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.
Say nothing, and let the weight of his hand at Marcus's ankle and the finger that has eased between skin and his rain heavy sleeve do their work. That would see them safely enough through this moment. He has already done the thing that needed doing. Not pacifying Rowntree—an impossibility—, but smoothing raised hackles to whatever extent is possible. Tomorrow is a more manageable thing with just that much done. If his aim were only to soothe what feelings required soothing to see this apostate question resolved quickly and quietly, there's little else that needs saying.
Instead, a faint tightening of the hand under Marcus's palm and Flint saying, "The Imperium has taken a great deal from me. A life. My home. The fear of that being done here has driven the South to take those from you and yours as well. Know that I'm not blind to that. Know that it figures in my thinking even when you're not in the room."
He might expect Flint to leave, awareness of a temperature being lowered, of the purpose in seeing himself here across the camp. He finds himself hoping he won't, enough that he might protest if he felt the other man about to collect himself.
Listens. Does not appear surprised, even in understated ways he might show it. It doesn't surprise because he is aware of the gravity of loss when he is near it. It has been spoken to in passing reference. He has felt it when Flint has bore him at arm's length, has felt it when that distance began collapsing, relenting. He runs his thumb over the edge of bone he feels at Flint's wrist.
"I know," Marcus says. "I do."
He said something careless, he thinks. Feels some ache, renewed, for this careful handling. Sifts around for something else to offer, and says instead, "Come here."
For a moment, Flint is still in the face of this invitation. His is a steady, heavy hand, and his inspection of Marcus's face has a certain unflinching quality. It's as if he's measuring something—not the man opposite him, but the effect of his own place here in the tent. Judging if he has been heard. Watching for some brittle edge. What I know, I do means, and whether there isn't some cruelty to demanding to be given this leeway and then moving into it the moment Marcus offers the space.
Only that when he moves, the trajectory is inevitable. He could no more peel his wrist free and refuse him than he could traipse back to his own tent without getting rained on. Marcus asks and he eventually answers. It's a pattern they're working themselves into.
In the narrow tent, Flint shifts in across the bend of Marcus's knee. Clumsy. A little too big for the space. He stinks of rain and wet leather and shoe polish. Despite the stolid shape of his presence at the foot of the bedroll, by the time he gets as far as kissing Marcus there's something crooked and relieved in the shape of his mouth. Please do, actually, give him this. He walked across the camp not certain he'd get it.
Marcus meets him a little halfway, leaning in. The space is awkward and cramped. He is used to it, used to operating under these conditions even with the occasional indulgence of a bedroom. Doesn't mind it. Breathes in deeper as they share the space, taking in this array of scents, welcoming them as readily as the kiss itself.
He closes his hand around a fold of wet coat, holding them both to it. He gives him a slow and shallow kiss, sweet for it, while rain patters and a finger of flame twitches on its wick.
Stays near, when it breaks. Keeps his fist closed.
"Most times," he says, after a couple of breaths, "I think you're the only one here who does understand."
Like he does, anyway. The depth of the thing. What changes are required. What it all might cost.
The huff of his breath in that narrow space is half scoff, half sigh—the lingering ghost of some frustration lodged in place long before this evening. His hand, having found it's way to Marcus's shoulder and neck by reflex, shifts to set his thumb behind the ear. Pressing absently, a pulse of contact that's whatever the opposite of a flinch is.
"Everyone knows its going to be an ugly business. They only imagine they haven't come to it yet."
At it's face, it's a fundamentally absurd thing to say from the inside of a war. But Marcus had said it once. That this is a life. Those have a strange way of making everything seem less desperate.
Case in point: some crack in the blunt force of him becomes a wrinkle ground in at the corner of Flint's mouth. Humorless, maybe, but a point of flexion in his assembled sharp face. He gives Marcus the smallest shake by the thumb pressed behind his ear, the fingers wrapped in over the worn soft collar of his shirt.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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?
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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 subject
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.
no subject
Instead, a faint tightening of the hand under Marcus's palm and Flint saying, "The Imperium has taken a great deal from me. A life. My home. The fear of that being done here has driven the South to take those from you and yours as well. Know that I'm not blind to that. Know that it figures in my thinking even when you're not in the room."
no subject
Listens. Does not appear surprised, even in understated ways he might show it. It doesn't surprise because he is aware of the gravity of loss when he is near it. It has been spoken to in passing reference. He has felt it when Flint has bore him at arm's length, has felt it when that distance began collapsing, relenting. He runs his thumb over the edge of bone he feels at Flint's wrist.
"I know," Marcus says. "I do."
He said something careless, he thinks. Feels some ache, renewed, for this careful handling. Sifts around for something else to offer, and says instead, "Come here."
no subject
Only that when he moves, the trajectory is inevitable. He could no more peel his wrist free and refuse him than he could traipse back to his own tent without getting rained on. Marcus asks and he eventually answers. It's a pattern they're working themselves into.
In the narrow tent, Flint shifts in across the bend of Marcus's knee. Clumsy. A little too big for the space. He stinks of rain and wet leather and shoe polish. Despite the stolid shape of his presence at the foot of the bedroll, by the time he gets as far as kissing Marcus there's something crooked and relieved in the shape of his mouth. Please do, actually, give him this. He walked across the camp not certain he'd get it.
no subject
He closes his hand around a fold of wet coat, holding them both to it. He gives him a slow and shallow kiss, sweet for it, while rain patters and a finger of flame twitches on its wick.
Stays near, when it breaks. Keeps his fist closed.
"Most times," he says, after a couple of breaths, "I think you're the only one here who does understand."
Like he does, anyway. The depth of the thing. What changes are required. What it all might cost.
no subject
"Everyone knows its going to be an ugly business. They only imagine they haven't come to it yet."
At it's face, it's a fundamentally absurd thing to say from the inside of a war. But Marcus had said it once. That this is a life. Those have a strange way of making everything seem less desperate.
Case in point: some crack in the blunt force of him becomes a wrinkle ground in at the corner of Flint's mouth. Humorless, maybe, but a point of flexion in his assembled sharp face. He gives Marcus the smallest shake by the thumb pressed behind his ear, the fingers wrapped in over the worn soft collar of his shirt.
"It's an opportunity, Marcus."