You're looking better feels like the wrong thing to say. Rude, maybe, or just needling directly at what Ellis knows Richard hadn't wanted to discuss. He'd meant what he'd said on the street that day. They didn't have to talk about the dream. Ellis can uneasily content himself with the knowledge that Richard, to his knowledge, is fairly good at keeping secrets.
Under the table, his feet carefully shift, blindly making room for...something. Hopefully the cat. Ellis is almost certain the owner of this establishment doesn't keep a pet.
"I've a question to ask you, and I recognize it's prying," Ellis says, resorting to honesty, momentarily setting aside the little nudge at his ankle. "You needn't answer it, but it'd be helpful to know."
What question is there, really, that Ellis could ask beyond the boundaries of any indignity not previously faced?
Richard does tip the tankard up to drink again -- more deeply -- before he sets it aside. Just in case.
“Try me.”
It’s nastier to silently accumulate leverage than it is to establish it outright: if you’ll answer one in return. But he is sometimes nasty, and he is nasty now, with no outward indication in an encouraging glance. What dream?
The thing beneath the table feels to have gone, or was never there. Imagined, perhaps.
"What you did to summon her," at which point Ellis does pause, not because he thinks Richard doesn't know who he means but because he is tilting his boot carefully to one side, seeking a furry occupant. "Is it something—"
Another beat, while Ellis visibly reorders the question. He isn't worried about Richard.
"Is it something that would be dangerous for you, if Ser Barrow carried his objections out of the sewer with us?"
Ellis was there with them, when they were all together trekking silently* down through a rat’s nest of dark, twisting tunnels to find that chamber. Richard and Ser Barrow have barely managed to maintain any working relationship at all, nevermind a positive one.
“Not that your Chantry would care to debate the distinction, but my blood is a material component of the spellwork rather than a source of power fueling it.”
He has a very reasonable way of saying so.
There is nothing for Ellis’ boot to find beneath the table -- just a flicker of movement low at his periphery as Thot the cat coils to propel herself uninvited up into his lap.
Not that Richard needs to hear Ellis' opinions on religion.
Thot is marked, but all Ellis does in response is lean back in his chair to make her leap easier than it might have been had he stayed leaning forward with his elbows braced on the table.
"Are you concerned about him?" is maybe the real question. Does Richard see a danger here? Is Ellis' concern misplaced?
He doesn’t press the point, past a glance that does some of that work for him.
Ellis is just one Warden, after all.
“I believe there is a greater chance than not that he reports whatever he believes I’ve done to an authority, or someone he believes will do it for him.” His inflection is limited in a way that would be curious for someone who didn’t have a known habit of narrating crises as he might a tax form tutorial.
Thot lands with room to spare, lighter than she looks, fangs already poked long from the flex of her whiskers as she stretches up to sniff under Ellis’ chin. Nosy.
It's hard to say if Ellis' brow drawing towards a frown is for the possibility of Barrow snitching, or awkward apprehension at Thot's inspection. Ellis' hand shifts indecisively on the table, before he leans fully back against his chair to better keep Thot in his periphery.
"Hello," is solely for her, a little warm note of amusement breaking through before he looks back across the table to Richard.
But to the matter at hand—
"I don't know very much about magic, but if you need someone to intercede on your behalf, I would."
"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?”
"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.
“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.
"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—
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.
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."
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.
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."
“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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
this thread really just an excuse to get some facetime with thot
Date: 2021-04-29 04:27 am (UTC)Under the table, his feet carefully shift, blindly making room for...something. Hopefully the cat. Ellis is almost certain the owner of this establishment doesn't keep a pet.
"I've a question to ask you, and I recognize it's prying," Ellis says, resorting to honesty, momentarily setting aside the little nudge at his ankle. "You needn't answer it, but it'd be helpful to know."
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Date: 2021-04-29 04:55 am (UTC)Richard does tip the tankard up to drink again -- more deeply -- before he sets it aside. Just in case.
“Try me.”
It’s nastier to silently accumulate leverage than it is to establish it outright: if you’ll answer one in return. But he is sometimes nasty, and he is nasty now, with no outward indication in an encouraging glance. What dream?
The thing beneath the table feels to have gone, or was never there. Imagined, perhaps.
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Date: 2021-04-29 10:40 pm (UTC)Another beat, while Ellis visibly reorders the question. He isn't worried about Richard.
"Is it something that would be dangerous for you, if Ser Barrow carried his objections out of the sewer with us?"
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Date: 2021-05-01 02:44 am (UTC)Ellis was there with them, when they were all together trekking silently* down through a rat’s nest of dark, twisting tunnels to find that chamber. Richard and Ser Barrow have barely managed to maintain any working relationship at all, nevermind a positive one.
“Not that your Chantry would care to debate the distinction, but my blood is a material component of the spellwork rather than a source of power fueling it.”
He has a very reasonable way of saying so.
There is nothing for Ellis’ boot to find beneath the table -- just a flicker of movement low at his periphery as Thot the cat coils to propel herself uninvited up into his lap.
*Presumably Wysteria was not silent.
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Date: 2021-05-02 01:49 am (UTC)Not that Richard needs to hear Ellis' opinions on religion.
Thot is marked, but all Ellis does in response is lean back in his chair to make her leap easier than it might have been had he stayed leaning forward with his elbows braced on the table.
"Are you concerned about him?" is maybe the real question. Does Richard see a danger here? Is Ellis' concern misplaced?
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Date: 2021-05-02 02:18 am (UTC)He doesn’t press the point, past a glance that does some of that work for him.
Ellis is just one Warden, after all.
“I believe there is a greater chance than not that he reports whatever he believes I’ve done to an authority, or someone he believes will do it for him.” His inflection is limited in a way that would be curious for someone who didn’t have a known habit of narrating crises as he might a tax form tutorial.
Thot lands with room to spare, lighter than she looks, fangs already poked long from the flex of her whiskers as she stretches up to sniff under Ellis’ chin. Nosy.
Silas drinks.
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Date: 2021-05-02 04:48 am (UTC)"Hello," is solely for her, a little warm note of amusement breaking through before he looks back across the table to Richard.
But to the matter at hand—
"I don't know very much about magic, but if you need someone to intercede on your behalf, I would."
no subject
Date: 2021-05-03 06:34 am (UTC)“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?”
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Date: 2021-05-05 03:04 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-06 07:09 pm (UTC)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.”
no subject
Date: 2021-05-06 08:24 pm (UTC)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—
no subject
Date: 2021-05-07 05:00 pm (UTC)“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?”
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Date: 2021-05-10 08:27 pm (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2021-05-11 05:01 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2021-05-20 07:24 pm (UTC)"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."
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Date: 2021-05-20 08:34 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2021-05-24 08:27 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2021-05-24 09:15 pm (UTC)“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.”
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Date: 2021-05-24 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-25 12:37 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2021-05-25 01:23 am (UTC)"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.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-25 01:40 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2021-05-25 02:01 am (UTC)What. Deliberately stepping back from who.
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Date: 2021-05-25 02:28 am (UTC)His eyebrows provide an obviously in gentle addendum.
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Date: 2021-05-25 02:33 am (UTC)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.
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