Marcus moves his grip from shoulder to somewhere below the nape of Flint's neck. Palm firm and grip tight, something he hopes feels grounding and assuring than anything else. The tremors will stop on their own accord and no sooner.
Gently, kneeling up beside Flint, he goes and touches the cold-damp linen to that head wound, pressing once there. There is a split second of entropic resistance that threatens another temporal loop, which would be rather ill-timed, but it's merely a skipped heartbeat in the scheme of things. That other hand moves up, thumb working alongside spine.
There hasn't been time for blood to coagulate very much, even before factoring in sweat and adrenaline and the free way blood tends to gush from these kinds of injuries, but still, he holds it there for a moment before lifting away. The gash is quick to fill again, but there isn't much else to see save to confirm its presence, and nothing worse.
Reapplies pressure.
"We should call in riders," he suggests. "Send for reinforcements, if they're guarding this passage so well."
And perhaps extract them both, or only Flint, he doesn't say, and he can rationalise how it would make sense for him to take over a griffon, see the Commander back to the forward camp.
"More likely we've just punched past their armor, and will find only scattered resistance from here forward."
He is distantly aware of the cold touch of the cloth, and the firm shape of hands on him. More distinct are the dusty gleam off the man's vambrace, and the shape of the bladed staff on the ground alongside them. A sour tang of sulfur on the air. The blood on Marcus' chin.
And if that's not so—if they wind their way carefully into the shrine from here and find it crawling with Venatori—, then what's to stop them from falling quietly back to call up those reinforcements?
"Nearly had you," he says, and must be referring to the bite from the kris dagger.
There's no reply for this first part. Either Flint will stand steady on two feet, once Marcus lets him try, or he won't.
There will be an acute thrum of discomfort as Marcus turns the cloth in his hand to face it now with its dry side. It signals some transition, swapping hands and shifting where he kneels, resting back on haunches. His spare hand comes to close at Flint's arm above the elbow. It's a ghost of an instinct, like putting his hand at the neck of an uneasy horse.
Flint's remark gets a scoff from Marcus—less cocky, more disbelieving. Yes, he was nearly had.
His focus twitches from his hand to Flint's eyes, a graze of a look, sharp edged but ironic. "He was miles away," he disputes.
That plain side of the cloth does elicit a flinch, which is a kind of relief. The world beginning to flow more or less in the correct direction, the prickle tug of the patchy Veil testing that reaction notwithstanding. These things should, by rights, sting a little.
He hums, a low skeptical noise that slants toward a teeth bared breed of humor—something about the blood on Marcus' face would seem to serve as a convenient counterargument—and closes the bloodied eye against the prickle of pain radiating out from under the applied pressure. A hand pops up under the influence of the same instinct, bicep flexing under the hand on it as Flint twists his arm up to find a similar bracing hold at Marcus' elbow. Grip firm, even while the muscle and sinew behind it twitch and shiver out against being asked to hold still.
Give or take the half seconds that the rippling of the Fade steals away, he counts silently to ten. Then tests unraveling his grip from Marcus' elbow in favor of raising it to cover the hand presently holding the cut of cloth to his head.
"I have it." It's fine. "Fetch me that crossbow. And if the bowman carried a belt hook for it, I'll have need of that as well."
Somewhere between Flint bracing his hand at Marcus' arm and then travelling up to manage the improvised compress, there's the flicker of impulse to apply ice-wet rag to face, and smooth back the blood drying by Flint's eye. Maybe, if time looped in on itself, or Flint counted to twenty, he'd have given in.
What happens anyway upon Flint's grasp is a sort of vice-grip in his chest in that span of silence, which had clenched so hard and fast in response to the sound of sword slammed through meat and bone, and in this aftermath, has been slower to reapply. Gallows humour passes and, with less fidgeting to occupy himself with, Marcus' expression resettles back into that overwound neutrality, a pull of tension at his brow.
He gives over the rag, a breath out that communicates some amount of put uponness, but gets to his feet, leaving off Flint's arm. He takes up his staff again, where blackened gore marks up dark iron, still warm to the touch but no longer fiery hot.
Paces off for that narrow chokepoint once more, where it smells like charred meat.
The crossbow and it's associated belt hook are fetched. And Flint, when he is permitted to clamber to his feet with the makedo compress still applied to the cut at his hairline, is steadier on his feet than it seems like he ought to be. There is no reason not to press forward.
