He draws in a longer breath at this first part. A natural aggravation for when semantics get brought into the thing.
A fiery temper doesn't need added heat to burn brighter. Kindling will do just as well, neutral and dry and thrown in without intention. "And you won't send a Templar because it would make a bad impression," Marcus says, heat entering his tone. Volume, for anyone who might be darting by the tent during the downpour or waiting beneath the awning. He would like to pace. There isn't the room. "Not that a Templar's judgment ought disqualify him, and nor a mage hunter's."
Because, of course, Marcus would disqualify them. Unnecessary, worthless, an added complication.
Raised voices, even from the Commander's office, are not uncommon within Riftwatch. It is a somewhat argumentative organization at the best of times and often in spite of what constitutes as rank. This, and Flint is some years—practically decades—removed from any world where the mere whiff of insubordination warrants instantaneous reprisal lest some flexion allow for the rot that ruins a perfect dictatorship.
It's fine. Marcus' frustrations don't scratch at an animal thing in him which has been bred to go heavy handed with provocation. The thing which sometimes longs to see the more incompetent members of their company beaten with a stick and the dangerous ones disposed.
"No," he says. He doesn't set his jaw, and then unset the muscle again. He understands how Marcus would be frustrated by this, Flint makes himself think instead. The hurried tempo of the rain on tent canvas makes it difficult to keep the thought in a straight, orderly line. "I'm telling you to defer to mine."
It's almost enough. Flint is giving him an explicit order, at least with regards to tomorrow's proceedings, how this problem he's personally discovered and brought back to him is to be dealt with. Something in him attuned to hierarchy of a kind he has had practice putting faith in wants to relax to it. Enough bickering, because the decision is already made. Accept it and go. He's done it before.
Practiced too in doing the opposite. Some other part of him that says he is not permitted to rest or relax if it means giving a single inch one way or another as far as mages are concerned. Even these ones, whose names he doesn't know, whose faces he won't recognise.
If these two impulses battle each other for preference, it happens in no time at all. "But you don't understand him," Marcus snaps. This, too, can't have come from nowhere. "Men like him, men that believe what they believe. Who've killed mages for doing what we're hoping we find, Abominations or no."
Flint, a brick wall. Calm, seated. Aggravating for it.
Something crackles at the base of his skull. He's aware of the sound more than he is the thing that causes it—the line of his spine straightening, the faint slant of shoulders becoming uncurved and the angle of his face shifts in response to that snapped protest as if it were a thing Flint might take on the chin or set between his teeth. Given the angle of the tent's canvas and the lopsided cast of the lamp within it, a somewhat uncharitable shadow lends itself to Flint's face—
Something in that has hooked at him. Patience wrenches a degree in the direction of stubborn.
In reply: a forced moment where Flint's hands shift there at his knees, squeezing and then releasing in quick succession instead of nipping back. It smacks of a compulsive, physical check. Something to balance against the metallic taste of irritation that's found his back teeth.
"All right." Doesn't sound like agreement or I understand. It sounds like a hovering shoe waiting to drop. "Then why don't you tell me how you imagine men like Rennit being made useful."
Exasperation in the brief glint of teeth, exhale, attention cast off to an irrelevant corner. Because Marcus does not believe men like Rennit can be made useful, deserve to be made useful, and so the question itself—
Well, it is a question part of him knows that Flint has to answer, each day. But he's not Flint, and they are talking about today, and tomorrow.
"We've shovels to spare," grousing. "And we've been letting mud gather in the camp."
"And when we're not in camp? How then?" comes rounding briskly back, as if the trajectory of his reply were inevitable regardless of what Marcus might say. They are not, actually, talking about today and tomorrow.
"You have me here." Flint's attention hasn't wavered. If anything, that slow eye has sharpened into examining Marcus as he is stood there at the edge of the mat. "May as well explain it to me now."
A certain amount of guardedness has instated itself, which normally happens when there is the sense of some kind of rhetorical trap closing around him. Marcus redirects focus back to Flint, assessing. Measuring the quality of the invitation.
"You decide the outcome you prefer," he says, finally. "You send the people who'll make it so. Let him slit Venatori throats if he and his like want to do the south any good."
He is still working his way around the edges of 'your strategy for its use will be an issue', setting his posture defensive, tone terse.
A second time at batting away the same interpretation, more baldly than before, fast on the heels of Flint's words, hackles up. Less decorum than before. Still, absurdly, minding his feet and the mat.
