The best that can be said for Thot’s efforts is that she keeps her claws in now that she’s been lifted, cold nubs at the lead of whatever grasping touch.
Richard nods to acquiesce to acquiescence, a short breath puffed out just shy of a sigh as he turns.
“Then please follow me.”
Through the yard, into the keep, round the stairs up into the mage tower.
His shared quarters are not, in fact, shared any longer. Loxley’s bed is long made, and his trunk long empty. Books and notes and a pickled dragon’s eyeball at the desk all belong to Richard. There’s a breastplate balanced against the trunk at the foot of the other, lived in cot. A few scattered bottles. An extra pair of boots. Stale weed smoke hangs musty in the space -- clings to the walls and blankets and old wood in the hearth the same way it does his clothes.
The table is spare save for a bottle of wine and a lamp, which he sparks alight in spite of the afternoon sun filtering in through a lone window.
There is, inevitably, a moment where Ellis considers retreat. A kind of quiet, anxious dread coiled in his chest in the course of their travels from the training yard and up the stairs, and it weighs on him now as his gaze sweeps the room.
Thot's questing paws root him in the moment. He watches Richard light the lamp, leaves the door ajar behind him as he lets invitation draw him further into the room, seat him at the table.
A considering look towards the bottle of wine, but even having shifted Thot back into the crook of an elbow doesn't see his free hand reaching for it. It stays instead on Thot's sleek belly as his gaze turns to Richard, eyebrows raising.
Ellis doesn’t reach for it and Richard doesn’t offer it. Instead he steps away to shut the door, severing the only clean getaway either of them might have made with a quiet click.
His return to the table is anticlimactic.
He sits in silence for a moment with his hands joined and studies the woodgrain. It’s been months since anyone’s been in here. Athessa was the last person to knock on his door.
He waits out the first, snippy replies, draws a breath, considers the scope of the question apart from the topic he suspects is waiting in the wings.
"It's not impossible."
The particulars of what a victory would cost—
Well, that's not the question. Ellis makes the tally all the same, set against what has already been sacrificed. It's a familiar calculation. He'd learned it at Joppa's elbow, has had nearly fifteen years to perfect it on his own.
"We could have talked about the war on the training yard," stands in for something else, a question.
But they can skip the preamble. There’s an air of pages being hooked under, a thick chapter flopped over and smoothed right to left in a deeper draw of breath and a harder screw-turn of eye contact along the table. He’s sat beside rather than across, the chair angled in -- close enough for a sharp kick in the shins, should either of them be so inclined.
The stubborn impulse towards No is likely written all over Ellis' face.
But it's held in check. His fingers curl in Thot's fur, the lightest inclination towards a belly scritch as Ellis looks directly back at Richard.
"Is it so hard to guess?"
Is not an answer. But Richard has, for some time now, had a knack of making Ellis feel as if he has been rendered transparent. It's not an entirely comfortable thing.
And there is an element of predictability in this. Richard had asked him for something that feels like—
“Why approximate when we have the power to make ourselves perfectly clear.”
It just makes sense.
No elfroot, no wine, and for Richard, no distractions. There’s an answering challenge to his patience, a steady lean of weight onto an invisible prybar. He hasn't blinked.
The only small mercy between them is Thot. She lolls idle where she’s held, purring, velvety soft, the thin whip of her tail curled and flicked in a lazy cycle between her feet.
This level of scrutiny inevitably brings with it discomfort. It's inescapable.
Ellis doesn't like to be studied closely.
He doesn't like to dredge up such explanations either. This one in particular is thorny, barbed with things Ellis is honor-bound not to speak aloud. And he knows instinctively that Richard will find the incomplete nature of the answer unfulfilling, and the impasse barring him from the rest to be a frustration.
Thot's purr vibrates under his fingers.
"I don't want this life for you," is as close as Ellis can get. It's shadowed with a particular truth: You're asking me to gamble with your life. There are many who do not survive the Joining, but that Ellis can never say.
The edge to his intensity dials back by a matter of degrees, his thoughts turned inward from their attempted scorch through to the back of Ellis’ skull. Mind-reading would have made his entire ordeal here in Thedas markedly easier.
As is, he’s left to turn over the answer he’s been given in silence.
Brief silence.
“Why should my desire be secondary to yours?”
