not supporting her weight wiggles its fingers in the direction of his joint. "I'd wager they'll raise a decent sum for Riftwatch's pocket."

Or what, say his eyebrows back.

He sets the hat back aside with exaggerated care.

For now.

There is the joint to pass up to her in its stead, a scattering of ash swept quick off his chest with the back of his hand before it can add to his collection (a hole punched through and stitched over under his clavicle, deeper burns bitten in across one shin, around his knee). Nothing quite so organized as the lines hashed in where his sleeves would be rolled.

“Perhaps if you drafted a transfer of ownership.” Yseult and the rest of Riftwatch would be more sympathetic to and less suspicious of his claim.

Edited 2022-07-30 21:43 (UTC)

"'To whom it may concern, in the case of my untimely death or mysterious disappearance—'"

She takes a long hit from the joint. The bitter edged smoke is held briefly high in the chest as the line of her attention rises from him. It casts out across the tops of the swaying grass, wandering toward the cloud smudge line of the sea touching the sky. When it comes, there's a tinge of humor in her rasping exhale.

Fitcher looks back to him.

"Any word from your cat?"

“I asked her to return if there was any change.”

So yes, in a way.

She’s somewhere out there over the cove, wheeling slow over dark water. A cursory scan overhead reveals nothing, no sign through the haze of FItcher’s smoke. He’s back to drawing lazy circles where her leg fits over him. Drifting distant again, in thought, the crook at his mouth crimped in bittersweet.

There’s a last time for everything.

Having drawn a second long, contemplative pull from off the joint, Fitcher passes it back down to him now from out of the resulting brief miasma.

"That feels good," is as idle a remark as a cat stretching after a nap in the sun is. Less so, though she makes no move to draw out from under the meandering pass of his fingers— "If you sent her, would she be able to find my like she did in that dream? Or was that just a convenience of our imaginations?"

There are a dozen good, extremely pressing reasons to ask that question.

Edited 2022-07-31 08:39 (UTC)

Silas retakes the joint with his off hand; the circling continues at a slower pace while he shifts concentration to the smoke coiling warm in his lungs, his timeworn recollection of the Dream Rules. Slow on the exhale, he tokes again before answering:

“She would have to know where to look.”

Not ideal.

“And it can be precarious for her to travel alone.”

Even a very clever cat is just a cat.

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