So they do, winding through the jagged series of tunnels and chambers that make up the defunct shrine—treading steadily downward until the thickening presence of Venatori, and the boiling up of darkspawn and ancient undead, does in fact demand those aforementioned reinforcements.
It makes for a long, miserable fucking day.
The blood on Flint's face has turned that old, front black by the time they claw their way back toward the forward camp. And he has tossed away the stolen crossbow by then, having relied entirely upon the sword in his belt for the last stage of their work. Sliding out of the griffon's saddle though, he doesn't look tired or ruined—only battered, and lightly at that. The swirl of momentum which follows directs him to the acting division head offices—a single expansive tent subject to the hot gusts of weather coming off the plains to the northwest—into which he disappears for some hours.
Presumably, he washes his face during this meeting. That said, it seems unlikely that he says anything more about the injury.
When the head of your division is your partner on a mission, there is no need for debriefs, further strategising, opinions or perspectives. Flint already has plenty.
And so when Marcus' boots find solid ground, he finds he is free of obligation. Well. Almost. He sees to the griffons, first, freeing them of their equipment, feeding and brushing down, ensuring Monster gets further attention so as not to incite any jealousies, and all of this he is a little too tired to do but it feels good, anyway. Sensible labour that requires nothing from him but a dedication to tasks he knows well.
He gets himself clean, after, and more than just his face. The water in the basin he is using is quick to turn a murky grey, and needs a few refillings before he is satisfied.
It is late. Darkness is slow to encroach. The nights in the desert are colder than you'd anticipate. He has found a place by a fire, hair still damp from determined efforts to clean it of soot and dust and blood and tied neatly back, a cloak over his shoulders, and a scrubbing brush in hand he is using to see to his staff. Beside him, lodged in the earth beside the blanket he is using as his seat, a half-emptied bowl of the slow-simmered stew some Diplomacy members had helpfully seen to over the day.
This spot by a fire also, incidentally, affords him view of the larger tent, where he flicks his attention up now and then.
Whatever conversation occupies the denizens of that tent drags mercilessly long. But eventually, a flare of light in the burgeoning darkness: the entrance to the tent rolling back, and a figure that isn't Flint slipping free. Then, the recognizable shape of him turned into a brief, lingering silhouette—he and someone else loitering momentarily at the threshold to exchange a further word before the tent flap is allowed to fall back and they become dusky shapes in the purple twilight.
The fire is also, incidentally, more or less along one of the most likely footpaths Flint might take to go from the point A of the field office to point B, his own tent. Though if not for some glint of firelight off the staff's sharp edge drawing the eye, he might not have given it so much as a passing glance. He is tired (though looks less so out here in the forgiving slant of the dark), and wants to peel himself out of these gory clothes, and to wash off the stink of murder and sweat. The sticky edges of the poultice one of the healers had been called in to apply while and and the other division heads had still been bent over their table is already beginning to itch, and if he does those other things then maybe he will be able to ignore it.
But the gleam of some scrubbed clean section of blade prompts a glance flickering in the fire's direction. Captures a brief scrape of eye contact. A nod, made in passing.
Once fire-crusted grime has been worked off the iron, out of grooves and runic engravings, it's gone over with oil and a rag. Checked over by light of the fireplace, and then he sets upon cleaning the bowl. There's been no battle that Marcus has been through, no matter how gore-spattered, how sizeable the victory or total the loss, that he hasn't come out the other side ravenously hungry, and tonight is no exception.
He leaves his spot by the fire. There are watch rotations already established of which he is not a part, but he relieves someone of theirs so they can enjoy a break for the excuse of standing somewhere empty and cold and dark at the very fringes of their camp and put a further dent in the limited supply of cigarettes he carries with him. Flips a scorpion off his boot with a turn of his ankle. Contemplates this truly dizzying amount of landscape that is switch to diminish from the scope of his vision, darkness swallowing sand dunes and red rock rendered indigo in dwindling dusk.
When he makes his way back to the camp, he moves towards where there are casks of water and ale both, the latter being of the same instinct someone had when they made sure to pack spices with the cooking supplies. He fills a tankard with it, and upon turning from that spot, and noting the light still on in Flint's tent, he sets a course.
Does not barge through the entryway, folded closed against desert vermin and company.
"It's not tied," is succinct an invitation as any.
The slanting tent is no back country lean-to; it harbors a low cot, a writing desk and a low-backed seat that's more really more stool than chair, a coarse mat laid over the rocky ground, all of which must collapse or roll up to be backed onto a griffon without much imposition. The tent's dimensions require only a slight stoop from any occupant choosing to remain standing. Flint though is sitting posted at the writing desk, and has twisted only partially round to acknowledge Marcus' entry.