He only just catches Then stop acting like one between his teeth, biting down around the impulse. It's not what he means, and the day—his day—hasn't been so long as all that. He's not so impatient as all that. Still, the bristling is visible in him. It ripples through the line of his shoulders and in the shadow of his face, in the flex of his thumbs.
He is not, unfortunately, a man entirely impossible to read. Restraint looks strange on him.
"Neither am I," he says. Moderation like a hand on a tightened rein, bridle and bridled. "So if you would like to discuss this, then by all means. But I have better things to do than to sit here while you exercise all the ways you know how to say no."
A zigzagged looking over rather clearly projects a dispassionate sympathy: one of them exercising restraint, the other, less so.
Hard to pinpoint the exact thing in what Flint says that has Marcus lapse silent. Some imprecise location between the word discuss and that Flint has better things to do. A moment of standing in place, as if met with a series of sudden and conflicting urges and unable to select one fast enough, before a decision snaps closed and Marcus turns for the tent flaps. Or perhaps an absence of decision, driving him away.
Not a lot of dignity in that kind of exit, and no satisfying door slam to communicate his ill temper. He tells himself: there will be the morning to sort it out. He will be clearer headed. Can present a better argument. Or he won't, and take assurance that Tasia might well look the other way if he has to push Rennit into a ditch.
He can tell himself: this is the only thing he is angry about.
Predictably, there is no effort to pursue Marcus from the tent. And why would there be? Flint had put a decision to the man, and he'd made it. If there is anything left for doing, it's to tread across the more or less preserved mat and see the tent flap secured in Marcus' wake. If he's being generous, he might cross his fingers and hope the following day's work is uneventful. Not that everyone will be agreeable and reasonable in the daylight—that tips from generosity into outright delusion—, but optimism often requires being satisfied with the imperfect.
No. Come morning, everyone will either agree to do their jobs as directed or they will not. Either is a possibility that can be managed, and there's little use in dwelling on the what if's in the interim.
For the Commander of Riftwatch doesn't chase anyone across the camp. He certainly doesn't do so for the man he's rumored to be bedding. He doesn't race his griffon where the company might mark the foolishness, and he will not be made to look so any other way either. Gone are the days when Riftwatch's resident pirate captain might take his men play raiding through the Gallows' Satanalia court. If he was ever actually that man (if that kind of naked attempt at camaraderie were ever anything but a play for his own benefit), then he is not that man now. If there's more to be said then it will wait until morning.
—Seems the likeliest bet. More probable than the possibility that in an hour or two, the flap to Marcus' shared tent might be ripped back with Flint slanted inside the triangle opening. The rain has failed to moderate in the interim. Water sluices from his tarpaulin hood.
"You," is for Marcus' startled tentmate, frozen like a startled rabbit in their half of the narrow space. "Get out."
Edited (mutters over misc words) 2025-01-13 08:04 (UTC)
The tentmate, confronted with the possibility of protesting this demand or facing the weather outside, only spends a moment dithering before selecting which discomfort they can live with. Their own tarpaulin cloak gathered, thrown about their shoulders in the process of exiting the small space.
Hanging from a post, the lantern sways a little from the bustle, throwing its light about. Marcus has already shifted to sit on his bedroll, having been startled out of his slouch at the small space split open without warning. Dressed for the future prospect of sleep in contested territory, which means, still dressed, though he's taken his sodden boots off to dry, and he makes a less bulky shape without layers of armor and dripping cloak.
Some amount of readiness in his posture, like he's expecting Flint to say something about an attack on the camp, except the ways this doesn't make sense stop him from getting up any further.
So. Stares up at Flint instead, a little stupidly.
He ducks, dripping, inside the tent and allows the heavy flap to fall shut behind him. In similarly short order, Flint has shed the dripping tarpaulin and stuffed its hood in the pinch between the tent's canvas and the rope suspending its peak. The cloak hangs there easily, shedding rain from its waxed hem just inside what qualifies as the threshold.
The earth of the tent's floor is soft and cold, but not yet mud. There's no mat. Restricting the effects of his passage to the degrading entryway is the closest thing that qualifies as fair play.
"We're going to talk about this," Flint informs him. He's already moving to find a place to sit at the foot of Marcus' bedroll. "If not this, then anything else."
