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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.

All of those dozen, pressing questions find something to approve of in that answer. Good. It would be a problem if he were to return to the Gallows with an easy lead on her in his company. Not that she's so pessimistic as to think what is true today won't be true tomorrow (to the contrary—she finds it best to trust these simple things; one might risk becoming overly paranoid otherwise), but accidents happen. And of all places in the world, that little fortress in the Kirkwall harbor seems especially prone to them.

What is slightly less satisfied with that answer is her leg under his wandering hand or the grit at the back of her neck, or the thing in her that would like to give him a short series of instructions for when he returns to Kirkwall. Give Bastien her best, be extra rude to Barrow, see that her weekly card game doesn't die out simply because she isn't there to conduct it.

There is a thing which happens and she has lots of practice with, which is going to places and finding herself fond. And then, when the work is finished, simply levering up that up like a stone out of the road and flinging it off into the adjacent field or wood or stream. She has expected prying this one up to be work given the length of time it's laid there.

"That's too bad," she decides, which is simultaneously an assessment of his cat's preternatural limitations, and plenty else.

Ah well. It was a pleasant thought.

He will do none of those things.

He will stay away from Riftwatch for as long as he can tolerate the feeling of his carpals burning themselves to cinders from the inside out and then he will be interrogated and perhaps relieved or suspended from duty. They’d housed Benedict in the dungeon for a while, he knows, after some real or perceived betrayal.

If he’s very motivated he might contact Yseult first to inform her that Madame Fitcher did not answer his call.

Right now he is smoking and reaching to position Fitcher’s hat over himself after all, an increasingly formless ennui to the roadkill jumble of his bones on this blanket. Ribs ready to picked open.

It is too bad. He’d rather not look at her after she’s said so.

But he does offer the joint back out.

Fitcher accepts it, as she does the treatment of her very jaunty hat. Sitting there in the sunshine, feeling the heat on the back of her neck, she helps with idly smoking the joint down to a stub—unhurried and more or less unbothered by the salt tinged heat, or where she is or isn't going once they've elected to be finished here. If there are indeed no Venatori agents on the horizon, then they have little to do save to elect to pack their things.

It's only after a long stretch of silence—not companionable but not anything else either—, the haze stripped away by the drifting air but the smell lingering, that she moves to extract her thigh from across him and out from under the drifting cycle of his hand. It affords her the capacity to lean forward, to lean down. To touch his scruffy jaw and press a skunky kiss to his cheek.

"You'll make a fine Warden. And if you don't—" Then what? "Then maybe I'll see you again, hmm?"

She smiles at him, toothy. Eventually, someone finds him.

His cheek is rough with grit, flexed raw under her touch.

I hope not would be a dishonest thing for him to say, but the lines are there, wry around his mouth and in the tilt of his nose after her.

“I will miss you,” is true, and more important in the scheme of the rapid and unexpected exits Rifters sometimes make from this plane. Farewells are a luxury. His ability to deliver this one without the sentiment squeezing in his throat is in large part owed to the time he’s had to lie there thinking about it, and the dozens of ways this might’ve gone worse.

Those things, and all the elfroot. He turns loose the last button on her shirt while she’s still leaned over him.

“Please don’t take my horse.”

Edited 2022-08-01 06:10 (UTC)

Her laugh is pleasantly low, the smokiest thing currently in residence on the blanket.

"And interfere with yours and Captain's bond? I wouldn't dare."

With a briefer, cheekier kiss, Fitcher straightens and pats him there on the ribs. Cheer up, Silas. Look at them, both hale and fit. Why, given just a few degrees less fondness in either direction and they might be in an altogether different state at present. Killing him would have soured her on the day. The week. Maybe the whole long string of them since she'd arrived in Kirkwall.

So maybe, in deference to all this good will—

"Give me an hour, then follow me to Ostwick. I'll see that your story bears up. Agreed?"

(Yes. She's going to miss him too.)

Seldom cheerful, Silas tolerates the pat with a steady eye for her keeping her word on this most important matter of the good Captain. With that last button undone, he lets his hand fall back to the blanket. There are scraps of grass there for him to pick at, the slow wind of a pinstriped snake tasting the far edge in search of his wrist.

“Alright.”

It’s agreed. The hat stays.

“I’ll remain here.”

If there is a sense that she might say something further, her long hand having gentled over his side and something less pleased lingering in the corner of her smiling mouth, Fitcher ultimately decides to keep it to herself. It's dismissed with another brief pat before she draws away to collect her things.

In short order, she's sorted stockings and various trouser buttons and the things between them. She doesn't bother with any of the shirt buttons, and her belt is slung jauntily over a shoulder rather than cinched about the waist. The hat is raised off his person, interior examined, and with a slanting look toward Silas's face is returned to protect the sun from getting an eye full. The pipe migrates back behind her ear.

If you change your mind—

No.

"If those Vints show up before you leave, tell them they've terrible timing," she says, oofing up off the ground to her feet. She dusts her backside with an exaggerated to do and bothers to tuck in only a single wild shirt tail. The toe of a boot pivots to softly graze his side.

"Be well, Silas."

And then Fitcher is off, first swatting through the long grass to fetch the red lacquered crossbow and its quiver before turning to take a path ostensibly very similar to the one he'd earlier cut.

They’d agreed upon the conditions of this arrangement back in Hasmal.

So he doesn’t reach to stop her drawing away, raising up on the kickstand of one elbow instead to better follow her with his eyes while buttons and belts are sorted. That he can’t keep heartache from gripping hollow at his face is a failing of whatever creationary history humans have on this plane, and the fact that it in no way shape or form involved fucking snakes.

But it isn’t as naked as he is, hemmed up in grit and prickle and eventually a shift of his posture into a full sit, after she’s returned her hat to him.

Easy to miss, particularly while otherwise occupied. He has the space of his sit to compose himself in while she rustles about, with a snake spiraling lazy up his arm and a sunburn baking into the knots in his shoulders, the tousle of his scalp.

The nudge of her boot toe finds him self-contained and quiet, his chin tucked.

“Goodbye, Serafine.”

It wins a pause in her trajectory, that name. The angle of her shoulders pivots briefly back in his direction, and there on her face is produced some genuine flashing smile and a pleased laugh

—(as there are only ever two options forward in these matters, and that is to either find them very sad or to choose to be cheered by them; how rare it is to hear that name spoken aloud, and how charming that he should choose it)—

which she carries with her as she traipses off with a jingling of an undone belt buckle, and the idle sway of the full quiver against her thigh. She disappears from the overlook. She, and the red mule, and the total of her belongings disappear from their little camp well short of that allotted hour. Soon, Serafine Tokar will disappear from Ostwick too, leaving only indications of her brief stay there and little evidence as to her direction after. How easy it can be to slip back into a world where no one knows your habits, or your sentiments, or your name if you only let it.

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