lifeaftr | CLOTHING ADVENTURES

CLOTHING ADVENTURES

Who: Anyone! Everyone!
What: Clothes were requested. Clothes are now granted.
When: morning of the 22nd initially
Where: meet me at the room that's literally filled to the brim with clothing in 15 minutes
Warnings: It's just clothes, what could possibly go wrong!
Notes: Everyone gets free clothes whether they participated in the actual request or not. CLOTHES FOR THE ENTIRE ISLAND.

There's a room in the Storyteller's temple; it was once empty, and now it's...not. It is, in fact, full of clothing of all sorts, to the point that it might be slightly difficult to find exactly what you're looking for.

Oh well. It's there now, no takebacks.

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[A million different variations on the same theme, quoted in so many different colors that it makes his head hurt. (Makes everything fucking hurt.) He remembers her voice because he remembered her voice, he remembered her imperfectly and in strokes and shades that must not have been who she was in practice. He took the theory of her and made her into something he recalled inaccurately - but close enough to hurt.]

[Remember the Counselor's perplexed murmur. Remember that goodbye tasted like copper on your tongue because you nearly bit through it in an effort to shut out the screaming.]

Don't go disappearing on me again, okay?

[He says it like a joke, but his smile is too uneven, and his expression is too pained.]

Edited 2018-09-13 05:58 (UTC)

[ She hesitates, her drive to face the truth head-on warring with her desire to protect Wash, to keep from hurting him any more than he's already been hurt.

You know I can't control that.

You know this isn't home for me.

But he does know. He does know, and the look on his face is breaking her heart, the way he's trying to smile and not quite making it, the fragility he can't hide.

She smiles back, and tilts her head like she's thinking about it, shrugs her shoulders in a careless, casual motion. ]

I guess I could stick around.

[Guilt is a familiar taste, but so is the afterthought - that it gets easier and easier to dismiss and let slide away into the background radiation of all the rest.]

[It's easy to dismiss, because it doesn't matter. Because neither of them picks or chooses how they end up here or when they leave, so what point is there in pretending?]

[Smile anyway.]

[Let it fade, just as quickly.]

At least you can bring something back.

[Like all these winsome shirts, for example.]

[ She's good on shirts, thanks, and it's not as though she's accumulated a lot else here. Still. The attempt at a joke, flat as it is, gives her an idea. ]

...Maybe I could bring you back.

[ It's just the beginning of an idea, and maybe an impossible one - but she's watching Wash's face closely even as it germinates in her mind, gauging his initial reaction. ]

[One corner of his mouth tweaks upwards, but he drops his stare. Reaches up a hand to comb through his terrible fucking helmet hair, where the bangs have flattened and the back sticks up oddly. He manages to make it all look, if possible, even more like an unkempt haystack than before.]

Tell me about it. What it's like.

[Which isn't an answer at all, because there are too many people he'd miss, and - how did that happen?]

[Hard to say, sometimes.]

[ It probably won't ever happen. She doesn't even know how to get herself back home, much less anyone else. And Wash doesn't want her to disappear on him, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's ready to drop everything and follow her. He's got his own life. His own friends.

Still. Even dreaming about it is better than just...resigning herself to here. To never getting back.

She hums, tilting her head back as she thinks about it. About Thedas. About Kirkwall. ]

It's...

It's not like...back home.

[ If the Mother of Invention, if anything that came before it, had ever really been home. ]

It's...older. More medieval, I guess. [ She grimaces, knowing how unappealing that probably sounds. ] But it's not like you think. Kirkwall...well, the Hightown part is nice, anyway. And Val Royeaux is beautiful.

[ She can't make herself call Kirkwall's Lowtown beautiful. She can't. ]

They have different animals there. Not as weird as here, but...

There are dragons.

There are dragons.

[Guess that's kind of like dinosaurs.]

You must've been pretty out of place at first, right? I mean, talk about low-tech. At least we still have guns around here.

[And his armor might still require this sort of latent recharging, but at least it still works. Mostly. His H.U.D. isn't in ideal condition anymore - inexplicable, given the fact that the suit should be waterproofed, but hey, it's not like a lot of this place makes sense anyway. He charges his sigil by sitting near some magic water. That's just kind of how it is.]

I only saw one, from a distance. But they're real.

[ Real, and honestly, she'd been content enough to keep that distance, even if Varric had talked casually about dragon-slaying beside the Iron Bull and the rest of his friends, about how exhilarating it was.

She nods, somber. ]

Yeah. It wasn't that bad, because I could bring some stuff with me. And I knew what to expect.

[ From what Varric had told her, from his book. She hadn't exactly been dumped in with no warning. ]

It was still...hard, at first. But once I got used to it, it wasn't that big a deal.

[ She gives him a wry smile. ]

Not having guns isn't so bad when you know no one else has them either.

You always were good with knives.

[Remember the black bolt that was Texas, an oil-dark smear against the white of Sidewinder. She moved fast as any SPARTAN, slamming a blade between the Meta's shoulder blades and shoving, hard, all with that same fluid efficiency as the first day she plowed three fellow agents down without breaking a proverbial sweat.]