Marcus watches all of this and can't find it in himself to find offense for this invasion, the steady drip of rainwater puddling at the entryway. Slowly, by measures, he settles into a sit as Flint invites himself over, sits as well. Not quite relaxed but adopting some of the configurations of being so, a bent knee and a hand bracing his balance at his side.
Wonders if Flint has spent any of the past hour staring at the texture of the tent canvas, aware of the night inching by, aware of the waste of that alone. Or if Flint had better things to do.
He is here, regardless. Marcus lets out a breath as he is informed of these options, and then says, "Go on."
He settles there with a creaking of leathers, a shoulder slanted in deference to the tent's wall. It's not, exactly, the posture of a man who intends to speak some short piece and then go traipsing back into the gloom. Marcus' tentmate had better have a warm alternative to while away the time available to them.
(The last time he had reason to be in a tent this small, they had been beating their way back across a mountain to rejoin Riftwatch's forces. It had rained then too. And while there is nothing particularly intimate about being hunched in this tent tonight— Well. If nothing else, he has thought of the scar on Marcus' side. The one he left him with. That evidence of his own less than accomplished technique for tending wounds.)
"We have few mage hunters and fewer Templars with anything resembling power in the north," he says. Plain as everything he has said to Marcus tonight has been, this is somehow more so. The lay of Flint's attention on him is unprotected by that same degree. "But I understand your disgust. I know there are things that are unforgivable. I know that asking you to see any of that differently would be an impossible thing. I don't want what I need you to do to be misunderstood as asking for that."
It is an easy memory to summon, the tent in the mountains. Other easy memories: sitting at this range and speaking, in various states of dress. The informality of sharing the bedroll, sharing a level ground. Missing elements: cheap liquor, broken tension, anticipation or loose limbed satisfaction.
Marcus draws in a breath as Flint begins as invited, but meets that attention with his own. Might as well listen, now that the other man as crossed the muddy, rainy campsite to say his piece.
Quiet, first. Then, "It won't be first time," skating a look aside. "Loyalists and worse, Templars, the ones who come to Riftwatch, sent out or looked to as a counter to all our bleeding hearts."
Back to Flint. "Are we pandering to them or the task at hand?"
"If by the task at hand you mean tomorrow's work, then neither." Might sound empty and placating. He finds himself canting his temple and turning his hand in a small cautionary gesture that says Wait, though. He isn't finished. Give him just a moment.
There is a truth he knows and Marcus must understand it. The outcome he prefers—
"We're in a war to unseat an ancient Magister. That is a necessity if any of us are to have a future. You know this. I know this. If we didn't, we would be elsewhere. What I wish to avoid is arriving there and finding we've installed the Southern Divine in Corypheus' place. Which means the question I must ask is what are we doing here in Antiva—in the Marches and the Gallows—if not tidying after the hem of her Exalted March? What must I do to be certain Riftwatch can resist carrying her into Minrathous?"
The small linkages in the bigger tapestry. Marcus finds himself pulling in a breath as a means of gathering his patience as the bigger picture is sketched out between them, in light of swinging lamp, the sound of rain.
There was a certain window of time when he didn't trust Commander Flint. Didn't like him. These two things entwined, as the way Flint would speak to him, speak to anyone, the way people spoke of Flint, struck him as a kind of hallucination. The impression that Flint was someone you could sit down and talk to and, through some amount of conversation and planning, you might be able to alter the trajectory of the world by the time you were done.
So he'd struggled and doubted. Wrested with it some, too, when they started bedding down together, never mind that some borderland had being enterable from a moment of shared perspective. The experiences that not only drove them to Rifwatch, but into a shared tent, fingers sticky with blood.
"Explain it to me."
If there is resistance in him now, it is that he would like to be convinced.
Had he come across the flooded camp with the expectation that doing so would win him this foothold? Maybe. There's something like gratification when it comes, and certainly he has no intention of passing over it. So maybe he did know it. Or maybe he just needed to try. Sometimes those two things sit so close together that they become indistinguishable from one another. When this works, it's because he is right. He is right because it works.
There are times he's more given to question the correlation between those two things. This isn't one. That knotted pressure sensation behind his ribs isn't pleasure for getting his chance; it's a secret thrill of pride for Marcus having given it to him.
(An old habit, this thing in him hungry to be invited.)
