Bastien smiles because of Ruadh's head-butt, and he smiles because this already feels close to forgiveness.
"For you, monsieur," he says to the mabari, for whom he will be this generous: a third of the remaining cheese, a third of the remaining bread.
There is some caution in the way he holds it out, but it has less to do with Ruadh's rippling muscles and heavy jaws, specifically, than with the temperamental, fluffy terriers who have snapped at Bastien's fingers in the past from the arms or laps or bags of their owners.
"Can he have a bite?" he asks again, this time to Ruadh, about Ellis. Seems only fair.
For such a large beast, Ruadh is very delicate in his acquisition of bread and cheese. A lap of tongue and lip is the limit of contact; Ruadh keeps his teeth well out of the way.
Ellis' head ducks at the question, but the shade of amusement in his expression is unmistakable. The mabari gives the question some obvious contemplation before butting his head once more against Bastien's knee. Permission, of a sort.
"I didn't come to rob you of your lunch," might head off the actual attempt. Ellis hadn't expected to be included in the offer, whatever begging his mabari had or had not been doing.
Begs the question of why he came in the first place, but they'll wind their way to it in due time.
"To rob me you would have to threaten me, I think," Bastien says while he tears the remaining two-thirds into one-thirds, "or use force."
He holds out Ellis' potential portion in one palm. Out of Ruadh's immediate reach, though he seems too gentle to snatch it. It'd be rude to tempt him to.
"Anyway, it is my second lunch." He smiles, not as brightly as he might if he were more confident they were alright, and looks briefly skyward in exasperation at himself. "I am eating my feelings."
The stairs are not exactly made for large mabari. Ruadh is suffering this hardship, ascending a few steps to stretch along the landing behind them. Shove his nose in between Bastien's elbow and rib, just to remain in the loop of conversation.
Ellis breaks the cheese in half and offers it to Ruadh without hesitation, action that speaks of habit already ingrained. He takes care with the action, dividing, passing the chunk into Ruadh's jaws, drawing a palm over Ruadh's square brow as the mabari chews. Letting the quiet settle while Ellis thinks on what's been said.
Then, straightening with what's left of the cheese in one hand and the hunk of bread balanced on one thigh, Ellis dips fingers into his pocket and draws out a trio of rough stones.
"There were no leaves," Ellis says, setting them down between them. Ruadh eyes the assortment, licking his chops.
A paltry offering, compared to the ring. But this is what Ellis has to give. What he'd collected for Bastien, even when he wasn't certain he would ever return to pass them over to him.
Edited (a day later: just kidding) 2022-05-09 02:59 (UTC)
There's food in one of Bastien's hands. The other is draped over Ruadh's bulky neck, fingers crooked to scratch his shoulder with a touch of reverence. But he looks at the stones with a smile while he's shuffling to stuff the last of his bread into his mouth and the last of his cheese on the stair next to his hip. Then the stones on his knees. They don't fit together like puzzle pieces, but he while he chews his mouthful he turns them until the curves and edges are complementary.
"No leaves," he says after. Not disappointment; rocks serve him just as well. Only wonder. The blight-born deserts of Orlais still have their stubborn plants and oases. He'd always thought the stories about the Anderfels, stripped so thoroughly of its life and natural cycles that a corpse couldn't decompose in the dust, must be exaggerated. But perhaps not.
Maybe he'll see it someday. Ideally not for very long. Not for a solitary hike to Weisshaupt and back.
He looks sideways at Ellis. Competing pressures: to explain himself and to not make excuses. To never give anyone more pieces of himself than they first give him of themselves, and to acknowledge—if only to himself—that he's taken pieces Ellis didn't intend to give him. Fit some of them together, staring at his ceiling. His confidence it was the only one of its kind: something from the rifts. Ellis' possession of it: Stark's or Poppell's, most likely. The dance lessons, the poetry, his sentimentality over a ring—Bastien's confident enough to bet his money on Wysteria.
His cheeks puff up with his capitulating exhale. He sounds more self-deprecating and embarrassed than solemn about the confession: "Bastien is my name. It's all anyone has called me since I was a boy." Give or take a few dozen brief false identities and his five-year stint as Edouard Almary, Honest Printer. That's not what he means. "But it isn't the name my parents gave to me, and I'm—" Hypocritical, after using the ring to investigate everyone he could, after opening Ellis' letters, after everything about his entire life and line of work. "—touchy, I suppose."