[He didn't have the same knack that C.T. did, but he learned. Over time, he learned.]

[ She knows it's true. She'd come up short in a lot of ways, back on the MoI, but at least she'd had that one skill to fall back on. It had saved her ass, more than once.

Had almost saved her, at the end.

She just shrugs, though, and raises an eyebrow at Wash. She's seen some of his own knifework here on the islands, after all, and noted the marked improvement. ]

You're not so bad these days, either.

Not nearly as good as you. [Though he'd be lying if he said she wasn't the reasons he chose to brush up on his knife work.]

Sounds nice, though. A kind of...vacation away from it all.

[Retirement. Sounds like an ideal victory. And he'd say she deserves the break, except that - except that he selfishly doesn't want to let go again, because closure, as it happens, is a multi-layered and multi-pronged thing, and not all forms of it are created equal.]

It sort of was. Varric...

[ She trips up on the second word. Varric is. Varric was. She still doesn't know quite how to approach it. How to talk about him. Like he's there, waiting for her. Like he's gone, and it's all just a memory. ]

They elected him Viscount of the city. He never wanted the title, but he took the responsibility seriously. There was a lot to do.

[ She'd tried to help, in between exploring the city, in between meeting the people she'd read about in his stories and trying to get her bearings. In between trying to come to grips with the fact that she was really there. ]

But we traveled a lot, too. All over the continent, meeting his friends.

[ She smiles sadly. ]

He wanted to show me everything. And...it was like, the more I saw, the more...real it felt. The more I...understood him.

[ The more she loved him. The more she felt like she really belonged. ]

[She really loved him.]

[Some part of him is chaining her away from that. From simply...wanting to get back. She could unselfishly want it and take the first opportunity to rip holes in reality to get back to him, if it weren't for the fact that there are people, reflections of who she was, that don't want to let go.]

[That have quite openly admitted that they don't want to let go.]

How long were you there?

[ In a way, maybe it's lucky that neither of them have a choice in the matter. CT can long for home, Wash can hope that she stays, and no matter what happens in the end, it won't be either of their faults. She can simultaneously want to go home and be glad that she's here with Wash and she doesn't have to decide.

She makes a small, melancholy noise, and looks away. ]

A couple of months.

[ Not nearly long enough. ]

[A couple months.]

[How long will it be before she's been here longer than she was there? Has that already happened? Is she counting the days? Tracking the threshold?]

[Don't think about it.]

Must have been some...pretty good months.

[ It's been almost three months, now. Unquestionably longer than the time she'd had in Kirkwall, no matter how generously she counts the days. ]

Yeah.

[ But her throat hurts suddenly, so much that she has to choke out the single word, and while she'd been okay talking about it before, suddenly she's...not anymore. Another sound escapes her, more distressed this time, and she turns her face away, wiping her eyes. ]

Sorry, I...

No, I'm...sorry. I - [Shouldn't have brought it up. Shouldn't have, but still did, still asked, like that would help. Like that would do anything but fog her brain with memories of people she can't see and places she can't visit.]

[There's no guarantee she can ever go back.]

[ You ever notice every time you open your mouth you make things worse?]

It's okay.

[ She'd chosen to talk about it, after all. She could have changed the subject long before now, if she'd wanted to. Should have, maybe. But...

She sucks in a shaky breath, then turns back to Wash. ]

It's...it's good to talk about it, sometimes.

It helps remind me that...it really happened.

[ That it wasn't all a hallucination, or a dream, no matter how far away and inaccessible it all seems now. ]

Maybe you could...ask for something from it? You know, from the Storyteller.

[Wash did contribute to this little clothing pile, after all. It was more to test the verisimilitude of the entire system than anything else, but he came away with the acknowledgment that at least the exchange of stories for material goods works.]

[Meaning that he can tell his abstracted, clipped, after-mission report-esque "stories" and those can still net him something.]

[ The Storyteller. She glances sidelong at him, the doubt clear on her face. She doesn't have to explain it. Not to Wash.

And maybe it's a little hypocritical to ask, while she's standing here picking through clothes that someone else's story had bought them, but she's asking anyway. ]

Do you really think that's a good idea?

I've been experimenting. What counts as a "story" is pretty...loose, actually. You don't even have to get into specifics.

[His use of them ultimately boils down to that which is purely utilitarian - his paranoia would never allow for anything else - but those "offerings" apparently still counted to the clothing pile, so he'll call that a win.]

Hmm.

[ You don't get something for nothing, though. Stories for favors seems like a simple enough proposition on the surface, but what's the point? There must be more to it than that. ]

Why do you think he wants to hear them? The stories.

They said it's what...powers them. From what everyone else is saying, this whole thing with the clothes gave them kind of a boost after the flowers.

[Forty offerings is evidently enough to boost a god after reviving something like two-dozen people all at once.]

Cause that makes sense.

[ On the other hand, "they" also say that he's a god. How's she supposed to say how gods work? ]

Do you believe them?

I don't trust anything that claims to be in charge, just as a rule.

[He learned that lesson late, but boy, boy did he learn it.]

But if no one else is going to get us what we need to survive, I'm going to use what I can.

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