contact part deux

[bouchonne]

if this were modern times byerly would probably make you listen to total eclipse of the heart before you were able to leave a message

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[cozen]

[ Through some huffy laughter at the nibbling, ]

For you? I will go as low as three. Some days. Seven on others. Alternating at random will keep him on his toes, you know?

[ His rapier is very bendy, because he's using it to flick the underside of Byerly's enchanting nose. Then he makes a show of sheathing it at his side and slides his arm around By's middle instead. ]

Do you know him very well? Your cousin.

[bouchonne]

[ And By snuggles against his side, and reflects on how it is a dreadfully strange thing, to be loved. ]

Not so well. Our families were in a bit of a feud, you see.

[cozen]

Ooh.

[ He sounds more comfortable than salacious—but still equally intrigued. ]

The kind with murders? Or the kind where you are not invited to weddings?

[bouchonne]

Bastien, what a horrific thought. Disinviting someone from a wedding? Unthinkable.

[ He shakes his head in mock-horror. Then: ]

Murders. His father was set to marry my aunt, who was a dreadful coquette. Poor thing. So disgraced was he by her infidelities that he killed her for them.

[ By frowns just a little bit. For others, he'd keep up some manic good cheer; in front of Bastien, though, he permits himself to show his pity and his melancholy. ]

It's hard to get an honest story about her now. She's more of a symbol than a person.

[cozen]

[ A coquettish aunt for Monsieur le Coquin. Bastien might be charmed, to finally hear tell of a relative that makes Byerly sound less like a solitary outcast among his own family, if she hadn’t died for it. ]

In Ferelden?

[ Must be. Of course people kill for jealousy in Orlais, but among the nobility they usually have to invent some other excuse, like irritation or boredom, so as not to seem unfashionable. ]

Your father’s sister?

[bouchonne]

Mm.

[ A nod. ]

This was well before I was born, mind. But it was such a scandal. Especially because after that all happened, the bastard started fucking my uncle. Can you imagine? So salacious.

[cozen]

[ Bastien makes a heh sound that’s more acknowledgment than laugh, hesitates, and asks, ]

Is that why your father was such a monster to you, you think?

[bouchonne]

[ If Byerly's startled look is anything to go off, this is a novel thought to him. ]

What do you mean?

[cozen]

[ Bastien’s shrug is small enough it would have to be felt, not seen. ]

If his sister got herself killed for sleeping around, as he sees it, and his brother came along behind her to carry on with her killer… I can see how it might give a man some fucked-up ideas. About what happens when you are promiscuous, you know. About what sort of people men who sleep with men must be.

[bouchonne]

I -

[ The tension ripples through him at once. Big enough to be both felt and seen. ]

He'd have to give a damn whether I lived or died. For the first one to be true. Which he never did. Or, no, that's not true; he'd have been happier if I'd died, I suspect.

[cozen]

Maybe not, then. Maybe he—

[ Maybe Byerly’s beast of a father doesn’t have to be made sense of. He stops himself, and he twists his head around instead, forehead resting near Byerly’s ear. ]

It wouldn’t excuse him, anyway. Nothing would.

[bouchonne]

No.

[ That drains a bit of the tension away. It's still visible in his hands, though - they rub together, finger against finger. It's strangely reminiscent of the lashing of a cat's tail. ]

No. [ Then: ] My uncle died, as well. Murdered by his mother. [ That's unclear. There are a great many hes in this story. ] Miles' mother.

[cozen]

[ Bastien watches his hands. The half-dozen messages he might take away from them, if Byerly were a bard, jumble together. Like hearing a voice too muffled to decipher except for a syllable here and there. ]

This feud sounds very lopsided.

[ He holds his free hand out, palm up in offering, near Byerly’s busy fingers. ]

[bouchonne]

[ He notices how easy to read his hands are being. Forces them to still. And then places his fingertips into Bastien's hand. For the safety, if nothing else.

A bit more evenly: ]

Oh, we've inflicted our own bits of suffering on them. Have no doubt.

[cozen]

[ Bastien drags By’s captured hand onto his thigh, where he presses it to rest palm-up so he can trace it with his fingertips. Around the base of the palm, up and down each long finger, and around again from the beginning. There are no hidden bardic messages in his own fingers. ]

Bits?

[bouchonne]

In the way that noble families do, in Ferelden. Opposition to their proposals during Landsmeets, sabotaging their agendas.