It the intervening interval, Flint's washed and changed. If any trace of blood or dirt remains on his person, it's a failing of having to scrub down out of a basin and not a lack of dedication to the task of setting himself back to rights. Even so, the light of the little oil lamp illuminating the page under his pen is less than flattering—renders the man in craggy touches of shadow, and paints wide dark swathes from cheek to under-eye.
The point of his attention flicks, briefly, to the tankard in Marcus' possession, and then makes to rock back to the half written page.
"You would do well to consider some rest."
There will be more work tomorrow. With the Venatori bitten back, further depths of the shrine await exploration. Given what all they faced today, they can hardly hope to send Research there without well-armed and capable company.
And he will. There is no choice in that matter, physically or by way of obligation, but Marcus still enters, letting the flap fall closed behind him. Head ducked and shoulders forward to accommodate the closer quarters. And now there's a distinct familiarity in nearness, but apparently in service to placing the tankard down on Flint's desk.
Smokey cling is far more reminiscent of recent cigarettes, thinner and sharper than the earthier black summonings on a battlefield. Doesn't linger in the air by the time he moves for the other available place to sit, which is at the edge of the cot.
The angle of his face alters by a half degree in answer to the tankard's placement, eye line resistant to being pulled from the page a second time but attention freely sliding sideways in spite of that. To the tankard, to the brief nearness of Marcus' presence and the shadow it paints on the canvas above them. The continued scratching of the pen is slow to resume as that shadow withdraws.
"I don't imagine Rutyer will be going in my stead."
His hand gets as far as completing the end its interrupted sentence before the pen is laid aside in favor of the cup.
Flint is allowed to drink from it without further commentary, first. Marcus' focus lists towards him, snags on something else. The shadow on canvas, or the loose fold of his own hands. Not a restless roving of focus, meditatively cycled through.
When it does cycle back to Flint, and desert-warmed ale is appreciated or otherwise, there's a small moment of study, for the faint streak of dirt or soot or something else that stripes a sickle's curve along the back of exposed neck. Maybe if he'd lingered there at Flint's seat at the desk, he'd have smudged it away with his palm, his thumb, the texture of skin and the starting fade of bristle at hairline easy to recall, and it's the fact that this thought feels like something sharp and broken off that finally prompts him to speak—
"I'm sorry for," and there is a tinge of regret, already, for words summoned into the tent. Apologies are clumsy things, easy to misuse. Nothing for it now. "That I didn't act differently first, today."
There has been plenty of time to consider alternate actions, particularly when twisting time had afforded him opportunity to enact them.
He has only just set the cup aside—privately grateful for the thin tang of the ale, which does more the alleviate the itching thirst at the roof of his mouth than any water today has—, and moved to take up the pen again when Marcus says this. Short the inkwell, he twists in the low backed chair to look at the man perched there in the cot's edge rather than dip the pen and continue across the page.
The lamplight cuts in through the bristle of red beard; melts the skeptical look he paints Marcus with into something less cutting.
"That you didn't act differently," he repeats back.
And notes that on a delay, his phrasing wants for explanation. For perspective. He can imagine that being in the thick of a thing is different to being several paces back, as fast as it all was. The teeth of that internal pressure don't let up.
"I left you open to the sword," he explains, customarily quiet, sedate gravel-edged tone in a space rendered private, and also safe, relatively speaking. "I focused on the wrong thing. It was only good fortune that there was a window to correct it."
It is different—warrants consideration. How aware had he been of that wall snarling up out of the crevasse floor as he'd been yanked down toward the sharp end of the swordman's arm in the moment, versus here in the security of the little tent far removed from that place and with only the tingling sense memory of some length of steel punched through him left to clench at his belly? Not very aware. Cognizant of the fact only to be more or less grateful that it shouldn't have played out a second time.
(The less consideration dedicated to that uneasy, queasy twinge in him that accompanies the thought, the better.)
"It was fortunate." All things being even, that's true enough. On most days, he prefers the experience of not being a corpse. Flint's attention remains narrowed on Marcus, brow set low and an idle shifting of the hand at the edge of the desk—thumb fussing against some spot of chipping veneer.
"I suppose next you'll expect me to express some apology in return for firing on the mage instead of the assassin."
(There had been an opening to sink a bolt in the lightly armored Venatori at close range before they'd vaulted over the patch of shared cover with those jagged twin daggers. He'd intentionally not taken it.)