There may be a fang to stick on swaddled in the puffy gums of his careful neutrality. It's hard to tell. His curiosity for the answer is genuine.
Because you don't know what you're asking invites questions Ellis won't answer, so that answer is discarded. Instead, Ellis leans an elbow on the table. His hand has stilled over Thot's belly. The scar curving up his neck is easily seen, instructive even, as Ellis counters—
"Suppose I asked you to take your knife, and cut my throat?"
Almost a joke: Ellis has considered a variation of that question not so long ago, and maybe had their conversation in the tent in Starkhaven gone differently—
But it hadn't. And now there is this question, a rebuttal that carries more weight than it should, because he's said more than he should to Richard in the course of their acquaintance.
A reflexive hood hardens into his brow for the break of Ellis’ rebuttal over his nose. He is distinctly unappreciative, resistance tightened in behind his ears, his hands untangled for him to scuff his whiskers and fold his arms.
He sits back.
It’s an honest answer to his question. He’s forced to consider it as such -- fairly, and without the taint of disapproval that’s gone sharp through the lines around his eyes.
“If we had cause to believe cutting your throat could forestall a sweeping victory for Corypheus, I would consider it.”
Ellis is quiet in the wake of it, watching Richard's face. There's some expectant quality in his expression, as if Richard has only paused in the course of giving his answer.
“If Tevinter continues to push the front and overtakes us, you won’t have the luxury of consideration. I’ll be killed in combat or captured and vivisected by the Venatori.”
Silence works, in this instance. He has plenty to say on the subject and still more that he skips neatly over with a drag at the corner of his mouth and a glance down between them -- trace evidence of a cruel thought discarded as unnecessary.
“You were not this bleak about my prospects when I asked you about it a year ago.”
It's not meant as a cruel thing, perhaps, but it is a confirmation, a reminder, and it lands with the same kind of force as a crossbow bolt striking a target.
"If I had realized you would take it as invitation, I would have never said such a thing," Ellis tells him, voice flattening over the words.
What he would or would not have done doesn't matter. The chasm between his intentions and what comes of them is well known to him. Ellis had already learned this lesson, though it hasn't saved him from making the same mistakes.
"Don’t give yourself too much credit. There is the Inquisitor’s message to consider," he raises his eyebrows to himself, matter-of-fact, "and I don’t think you cared for me much at the time."
He hadn’t fully imprinted, or whatever this attachment is.
Richard is quiet again. Just for a moment, to reorient himself away from the sidestep of this latest exchange.
The breath he huffs in for rebuttal is spent without shaping itself into speech, tension screwed in tight at the back of his sternum and held there. He’s found a mark on the floor to frown at, his jaw worked and prickled and set.
“Obviously.”
The table, the lamp, the cat, the wan slant of afternoon light through the window.
“Am I to believe you’ve made headway in your research with the Tevinter Imperium crashing down upon the Free Marches?”
A flat look across the table. No, Ellis has not made headway in much of anything in the midst of everything that's happened in the past few months.
However—
"Now that I'm able to be more easily spared, I will go to Skyhold to collect some of what I've been promised. And then find my way to Ansburg, for the rest."
What he might make of that, well.
There is a moment of clear calculation, where Ellis looks back across the table and sizes Richard up. There had been a point, even after the dream, but prior to Richard making this request of him, where Ellis would have asked his help in this without hesitation. But now he has to consider: would he truly receive the benefit of Richard's help, or not?
"I want to go to Weisshaupt, and see what I might find there. But that's not so easy."
By turn, Richard seems aware of the burdensome reality of his default recommendation. Still speaking to the ground, there is a distinctly defensive brace to his pause in suggesting:
"Aye, you could," is so bland that it is less an agreement and more vague observation.
Yes, Richard could. But Ellis cannot tell if it would be supremely foolish to allow it, for more reasons than the shard in Richard's hand. What happens to a Rifter found in Weisshaupt? Ellis' fingers curl in Thot's fur.
What happens in Weisshaupt if Richard decides he's tired of waiting?
How foolish would it be to assume that surviving the Joining would save Richard from being experimented upon?
Ellis shakes his head.
"It's far off," is only kicking the matter down the road, along with the other topic of contention between them. But that's never not worked out for Ellis, so why change tack now?