[ He's looking for messages in the patterns of those fingers on his. He's strangely comforted when none emerge. How strangely lovely it is, to talk as two normal men might talk. Not spies. Not using all their wiles to dissect the problems before them. Just two people muddling through. ]

Tragically, raiding their lands for their cattle and setting fire to their homes went out of favor when we started calling ourselves Fereldans instead of Alamarri.

[cozen]

[ His fingers pause on their journey around Byerly’s hand while he angles a look up, his serious contemplation on hold for just a moment. ]

What about painting your name on the sides of their cattle in the dead of night?

[bouchonne]

[ That's so bizarre that it startles a laugh out of him. ]

"Curse the Rutyers! Our druffalo will never be the same! At least not until the next time we bathe them!"

[cozen]

Sometimes letting someone know you could have done worse and chose not to is very effective.

[ He’s pleased, to have earned a laugh in the midst of all this seriousness, and some of that lingers on his face while he returns to business and hand-tracing. ]

Have you encountered them since you left home? I suppose it would be hoping too much for some people to like you more because of it.

[bouchonne]

Hoping far too much.

[ He shakes his head. Here, at least, there's less unhappiness and more sardonic wryness. ]

As it turns out, a clan prone to murdering over honor isn't terribly charmed by dissolution. If I were upright, humorless, and grim, they'd have taken me in as their own. Being as I am, however, a bawdy slattern...

[cozen]

[ With a little sigh, like it’s tragic, even though he’s still smiling: ]

You will have to settle for being taken in as our own.

[bouchonne]

[ Ah. His smile is wry, and curious, and a tiny little bit nervous. Tiny little bit. ]

Is that what I am?

[cozen]

Yes.

[ He traces a spiral on Byerly’s palm. He can’t help noticing the nervousness. He can’t help wondering if it means he’s overstepping—again—and should ease back. But he can push through the thought and still say what he means, without stalling for time or trying to manage the outcome, and be confident that even if he is overstepping Byerly will give him time to make up for it, and that’s something. ]

Your own clan of misfits and runaways who love you very much. [ Himself, of course, but Alexandrie and Sidony too. ] Even your unseemly honorable bits.

[bouchonne]

The worst parts. So disgusting.

[ His fingers curl, capturing Bastien's hand mid-spiral. He holds it there a moment - admiring the back of his hand, the lines of tendons and veins under the skin.

One would assume that there'd be something in the blood of a freeman or a peasant that would come to the surface - some physical qualities that mark him as different. Plenty of nobles claim that that's the case. You look like a peasant, they say, at times, like there's some secret feature that marks the lowborn. But Bastien's bones, his fine long limbs, his agile fingers, are as beautiful as any nobleman's. His high cheekbones and solid nose are as wonderful as they'd be if the man's parents had made a calculated match based on beauty, rather than based on whatever strategic thinking draws commoners to one another.

If Byerly had been a dutiful son, he wouldn't be holding a freeman's hand like this. If he were a proper Rutyer, he might find a lover in the lower classes, but she'd (or, if he were truly discreet, he'd) be less-than. Something to possess. Something to exploit. Not a partner in any way. Not someone who'd look him in the eye and offer assessments both gentle and blunt, who'd look after his soul. If he'd been a dutiful son, he'd never be able to keep a wife who would never produce his heirs. If he'd been a dutiful son, perhaps he could keep a married woman as a lover, but he could never keep that married woman, fortunes hitched to a Tevinter magister.

His father was a son of a bitch. Presumably still is. But...Odd and painful as the turns of his life have been, perhaps he's not so sorry to have ended up where he has. ]

That's how the Dalish do it, isn't it? Take in vagrants and ne'er-do-wells?

[cozen]

[ Bastien looks at By's face while By looks at his hand. He's well past the point of memorization. He used to sneak it in during glances up from letters or reports. More recently he's had mornings. Not all that many of them, but a few, when there were no scheduled meetings or pressing matters or restless, busy moods to prevent Bastien from holding very still and keeping very quiet for a little while to watch him sleep.

Other lovers—because there have been others, some of them lasting a year or more, even if the shallowness of feeling makes lover a misleading label—he'd have felt finished looking at, around now. Stories that were only as good as their twists and unresolved questions, without any humor or elegant phrasing or varying interpretations to reward revisiting them.

But he's as fascinated by the length of Byerly's eyelashes as he was a year ago.

And then he's grinning. ]

I am not getting a tattoo.