His focus sharpens, some, a subtle telegraph of an attempt at reading Flint, divining sarcasm or sincerity from tone, the minor pulls of expression. More curious than anxious. A pause follows as recollects what Flint means. Similarly, it's difficult to discern the other man's decision making in a moment that was heady with adrenaline, having only felt the sharp sting of the knife at his chin some seconds after, fast beating heart pushing blood quicker through veins.
"No," is the simplest, truest response.
No, he wouldn't expect it. No, he doesn't require apology. Both of those things. But mainly, "It isn't the same."
There's no inquiring cock of the head, no softening upward slant of the chin. So maybe it's not really a real question when he asks—
"Isn't it?"
But rather an assessment, dialed in on Marcus in order see watch in which direction his answer breaks having already internally determined which trajectory would be preferable and which wouldn't. Why, because Marcus had only suffered a nick to the chin? Because he'd survived it?
(Some other answer that he has tucked up close somewhere he can feel, but not see.)
insistent, still quiet. There is an easy logic to follow here, he knows, he has contemplated it while watching the desert go from red to inky purple and shrink into blackness, he has twisted it through his fingers while raking stiff brush bristle over iron. They are alive, through virtue rather than fault of their own actions.
But there is a snarl in it, thorny and stubborn.
"I know what a near miss feels like," he says. "Being in one, seeing one. But that wasn't it. There was a world where it wasn't, for a moment. And I'm sorry."
Here, a twitched gesture, almost a shrug, as if to offload something.
It makes logical sense to check this. To dismiss the overture of Marcus' guilt or sentimentality or whatever this is meant to be. To refuse this as something that doesn't belong to him; wipe away the shape of this because he doesn't care to have the thing driving it hooked onto his person.
Yes, it was lucky there was some opportunity to take a second crack at the thing. But it's not as if whatever Marcus had done during that first pass had been particularly to blame. These things happen. They happen to good men with sturdy sword arm's and sure aim. It is rare, technically speaking, for anyone in his profession—the ones has held, the one he keeps now—to avoid the thing forever. Eventually, that Venatori short sword or one like it will find him again and there will be no changing it then. That's true no matter what ownership Marcus Rowntree might prefer to have over the matter.
He might easily say so.
But rather than curtail him, Flint looks at Marcus across the narrow tent—glower painted on by the unflattering slant of shadow more so than it is legitimate, the world having a habit of contriving to make his brow appear heavier and more serious than it may actually be.
"Well," he says. "Thanks for not fucking it a second time."
It's probably an arrogance unique to battlemages given their amount of control over as many elements of a scrap as they have. Where to throw ones concentration, who to protect and when, what part of the field to manipulate and which enemy to target—all quick decisions that those skilled in warfare might fancy themselves adept at managing, of equal importance as how good a person is at magic at all. It's a falsehood to think that all mages are capable or even competent soldiers, just for virtue of their power. It's a falsehood to think that even those adept at combat are in charge of how that combat goes.
But there is some ragged edge of belief in this one error that has hooked into him and compelled him to this tent and the conversation in it. Marcus tolerates that apparent glower with the ease of someone who has, in many respects, gotten used to it.
And doesn't laugh, but makes a sound is the beginning of it.
"Welcome," shorthand acceptance, dry. It feels like a trade. Apology given over for a brusque gratitude he wasn't after. It eases the thing that had set its teeth in him, a little. Marcus would not say in so many words that he came here to make himself feel better.
But he didn't come here to soothe anyone's else's apprehensions either.
Flint's study of him flicks down to Marcus' joined hands, then scatters back up along some impulsive unplanned track. When his own hand shifts from the chipped desk's edge, it moves after the cup—a certain impression that it's ultimately headed back for the discarded pen.
"I trust you'll keep all of this in mind tomorrow with your charges," Flint says, the low chair creaking gently under his weight as his attention slides back toward the page. It isn't a dismissal, strictly, which Marcus should know. He's certainly been in the receiving end of every kind of one.
The cot squeaks on its folding parts as Marcus pushes himself up to stand.
No Aye, Commander, just sort of a noise that acknowledges this thing Flint has said. His shadow doesn't shrink on the wall where it would if he'd made for the entryway, but skews off strange in scale as he moves nearer. Contact established with a hand light at Flint's shoulder, sort of a warning for the second, which lands gently and inevitably more intimate at the curve where muscle connects shoulder to spine.
