FADE RIFT [INBOX]

[shri]

ＬＡＤＹ ＬＡＫＳＨＭＩ
( Lady Lakshmi, Bai Saheba, Rani Lakshmibai )

ＶＯＩＣＥ | ＡＣＴＩＯＮ | ＮＯＴＥＳ

Unavaliable To All:

• 30mins around dawn
  
  Only to Voice:
  
• Hour training morning and evening
  
• Any time she's gone riding.
  
• When she's in the field.
  
  Only to Book:
  
• When she's otherwise in a meeting, leave a message.
  
• Very late at night or early in the morning.
  
  Other:
  
• She usually takes her morning meals in the mess hall with everyone else.
  
• Her days are usually spent in Kirkwall seeing to either her personal business or Inquisition tasks.
  
• She has a bath twice a day, every day.
  

Comments

[shri]

She's been tense for days. There has been no word of Magni, of Kitty, since they left, and the Inquisition now cuts itself to pieces under its own foolishness. She has wanted for so little since then, wanted to speak to no one more than she has to.

Thankfully, most have left her alone, to that end. Let a broody tiger prowl her chambers, do her work, and leave. So she isn't expecting a knock on the door? Only one person would at this hour.

"Magni, next time you are -" her eagerness falls away. that happiness so plain on her face at the thought of the other half of her heart finally returned. But it isn't.

"Ricart? Is there an emergency?" why ever else would he be here if there was not one?

[esquive]

He's prepared himself for a short list of possibilities. Maybe she will be crying or raging. Maybe she will be draped all in black or have twelve dozen candles burning various spiced scents or he will catch her in prayer to some god whose name he doesn't recognize in service of a breed of mourning rites he has no way of knowing.

What he does not expect is-- this. The brightness in her face and temper, the sound of Magni's name in her mouth like the pierce of something sharp at his side.

For a moment, he just stands there in the doorway and stares at her as all the meager color drains from his face to be substituted with a cold, bloodless look of mute horror. Eventually he blurts out:

"You don't know."

It's not a question, it's just apalling.

[shri]

Lakshmi looks him up and down as her hand holds on the door. For a moment, misunderstanding him completely, and regarding him over again like somehow she could discern what he means to say before he says it. So she could do the one respect she has tried to give him: keep all their interactions short as possible.

But there was no understanding the look on his face. Fear?

"Ricart, this isn't the time for that. If I need to attend to something urgently -" still thinking that it was work. Because it was to that end, what she had been doing all day. "Is it a order you can explain on the way? I can be ready in a moment."

[esquive]

How could she not know? It's been discussed to death over the crystals and every face in the Gallows has a strange ashen quality to it. How could she not know?

A moment's stinging bewilderment. Something, he feels, is coming dislodged in him the longer he stands here.

"You should sit." Her father is dead too, he remembers out of nowhere at all. "Sit down and I will tell you."

[shri]

Something's wrong. Like the unfurling of a banner in the wind, she feels it spreading through her chest, cold as fever. Her teeth grit, as the fear comes, and how little she deals with that well, the great truth of half her actions was that standing still in the face of terrible things had just never been an option.

So even as he goes to tell her to sit down, she doesn't. Of course, she doesn't, she has never faced anything sitting down. Instead, she grabs Marcoulf's shoulder, jerking him hard in a strong hand. Nothing kind to it.

"Marcoulf." His name, for the first time in months. "Tell me."

[esquive]

He doesn't flinch, but there's a rigid quality to how Marcoulf braces against the grip of her hand that says there is a version of this where he does. Or that he once might have and has since unlearned the impulse. And while he's never been very keen at meeting her eye, he's less so now: glances at her face and then away, fixating on some loose strand of her dark hair curled about her ear instead.

"The contingent sent to reinforce our people investigating the ruins on Baron Deshaies' land in Orlais returned." What had the boy on the crystal network said? It had seemed very neatly done. "They were captured by mercenaries. There was a Tevinter mage. I believe-- it was said--"

He squirms uneasily in the sturdiness of her one handed grip. Marcoulf finds her other hand with his, careful about how he touches her but firm about pressing the strands of leather and beads and bone into her palm.

"She would prefer you to have it."

There it is; that thing in him crumbling.

[shri]

She will not look at it. She refuses to look at it - she refuses to look anywhere but his face as she feels the familiar bite of Magni's adornments. How she knows them so perfectly to their imprecise loving lines. Felt them so often in her fingers, warmed by Magni's skin. Nor does she let him take his hand away, hanging onto him, hanging onto it. Her nails sinking into the inside of his wrist before he can go further.

Because if she takes her eyes off his face, she might not see a lie, see something uncertain, that could mean this isn't true. "No, no it could not - " the flat refusal. The denial she pushes for the first time, so strongly back at him. She accepted anything, everything that had been given to. My Lord Shiva, I have given all to you, you cannot take this too. Not this. " - No." A deeper, deeper breath, as she tries to find something to make sense of it. "The report is wrong. You're wrong." She shoves her hand harder against his chest, even as she does not let him go.