A bear with a burr he oughtn't have snarled at anyone else about.
Here is some shared ground: that tension between explanation and excuse, Ellis has found himself in such a space before, even recently, standing on the opposite of Bastien's desk watching his face crumple into disapproval. And beyond that, this urge towards secrecy, holding fast to all parts of himself lest someone hear them and—
Draw conclusions. Come to some decision much like Ellis suspects Bastien already has: that Ellis is worth something, when that has not been true in a very long time.
But still, he has been given something. A piece of the kind of truth that Ellis knows comes at a very dear price.
"I didn't think of it as something to be used in the way you described," Ellis admits. "I've not used it at all myself."
Is this so surprising? Ellis has never wanted anyone else's secrets. He has reached no hand towards anything that isn't freely given. But it isn't so much about the work as it is about what Bastien holds in check. Ellis hasn't wrenched that secret from him. (He had put it on his smallest finger, standing in the crowded market square. He had taken it off only moments later, unsettled by the rush of whispered names that had spilled forth. If one was Bastien's, it would be impossible to know which.)
His hands turn one over the other. Index finger and thumb finding the stiff bend of his left hand, masking it behind the closure of one hand over the other. Draws breath, and holds it. Hesitating. Ruadh gone still between them, attentive.
Bastien's eyebrows raise when he first speaks, his gaze flickering from the rocks to Ellis with a smile.
He's known Ellis too long to be surprised. And before Ellis, he knew too many people who never seemed interested in anything. It's alien, the absence of an instinct that's driven Bastien's whole life—even as a child, he never passed a window he didn't want to peek through. But it's a type of alien he has plenty of experience with. Maybe the surprising part is that, in Ellis, he finds it more charming than dull. An honest heart (or a wounded one, or both), not the incuriosity of the sluggish or self-involved. Ellis is neither of those.
The smile stays in place during Ellis' hesitation, but Bastien's gaze moves to his hands. Silence. Nerves. It's tempting, to talk. To save Ellis from whatever he's thinking about. To say, I know, overconfident as it would be, or a less daring thank you for coming to find me, or a torrent of chatty babble to sweep them away from this entire territory of conversation and into something simpler. That last one—that's what he would do if he didn't care.
But Ruadh is still and waiting. Bastien follows his lead. Halfway, at least. He waits, but he also moves, lifting his dangling hand from the mabari's shoulder to settle over Ellis' twisting fingers. His thumb taps thrice, reminiscent of a let me in knock, but mostly friendly levity. It's alright if he wants to say something. And in a different way, one against all of Bastien's natural and learned instincts but that Ellis is nonetheless owed, it's alright if he doesn't.
The contact sparks up a suggestion of movement in Ellis' body, not exactly up and away, but a passing, indecisive tension. Bracing, a rolling of his shoulders and shifting on the steps, before Ellis settles under Bastien's hand, heeds the knock of his thumb.
It still takes a few moments for Ellis to choose his words.
This too might be familiar to Bastien, if Ellis were to explain it. The care that goes into giving over a piece of himself. He turns it over and over in his head, hesitating, paring down the sentiment to the heart of the thing before his attention lifts from their hands to Bastien's face.
"My family name was Ginsberg," is a small thing, isn't it? The ring might have told it to Bastien already. Ellis can't be sure, won't ask. "I stopped using it a long time ago."
Bastien isn't a rifter. And he is an intelligent man. He'll be able to spin out a conclusion for himself without Ellis needing to say it aloud.
Maybe he's intelligent. Unfortunately, he's at least equally imaginative, and with so little context Bastien spins out not a conclusion but an array of possibilities. A family Ellis was ashamed of, a family who was ashamed of him. A criminal history or a blood feud that would follow his full name across Thedas. A decision to leave behind something painful, tossing his name into the wind like ashes from an urn.
The heaviness of his no, when asked if he had family in Ferelden, had made Bastien guess his family must be dead—but only a guess.
He looks at Ellis' profile, searching and inquisitive, but he doesn't ask. After a pause he nods, squeezes Ellis' knuckles in parting before slipping his hand away, and strokes the silky spot behind Ruadh's ear instead.
"It's a good name," he says, tentative. Maybe Ellis hates it. "At least by the sound of it."