Higher than where the sword jutted out, but he doesn't really recall, and it's not his aim to pantomime some kind of physical confirmation of the absence of killing blow. It's his aim instead to squeeze over the muscle appended to sword arm, to brush his thumb against the streak of dirt at the back of Flint's neck.
The specific rub of his thumb makes the purpose clear. Missed a spot.
Unsurprising. Possibly there are also little flakes of blood mixed in with the dusky sand under his fingernails and in strange places he wouldn't think to scrub—shadows of things that won't come fully away until they've returned to the Gallows and he's soaked himself in the deepest basin he can commandeer.
But here— a faint twitch, and now that gentle inquiring cant of the temple. Not turning so far as to raise his eyes to Marcus, but laying over to such a degree that the shadow plays differently on his face and over the desk, and that the glow of the oil lamp touches pale eyelashes and the fine hairs hatching the width of Flint's cheek.
Near to that scuff of thumb, the muscle is stiff and tender. Something in his back aches, and it has very little to do with the creeping memory of the Venatori sword and everything to do with the struggle of clambering up out of the crevasse and because, against all odds, he is becoming an old man. Because it's cold in the desert. Because he occasionally wants—
He sighs out through the nose. Dips the pen in the neglected inkwell. If the line of his neck alters faintly under the span of Marcus' fingers, then it can be because he's bowing his head to the work.
Dirt removed, that touch travels down that well-mapped line of the back of Flint's neck, a gentle seeking out of muscle that feels strung through with cord, tight and overworked. Marcus presses against it, and when there is no immediate verbal objection, the working over it with his thumb that doesn't pretend at being something other than an attempt at easing the physical evidence of a long and miserable day.
Firm, but not just jostling. He imagines that ruining penmanship is more likely to see him turned away than most other things that surprisingly have yet to. Palm pressing against the wing of muscle lower down. His other hand keeps a familiar hold of shoulder, resting there.
They like to touch each other. He likes to touch Flint, and there's yet to be spoken analysis of what it means when it isn't in the service to getting off. What itch is being scratched. Here, working down tense muscle in a way he knows to be pleasing, it certainly scratches at something in himself, not wholly related to that panicky clench that was slow to release.
He'll do this for a while, disinclined to interrupt work with more chatter he hasn't an instinct for. Content to.
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no subject
Gently, kneeling up beside Flint, he goes and touches the cold-damp linen to that head wound, pressing once there. There is a split second of entropic resistance that threatens another temporal loop, which would be rather ill-timed, but it's merely a skipped heartbeat in the scheme of things. That other hand moves up, thumb working alongside spine.
There hasn't been time for blood to coagulate very much, even before factoring in sweat and adrenaline and the free way blood tends to gush from these kinds of injuries, but still, he holds it there for a moment before lifting away. The gash is quick to fill again, but there isn't much else to see save to confirm its presence, and nothing worse.
Reapplies pressure.
"We should call in riders," he suggests. "Send for reinforcements, if they're guarding this passage so well."
And perhaps extract them both, or only Flint, he doesn't say, and he can rationalise how it would make sense for him to take over a griffon, see the Commander back to the forward camp.
no subject
He is distantly aware of the cold touch of the cloth, and the firm shape of hands on him. More distinct are the dusty gleam off the man's vambrace, and the shape of the bladed staff on the ground alongside them. A sour tang of sulfur on the air. The blood on Marcus' chin.
And if that's not so—if they wind their way carefully into the shrine from here and find it crawling with Venatori—, then what's to stop them from falling quietly back to call up those reinforcements?
"Nearly had you," he says, and must be referring to the bite from the kris dagger.
no subject
There will be an acute thrum of discomfort as Marcus turns the cloth in his hand to face it now with its dry side. It signals some transition, swapping hands and shifting where he kneels, resting back on haunches. His spare hand comes to close at Flint's arm above the elbow. It's a ghost of an instinct, like putting his hand at the neck of an uneasy horse.
Flint's remark gets a scoff from Marcus—less cocky, more disbelieving. Yes, he was nearly had.
His focus twitches from his hand to Flint's eyes, a graze of a look, sharp edged but ironic. "He was miles away," he disputes.
no subject
He hums, a low skeptical noise that slants toward a teeth bared breed of humor—something about the blood on Marcus' face would seem to serve as a convenient counterargument—and closes the bloodied eye against the prickle of pain radiating out from under the applied pressure. A hand pops up under the influence of the same instinct, bicep flexing under the hand on it as Flint twists his arm up to find a similar bracing hold at Marcus' elbow. Grip firm, even while the muscle and sinew behind it twitch and shiver out against being asked to hold still.
