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[katabasis]

action + written + crystal

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[bouchonne]

It is ironic, since it's your people who gave them to us. The Blights. If there were justice, I suppose you'd be fighting your dark gods alone.

[ He smiles sweetly, and picks up his own glass. Doesn't drink. ]

But - do you think? That I'd enjoy it? I don't know. Blood makes me feel faint.

[katabasis]

Does it?

[He turns to the next page, and this must be something worth actual consideration. He takes to nursing the glass, attention fixed on the pages as he slowly thumbs through it. Presumably Rutyer will reach his point given an age to do so.]

[bouchonne]

Dreadfully so. I am, you understand, a weak man. Cowardly.

[katabasis]

[Here, a glance up. Is that why this is taking so long - cowardice?

Then his focus slides back to the page.]

[bouchonne]

I suppose you wouldn't know what it's like to be a coward. So brave. So strapping and burly. Boldness personified.

[ His voice is pitching a little lower, now, the obnoxious edge softening into a bit more of a murmur. Strangely calming. ]

[katabasis]

[It doesn't warrant address. Scratch, scratch goes the pen. What he does eventually offer without looking up is:]

You have half an hour remaining, Messr Rutyer. You may of course spend it however you like.

[bouchonne]

Mm.

[ That warning goes barely acknowledged. ]

Did you ever have a moment where you were a coward?

[katabasis]

I can't say that I've had the luxury, no.

[What happens to a young soporati boy on a Tevene ship who is too stricken with fear to do what he is ordered? He has no idea, but he can imagine it.]

[bouchonne]

Do you fancy cowardice a luxury?

[katabasis]

I do.

[Plain enough.

(Maybe he will dismiss Rutyer early after all. Sitting like this as if nothing is wrong with the jagged ache in his side is making his fingers buzz.)]

[bouchonne]

Such ignorance.

[ There's a warm curl of amusement in Byerly's voice. It's rather sweet-sounding.

He hasn't drunk any of his wine. ]

To go through life a coward is like going through life like your little quartermaster, stumbling about on a single leg. No one makes an allowance for your shortcoming, but you must still do all that others do.

[katabasis]

Fear is normal, [he says, attention still there on the page before him. The handwriting is truly awful. Who the fuck filed this?] Cowards are made either by their inaction or in their refusal to own the choices they do make. Perhaps our definition of the word differs.

[He takes another sip from the glass-- and then pauses. Perhaps he catches the other glass, still full, in the corner of his eye or maybe the low sway of Byerly's voice has registered, or maybe he is simply tired of this particular series of papers. Either way, Flint looks up, sets aside his pen and finally sits back in the chair. If there is a wince, he pretends there isn't.]

The philosophy is a pleasant change of pace.

[bouchonne]

I'm a philosopher by nature, dear fellow. I've made no secret of that. You've simply disliked all my philosophy so far.

[ He smiles, long lashes lowered over his lovely eyes, head tilted very slightly to the side. ]

But I don't speak of fear. I speak of weakness. I am dreadfully weak, you see. And it's not my fault - I was born this way. It's a hard thing to understand for a man born of all the gifts you have, I suppose.

[katabasis]

[Elbows hooked on the chair arms, Flint laces his fingers together across his middle. He is being led by the nose, he senses, but that's fine.] Do you refer to a physical weakness, or to some other kind?

[bouchonne]

Ah, both.

[ He hooks an elbow around the back of his chair and slumps a little lower in his seat. ]

I mean, look at me, to start with. A descendant of the most vicious barbarians that marched north with Andraste, and I've these dreadfully narrow shoulders and this shallow chest. Shameful, don't you think? My great-great-great-greats looked like you - stocky, solid, burly and brawling - and your great-great-great-greats looked like me.

[ A mournful sigh, then - ]

But the spiritual weakness is the greater one. You might not think it, with how charming I am, but I am truthfully capable of very great evil, Captain. Evil without honor. Perhaps it's my physical weakness, at least in part, my childhood of boys like you finding their fun in taking advantage of my narrow shoulders and shallow chest to get their jollies, but honor had to be sacrificed, and the weakness embraced.

[katabasis]

[There is a threat in that. He elects to ignore it.]

Some might say that having found a way to leverage your deficiencies makes them no longer a weakness. Unless, I suppose, you find that your capacity for dark deeds weighs on your conscience.

[bouchonne]

[ For a moment, he thinks about that comment. It's a little surprising that it gets under his skin, but it does. Does it weigh on him, to have ransomed his honor and pride? To crawl, and scrape, and beg, and cheat, and steal, and even at times kill? He doesn't know. Even now, it's obscure to him. All he knows is that he's worthless and despicable, but self-loathing is a separate thing from guilt. ]

I suppose it all depends on how you conceptualize weakness. Is a weak man the one who is without power? Or is a weak man the one who cannot resist temptation?

[katabasis]

Neither. A weak man is one who somehow finds himself in possession of power and does nothing but cling to it. Everything he does is done in the service of preserving it; everyone he loves is as a support to it; everything he wants is more of it, to wield more broadly.

[This is how men who ruin sleep at night.]

[bouchonne]

So the powerless cannot be weak?

[katabasis]

What do you call power? In Ferelden it might be the strength of your arm, and in Tevinter it's where you stand in relation to the person above and below you, and in Orlais it's how well you play the Game, and in Antiva it's trade. But who names that thing, and why the fuck should you care about what they have to say about any of it?

[bouchonne]

[ An arch of his eyebrow. ]

How, dear Captain, could you ever not care about what they have to say about it? The world is not forged by your hand. It is a relic, a family heirloom, passed down from the generations before us. A tainted cup from which we must drink. [ To pick a metaphor at random. ] The only alternative is to die of thirst. No, we cannot and do not forge the world.

[katabasis]

[Something in his face goes briefly sharp, and then softens into strange lines. It is not pained, but viewed in the late afternoon haze through the office window which won't fully close, it could be that particular kind of fondness capable of inspiring it. There is something to this that is like reaching backwards. It is the nauseating pinch of space which occurs when travelling by eluvian, only what sits on the other side is a different kind of temple in a different time and with different people. Somewhere in Tevinter there is likely still a house with a private study not so removed from this one where two people had once sat and talked about the inevitable.

It's strange to be on the other side of that conversation. It chokes something in him. For a split second, he wants to be here.]

But we could.

[bouchonne]

[ An idealist, under the scruff and the gruff? An optimist? There's an unexpected twist. Byerly's long, graceful fingers trace the line of his own chin as he studies Flint with some interest. ]

And how would that work?

[katabasis]

[Distantly, he is aware that the wine has done the ache in his side some good. That at some point, the latter has begun to slip sideways out from under the hum of everything else. The dull pain is there at his fingertips still - if he cared to, he could touch it -, but it's verging now on optional opposed to obligatory. It slides easily through the fingers in favor of:]

By convincing people it's possible - by showing enough of them that there is an alternative to what they believe they've inherited. Take this place. Could your father or your grandfather or however far back you'd like to go imagine that something like Riftwatch would even for a moment be tolerated to exist? Take you. Who was it that played you for worthless, and did they guess you'd end up here?

The world is already changing, Messr Rutyer. Someone will use that to their advantage, and there's no reason that it shouldn't be the people who would see it made differently.

[bouchonne]

But things always return to the way they were.

[ There's a small, odd twinge in his gut. Who knows why. ]

The Blight always comes again. Men like Corypheus always come again. A thousand years ago we were fighting the same things we fight now. The vulnerable were used and abused back then, and they are now. Something like Riftwatch is a deviation, not a change.