Sat there on the end of the bedroll with his shoulder bent under the slant of the tent canvas, Flint holds the opportunity in his mouth as his attention flicks over Marcus. He marks the lay of his brow and the like of his mouth and the hum of the rain about them. The smell on the air is dirty lantern oil and nearby fields lying unsowed.
"To stop her installation in the North, Tevinter must be made into a trap. One that is either inescapable or too destructive to what the South believes to risk. We must make friends among the Imperium's slaves and the soporati and the mages likely to lose more than they gain as Corypheus' influence grows, and convince them that the things coming for them are worth the indignity of an alliance with one another.
"In doing so, there will be a moment where our efforts diverge with the March's and we will be unable to pretend otherwise. I would like to know when that moment is coming," he says. "I would like to decide where and how it occurs. I would like to arrange it so that if men like Rennit don't join us for it, that they hesitate long enough to be made irrelevant."
In what sense? The moment, he is sure, will dictate it. But this is how to fight a thing more dangerous or powerful than you. You must make it uncertain just long enough to strike it. Rennit, Flint thinks, would agree.
"That can never happen if he's unable to imagine a future for himself. If the Templars in our company—most of which have already refused the Order's call—see no escape for themselves, you know they're likely to stand in your way. To convince them otherwise, we must allow them to have a use now."
Of course Marcus is silent through all of this, having invited it, having a natural inclination towards listening when the situation requires it. When the person is deserving of it, as well. One of those attributes, divided in the company—the mages (most of them) would say he is infinitely patient, entirely receptive, ever interested. Everyone else, the very opposite.
Well, not everyone else. He listens to Flint now. The argument feels a little like a rearrangement of furniture in a room—unchanging walls, unchanging objects, a better configuration. Things he has known, understood, or believed he had known them, understood them. Perhaps not, given its quick crumbling when tested.
So he is silent after Flint finishes as well, doing some labours towards determining his own aversion to tonight's orders.
"Alright," after he is done. "And where do a pack of apostates figure in?"
If they figure in. If their welfare is being risked for allowing a mage hunter his voice, is their welfare a part of the tapestry?
It's a fair question. What is the future being pursued if it doesn't somehow incorporate those people, or people like them?
"I don't know," Flint confesses. It is a confession. He could pretend he knew everything, couldn't he? "Maybe they can be left alone, or maybe we send them to our allies in the Imperium. Maybe both those things are too dangerous. That's why I'd have the three of you go. Rennit will be wary to the delicacy of their situation; Tasia can help them if that's all they're desperate for; you can be relied on to see what's done is done correctly."
There is an element to all of this that requires shots taken in the dark. Trust—in the pull of a habit, if nothing else.
"I said Rennit should go. I didn't say you were obligated to follow him."
A slight tip of his head as if to ask: didn't he? If not to be led by, then be leashed by.
But the conviction behind this asking gesture doesn't make it all the way into words. Here is Flint, saying what he means, delivered with patient explanation. It is up to Marcus to take it, worry over it, crack it open if he must. The rain pummels the slanted canvas and he considers the quality of his own dissatisfaction.
"It's been years since the rebellion. We neither lost nor won. The sentiment at the time was, we'll come back to it. When the time is right, it'll be resolved one way or another. Templar armies burning through to stand against or the rise of a cohesive mage politic or some other decisive thing."
They've had conversations like this before, quiet and textured and understated, and always with the understanding that a great well of feeling likely exists beneath the surface. The drag of breath, louder in closer confines, as he draws air in, relaxes into his present forward slouch.
"And now we're here, in this war that won't end. If I don't see past it, that's alright. I only wouldn't want this to be all there is."
He has not touched Marcus at all this evening save for whatever incidental scuff of hands might have occurred while passing him that rag to mop rain up with, and here with whatever jostling is unavoidable when crowding in at the foot of an occupied bed roll. But Flint's moved to touch him now, and so the crook of his elbow unfolds and his hand finds Marcus's ankle. It makes for a loose anchor point. Which of them it's meant to anchor is unclear.
Both, maybe. Haven't they discussed how they want the same things?
"It won't have been for nothing. The cost is entirely unjustified, but eventually something will be had for it. I believe that," he says. "There would be no purpose in struggling otherwise."
No hardship or effort at all, then, to lift his hand to map his palm along Flint's knuckles. The familiar presence of rings. A more tender strip of skin at the inner wrist that Marcus finds with the tip of a finger, resting there.