“It’s difficult to make a case without knowing what your reservations are.”
He can guess.
He is guessing, the off-axis tuck of his chin already offended by some slight he’s imagined -- a matter of personality, or ability, or trust, as so often seems the case of late. It’s almost certainly his martial ability -- he thinks to the meaty clop of a Shriek’s blade into his thigh. Even in his dreams he’s pathetic.
It doesn’t really matter. The cold knot in his gut is the same.
The brief, quizzical expression on Ellis' face is likely not very surprising. Can it possibly be unexpected that Ellis hadn't factored in any kind of personal risk when he'd considered the idea?
But it resolves into neutrality, a spreading of one hand across the table while the other keeps Thot pinned against one thigh.
"I'm one of them."
A statement meant for Richard to draw assumptions from.
If he were making this case to Vance and Adrasteia, the greater context would be so clear. Ellis was very much one of them. He had the track record for it, after Adamant, after what he'd done in the Western Approach. The odds of finding someone who recognized him in Weisshaupt was very high, and that would be a shield.
And even if it wasn't, what could be done to him?
"It only matters if they've reason to suspect something of me, and they won't. I've never had that kind of reputation."
He doesn’t have to look to sense the confusion in that break, buttoned down as he is in a vice of personal dismay, frustration, and so on. There isn’t much buttery lamplight can do to soften the lines drawn in hard around his mouth, along his nose, between his brows.
But packing it all away still comes naturally -- a kind of psychological reflex upon recognition of how far off the cliff edge he’s strayed. All it takes is a pause for perspective to check against the dazzling flash of an impulse that’d see the table turned over and the lamp spilled and the wine bottle broken, very wasteful. And embarrassing besides.
So he’s quiet until it’s neutral on neutral.
“I could send Thot with you.”
She’s cleaning between her toes, which are splayed like Ellis’ hand over her belly. The faint fork to her tongue rasps once or twice at his wrist along the way.
Ellis had taught himself some similar skill, how to weather something destructive until it's been winnowed down to nothing. (Ellis' temper isn't absent, only deadened and dulled to almost-lifeless embers through year of strict practice.) The quiet stretches, unbroken, with Thot's casual movements under his hand noted distantly at the edges of his attention, some minor fraction spared from his study of Richard's face.
"You'd miss her."
His eyes don't drop to his lap to the cat in question.
"You could come with me to Skyhold," is a halving, an assessment of risks. Skyhold, but not Ansburg, not Weisshupt. It's not so dissimilar to what he had considered with Holden on the road. It is an offering, an outstretched hand.
It does not feel to Ellis that Skyhold is Richard's preferred destination. But it's at the very least the beginning point.
If Wysteria hadn’t stepped in to assist him he might never have managed to fish her out of the Fade in the first place.
He sighs at the thought as he looks to her.
The shape she’s coiled herself into in Ellis’ lap is an unlikely one, feet kicked up and out, her head twisted under and around to get at them. Not quite an ouroboros, but certainly closer than any cat with a mammalian spine should be.
“I could,” he cannot quite help but needle back, claws pricked and retracted before he hoists himself back up into eye contact. Earnest. “I’d like to.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Richard nods to acquiesce to acquiescence, a short breath puffed out just shy of a sigh as he turns.
“Then please follow me.”
Through the yard, into the keep, round the stairs up into the mage tower.
His shared quarters are not, in fact, shared any longer. Loxley’s bed is long made, and his trunk long empty. Books and notes and a pickled dragon’s eyeball at the desk all belong to Richard. There’s a breastplate balanced against the trunk at the foot of the other, lived in cot. A few scattered bottles. An extra pair of boots. Stale weed smoke hangs musty in the space -- clings to the walls and blankets and old wood in the hearth the same way it does his clothes.
The table is spare save for a bottle of wine and a lamp, which he sparks alight in spite of the afternoon sun filtering in through a lone window.
“Have a seat.”
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Thot's questing paws root him in the moment. He watches Richard light the lamp, leaves the door ajar behind him as he lets invitation draw him further into the room, seat him at the table.
A considering look towards the bottle of wine, but even having shifted Thot back into the crook of an elbow doesn't see his free hand reaching for it. It stays instead on Thot's sleek belly as his gaze turns to Richard, eyebrows raising.