Give or take the half seconds that the rippling of the Fade steals away, he counts silently to ten. Then tests unraveling his grip from Marcus' elbow in favor of raising it to cover the hand presently holding the cut of cloth to his head.
"I have it." It's fine. "Fetch me that crossbow. And if the bowman carried a belt hook for it, I'll have need of that as well."
no subject
What happens anyway upon Flint's grasp is a sort of vice-grip in his chest in that span of silence, which had clenched so hard and fast in response to the sound of sword slammed through meat and bone, and in this aftermath, has been slower to reapply. Gallows humour passes and, with less fidgeting to occupy himself with, Marcus' expression resettles back into that overwound neutrality, a pull of tension at his brow.
He gives over the rag, a breath out that communicates some amount of put uponness, but gets to his feet, leaving off Flint's arm. He takes up his staff again, where blackened gore marks up dark iron, still warm to the touch but no longer fiery hot.
Paces off for that narrow chokepoint once more, where it smells like charred meat.
no subject
So they do, winding through the jagged series of tunnels and chambers that make up the defunct shrine—treading steadily downward until the thickening presence of Venatori, and the boiling up of darkspawn and ancient undead, does in fact demand those aforementioned reinforcements.
It makes for a long, miserable fucking day.
The blood on Flint's face has turned that old, front black by the time they claw their way back toward the forward camp. And he has tossed away the stolen crossbow by then, having relied entirely upon the sword in his belt for the last stage of their work. Sliding out of the griffon's saddle though, he doesn't look tired or ruined—only battered, and lightly at that. The swirl of momentum which follows directs him to the acting division head offices—a single expansive tent subject to the hot gusts of weather coming off the plains to the northwest—into which he disappears for some hours.
Presumably, he washes his face during this meeting. That said, it seems unlikely that he says anything more about the injury.
no subject
And so when Marcus' boots find solid ground, he finds he is free of obligation. Well. Almost. He sees to the griffons, first, freeing them of their equipment, feeding and brushing down, ensuring Monster gets further attention so as not to incite any jealousies, and all of this he is a little too tired to do but it feels good, anyway. Sensible labour that requires nothing from him but a dedication to tasks he knows well.
He gets himself clean, after, and more than just his face. The water in the basin he is using is quick to turn a murky grey, and needs a few refillings before he is satisfied.
It is late. Darkness is slow to encroach. The nights in the desert are colder than you'd anticipate. He has found a place by a fire, hair still damp from determined efforts to clean it of soot and dust and blood and tied neatly back, a cloak over his shoulders, and a scrubbing brush in hand he is using to see to his staff. Beside him, lodged in the earth beside the blanket he is using as his seat, a half-emptied bowl of the slow-simmered stew some Diplomacy members had helpfully seen to over the day.
This spot by a fire also, incidentally, affords him view of the larger tent, where he flicks his attention up now and then.
no subject
The fire is also, incidentally, more or less along one of the most likely footpaths Flint might take to go from the point A of the field office to point B, his own tent. Though if not for some glint of firelight off the staff's sharp edge drawing the eye, he might not have given it so much as a passing glance. He is tired (though looks less so out here in the forgiving slant of the dark), and wants to peel himself out of these gory clothes, and to wash off the stink of murder and sweat. The sticky edges of the poultice one of the healers had been called in to apply while and and the other division heads had still been bent over their table is already beginning to itch, and if he does those other things then maybe he will be able to ignore it.
But the gleam of some scrubbed clean section of blade prompts a glance flickering in the fire's direction. Captures a brief scrape of eye contact. A nod, made in passing.
no subject
Once fire-crusted grime has been worked off the iron, out of grooves and runic engravings, it's gone over with oil and a rag. Checked over by light of the fireplace, and then he sets upon cleaning the bowl. There's been no battle that Marcus has been through, no matter how gore-spattered, how sizeable the victory or total the loss, that he hasn't come out the other side ravenously hungry, and tonight is no exception.
He leaves his spot by the fire. There are watch rotations already established of which he is not a part, but he relieves someone of theirs so they can enjoy a break for the excuse of standing somewhere empty and cold and dark at the very fringes of their camp and put a further dent in the limited supply of cigarettes he carries with him. Flips a scorpion off his boot with a turn of his ankle. Contemplates this truly dizzying amount of landscape that is switch to diminish from the scope of his vision, darkness swallowing sand dunes and red rock rendered indigo in dwindling dusk.