There are some kernels of truth in these possibilities. His family would be ashamed of the man he'd become, perhaps. Or the many he had been in that stretch of space between refugee and Warden.
And he had let his name turn to ash, scattered across Blight-struck Ferelden lands as he'd boarded the ship that would carry him into the Free Marches.
Ellis' gaze is tipped downward, watching Bastien's hand on his, the flex of his fingers before they lift away. Ellis runs his own thumb over the vacated space as Ruadh's head tips lazily into Bastien's hand.
"It was," Ellis agrees. Bastien's curiosity is not dissimilar to Wysteria's. Ellis is aware of the way it prickles at him, all this unspoken scrutiny. "I'd like it if you kept it to yourself."
Bastien catches that thumb in his peripheral vision. If the dog were not between them, that would be all of the prompting he needed to channel some of his relief at this repaired bridge into leaning against Ellis' solid shoulder again or giving him a silly Orlesian kiss on his serious Fereldan cheek. Some people aren't touched often enough.
But the dog is there, so it would have to be a thing, instead of nothing.
"I will," he says. Barring the unlikely case that giving away Ellis' family name will save a life or the world, he means it.
And then he twists down to kiss the top of Ruadh's broad, scarred head instead, since it's in reach.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
"For you, monsieur," he says to the mabari, for whom he will be this generous: a third of the remaining cheese, a third of the remaining bread.
There is some caution in the way he holds it out, but it has less to do with Ruadh's rippling muscles and heavy jaws, specifically, than with the temperamental, fluffy terriers who have snapped at Bastien's fingers in the past from the arms or laps or bags of their owners.
"Can he have a bite?" he asks again, this time to Ruadh, about Ellis. Seems only fair.
no subject
Ellis' head ducks at the question, but the shade of amusement in his expression is unmistakable. The mabari gives the question some obvious contemplation before butting his head once more against Bastien's knee. Permission, of a sort.
"I didn't come to rob you of your lunch," might head off the actual attempt. Ellis hadn't expected to be included in the offer, whatever begging his mabari had or had not been doing.
Begs the question of why he came in the first place, but they'll wind their way to it in due time.
no subject
He holds out Ellis' potential portion in one palm. Out of Ruadh's immediate reach, though he seems too gentle to snatch it. It'd be rude to tempt him to.
"Anyway, it is my second lunch." He smiles, not as brightly as he might if he were more confident they were alright, and looks briefly skyward in exasperation at himself. "I am eating my feelings."
no subject
Ellis breaks the cheese in half and offers it to Ruadh without hesitation, action that speaks of habit already ingrained. He takes care with the action, dividing, passing the chunk into Ruadh's jaws, drawing a palm over Ruadh's square brow as the mabari chews. Letting the quiet settle while Ellis thinks on what's been said.
Then, straightening with what's left of the cheese in one hand and the hunk of bread balanced on one thigh, Ellis dips fingers into his pocket and draws out a trio of rough stones.
"There were no leaves," Ellis says, setting them down between them. Ruadh eyes the assortment, licking his chops.
A paltry offering, compared to the ring. But this is what Ellis has to give. What he'd collected for Bastien, even when he wasn't certain he would ever return to pass them over to him.
no subject
"No leaves," he says after. Not disappointment; rocks serve him just as well. Only wonder. The blight-born deserts of Orlais still have their stubborn plants and oases. He'd always thought the stories about the Anderfels, stripped so thoroughly of its life and natural cycles that a corpse couldn't decompose in the dust, must be exaggerated. But perhaps not.
Maybe he'll see it someday. Ideally not for very long. Not for a solitary hike to Weisshaupt and back.
He looks sideways at Ellis. Competing pressures: to explain himself and to not make excuses. To never give anyone more pieces of himself than they first give him of themselves, and to acknowledge—if only to himself—that he's taken pieces Ellis didn't intend to give him. Fit some of them together, staring at his ceiling. His confidence it was the only one of its kind: something from the rifts. Ellis' possession of it: Stark's or Poppell's, most likely. The dance lessons, the poetry, his sentimentality over a ring—Bastien's confident enough to bet his money on Wysteria.
His cheeks puff up with his capitulating exhale. He sounds more self-deprecating and embarrassed than solemn about the confession: "Bastien is my name. It's all anyone has called me since I was a boy." Give or take a few dozen brief false identities and his five-year stint as Edouard Almary, Honest Printer. That's not what he means. "But it isn't the name my parents gave to me, and I'm—" Hypocritical, after using the ring to investigate everyone he could, after opening Ellis' letters, after everything about his entire life and line of work. "—touchy, I suppose."