[esquive]

He lets her do it - that dig of her fingernails in weather rough skin and the rough strike at his center. That small piece of her hair had come dislodged from behind her ear. And he doesn't look at her and he doesn't think about the thing being driven hard back into the flesh of his hand and he doesn't think about a series of broken bodies in anonymous places and he doesn't think to say I'm sorry because if he considers the effort of that for too long, he doesn't know what else comes draining out of him with it.

[shri]

Her heart comes faster, beating against her veins, it drowns out all other sounds, the world going distant. For it was the fumbling in the dark were emptiness lay, one more burning room that she so often closed the door on, roaring back open until she can't hear anything else. The flames that fill and choke, the black smoke that stains her clothes, her thoughts, her mind. Of the things that she has, does not have.

" - A girl - a rifter. Kitty Jones. Spoke like a Fereldon. She had brown hair - quick eyes. What of her? She was with them - "

Give her something, tell her, tell her she is not in this same loop. But it's too late. She can ask, and she already knows. This is where she must exist. This same place, over and over and over again. Let this cycle end, stop this pattern of life turning over itself like the snake that eats its own tail, heavy around her neck. Living when it should not. Consuming and consumed.

[esquive]

"I don't believe they found anyone at all." This said very gently, a soft sound as if the meaning might be quieted too.

[shri]

As if, as if there is ever a way to make those words less absolute. As if, if he said them quietly, the world might not hear it, and that means it could be undone. Like whispers could make things not true. But who did either of them think they were fooling?

Which she might even have asked him that if she could stop the wail of pain that comes out of her mouth. The building, choking up sound in the back of her throat. Might have stared him down if not for the way her legs give out underneath her, make her stumble between him and the door frame. Shoving him, but not letting him go, yanking him back as she falls against him. But she cannot hear herself, any more than she can form words for it. A strike in that helplessness, not to him, but to herself, for the red vermillion that she had placed upon her brow since she and Magni had placed upon each other's foreheads in the solemnity of make-do vows of fidelity. Smearing it away as all widows must do.

Hanging onto him, ugly, the grief as sudden as those same flames. Sudden, hot and engulfing. "Give them back - give them back." The words are pitched, mad with their pain, like she could rip the air apart if she but tried. But she never could, she never could.

[esquive]

There is no supporting her. She's a small woman, but her weight and the drag of it on him is very real and he finds himself clutching at her elbows in an insensible effort to keep her something resembling upright. She'd drag you down like this, he thinks blandly, if there was anywhere to go. The hollowness of the thought swallows every ounce of grief that belongs to him. It's a pit to poisonous things into, to set that disjointed piece somewhere else so that it doesn't stab him at some inopportune moment.

This is what is wrong with you: you've been holding all these sharp things against your belly with your bare hands. Of course they've cut. That's what they're designed for. Are you sorry for what you said to her last?, asks same razor edge too distant to hear over the sound of Lakshmi Bai's agony.

"Easy, easy," he doesn't say. But he does let her clutch him and he doesn't release her even if it means being dredged about to accommodate her grip and her need and the burden of her. It's fine. There's room for it.

[shri]

There is nowhere else to go, from here - and the worst, the worst of this knowledge is that it has already been hers. She has been in this room, on the floor, she has screamed herself empty in the pain of it until her voice no longer could be called her own. She has held this - these snatch of leather, beads and stone - so tightly it cuts her then and it does now. Slices her palms open, mingles her blood on his clothes as she weeps, drips it red onto his coat. A mindless, thoughtless thing, that goes on and on and on, and of course, it does, for there will not be a moment where her body will not remember it. One more room, with one more door she will have to shut when the smoke clears.

( It never will. She knows it, there is no breathing clearly. If this land has taken her from her Mother Ganga, if it has taken her from dry deserts and her Knight, her Tesla, her Devi, why not - )

"Why must they take my heart? I have arms, legs, eyes and ears. Why must my heart be taken from my chest?" Begging it, desperate, confused. That bloody hand beats against his shoulder, her forehead driven into his chest. Driving and holding, pushing and pulling. "How many husbands must I lose, how many children? How many- ?" But even the blows are weak, broken as her voice. "Please, I would give my body to ash, if it will give them back."

[esquive]

There's no answer for any of it out of him, but it isn't as if they're really questions meant for him. Instead Marcoulf waits, his grip on her arms careful and without much limitation. This part is happening to a different person. Someone else is in this doorway; someone else delivered the news; someone else is responsible for her grief.

Eventually that someone else says, softly as if talking to a child or a trembling animal: "Madame Bai, you should sit. Have you eaten today?"