He's spoken before of an uncertain future, of what he would do or where he would go, of not knowing. Tolerable, still, if only it didn't feel that this is that future, that it has happened, and mages will live in a kind of uncertain purgatory at the whims of who might make a decision on a given day. A muddier, murkier place than the little utopias they spoke into being while caged.
Tonight, anyway, it has felt like this. Less so, being touched and told otherwise.
"Aye," he says, after taking some account of the chill in skin, the texture of the damp sleeve his has slipped a knuckle beneath.
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no subject
A fiery temper doesn't need added heat to burn brighter. Kindling will do just as well, neutral and dry and thrown in without intention. "And you won't send a Templar because it would make a bad impression," Marcus says, heat entering his tone. Volume, for anyone who might be darting by the tent during the downpour or waiting beneath the awning. He would like to pace. There isn't the room. "Not that a Templar's judgment ought disqualify him, and nor a mage hunter's."
Because, of course, Marcus would disqualify them. Unnecessary, worthless, an added complication.
"You're asking me to defer to it."
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It's fine. Marcus' frustrations don't scratch at an animal thing in him which has been bred to go heavy handed with provocation. The thing which sometimes longs to see the more incompetent members of their company beaten with a stick and the dangerous ones disposed.
"No," he says. He doesn't set his jaw, and then unset the muscle again. He understands how Marcus would be frustrated by this, Flint makes himself think instead. The hurried tempo of the rain on tent canvas makes it difficult to keep the thought in a straight, orderly line. "I'm telling you to defer to mine."
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Practiced too in doing the opposite. Some other part of him that says he is not permitted to rest or relax if it means giving a single inch one way or another as far as mages are concerned. Even these ones, whose names he doesn't know, whose faces he won't recognise.
If these two impulses battle each other for preference, it happens in no time at all. "But you don't understand him," Marcus snaps. This, too, can't have come from nowhere. "Men like him, men that believe what they believe. Who've killed mages for doing what we're hoping we find, Abominations or no."
Flint, a brick wall. Calm, seated. Aggravating for it.
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Something in that has hooked at him. Patience wrenches a degree in the direction of stubborn.
In reply: a forced moment where Flint's hands shift there at his knees, squeezing and then releasing in quick succession instead of nipping back. It smacks of a compulsive, physical check. Something to balance against the metallic taste of irritation that's found his back teeth.
"All right." Doesn't sound like agreement or I understand. It sounds like a hovering shoe waiting to drop. "Then why don't you tell me how you imagine men like Rennit being made useful."
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Well, it is a question part of him knows that Flint has to answer, each day. But he's not Flint, and they are talking about today, and tomorrow.
"We've shovels to spare," grousing. "And we've been letting mud gather in the camp."
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"You have me here." Flint's attention hasn't wavered. If anything, that slow eye has sharpened into examining Marcus as he is stood there at the edge of the mat. "May as well explain it to me now."
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"You decide the outcome you prefer," he says, finally. "You send the people who'll make it so. Let him slit Venatori throats if he and his like want to do the south any good."
He is still working his way around the edges of 'your strategy for its use will be an issue', setting his posture defensive, tone terse.
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He scoffs in spite of himself (and that narrowing sense laid about Marcus' shoulders). Wouldn't it be convenient if that's all that any of this took?
"Why entertain a half measure? Suggest we cut his hand off and send the man back to the Inquisition."
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A second time at batting away the same interpretation, more baldly than before, fast on the heels of Flint's words, hackles up. Less decorum than before. Still, absurdly, minding his feet and the mat.
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He is not, unfortunately, a man entirely impossible to read. Restraint looks strange on him.
"Neither am I," he says. Moderation like a hand on a tightened rein, bridle and bridled. "So if you would like to discuss this, then by all means. But I have better things to do than to sit here while you exercise all the ways you know how to say no."
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Hard to pinpoint the exact thing in what Flint says that has Marcus lapse silent. Some imprecise location between the word discuss and that Flint has better things to do. A moment of standing in place, as if met with a series of sudden and conflicting urges and unable to select one fast enough, before a decision snaps closed and Marcus turns for the tent flaps. Or perhaps an absence of decision, driving him away.
Not a lot of dignity in that kind of exit, and no satisfying door slam to communicate his ill temper. He tells himself: there will be the morning to sort it out. He will be clearer headed. Can present a better argument. Or he won't, and take assurance that Tasia might well look the other way if he has to push Rennit into a ditch.