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His return to the table is anticlimactic.
He sits in silence for a moment with his hands joined and studies the woodgrain. It’s been months since anyone’s been in here. Athessa was the last person to knock on his door.
“Do you think it’s possible to win this war?”
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He waits out the first, snippy replies, draws a breath, considers the scope of the question apart from the topic he suspects is waiting in the wings.
"It's not impossible."
The particulars of what a victory would cost—
Well, that's not the question. Ellis makes the tally all the same, set against what has already been sacrificed. It's a familiar calculation. He'd learned it at Joppa's elbow, has had nearly fifteen years to perfect it on his own.
"We could have talked about the war on the training yard," stands in for something else, a question.
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But they can skip the preamble. There’s an air of pages being hooked under, a thick chapter flopped over and smoothed right to left in a deeper draw of breath and a harder screw-turn of eye contact along the table. He’s sat beside rather than across, the chair angled in -- close enough for a sharp kick in the shins, should either of them be so inclined.
Thot licks her nose, blue over black.
“Tell me why you’ve been angry with me.”
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But it's held in check. His fingers curl in Thot's fur, the lightest inclination towards a belly scritch as Ellis looks directly back at Richard.
"Is it so hard to guess?"
Is not an answer. But Richard has, for some time now, had a knack of making Ellis feel as if he has been rendered transparent. It's not an entirely comfortable thing.
And there is an element of predictability in this. Richard had asked him for something that feels like—
Harm.
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It just makes sense.
No elfroot, no wine, and for Richard, no distractions. There’s an answering challenge to his patience, a steady lean of weight onto an invisible prybar. He hasn't blinked.
The only small mercy between them is Thot. She lolls idle where she’s held, purring, velvety soft, the thin whip of her tail curled and flicked in a lazy cycle between her feet.
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Ellis doesn't like to be studied closely.
He doesn't like to dredge up such explanations either. This one in particular is thorny, barbed with things Ellis is honor-bound not to speak aloud. And he knows instinctively that Richard will find the incomplete nature of the answer unfulfilling, and the impasse barring him from the rest to be a frustration.
Thot's purr vibrates under his fingers.
"I don't want this life for you," is as close as Ellis can get. It's shadowed with a particular truth: You're asking me to gamble with your life. There are many who do not survive the Joining, but that Ellis can never say.
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The edge to his intensity dials back by a matter of degrees, his thoughts turned inward from their attempted scorch through to the back of Ellis’ skull. Mind-reading would have made his entire ordeal here in Thedas markedly easier.
As is, he’s left to turn over the answer he’s been given in silence.
Brief silence.
“Why should my desire be secondary to yours?”
There may be a fang to stick on swaddled in the puffy gums of his careful neutrality. It's hard to tell. His curiosity for the answer is genuine.
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"Suppose I asked you to take your knife, and cut my throat?"
Almost a joke: Ellis has considered a variation of that question not so long ago, and maybe had their conversation in the tent in Starkhaven gone differently—
But it hadn't. And now there is this question, a rebuttal that carries more weight than it should, because he's said more than he should to Richard in the course of their acquaintance.
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He sits back.
It’s an honest answer to his question. He’s forced to consider it as such -- fairly, and without the taint of disapproval that’s gone sharp through the lines around his eyes.
“If we had cause to believe cutting your throat could forestall a sweeping victory for Corypheus, I would consider it.”
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Ellis is quiet in the wake of it, watching Richard's face. There's some expectant quality in his expression, as if Richard has only paused in the course of giving his answer.
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Silence works, in this instance. He has plenty to say on the subject and still more that he skips neatly over with a drag at the corner of his mouth and a glance down between them -- trace evidence of a cruel thought discarded as unnecessary.
“You were not this bleak about my prospects when I asked you about it a year ago.”
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"If I had realized you would take it as invitation, I would have never said such a thing," Ellis tells him, voice flattening over the words.
What he would or would not have done doesn't matter. The chasm between his intentions and what comes of them is well known to him. Ellis had already learned this lesson, though it hasn't saved him from making the same mistakes.
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He hadn’t fully imprinted, or whatever this attachment is.
Richard is quiet again. Just for a moment, to reorient himself away from the sidestep of this latest exchange.
"Is your fear just that I will die?"