A bear with a burr he oughtn't have snarled at anyone else about.
"Something to work on."
no subject
Draw conclusions. Come to some decision much like Ellis suspects Bastien already has: that Ellis is worth something, when that has not been true in a very long time.
But still, he has been given something. A piece of the kind of truth that Ellis knows comes at a very dear price.
"I didn't think of it as something to be used in the way you described," Ellis admits. "I've not used it at all myself."
Is this so surprising? Ellis has never wanted anyone else's secrets. He has reached no hand towards anything that isn't freely given. But it isn't so much about the work as it is about what Bastien holds in check. Ellis hasn't wrenched that secret from him. (He had put it on his smallest finger, standing in the crowded market square. He had taken it off only moments later, unsettled by the rush of whispered names that had spilled forth. If one was Bastien's, it would be impossible to know which.)
His hands turn one over the other. Index finger and thumb finding the stiff bend of his left hand, masking it behind the closure of one hand over the other. Draws breath, and holds it. Hesitating. Ruadh gone still between them, attentive.
no subject
He's known Ellis too long to be surprised. And before Ellis, he knew too many people who never seemed interested in anything. It's alien, the absence of an instinct that's driven Bastien's whole life—even as a child, he never passed a window he didn't want to peek through. But it's a type of alien he has plenty of experience with. Maybe the surprising part is that, in Ellis, he finds it more charming than dull. An honest heart (or a wounded one, or both), not the incuriosity of the sluggish or self-involved. Ellis is neither of those.
The smile stays in place during Ellis' hesitation, but Bastien's gaze moves to his hands. Silence. Nerves. It's tempting, to talk. To save Ellis from whatever he's thinking about. To say, I know, overconfident as it would be, or a less daring thank you for coming to find me, or a torrent of chatty babble to sweep them away from this entire territory of conversation and into something simpler. That last one—that's what he would do if he didn't care.
But Ruadh is still and waiting. Bastien follows his lead. Halfway, at least. He waits, but he also moves, lifting his dangling hand from the mabari's shoulder to settle over Ellis' twisting fingers. His thumb taps thrice, reminiscent of a let me in knock, but mostly friendly levity. It's alright if he wants to say something. And in a different way, one against all of Bastien's natural and learned instincts but that Ellis is nonetheless owed, it's alright if he doesn't.
no subject
It still takes a few moments for Ellis to choose his words.
This too might be familiar to Bastien, if Ellis were to explain it. The care that goes into giving over a piece of himself. He turns it over and over in his head, hesitating, paring down the sentiment to the heart of the thing before his attention lifts from their hands to Bastien's face.
"My family name was Ginsberg," is a small thing, isn't it? The ring might have told it to Bastien already. Ellis can't be sure, won't ask. "I stopped using it a long time ago."
Bastien isn't a rifter. And he is an intelligent man. He'll be able to spin out a conclusion for himself without Ellis needing to say it aloud.
no subject
The heaviness of his no, when asked if he had family in Ferelden, had made Bastien guess his family must be dead—but only a guess.
He looks at Ellis' profile, searching and inquisitive, but he doesn't ask. After a pause he nods, squeezes Ellis' knuckles in parting before slipping his hand away, and strokes the silky spot behind Ruadh's ear instead.
"It's a good name," he says, tentative. Maybe Ellis hates it. "At least by the sound of it."
no subject
And he had let his name turn to ash, scattered across Blight-struck Ferelden lands as he'd boarded the ship that would carry him into the Free Marches.
Ellis' gaze is tipped downward, watching Bastien's hand on his, the flex of his fingers before they lift away. Ellis runs his own thumb over the vacated space as Ruadh's head tips lazily into Bastien's hand.
"It was," Ellis agrees. Bastien's curiosity is not dissimilar to Wysteria's. Ellis is aware of the way it prickles at him, all this unspoken scrutiny. "I'd like it if you kept it to yourself."
🎀?
But the dog is there, so it would have to be a thing, instead of nothing.
"I will," he says. Barring the unlikely case that giving away Ellis' family name will save a life or the world, he means it.
And then he twists down to kiss the top of Ruadh's broad, scarred head instead, since it's in reach.