He can tell himself: this is the only thing he is angry about.
no subject
No. Come morning, everyone will either agree to do their jobs as directed or they will not. Either is a possibility that can be managed, and there's little use in dwelling on the what if's in the interim.
For the Commander of Riftwatch doesn't chase anyone across the camp. He certainly doesn't do so for the man he's rumored to be bedding. He doesn't race his griffon where the company might mark the foolishness, and he will not be made to look so any other way either. Gone are the days when Riftwatch's resident pirate captain might take his men play raiding through the Gallows' Satanalia court. If he was ever actually that man (if that kind of naked attempt at camaraderie were ever anything but a play for his own benefit), then he is not that man now. If there's more to be said then it will wait until morning.
—Seems the likeliest bet. More probable than the possibility that in an hour or two, the flap to Marcus' shared tent might be ripped back with Flint slanted inside the triangle opening. The rain has failed to moderate in the interim. Water sluices from his tarpaulin hood.
"You," is for Marcus' startled tentmate, frozen like a startled rabbit in their half of the narrow space. "Get out."
no subject
Hanging from a post, the lantern sways a little from the bustle, throwing its light about. Marcus has already shifted to sit on his bedroll, having been startled out of his slouch at the small space split open without warning. Dressed for the future prospect of sleep in contested territory, which means, still dressed, though he's taken his sodden boots off to dry, and he makes a less bulky shape without layers of armor and dripping cloak.
Some amount of readiness in his posture, like he's expecting Flint to say something about an attack on the camp, except the ways this doesn't make sense stop him from getting up any further.
So. Stares up at Flint instead, a little stupidly.
no subject
The earth of the tent's floor is soft and cold, but not yet mud. There's no mat. Restricting the effects of his passage to the degrading entryway is the closest thing that qualifies as fair play.
"We're going to talk about this," Flint informs him. He's already moving to find a place to sit at the foot of Marcus' bedroll. "If not this, then anything else."
no subject
Wonders if Flint has spent any of the past hour staring at the texture of the tent canvas, aware of the night inching by, aware of the waste of that alone. Or if Flint had better things to do.
He is here, regardless. Marcus lets out a breath as he is informed of these options, and then says, "Go on."
no subject
(The last time he had reason to be in a tent this small, they had been beating their way back across a mountain to rejoin Riftwatch's forces. It had rained then too. And while there is nothing particularly intimate about being hunched in this tent tonight— Well. If nothing else, he has thought of the scar on Marcus' side. The one he left him with. That evidence of his own less than accomplished technique for tending wounds.)
"We have few mage hunters and fewer Templars with anything resembling power in the north," he says. Plain as everything he has said to Marcus tonight has been, this is somehow more so. The lay of Flint's attention on him is unprotected by that same degree. "But I understand your disgust. I know there are things that are unforgivable. I know that asking you to see any of that differently would be an impossible thing. I don't want what I need you to do to be misunderstood as asking for that."
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Marcus draws in a breath as Flint begins as invited, but meets that attention with his own. Might as well listen, now that the other man as crossed the muddy, rainy campsite to say his piece.
Quiet, first. Then, "It won't be first time," skating a look aside. "Loyalists and worse, Templars, the ones who come to Riftwatch, sent out or looked to as a counter to all our bleeding hearts."
Back to Flint. "Are we pandering to them or the task at hand?"
no subject
There is a truth he knows and Marcus must understand it. The outcome he prefers—
"We're in a war to unseat an ancient Magister. That is a necessity if any of us are to have a future. You know this. I know this. If we didn't, we would be elsewhere. What I wish to avoid is arriving there and finding we've installed the Southern Divine in Corypheus' place. Which means the question I must ask is what are we doing here in Antiva—in the Marches and the Gallows—if not tidying after the hem of her Exalted March? What must I do to be certain Riftwatch can resist carrying her into Minrathous?"
no subject
There was a certain window of time when he didn't trust Commander Flint. Didn't like him. These two things entwined, as the way Flint would speak to him, speak to anyone, the way people spoke of Flint, struck him as a kind of hallucination. The impression that Flint was someone you could sit down and talk to and, through some amount of conversation and planning, you might be able to alter the trajectory of the world by the time you were done.