When he makes his way back to the camp, he moves towards where there are casks of water and ale both, the latter being of the same instinct someone had when they made sure to pack spices with the cooking supplies. He fills a tankard with it, and upon turning from that spot, and noting the light still on in Flint's tent, he sets a course.
Does not barge through the entryway, folded closed against desert vermin and company.
Anyway. "Commander."
cant believe i set myself up for a tent flap door
The slanting tent is no back country lean-to; it harbors a low cot, a writing desk and a low-backed seat that's more really more stool than chair, a coarse mat laid over the rocky ground, all of which must collapse or roll up to be backed onto a griffon without much imposition. The tent's dimensions require only a slight stoop from any occupant choosing to remain standing. Flint though is sitting posted at the writing desk, and has twisted only partially round to acknowledge Marcus' entry.
It the intervening interval, Flint's washed and changed. If any trace of blood or dirt remains on his person, it's a failing of having to scrub down out of a basin and not a lack of dedication to the task of setting himself back to rights. Even so, the light of the little oil lamp illuminating the page under his pen is less than flattering—renders the man in craggy touches of shadow, and paints wide dark swathes from cheek to under-eye.
The point of his attention flicks, briefly, to the tankard in Marcus' possession, and then makes to rock back to the half written page.
"You would do well to consider some rest."
There will be more work tomorrow. With the Venatori bitten back, further depths of the shrine await exploration. Given what all they faced today, they can hardly hope to send Research there without well-armed and capable company.
me, free of sin
And he will. There is no choice in that matter, physically or by way of obligation, but Marcus still enters, letting the flap fall closed behind him. Head ducked and shoulders forward to accommodate the closer quarters. And now there's a distinct familiarity in nearness, but apparently in service to placing the tankard down on Flint's desk.
Smokey cling is far more reminiscent of recent cigarettes, thinner and sharper than the earthier black summonings on a battlefield. Doesn't linger in the air by the time he moves for the other available place to sit, which is at the edge of the cot.
"You'll be going back in?"
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"I don't imagine Rutyer will be going in my stead."
His hand gets as far as completing the end its interrupted sentence before the pen is laid aside in favor of the cup.
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When it does cycle back to Flint, and desert-warmed ale is appreciated or otherwise, there's a small moment of study, for the faint streak of dirt or soot or something else that stripes a sickle's curve along the back of exposed neck. Maybe if he'd lingered there at Flint's seat at the desk, he'd have smudged it away with his palm, his thumb, the texture of skin and the starting fade of bristle at hairline easy to recall, and it's the fact that this thought feels like something sharp and broken off that finally prompts him to speak—
"I'm sorry for," and there is a tinge of regret, already, for words summoned into the tent. Apologies are clumsy things, easy to misuse. Nothing for it now. "That I didn't act differently first, today."
There has been plenty of time to consider alternate actions, particularly when twisting time had afforded him opportunity to enact them.
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The lamplight cuts in through the bristle of red beard; melts the skeptical look he paints Marcus with into something less cutting.
"That you didn't act differently," he repeats back.
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And notes that on a delay, his phrasing wants for explanation. For perspective. He can imagine that being in the thick of a thing is different to being several paces back, as fast as it all was. The teeth of that internal pressure don't let up.
"I left you open to the sword," he explains, customarily quiet, sedate gravel-edged tone in a space rendered private, and also safe, relatively speaking. "I focused on the wrong thing. It was only good fortune that there was a window to correct it."
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(The less consideration dedicated to that uneasy, queasy twinge in him that accompanies the thought, the better.)
"It was fortunate." All things being even, that's true enough. On most days, he prefers the experience of not being a corpse. Flint's attention remains narrowed on Marcus, brow set low and an idle shifting of the hand at the edge of the desk—thumb fussing against some spot of chipping veneer.
"I suppose next you'll expect me to express some apology in return for firing on the mage instead of the assassin."
(There had been an opening to sink a bolt in the lightly armored Venatori at close range before they'd vaulted over the patch of shared cover with those jagged twin daggers. He'd intentionally not taken it.)
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"No," is the simplest, truest response.
No, he wouldn't expect it. No, he doesn't require apology. Both of those things. But mainly, "It isn't the same."
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"Isn't it?"
But rather an assessment, dialed in on Marcus in order see watch in which direction his answer breaks having already internally determined which trajectory would be preferable and which wouldn't. Why, because Marcus had only suffered a nick to the chin? Because he'd survived it?