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Ellis says neither. His hand is heavy over Thot's ribs, unmoving as he looks back at Richard.
"Are you trying to talk me out of our agreement?"
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“Obviously.”
The table, the lamp, the cat, the wan slant of afternoon light through the window.
“Am I to believe you’ve made headway in your research with the Tevinter Imperium crashing down upon the Free Marches?”
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However—
"Now that I'm able to be more easily spared, I will go to Skyhold to collect some of what I've been promised. And then find my way to Ansburg, for the rest."
What he might make of that, well.
There is a moment of clear calculation, where Ellis looks back across the table and sizes Richard up. There had been a point, even after the dream, but prior to Richard making this request of him, where Ellis would have asked his help in this without hesitation. But now he has to consider: would he truly receive the benefit of Richard's help, or not?
"I want to go to Weisshaupt, and see what I might find there. But that's not so easy."
It is, in fact, extremely dangerous.
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“I could accompany you.”
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Yes, Richard could. But Ellis cannot tell if it would be supremely foolish to allow it, for more reasons than the shard in Richard's hand. What happens to a Rifter found in Weisshaupt? Ellis' fingers curl in Thot's fur.
What happens in Weisshaupt if Richard decides he's tired of waiting?
How foolish would it be to assume that surviving the Joining would save Richard from being experimented upon?
Ellis shakes his head.
"It's far off," is only kicking the matter down the road, along with the other topic of contention between them. But that's never not worked out for Ellis, so why change tack now?
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He can guess.
He is guessing, the off-axis tuck of his chin already offended by some slight he’s imagined -- a matter of personality, or ability, or trust, as so often seems the case of late. It’s almost certainly his martial ability -- he thinks to the meaty clop of a Shriek’s blade into his thigh. Even in his dreams he’s pathetic.
It doesn’t really matter. The cold knot in his gut is the same.
“How deadly will it be for you?”
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But it resolves into neutrality, a spreading of one hand across the table while the other keeps Thot pinned against one thigh.
"I'm one of them."
A statement meant for Richard to draw assumptions from.
If he were making this case to Vance and Adrasteia, the greater context would be so clear. Ellis was very much one of them. He had the track record for it, after Adamant, after what he'd done in the Western Approach. The odds of finding someone who recognized him in Weisshaupt was very high, and that would be a shield.
And even if it wasn't, what could be done to him?
"It only matters if they've reason to suspect something of me, and they won't. I've never had that kind of reputation."
In which reputation means ambition.
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But packing it all away still comes naturally -- a kind of psychological reflex upon recognition of how far off the cliff edge he’s strayed. All it takes is a pause for perspective to check against the dazzling flash of an impulse that’d see the table turned over and the lamp spilled and the wine bottle broken, very wasteful. And embarrassing besides.
So he’s quiet until it’s neutral on neutral.
“I could send Thot with you.”
She’s cleaning between her toes, which are splayed like Ellis’ hand over her belly. The faint fork to her tongue rasps once or twice at his wrist along the way.
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Ellis had taught himself some similar skill, how to weather something destructive until it's been winnowed down to nothing. (Ellis' temper isn't absent, only deadened and dulled to almost-lifeless embers through year of strict practice.) The quiet stretches, unbroken, with Thot's casual movements under his hand noted distantly at the edges of his attention, some minor fraction spared from his study of Richard's face.
"You'd miss her."
His eyes don't drop to his lap to the cat in question.
"You could come with me to Skyhold," is a halving, an assessment of risks. Skyhold, but not Ansburg, not Weisshupt. It's not so dissimilar to what he had considered with Holden on the road. It is an offering, an outstretched hand.
It does not feel to Ellis that Skyhold is Richard's preferred destination. But it's at the very least the beginning point.
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If Wysteria hadn’t stepped in to assist him he might never have managed to fish her out of the Fade in the first place.
He sighs at the thought as he looks to her.
The shape she’s coiled herself into in Ellis’ lap is an unlikely one, feet kicked up and out, her head twisted under and around to get at them. Not quite an ouroboros, but certainly closer than any cat with a mammalian spine should be.
“I could,” he cannot quite help but needle back, claws pricked and retracted before he hoists himself back up into eye contact. Earnest. “I’d like to.”
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slaps bow onto this
BOW