So he'd struggled and doubted. Wrested with it some, too, when they started bedding down together, never mind that some borderland had being enterable from a moment of shared perspective. The experiences that not only drove them to Rifwatch, but into a shared tent, fingers sticky with blood.
"Explain it to me."
If there is resistance in him now, it is that he would like to be convinced.
no subject
There are times he's more given to question the correlation between those two things. This isn't one. That knotted pressure sensation behind his ribs isn't pleasure for getting his chance; it's a secret thrill of pride for Marcus having given it to him.
(An old habit, this thing in him hungry to be invited.)
Sat there on the end of the bedroll with his shoulder bent under the slant of the tent canvas, Flint holds the opportunity in his mouth as his attention flicks over Marcus. He marks the lay of his brow and the like of his mouth and the hum of the rain about them. The smell on the air is dirty lantern oil and nearby fields lying unsowed.
"To stop her installation in the North, Tevinter must be made into a trap. One that is either inescapable or too destructive to what the South believes to risk. We must make friends among the Imperium's slaves and the soporati and the mages likely to lose more than they gain as Corypheus' influence grows, and convince them that the things coming for them are worth the indignity of an alliance with one another.
"In doing so, there will be a moment where our efforts diverge with the March's and we will be unable to pretend otherwise. I would like to know when that moment is coming," he says. "I would like to decide where and how it occurs. I would like to arrange it so that if men like Rennit don't join us for it, that they hesitate long enough to be made irrelevant."
In what sense? The moment, he is sure, will dictate it. But this is how to fight a thing more dangerous or powerful than you. You must make it uncertain just long enough to strike it. Rennit, Flint thinks, would agree.
"That can never happen if he's unable to imagine a future for himself. If the Templars in our company—most of which have already refused the Order's call—see no escape for themselves, you know they're likely to stand in your way. To convince them otherwise, we must allow them to have a use now."
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Well, not everyone else. He listens to Flint now. The argument feels a little like a rearrangement of furniture in a room—unchanging walls, unchanging objects, a better configuration. Things he has known, understood, or believed he had known them, understood them. Perhaps not, given its quick crumbling when tested.
So he is silent after Flint finishes as well, doing some labours towards determining his own aversion to tonight's orders.
"Alright," after he is done. "And where do a pack of apostates figure in?"
If they figure in. If their welfare is being risked for allowing a mage hunter his voice, is their welfare a part of the tapestry?
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"I don't know," Flint confesses. It is a confession. He could pretend he knew everything, couldn't he? "Maybe they can be left alone, or maybe we send them to our allies in the Imperium. Maybe both those things are too dangerous. That's why I'd have the three of you go. Rennit will be wary to the delicacy of their situation; Tasia can help them if that's all they're desperate for; you can be relied on to see what's done is done correctly."
There is an element to all of this that requires shots taken in the dark. Trust—in the pull of a habit, if nothing else.
"I said Rennit should go. I didn't say you were obligated to follow him."
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But the conviction behind this asking gesture doesn't make it all the way into words. Here is Flint, saying what he means, delivered with patient explanation. It is up to Marcus to take it, worry over it, crack it open if he must. The rain pummels the slanted canvas and he considers the quality of his own dissatisfaction.
"It's been years since the rebellion. We neither lost nor won. The sentiment at the time was, we'll come back to it. When the time is right, it'll be resolved one way or another. Templar armies burning through to stand against or the rise of a cohesive mage politic or some other decisive thing."
They've had conversations like this before, quiet and textured and understated, and always with the understanding that a great well of feeling likely exists beneath the surface. The drag of breath, louder in closer confines, as he draws air in, relaxes into his present forward slouch.
"And now we're here, in this war that won't end. If I don't see past it, that's alright. I only wouldn't want this to be all there is."
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Both, maybe. Haven't they discussed how they want the same things?
"It won't have been for nothing. The cost is entirely unjustified, but eventually something will be had for it. I believe that," he says. "There would be no purpose in struggling otherwise."
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He's spoken before of an uncertain future, of what he would do or where he would go, of not knowing. Tolerable, still, if only it didn't feel that this is that future, that it has happened, and mages will live in a kind of uncertain purgatory at the whims of who might make a decision on a given day. A muddier, murkier place than the little utopias they spoke into being while caged.
Tonight, anyway, it has felt like this. Less so, being touched and told otherwise.
"Aye," he says, after taking some account of the chill in skin, the texture of the damp sleeve his has slipped a knuckle beneath.
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