(Some other answer that he has tucked up close somewhere he can feel, but not see.)
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insistent, still quiet. There is an easy logic to follow here, he knows, he has contemplated it while watching the desert go from red to inky purple and shrink into blackness, he has twisted it through his fingers while raking stiff brush bristle over iron. They are alive, through virtue rather than fault of their own actions.
But there is a snarl in it, thorny and stubborn.
"I know what a near miss feels like," he says. "Being in one, seeing one. But that wasn't it. There was a world where it wasn't, for a moment. And I'm sorry."
Here, a twitched gesture, almost a shrug, as if to offload something.
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Yes, it was lucky there was some opportunity to take a second crack at the thing. But it's not as if whatever Marcus had done during that first pass had been particularly to blame. These things happen. They happen to good men with sturdy sword arm's and sure aim. It is rare, technically speaking, for anyone in his profession—the ones has held, the one he keeps now—to avoid the thing forever. Eventually, that Venatori short sword or one like it will find him again and there will be no changing it then. That's true no matter what ownership Marcus Rowntree might prefer to have over the matter.
He might easily say so.
But rather than curtail him, Flint looks at Marcus across the narrow tent—glower painted on by the unflattering slant of shadow more so than it is legitimate, the world having a habit of contriving to make his brow appear heavier and more serious than it may actually be.
"Well," he says. "Thanks for not fucking it a second time."
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But there is some ragged edge of belief in this one error that has hooked into him and compelled him to this tent and the conversation in it. Marcus tolerates that apparent glower with the ease of someone who has, in many respects, gotten used to it.
And doesn't laugh, but makes a sound is the beginning of it.
"Welcome," shorthand acceptance, dry. It feels like a trade. Apology given over for a brusque gratitude he wasn't after. It eases the thing that had set its teeth in him, a little. Marcus would not say in so many words that he came here to make himself feel better.
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Flint's study of him flicks down to Marcus' joined hands, then scatters back up along some impulsive unplanned track. When his own hand shifts from the chipped desk's edge, it moves after the cup—a certain impression that it's ultimately headed back for the discarded pen.
"I trust you'll keep all of this in mind tomorrow with your charges," Flint says, the low chair creaking gently under his weight as his attention slides back toward the page. It isn't a dismissal, strictly, which Marcus should know. He's certainly been in the receiving end of every kind of one.
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No Aye, Commander, just sort of a noise that acknowledges this thing Flint has said. His shadow doesn't shrink on the wall where it would if he'd made for the entryway, but skews off strange in scale as he moves nearer. Contact established with a hand light at Flint's shoulder, sort of a warning for the second, which lands gently and inevitably more intimate at the curve where muscle connects shoulder to spine.
Higher than where the sword jutted out, but he doesn't really recall, and it's not his aim to pantomime some kind of physical confirmation of the absence of killing blow. It's his aim instead to squeeze over the muscle appended to sword arm, to brush his thumb against the streak of dirt at the back of Flint's neck.
The specific rub of his thumb makes the purpose clear. Missed a spot.
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But here— a faint twitch, and now that gentle inquiring cant of the temple. Not turning so far as to raise his eyes to Marcus, but laying over to such a degree that the shadow plays differently on his face and over the desk, and that the glow of the oil lamp touches pale eyelashes and the fine hairs hatching the width of Flint's cheek.
Near to that scuff of thumb, the muscle is stiff and tender. Something in his back aches, and it has very little to do with the creeping memory of the Venatori sword and everything to do with the struggle of clambering up out of the crevasse and because, against all odds, he is becoming an old man. Because it's cold in the desert. Because he occasionally wants—
He sighs out through the nose. Dips the pen in the neglected inkwell. If the line of his neck alters faintly under the span of Marcus' fingers, then it can be because he's bowing his head to the work.
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Firm, but not just jostling. He imagines that ruining penmanship is more likely to see him turned away than most other things that surprisingly have yet to. Palm pressing against the wing of muscle lower down. His other hand keeps a familiar hold of shoulder, resting there.
They like to touch each other. He likes to touch Flint, and there's yet to be spoken analysis of what it means when it isn't in the service to getting off. What itch is being scratched. Here, working down tense muscle in a way he knows to be pleasing, it certainly scratches at something in himself, not wholly related to that panicky clench that was slow to release.
He'll do this for a while, disinclined to interrupt work with more chatter he hasn't an instinct for. Content to.
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